Most students never see the whole tree. They see the branch they were handed and assume it is the tree. Then, after years of study inside one school, some of them hit a wall. The rituals they were taught lead somewhere they did not sign up for. The correspondences they memorized turn out not to match the text they were said to be drawn from, once the student goes and reads the text. Letters of this kind are what led the fellowship to build this room, and this page is the map we send in reply.
It is not complete. There are far too many small schools to name them all. But nearly all of them come from a few roots, and a student who knows the roots can begin to see the seams in whatever system she is in. The history below is not the fellowship's opinion. It is what scholars of these movements have established over decades, and every date can be checked. Where we offer a judgment, we say so.
Six Roots
Most of what a student will meet in a modern mystery school grows from some combination of six old roots. Some look like the occult and some look like religion. The line between the two is thinner than either side likes to admit.
- The gnostic stream. A family of movements of the second and third centuries, known to us mostly through what the church writers said against them until the Nag Hammadi jar came out of the ground in 1945. Its core conviction is that the material world is a mistake or a prison made by a lesser power, and that a spark of the true divine is trapped inside you, waiting to be freed by secret knowledge. Whenever a school tells you that the body is a cage, that matter is illusion, or that you are climbing out of this world through a series of gates, you are hearing this root.
- The Platonists of the late ancient world. An Egyptian-born philosopher teaching in Rome in the third century, and after him a Syrian philosopher of the fourth and a head of the school at Athens in the fifth, taught that all reality flows out from a single source, the One, in descending levels, and that the soul's task is to climb back. The Syrian added theurgy, the ritual work described on the page Asking and Commanding. This is the shape of nearly every esoteric map: emanation from a source, a ladder of levels, ascent by practice. The tree of life, as most people meet it, is drawn on Platonist paper.
- The Hermetic writings and sacred geometry. Greek texts written in Roman Egypt in the second and third centuries and ascribed to Hermes the Thrice-Greatest. Their key idea is correspondence, which a later text summed up in a famous phrase, as above, so below. The whole cosmos mirrors itself at every level, and so whoever works the mirror can work the world. Beside them runs the geometry of Pythagoras and Euclid and the Roman architects, the conviction that number and proportion are the hidden language of creation. Every table of correspondences a student has ever seen, every claim that a symbol works because the universe is built that way, comes from here.
- The Kabbalah. The Jewish mystical tradition, which begins with the short and ancient Book of Formation, flowers in the Book of Brightness in twelfth-century Provence, and reaches its height in the Zohar in thirteenth-century Spain. It gave the West the ten sefirot, the twenty-two letters as the instruments of creation, and the divine names. At the end of the fifteenth century two Christian scholars read it as Christians and made of it a Christian Kabbalah, and that is the version the mystery schools inherited.
- The Torah and the books of Enoch. Genesis, the books of Kings and Chronicles, the story of Solomon's temple; and the books that fell out of the canon, Enoch and Jubilees, which were read in their own ancient tongues again only after the caves by the Dead Sea gave up their fragments. This root gives the angels their names and ranks, gives the demons their origin in the fallen Watchers, gives Freemasonry its temple, and gives the books of conjuring their Solomon. It is the root people forget, because it looks like religion rather than the occult. It is also the root the Essenes knew best.
- The religions of India and Tibet. Karma, rebirth, the chakras, the subtle body, the practice of meditation. These are very old in India but late arrivals in the West. They came into Western esotericism through the Theosophical Society after 1875, read through Victorian translations, and spread from there into nearly everything. When a school teaches you the tree of life in one breath and your past lives in the next, this root has been grafted on.
A Translation in Florence
The beginning of what scholars call Western esotericism was not a secret society. It was a translation job. In 1463 Cosimo de' Medici, the old ruler of Florence, told his household scholar to set aside his work on Plato and translate a bundle of Greek manuscripts that had lately come to the city, because he wanted to read them before he died. They were the Hermetic writings. Within a generation a young count of Mirandola had set Hermes, Plato, and the Kabbalah side by side in nine hundred propositions, and a German lawyer who had learned Hebrew had built a Christian Kabbalah out of Jewish sources.
That synthesis drew on four of the six roots: the Hermetic, the Platonist, the Kabbalistic, and a thin thread of the gnostic. It did not take the Eastern root, which was three centuries away. The biblical root was already in the room, because every man doing this work was a Christian. And one thing had been waiting in the cellar since the thirteenth century: the books of conjuring circulated under Solomon's name. They came along later. From this synthesis two great branches grow, and nearly everything a student will meet today comes down from one or the other.
The Branches, Year by Year
- 1614 to 1616
The Rosicrucian manifestos
Three anonymous pamphlets appear in Germany announcing a secret brotherhood of Christian sages founded by one Christian Rosenkreutz. There was no brotherhood; one of the young Lutherans thought to be behind them later called the whole affair a jest. People went looking for the brothers, and when they could not find them, they founded the brotherhood themselves. The idea of a hidden order of adepts holding the true wisdom has been the template for every mystery school since.
- 1717
The first grand lodge
Four London lodges, heirs of stonemasons' guild rules that had been written down since about 1390, form a grand lodge and open the craft to gentlemen. Freemasonry grew from a different root entirely: Genesis, Kings, and the building of Solomon's temple, with no Kabbalah and no Hermes in it. But it had something the esoteric world badly wanted, a working system of degrees, oaths, and rituals. See Two Pillars in the Porch.
- 1745
A vision in London
A Swedish mining engineer and anatomist sees Christ in a London inn, lays down his science, and spends the rest of his life writing what he was shown of heaven and hell. Everything in nature, he teaches, corresponds to something in spirit. He read no Kabbalah and founded no order, but his readers did, and from him a line runs to the magnetic healers, to the seance room, and to the second great confluence.
- About 1750 to 1780
The Golden and Rosy Cross
The Rosicrucian idea finds its way into the lodges. In Germany an order of the Golden and Rosy Cross teaches Kabbalah and alchemy up a ladder of nine grades. The blend now has a body.
- 1781
An Egyptian fantasy
A Protestant pastor of Paris, himself a Freemason, announces that the tarot cards are a lost Egyptian book of wisdom. They are not. See The Cards and the Letters.
- 1848
Knocks in a farmhouse
Two young sisters in upstate New York say they are receiving knocks from a dead peddler buried in the cellar. Within a decade seances are held in parlors across America and Britain, with a whole vocabulary of mediums, spirit guides, and messages from the other side.
- 1856
Cards against letters
A former seminarian of Paris, writing under a Hebrew pen name, lays the twenty-two trumps of the tarot against the twenty-two Hebrew letters in order, first card to first letter, and so on down the line. He does not take his order from the Book of Formation, which arranges the letters by a different logic altogether.
- 1875
The Theosophical Society
A Russian woman who had come out of the seance rooms founds the society in New York with an American colonel and a lawyer. Her first great book, two years later, is a thousand pages of ancient wisdom assembled in large part from other people's books, the seminarian's among them, very often without credit. The society moves to India; she teaches that the true source of wisdom is a brotherhood of hidden masters in Tibet who write to her by letter. In 1885 a society for psychical research investigates and calls her one of the most accomplished impostors in history. It does not matter. In 1888 she publishes a complete cosmology of seven planes, root races, karma, rebirth, chakras, astral bodies, and masters. None of this had been part of Western esotericism before. This is the point on the map where Hindu and Buddhist ideas enter, filtered through a Russian medium and a Victorian reading of the Upanishads.
- 1888
The Golden Dawn and the Rose-Cross of Paris
In London the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn is founded and puts everything into one vessel: Christian Kabbalah, Hermetic philosophy, the books of conjuring, Rosicrucian legend, Masonic structure, the seminarian's tarot, and the gods of Egypt. It claims the Book of Formation as its authority and then moves seven of its letters. See The Secret Chiefs. In Paris that same year a marquis and a young student of medicine help found a Kabbalistic order of the Rose-Cross, and the Martinist movement takes shape around the same young man; his book on the tarot, the next year, keeps the seminarian's attributions intact. The London order and the Theosophists share members from the start: one of the order's founders was a Theosophist, and an Irish poet and an English actress belonged to both. The tree of life with the seminarian's tarot hung on it, and the seven planes with the masters above them, were taken in by the same people in the same decade, and neither side checked the other.
- 1904
Thelema and the Goetia
A member who has broken with the London order announces a religion of his own, and the same year puts into print, for a general audience, the Goetia: the catalogue of spirits and the means of commanding them from the seventeenth-century grimoire called the Lesser Key of Solomon. A student who was taught a Kabbalistic ritual and found herself, a few lessons later, summoning spirits from a grimoire has met the reason here. Two different roots were blended in 1888, and the blend handed her this.
- 1909 to 1915
The deck and its maker's order
A London scholar of the mystics, long a member of the order, designs the tarot deck most of the world now owns, and an artist of the same order paints it. In 1915 he founds an order of his own with a more Christian and mystical cast.
- 1912 to 1923
The children of Theosophy
A teacher in Germany leaves the Theosophists to found Anthroposophy. After the First World War another leaves to found a school whose writings will give the New Age its vocabulary of rays, ascension, and the age of Aquarius.
- The 1920s
Schools of the order's tradition
An American teacher founds a school in the London order's tradition and carries its correspondences over intact, adding scales of color and sound of his own. Those who know his work call him the most sober and disciplined teacher that tradition ever produced; his method is sound, applied to an unsound map. In London a woman of the same tradition founds the Society of the Inner Light.
- 1937
The system in print
A former member publishes the order's whole system in four volumes. From then on nearly every book on tarot and Kabbalah on the shelf inherits it.
- 1954
Witchcraft Today
A retired English civil servant publishes the book from which modern Wicca is usually dated. He built its rites from the London order's rituals, the writings of the man of 1904, and a Masonic structure of degrees. A great many who practice it are on a branch of the London order's tree and do not know it.
- 1970 to 1990
The New Age
Spiritualism, Theosophy, the human potential movement, and the practices of the East stripped of their traditions are blended into one marketplace. Channeling in its modern sense dates from these years, and the tarot is picked up and refitted for it.
Three Reasons to Care
Why should a student of the Essene way care about any of this? For three reasons.
First, because the roots do not all want the same thing from you. The books of conjuring are about command: you draw the circle, you speak the name, you compel the spirit. The Torah root is about petition: you ask, and you compel nothing, because no created being has the right to override another's will, and that includes you. These are not the same practice, whatever a curriculum may imply. When a school blends them and hands you the result as one course of study, you can spend years doing the one while believing you are doing the other. Because of the confluence of 1888, a student can enroll in a school of that lineage for the Kabbalah and end up practicing the Goetia.
Second, because a claim of authority is not a source. Nearly every school on this map claims the Book of Formation, or the Kabbalah, or ancient Egypt, or a secret brotherhood. Very few can show you the page. A student who knows the map can ask any teacher a simple question: which root does this come from, and can you show me the text? If the answer is that it was revealed to the founder, or that the secret chiefs said so, that is not a source. It is a story about a source. It may be a good story. You should know which you are being given.
Third, because your time is the most precious thing you have. Whatever you believe about what comes after, this life is the one place where you can actually change. If you are going to give a decade to a discipline, you deserve to know what it is made of before you begin, not after you hit the wall.
Where the Fellowship Stands
None of this means that the blended systems are worthless. Some of the most disciplined spiritual teachers of the last century worked inside them, and a capable person can do brilliant work inside a flawed map. But the student deserves to know the map.
The fellowship stands on no branch of this tree. Our roots are the fifth of the six, the Torah and the books of Enoch that the Essenes copied, together with the gospels of the Way that grew from the same soil. We read the Kabbalah and the Platonists and the rest as neighbors whose history we know and whose gifts we respect. Many branches of this tree have claimed the Essenes as their ancestors, and the article How a Tradition Grows shows how little ground those claims stand on. We keep one rule above the rest: ask, never command.
A student need not land where we do. But she should know the tree before she chooses a branch.