Definitions and explanations of key terms used throughout the site.
A family of secret societies formed in late medieval Germany, which taught esoteric practices that were concealed from the average person. The meetings of these societies were held in private...
Designed for or understood by the specially initiated alone.
Q. Similarly, describe the Initiate of The Sacred Science. A. He who deals with the causes behind phenomena, studies and learns to wield the laws in all worlds of form and co-ordinates them in one essential Unity or Cause.
Source: The Science of the Initiates by Eugene Milne Cosgrove
We know that with the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century—a development clearly linked to the temperament of the left brain—the esoteric tradition lost much of its prestige and that, in order to maintain itself, it had to...
Source: The Secret Teachers of the Western World by Gary Lachman
The esoteric tradition is also intuitive, focusing on our subtle, inner worlds, rather than our obvious outer one. It believes in a living, organic, spiritual, even conscious universe, rather than a dead, mechanical, oblivious one. It is also concerned more...
Source: The Secret Teachers of the Western World by Gary Lachman
All THE upside-down, inside-out, other-way-round thinking of the secret societies, all that is bizarre and mind-bending in what follows stems from the belief that mind preceded matter. We have almost no evidence to go on when we decide what we...
Source: The Secret History of the World by Mark Booth
They shall then know truth and, more than that, they shall realize that from the beginning truth has been in the world unrecognized.
Source: Melchizedek and the Mystery of Fire by Manly P. Hall
For those who have a sense of this invisible, other reality, the answers to life’s mysteries offered by modern science are inadequate and unsatisfying. They are unable to accept them and they find themselves seeking something else.
Source: The Secret Teachers of the Western World by Gary Lachman
Some of these teachers we know and in a sense are not secret at all. Yet in many cases what they have to teach remains so. Some are not so well known, indeed, are hardly known at all. One can...
Source: The Secret Teachers of the Western World by Gary Lachman
For one thing, the esoteric tradition deals in imagery and symbols, the meanings of which are often complex and multiple, and which elude the left brain’s demand for clarity and definiteness; they are more attuned to what McGilchrist calls the...
Source: The Secret Teachers of the Western World by Gary Lachman
The symbols and ceremonies of Masonry have more than one meaning. They rather conceal than disclose the Truth. They hint it only, at least; and their varied meanings are only to be discovered by reflection and study. Truth is not...
Source: Morals and Dogma by Albert Pike
Underlying this Secret Doctrine was a profound philosophy of the creation or evolution of worlds and of man. The present humanity, in many quarters of the globe, has evolved on the intellectual plane so far that there now exist a...
Source: Mystic Masonry by Jirah Dewey Buck
What this secret tradition reveals is that the one whom most Christians naïvely worship as creator, God, and Father is, in reality, only the image of the true God. According to Valentinus, what Clement and Ignatius mistakenly ascribe to God...
Source: The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
Indeed, imagination, linked to the right brain, is one of the central pillars of the esoteric tradition. As the historian of esotericism Antoine Faivre writes, imagination is “a kind of organ of the soul, thanks to which humanity can establish...
Source: The Secret Teachers of the Western World by Gary Lachman
Sometimes this philosophy has been hidden from the public and at other times it has been placed in plain view - though always in such a way as to remain unrecognized by outsiders.
Source: The Secret History of the World by Mark Booth
[Renaissance philosophers] were alerted to the ancient manuscript tradition named after their supposed author, Hermes Trismegistus... The documents were collectively called the Corpus Hermeticum or, simply, the Hermetica.
Source: The Magus of Freemasonry by Tobias Churton
Don’t believe the church and state and everything they tell you -
It gets old when you talk to the sun - In a tongue understood by no one
