But what you spot, already, in late antiquity is that this time period, esoteric, and its contrast exoteric begins to be connected no longer handiest to a Metaphysical Science coaching situation, but all forms of matters like the mysteries, the thriller cults. So initiation turns into an instance of the esoteric and the transmission of esoteric knowledge. And you also get, by the point of early Christianity and a number of the early church fathers, like Clement of Alexandria, for instance, a connection to religion, that so the founders of the thriller cults were philosophers that were veiling the truths and myths, and also you needed to be initiated to discover ways to interpret them.
But additionally that Christianity had such an esoteric oral tradition it’s helping humans to read the Gospels the proper way. And so those connections between the hidden and found out in phrases of knowledge has to do with faith, philosophy, and enunciation is quite old stuff. And it’s at the center of a number of the later meanings of esotericism as properly.
But that is a crucial point that the now esoteric system, then, is a miles, a great deal later antique. It’s basically a term which you begin getting within the nineteenth century. Well, you get it in German inside the late 1700s, and then in French within the early 1800s, after which it comes into English as properly. And what’s thrilling to mention right here is that one group that clearly started out picking up this time period and running with it turned into the folks that we now called occultists. So it become very a good deal an emic term in this period.
So an in-organization time period for the kind of lineage or transmission of secret expertise that one might claim to be preserving today. So in the context of nineteenth century occultism, esotericism might reference, properly, secret teachings of magic historical expertise from Egypt or from Zoroaster. It would stand for the occult sciences, alchemy and astrology and so on. But also just like the Gnostics and the Hermitists, and the Rosicrucians and the Knights Templars and all you can consider forming a transmission to nowadays, right? That changed into the concept.
