/lit/ - Literature

>>21461298
The secret behind much of Western esotericism, secret societies which arose in Christian Europe and were often suppressed/distrusted by it, is as a front the revival/preservation of study of other mystical and religious teachings besides Christianity (such as the Jewish Cabala, Neoplatonism, and Hermeticism in Renaissance esotericism), and the core behind those entities like alchemy, the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, and the like, who confuse and mystify outsiders, seems to be along the lines of what >>21457998 suggests.

These entities — where they are (if at all) good and authentic, not necessarily in corrupt factions such as of at least some of Freemasonry, which likely was corrupted and became a front for radical. revolutionary politics working against the domination of Europe by the monarchies and the Church — seem to have been fronts for (among other things), the study of comparative religion and other disreputable mystical teachings (disreputable for “not being Christian”), as well as the preservation and handing down of techniques, practices, and teachings along the lines of those to be found in the East of the conscious self-transformation of the human being by the focusing of attention in directed paths (parallel to Eastern yogic meditation, practices like the recitation of mantras or the zikr of the Sufi, the contemplation of symbolism or geometrical designs like Hindu yantra, etc.)

As >>21457998 suggests, again, this can be analogized to Tantra (a massive yet family-related coterie of similar practices throughout Buddhism and Hinduism in the East which, taken as a whole, act as potent means of the directed, long-term disciplining and alteration of the consciousness, eventually allowing one to reach higher levels of the individuality, or higher states of being).

This is also mirrored in Western mysticism, as this poster again suggests, in “authentic egypto-hellenic, gnostic hermetic alchemy”, or the allegory of alchemy as referring to the cultivation and transformation of subtle energies/higher-bodies-of-the-being to attain to this aforementioned transformation of the human being, symbolized as Immortality (the identification of oneself with the underlying permanent and immortal aspect of oneself, consequently bringing this Divine Perfection down into and perfecting the body, mind, and soul of the human being).