Religions, Cults and Power

After the Ashokan centuries, Buddhism changed in two linked directions. In doctrine it grew into the Mahāyāna, the “Great Vehicle”, which taught the bodhisattva ideal, the Pure Lands, the philosophy of emptiness and the Yogācāra analysis of a “store consciousness”.…

Buddhism and Jainism had made renunciation the high road to liberation. Brahmanical religion answered them with stories. The Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa turned the ethics of king and warrior into sacred narrative. Within the Mahābhārata, the Bhagavad Gītā argued that…

What outsiders call “Hinduism” is, in the words of Michael Baltutis’s primer, “a family of myriad faiths with four primary denominations: Saivism, Vaishnavism, Shaktism and Smartism” [Baltutis, What Is Hinduism?, #54289, “Chapter 2: Hinduism’s Four Denominations”]. Running through all four,…

Classical Indian philosophy is organised as darshanas, “views” or “points of view.” There are six orthodox systems, usually paired: Nyaya and Vaisheshika, Samkhya and Yoga, Mimamsa and Vedanta. All accept the authority of the Veda. They argued with each other…

Bhakti, devotional love of a personal God sung in the vernacular, began in Tamil country and moved north over the next thousand years. It challenged Brahmin ritual and Sanskrit learning, and in the north it met Islamic Sufism. Out of…

Long before anything was called “Confucianism” or “Taoism”, the Yellow River peoples had a complete religious world. It held a high god in the sky, royal ancestors consulted through cracked bones, spirits of mountain and soil, gods of the door…

Kongzi (traditionally 551–479 BCE), latinised as Confucius, was a disappointed minor official in his lifetime. Within four centuries he was the patron sage of an empire, and from 1313 to 1910 his canon was memorised by every candidate for office.…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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],…

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.…

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…

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 and Hermetic theology supplied the Western esoteric tradition with its metaphysics. Alchemy and astrology were its operative arts: alchemy worked on matter, astrology read the heavens. Both rest on the axiom ascribed to Hermes, “What is below is like…

The Order of the Temple existed for less than two centuries, from a handful of knights guarding a pilgrim road to the arrests of 13 October 1307 and the burning of its last Grand Master in 1314. Its afterlife in…

Between 1614 and 1616 three anonymous German publications announced an invisible brotherhood of the Rosy Cross. Its founder had supposedly learned the secrets of nature in Arabia and Morocco, and its members now invited the learned of Europe to join…

Freemasonry tells two stories about its origins. In its own legends it is as old as geometry, reaching back through the medieval cathedral builders to Solomon’s Temple, to Hiram, to Enoch’s pillars or to Egypt. The documentary record is much…

Freemasonry describes itself, in a definition its own writers repeat, as “a science of morality veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols” [Gruber, “Freemasonry: Its Origin and History”, printed in Sickels, The General Ahiman Rezon, #66646, quoting Mackey]. The Craft,…

The Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite is the system of thirty-three degrees built on top of the three Craft degrees, and Albert Pike (1809-1891) is the figure who shaped it. His Morals and Dogma (1871) is a lecture-book for the…

A handful of passages in Morals and Dogma are quoted more often than the rest of its 800-odd pages together. They are the Lucifer sentence of the 19th degree, the Satan-as-Force passage of the 3rd, the admission that Masonry “uses…

Between the first grand lodge (London, 1717) and the end of the nineteenth century, Freemasonry split along ritual, religious and political lines. On the Continent, Templar “high degrees” multiplied, and Rome condemned the Craft again and again. A Bavarian society,…

Whether the lodges made revolutions or merely hosted revolutionaries is a question the library’s sources answer in sharply different ways. Masonic insiders such as Keghel and the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania’s editor of Washington’s letters stress a Craft that trained…

The Revolution broke up most eighteenth-century occult societies, but the nineteenth century rebuilt them on a larger scale. Masonic high degrees, French Martinism, Kabbalah and the new interest in Asian religion merged into a few organisations that shaped Western esotericism…

Every chapter in Parts 12 to 17 relies on a small set of names: Satan, the Devil, Lucifer, Ahriman, daeva, jinn, Iblis, shaytan. They were not coined together. Each comes from a different language, scripture and century, and later writers…

The previous chapter followed the Adversary as a theological figure. This chapter follows his supposed human allies. Between roughly 1400 and 1750, according to the editor of the library’s main primary-source collection, “more than 100,000 people – mainly women –…

Early modern Europe produced three images of people who chose the Devil deliberately: the scholar who signs a pact, the renegade priest who says Mass over a woman’s body, and the aristocratic rake who mocks God over claret in a…