The ageless wisdom

Brotherhoods and Movements

In the next centuries it is possible to follow this stream of thinkers, prophets and visionaries, who changed the atmosphere within the spiritual field. Sometimes they established brotherhoods and mystery societies. E.g. the Neo-Platonic Academy in Florence, The Bohemian Brethren or Familia Caritas, or John Dee, Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville and Francis Bacon, who together with others established the Rosicrucians. Others stepped outside society taking the risk this implied. Giordano Bruno, Baruch de Spinoza, William Blake and the above-mentioned Paracelsus belonged to this anarchist group together with Cagliostro, Anton Mesmer, Jakob Boehme and Emanuel Swedenborg. Nevertheless they had followers and caused establishment of groups and societies that kept up the tradition. Sometimes groups of philosophers inspired each other, as was the case with the Platonics of Cambridge in the Renaissance, and the German romantic philosophers and poets, as for instance Shelling, Fichte, Schiller, Goethe and Hegel.

In other cases it was religious persons and freethinkers, like Robert Green Ingersoll, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, who were the initiators of the American Transcendentalist Movement and the foundation of the Unitarian Church in the 18th century, or P. Parkhurst Quimby and several others who founded the New Thought Movement. At other times it was the more direct esoteric groups founded in the beginning of the 20th century. The most evident examples hereof are Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and the foundation of the Theosophical Society, Rudolf Steiner and the Anthroposophical Society, as well as Alice Ann Bailey and the Lucis Trust. However, the list is long and includes a large number of groups from the spiritualists to the ritual orders and the more informal gatherings of universally oriented freethinkers.

The ways of freedom

No matter how you categorize these unorthodox currents and impulses, you can see them as one unbroken chain through the centuries. The common denominators are not always easy to phrase in a formula, but the starting point is always freedom for the individual to find his own special way to divinity, to the inner source. In this fundamental freedom we find faith in a Divine Providence, which calls the individual to contemplation when the exploration in the material world has produced a void towards materialistic values. There is a faith in the individual’s capability to find his way, and in an independence of confessions and systems, which is to ensure the salvation or healing of the fragmentation. At the same time there is an apprehension that the human being is divine in its essence, and that it is possible to reach perception and finally identification with the spiritual reality. It is of minor importance whether this inner correlation is made via art, philosophy, research or religious immersion. The crux is that there are many ways to the same objective. In the end it is the individual temperament that defines the way for each individual person.

The wisdom that was expressed in the temple culture of Egypt, that vitalized the British Druid Order, that inspired the Far Eastern Taoists, and that gave strength to the ancient traditions of the American Indians, found its own characteristic expression in the Western culture of the twentieth century. You may really speak of a renaissance of philosophia perennis to a larger extent than it has ever before been possible in the Western World. Whereas the dominating phase of Christianity was expressed almost as underground movements and fragmentary subcultures, it became a free and open dissemination of the universal spirituality in the twentieth century. The theosophical movement played an important role in the preparation for several of the essential thoughts, and during the second half of the twentieth century it was possible to see an escalating dissemination of new thoughts, which developed their own lives.