Lives · Works · Ideas · Traditions
Encyclopedia
A growing encyclopedia of lives, works, ideas, and traditions, prepared for close reading and conversation with Socrates.
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Entries
- Modern EsotericismRaymond Abellio1907–1986An engineer, socialist militant, collaborationist leader, novelist, and French esoteric thinker whose ‘absolute structure’ sought a common form beneath perception, history, and initiatory symbolism.
- Renaissance EsotericismHeinrich Cornelius Agrippa1486–1535A German humanist, theologian, physician, and author who systematized Renaissance learned magic while arguing that unaided human knowledge is uncertain and that faith must govern reason.
- Romantic Visionary ChristianityWilliam Blake1757–1827An English poet, painter, and engraver whose illuminated books joined a mythology of imagination, the divided human being, and forgiveness to an original visionary Christianity.
- Renaissance EsotericismHeinrich Khunrath1560–1605A German physician, laboratory alchemist, and Lutheran lay theologian who joined Christian Kabbalah, divine magic, and physico-chemistry in a theosophy practiced through prayer, experiment, and images.
- Contemporary EsotericismPeter KingsleyBorn 1953A British-born classical scholar and mystical writer who recasts Parmenides and Empedocles as healer-prophets and joins philology to a claimed living lineage of Western initiation.
- Victorian MysticismGeorge MacDonald1824–1905A Scottish poet, novelist, preacher, and pioneer of mythopoeic fantasy who joined Christian universalism, Romantic imagination, and the transformation of the self through obedience, death, and divine love.
- Ancient Greek HistoryPotidaea, Battle of (432 BCE)432 BCEAn Athenian victory on the eve of the Peloponnesian War, remembered for Socrates’ rescue of Alcibiades and a public epitaph declaring that the aether received the souls of the fallen.
- Modern EsotericismÆ (George William Russell)1867–1935An Irish poet, painter, visionary, Theosophist, editor, and cooperative organizer who joined disciplined spiritual perception, Celtic cosmogony, poetic imagination, and the idea of a national soul.