Richard Smoley - Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions

R ICHARD S MOLEY was educated at Harvard and Oxford universities. From 1990 to 1999 he was editor of Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions. His other works include Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition; Forbidden Faith: The Gnostic Legacy from the Gospels to The Da Vinci Code; and The Essential Nostradamus. His Web site is www.innerchristianity.com.

J AY K INNEY is an editor and writer living in San Francisco. He was publisher and editor in chief of Gnosis from its inception in 1985 to 1999. His other works include The Inner West: An Introduction to the Hidden Wisdom of the West and The Masonic Enigma. His further writings can be found at www.jaykinney.com and www.gnosismagazine.com.

A Guide to the
Western Inner Traditions

Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney

REVISED EDITION

Learn more about Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney and their work at www.innerchristianity.com and www.jaykinney.com

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Copyright 1999, 2006 by Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney

Revised Quest edition 2006

First edition published by Penguin/Arkana, 1999

Quest Books
Theosophical Publishing House
PO Box 270
Wheaton, IL 60187-0270

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Cover design, book design, and typesetting by Kirsten Hansen Pott

Cover image: Spring, copyright 2005 by Iren Schio, reproduced by permission of American Artists Series, www.AmericanArtistsSeries.com, Tel: 800-806-7206.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smoley, Richard.

Hidden wisdom: a guide to the Western inner traditions / Richard Smoley and Jay Kinnery. Rev.ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8356-0844-2

1. Occultism I. Kinney, Jay. II. Title.

BF1411.S665 2006

ISBN for electronic edition, e-pub format: 978-0-8356-2044-4

5 4 3 2 * 10

It has long been debated whether religion has done more to further human progress or to hinder it. The great faiths of the world have guided and inspired millions, but they have also urged many on to hatred and bloodshed. Such are the evils religion can provoke, Lucretius wrote of human sacrifice in pagan antiquity, but almost all the worlds religions have criedand are still cryingfor throats to be slit in their honor. Such manifestations remain so common that by now it is clichd to denounce them.

This issue is more pressing now than it was nearly seven years ago, when this book was first published. The mid-twentieth century envisioned our age as a clinically sanitary era when people would zip off to work in personal spaceships and have robots catering to their every whim. Instead we are vexed with disputes about sacred sites and holy books, and each day the cultural wars in the United States seem more and more a struggle between the rival sects of fundamentalism and secularism.

Beyond all question we are living in a time of spiritual upheaval, but in what direction is this tumult moving? From one perspective, it looks as if conservative forms of religion are reasserting themselves, as we see in the ascendancy of the religious right in American politics and in the tremendous success of Mel Gibsons Passion of the Christ and the Left Behind novels.

Yet viewed from another angle, the public seems desperate to grasp at any evidence that casts doubt upon the institutional faiths. We see as much in The Da Vinci Code as well as in countless books and television programs that claim to reveal the truth about Mary Magdalene, the Gnostics, the Templars, and the Freemasonstruths that were allegedly suppressed by the religious authorities. If many of these claims range from the tenuous to the absurd, it is well to remember that scholarship has not been unwaveringly kind to the claims of mainstream religions either. Most New Testament scholars admit that the Gospels contain a heavy admixture of myth, and archaeologists have concluded much the same about the Hebrew scriptures. Summarizing recent findings in their 2001 book The Bible Unearthed, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman contend that the Exodus did not happen in any form that is recognizable from the archaeological record. The Israelites, for example, could not have escaped from the land of Egypt into Canaan, because Canaan was under Egyptian rule at the time of the supposed Exodus. For the eminence of David and Solomon, the evidence is just as scant. Archaeological findings from that era suggest that, in Finkelstein and Silbermans words, Jerusalem in the time of David and Solomon was perhaps not more than a typical hill country village. They go on to say that much of the description of Solomons glory was appropriated from the later splendors of the House of Omriall of whom, according to the Bible, did evil in the sight of the Lord.

What we are seeing in fundamentalism is, in short, a desperate clinging to old forms of belief when those forms are becoming more and more untenable each day.

In this situation, many look to science as a mainstay of rationality and objectivity. This view may be nave. Science has told us much about how the world works, but little or nothing about why. It has proved unable to address questions of ultimate meaning or purpose. For that matter, science has yet to offer a complete and coherent picture of the material universe. The search for the grand unification theory in physics remains as inconclusive as the quest for consciousness has proved in neurology. Yet scientists on the public platform often sound as if they know that the universe is a mere mechanism of blind actions and reactions when in fact they know no such thing. By talking as if it has settled questions of ultimate meaning when it has not, scienceor rather, scientism, which is science festooned in the robes of religionoften appears as dishonest and reactionary as fundamentalism.

The discomfort these tensions are causing in Western civilization grows more acute each day. At this point we may feel fairly sure that their resolution is not going to come from either science or religion as conventionally understood. The answer will have to come from elsewhere.

Here is where the subject of this book comes in. The Western esoteric tradition has long undergirded our civilization. In archaic Greece, it informed the beginnings of philosophy and science. A century or two later, by couching this tradition in the language of the nascent discipline of philosophy, Plato embedded it in the Western canon. Those who were influenced by him in turn, ranging from the Gnostics to the Neoplatonists to the early church fathers, interwove this tradition into Judaism and Christianity. Later forms of the esoteric doctrine, including the Kabbalah, alchemy, Rosicrucianism, and Freemasonry, helped shape the modern world as we know it, as we shall see. But as the modern world took form, it turned its back on the wisdom that had given it life.