Illuminati Hell Or Aquarian Heaven?

Illuminati Hell Or Aquarian Heaven?

June 19, 2012 By davidjones
By JOHN LAMB LASH—

In March 1991, Random House published The Seeker’s Handbook – The Complete Guide to Spiritual Pathfinding (TSH). The book was carefully timed to serve the need it defined, a need I identified in the social-spiritual trends of that moment: namely, the need for orientation to, and clarification of, the options presented in the New Age movement (NAM), loosely known as alternative spirituality.

The dawn of the 1990s saw that movement peaking. My intention with this book was to offer a pathfinding tool, something like an intellectual compass for navigating through the huge array of books, teachers, programs, and practices that had been proliferating massively since the 1960s.

To that end, I proposed the metaphor of the labyrinth to describe the multiple winding pathways facing modern truth-seekers. I also suggested that in our time, due to the very multiplicity of options for spiritual development – everything from Baha’i to Buddhism to body work, from alchemy to zen – the task of pathfinding itself becomes an art. Sorting out what principle, program, or person you are going to follow in undertaking a spiritual practice to guide your life is on its own terms a challenging practice, regardless of which practice you finally adopt! This observation is as true now, I would say, as it was when I wrote the book.

The Hermetica

It has not always been so, of course. I dedicated a long section of TSH to describe “how the radio came to the beach.” That is to say, how it developed historically that Western society today faces such a vast range of options for self-development along spiritual, metaphysical, and mystical lines. Without going back beyond the Dark Ages to the destruction of the Mysteries – another investigation, covered at length in Not in His Image – I came forward from the Renaissance. The key event that laid the foundation for today’s eclectic New Age spirituality was the discovery of a sheaf of writings entitled the Hermetica. The Lexicon of 1,000 entries in TSH defines Hermetics:
From Greek, Hermes, equivalent to the Egyptian Thoth, the God of writing, calculation and the sacred arts. Loosely, the body of technical and inspirational teachings believed to be derived from the secret schools of the Egyptian Mysteries. Specifically, the corpus of thirteen rare manuscripts introduced into Europe in the 15th century, which opened the way to independent spiritual seeking in the West, especially through disclosure of the concept of theogeny.

The inception of New Age spiritual pathfinding happened in an almost single-handed way due to the influence of a Florentine nobleman, Cosimo de Medici (1389-1464). When he received the Egyptian manuscripts, Cosimo deemed the “ancient wisdom” preserved therein to be of higher value than the Bible, and predating Moses. He instructed Marsilio Ficino, appointed by him to head the Florentine Academy of Arts and Sciences, to translate the Hermetica from Greek into Latin for the edification of the trendy Italian intelligentsia of his court. In that single act, Cosimo initiated a chain of events that led ultimately to the New Age movement of today.

TSH summarises sixteen key themes of the modern alternative spirituality, contrasted to conventional faiths such as Judaism, Christianity (Roman, Protestant, and Orthodox), and Islam: 1. ancient wisdom, 2. Gaia, goddess revival, 3. shamanism, 4. masters, 5. planetisation, 6. channeling, 7. holistics and healing arts, 8. East/West studies, 9. martial arts and the warrior path, 10. paranormal reality and psychic powers, 11. reincarnation, 12. earth changes, 13. service and group effort (Aquarian idealism), 14. metahistory (parallel or secret history), 15. para-physics, chaos/complexity theory, physics of consciousness, 16. co-creation.

In the context of this essay, the final theme has a telling import. In the ultimate sense, it could be said that the Hermetica introduced two closely linked themes into Western society, and from this dyad all other aspects and ramifications of the New Age outlook are generated. These themes are co-creation, “you create your own reality,” and theogeny, “you become as gods, knowing good and evil.” Theogeny is a made-up word I propose, not to be confused with theogony, meaning an account of the origin and genealogy of the gods – as found in Hesiod’s poem, Theogony, for instance. Theogeny means “the birth or genesis (-geneos) of divine potential (theo-) in the human species.” The assertion of this god-like potential and the call to cultivate it, is the hallmark of New Age philosophy and ethics at its best. It is also the key point of heresy that distinguishes alternative spirituality from conventional faith.

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