Month: October 2026

Between 1463 and 1614 a small group of humanists, priests and physicians built a Christian magical philosophy. It rested on three supposedly ancient revelations: the writings of the Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus, the Neoplatonic theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, and the Hebrew…

Kabbalah, the “received” tradition of Jewish mysticism, is the single most important body of doctrine behind the Western esoteric tradition. The Renaissance magus, the Rosicrucian, the nineteenth-century occultist and the Scottish Rite Freemason all claimed to draw on it. Its…

In the twentieth century revolutionary and nationalist states took up the old East Asian question of who decides orthodoxy. China’s Party encouraged, then crushed, a qigong revival. Japan’s postwar freedom produced hundreds of new religions, one armed with nerve gas.…

Chinese political theory contained its own justification for overthrowing the ruler. The ancient idea of the Mandate of Heaven, “that a ruler was selected by the deities to lead the people” [History of East Asia, #71236, Part 1 ch. 1],…

Korea’s religious history comes in layers, and each layer was laid down by a political power. The oldest is a native shamanism tied to a foundation myth. Three kingdoms and then Goryeo made Buddhism a political force. Joseon replaced it…

Tibet is the clearest Asian case of a Buddhist clergy becoming a state: a warrior monarchy adopted Indian Buddhism, monastic schools then competed for Mongol and Manchu patronage, and one reincarnating line came to rule from the Potala. Sam van…

Buddhism reached Japan as a court religion, carried by the Soga clan and protected by kami who were enlisted to guard its temples (Chapter 98). Over the next millennium the Japanese remade it. The Kamakura period (1185–1333) produced popular faiths…

Shinto has no founder and no fixed creed, and for most of its history it had no name. Yet from its earliest records it was bound up with the legitimacy of a ruling house. The Yamato claim of descent from…

Buddhism was the first great foreign religion to take root in China. Within a few centuries it had become, in John Clark Archer’s words, the religion of a land that stayed “without doubt Confucian” in its general culture [Archer, Faiths…

Daoism has two faces. One is the philosophy of the Daodejing and Zhuangzi, quietist and paradoxical, yet full of advice to rulers. The other is a church of hereditary Celestial Masters, healing parishes that collected rice and confessions, armies, emperor-killing…