Hermetic Orders and Theosophy: From Hermes Trismegistus to Madam Blavatsky

The 19th-century revival of Western esotericism is one of the most important and least understood episodes in the history of esoteric traditions and mystical orders. In the period from roughly 1850 to 1920, a small group of writers, occultists, and ritual magicians in France, Britain, and the United States constructed a new kind of Western esotericism, one that drew on older sources — Hermeticism, Kabbalah, alchemy, astrology, Neoplatonism — but combined them in a new, modern, explicitly organized form. The result was a long line of esoteric orders, magical lodges, and mystical societies, of which the most important are the Martinist Order, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Theosophical Society, the Anthroposophical Society, and a constellation of smaller bodies. The story of this revival is also, in part, the story of the Rosicrucian tradition, and of how the older 17th-century Rosicrucian manifestos were reinterpreted in the 19th century as the founding documents of a new magical order.

Hermes Trismegistus and the Origins of the Hermetic Tradition

The Hermetic tradition begins with Hermes Trismegistus, a legendary figure who was, in late antiquity, identified with a conflation of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. The Corpus Hermeticum, a body of Greek-language philosophical and revelatory texts, was attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and circulated in the late ancient and early medieval Mediterranean world. The Corpus was a marginal text in the medieval Latin West, but it was a major text in the Greek East and, after the 12th century, in the Arabic-speaking world, where the Hermetic texts were read by philosophers, astrologers, and alchemists.

The pivotal event in the Western reception of the Hermetic tradition was the rediscovery and translation of the Corpus Hermeticum by the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino, who completed his Latin translation in 1463. Ficino also translated Plato, Plotinus, and other Neoplatonic writers, and he gathered around himself in Florence a circle of philosophers, poets, and mystics that included Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Cristoforo Landino, and others. The Florentine Academy, as the circle came to be known, was one of the most influential intellectual gatherings in the history of Western thought, and its reading of the Corpus Hermeticum as a divinely revealed, prisca theologia — an ancient theology that confirmed the truth of Christianity — shaped the Renaissance revival of Hermeticism and, through it, the entire later Western esoteric tradition.

The Florentine Academy’s reading of the Hermetic texts was based on a mistake. The Corpus Hermeticum was, in fact, a body of late ancient syncretic texts composed in the 1st through 3rd centuries CE, not divinely revealed Egyptian wisdom. The mistake was exposed definitively in 1614 by the Geneva scholar Isaac Casaubon, who dated the Greek of the Corpus to the post-Christian period. Casaubon’s dating did not, however, diminish the cultural influence of the Hermetic texts. The reading of the Corpus as ancient Egyptian wisdom persisted in esoteric and occult circles well into the 19th century, and it was on the basis of this mistaken reading that much of the modern Hermetic tradition was built.

The 19th-Century Hermetic Revival: Lévi, Papus, the Martinists

The 19th-century Hermetic revival began in France, with the writings of Éliphas Lévi (Alphonse Louis Constant, 1810–1875), a former seminarian and Catholic teacher who became, in the 1850s and 1860s, the most influential French occultist of the century. Lévi’s two most important books, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1856) and La Clef des Grands Mystères (1861), attempted a synthesis of Catholic mysticism, Kabbalah, the Hermetic tradition, and the ritual magic of the Lesser Key of Solomon. Lévi’s reading of the “Baphomet” of the medieval Templars, in particular, became one of the most influential and most controversial images in the history of modern occultism.

Lévi was the chief inspiration for the next generation of French occultists, of whom the most important was Papus (Gérard Encausse, 1865–1916), the founder of the Martinist Order. The Martinist Order, founded in 1886 in Paris, was structured around a graded initiation system in which the higher degrees were concerned with Christian mystical practice and the lower degrees with Hermetic and Kabbalistic instruction. Papus was a prolific writer, and his books, including Traité élémentaire de science occulte (1903) and La Kabbale (1892), did much to popularize the Hermetic tradition in France and the French-speaking world.

The Martinist tradition continues in a number of present-day orders, of which the most important is the Martinist Order founded in 1886 and its various offshoots. The French Hermetic revival of the 19th century also produced a number of other important bodies, including the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Croix, founded by Joséphin Péladan and Stanislas de Guaita in 1888, and the work of the writer and magician Joris-Karl Huysmans, whose novel Là-bas (1891) is set in the Parisian occult milieu of the period.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

The most important 19th-century magical order in the English-speaking world, and the most influential magical order of the entire modern period, is the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888. The Golden Dawn was organized as a graded initiation system with three “orders” — the outer order of the Golden Dawn, the second order of the Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis (R.R. et A.C., or “Red Rose and Golden Cross”), and the third order, which was largely a paper body. The order’s rituals, which were written by S. L. MacGregor Mathers, drew on the Rosicrucian and alchemical traditions, on the Kabbalah, on astrology, and on the ceremonial-magic tradition of the Lesser Key of Solomon.

The Golden Dawn’s central technical device was a complete system of magical correspondences, organized around the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, that mapped the Sefirot, the planets, the signs of the zodiac, the elements, the alchemical stages, the tarot trumps, the angelic names, and the divine names into a single integrated system. This system, which was partly preserved in the Golden Dawn’s “Knowledge Lectures” and partly in the published works of the order’s members, is the basis of nearly all subsequent Western ceremonial magic, and it is the framework within which most modern English-speaking readers of Western esotericism operate.

The Golden Dawn’s history is a famously tumultuous one, marked by the personal and doctrinal conflicts of its principal members: W. Wynn Westcott, the nominal founder, who was a London coroner and a scholarly occultist; S. L. MacGregor Mathers, the order’s chief ritualist, who was an autocratic and uncompromising figure; W. B. Yeats, the Irish poet, who was a member of the order and who used its symbolism in his poetry and plays; Aleister Crowley, the English magician, who was briefly a member of the R.R. et A.C. and who went on to found the religion of Thelema and the magical order of the Ordo Templi Orientis; and Florence Farr, the actress and occultist, who was one of the order’s most important members. The schisms of the Golden Dawn produced the Stella Matutina, the Alpha et Omega, and the Whare Ra, and the doctrinal and ritual material of the order continues to circulate in a large number of modern esoteric orders and magical lodges.

The Theosophical Society

The Theosophical Society was founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), a Russian-born occultist, and Henry Steel Olcott, an American journalist. The society’s foundational document is Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine (1888), a vast, learned, and idiosyncratic work that attempted to synthesize the Western esoteric tradition with the religious and philosophical traditions of India, Tibet, and Egypt, and that argued for the existence of a single, ancient, and universal “Wisdom Religion” underlying all of the world’s religions.

The Theosophical Society was organized into lodges and sections, with a president and a general council, and it grew rapidly in the 1880s and 1890s. The society’s most famous members included Annie Besant, who succeeded Olcott as president; C. W. Leadbeater, a clairvoyant and prolific writer; and Jiddu Krishnamurti, an Indian boy whom Besant and Leadbeater presented as the vehicle of a coming “World Teacher.” Krishnamurti later repudiated the role, dissolved the Order of the Star in the East that had been built around him, and pursued an independent teaching that rejected organized religion, occultism, and Theosophical doctrine in favor of a simple, direct attention to “what is.”

The Theosophical Society was the source of a great many later esoteric and occult bodies, including the Anthroposophical Society (founded by Rudolf Steiner in 1913), the Arcane School of Alice Bailey, and the “I AM” Activity of Guy and Edna Ballard. The Theosophical Society’s reading of Asian religions, in particular, was enormously influential on Western occultism and on the popular Western reception of Hinduism and Buddhism, although this reading has been heavily criticized by both academic Indologists and by the Hindu and Buddhist traditions themselves.

Anthroposophy

The Anthroposophical Society was founded in 1913 in Munich by Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), an Austrian-born philosopher and occultist who had been the general secretary of the German section of the Theosophical Society from 1902 to 1912. Steiner broke with the Theosophical Society over the question of Krishnamurti and over his disagreement with the Theosophical doctrine of reincarnation along racial lines. Steiner’s own system, which he called “spiritual science” or Anthroposophy, was a complex synthesis of Christianity, Goetheanism, Rosicrucianism, and a doctrine of the evolution of consciousness through repeated earthly lives.

The Anthroposophical Society continues in many countries today, and its practical activities include the Waldorf education movement, biodynamic agriculture, anthroposophic medicine, and the dramatic and visual arts of the Goetheanum, the society’s headquarters in Dornach, Switzerland. Steiner’s writings, including The Philosophy of Freedom (1894), An Outline of Esoteric Science (1909), and the many lecture cycles of his mature period, are read as a major body of esoteric and philosophical literature in their own right.

The Arcane School and Alice Bailey

Alice Bailey (1880–1949) was an American-born Theosophist who, in 1920, claimed to have received “dictations” from a Tibetan master she called “the Tibetan,” and who founded in 1923 the Arcane School, a small esoteric school that continues to operate today. Bailey’s writings, including the “Treatise on the Seven Rays” and the “Treatise on White Magic,” are a continuation and modification of the Theosophical tradition, with a strong emphasis on what she called “the Ageless Wisdom” and on the role of the Christ as a cosmic principle.

Bailey’s work is less well known in the popular literature on esotericism than Blavatsky’s, but it is more rigorous in structure, and it has been influential in a number of later 20th-century esoteric bodies, including the Lucis Trust, which Bailey founded and which is the principal institutional vehicle of her work today.

The Modern Hermetic Revival

The 20th and 21st centuries have seen a continued growth of the Hermetic and Theosophical traditions. Modern orders working within the Hermetic and Rosicrucian frame include AMORC, the Rosicrucian Fellowship, the Confraternity of the Rose Cross, the various Golden Dawn derivative bodies, the Martinist Order, and a number of smaller and more traditional groups. The question of whether the Rosicrucians are “real” today is in effect the question of how to read the institutional history of this entire tradition.

The Theosophical tradition continues in the Theosophical Society (with headquarters in Adyar, Chennai, India) and in the many derivative bodies. The Anthroposophical Society continues in the Waldorf and Goetheanum complex. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn has been the model for a long line of new magical orders, of which the most notable in the 21st century is the Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn, an effort to recover the order’s original 19th-century rituals and to make them available to modern practitioners. The seven Hermetic principles, the alchemical tradition, and the Kabbalistic system that the 19th-century revival made central are now the standard framework for most modern Western esoteric practice, and the orders and lodges that work within that framework are the most visible face of the modern Western esoteric revival.

Sources and Further Reading

The standard scholarly references are Antoine Faivre, L’ésotérisme (1992; English translation 2010); Wouter Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism: A Guide for the Perplexed (2013); and the standard monograph on the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn is Ellic Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn (1972), with Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment (2004), for the social context. For Theosophy, Bruce F. Campbell, Ancient Wisdom Revived (1980), and Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine (2001). For Anthroposophy, Robert McDermott, ed., The Essential Steiner (1984), and for Steiner in context, the essays in Theosophy and the Arts (eds. Weidner and Willis, 2014). For Alice Bailey, the most balanced academic study remains Mary K. Neff, The Personal Approach to the Study of Alice A. Bailey (1971), and for the Tibetan question, the relevant article by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke in Theosophical History (1990).

The esoteric traditions and mystical orders pillar, Rosicrucians, Gnostic and mystical brotherhoods, and Renaissance secret societies clusters treat the surrounding context. The seven Hermetic principles, Kabbalah and secret societies, alchemy and secret orders, and are the Rosicrucians real today treat the specific topics in detail.