/lit/ - Literature

>>22867104
sup niggers

>>21788182
It's fun to tell girls you're reading Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. It sounds big and smart.

And it's fun to wikipedia Rosicrucians and the Assassins.

But the actual characters and plot are pretty thin. Umberto is a better archivist than author.

>>21461298
One of the “big secrets” behind much of Western esotericism, secret societies which arose in Christian Europe throughout history, seems to have been that they were, at least in part, fronts for the study of comparative religion and the underlying framework behind as belief in a prisca theologia (universal theology).

See for instance the Rosicrucians:

>In his work "Silentium Post Clamores" (1617), the Rosicrucian Michael Maier (1568–1622) described Rosicrucianism as having arisen from a "Primordial Tradition" in the following statement: "Our origins are Egyptian, Brahminic, derived from the mysteries of Eleusis and Samothrace, the Magi of Persia, the Pythagoreans, and the Arabs.

>>21457998 makes a good mention of Tantra (the complex body of psychophysical practices of the East to regularly discipline and transform the consciousness and the being doing them over the time to a more advanced state).

>>21461510
In reference to Christianity, teachings and symbols of Christianity have also commonly been employed in Western esotericism which lived under and interacted with the Church (examples include Christian Kabbalah, and the strongly Christian nature of the Rosicrucian writings/mythos, and Masonic ceremony and literature which extols Christ and the Scriptures), except with — that great secret heresy which never fully was stamped out from the West, apparently — an underlying Gnostic temperament (that gnosis, a special form of knowledge or experiencing, is the core of Christianity, which itself can transform us to a higher level of being analogous to enlightenment, and which state could also be put as the recognition of the sparks of the Godhead trapped in ourselves and everyone else, our piercing through the veil of the material, sensate universe and reasserting the innate dignity, wisdom, splendor and proper position of one’s highest, inmost Spirit, conceived, again, as an isomorphic representation and spark of the Godhead).

Suggestive evidence at least some (if not much) of Western esotericism was partially a veil for the study of comparative religion, is found in the self-generated mythos of the Rosicrucians in 17th-century Europe, for instance.

In his work "Silentium Post Clamores" (1617), the Rosicrucian Michael Maier (1568–1622) described Rosicrucianism as having arisen from a "Primordial Tradition" in the following statement: "Our origins are Egyptian, Brahminic, derived from the mysteries of Eleusis and Samothrace, the Magi of Persia, the Pythagoreans, and the Arabs."

The very phrase “philosophia perennis” (and prisca theologia) was largely conceived and elaborated on in the first place by Renaissance philosophers, mystics and theologians, inspired by a revival of interest in Neoplatonic philosophy and Hermeticism during the Renaissance, as well as an attempted synthesis of these with similar trends and ideas in Greek philosophy, Jewish theology and the Kabbalah, and Muslim theology and Sufi mysticism (which all also played a not-insignificant role on the European scholarship and theology of that time).

This worldview is rarely explicitly and entirely anti-Christian, and often included much of Christian theology, symbolism, and imagery in its synthesizing worldview, not denying any influences by Christianity but trying to reconcile it with a universal perspective, viewing it as reconcilable with the same eternal esoteric wisdom underlying various world religions. This, of course, is “the Great Heresy of Universalism” (also criticized as syncretism, polytheism or anti-Christian devilish lies), which warranted much of the Church’s condemnations of these societies and mystical teachings, their anathematizing them to preserve a monopoly on the role of mediator of humanity with the Divine.

What books should I look for about Rosicrucianism? Any authors or works in particular? I don't know where to start.