INVOKING THE ELEMENTS
photo by Dennis Ho
UNTIL REVEALED, ALL KNOWLEDGE IS HIDDEN.
10 | FOLIOWEEKLY.com | FEBRUARY 8-14, 2017
To discover the concealed is what drives us to evolve and improve. The blinding blur of technologies we create is rivaled only by our impatience to develop them even faster. This same speed has influenced our beliefs, albeit in a less-hurried pace. Wisdom, traditions and religions survive and evolve due to devotion, comfort and, to a large degree, conquest. Western religion offers a binary, dualistic world and, as the sparks fly upward, we’re told to choose a side. But there’s another thread that’s run parallel to accepted faiths, a counter-world of covert sects and beliefs that, over millennia, have withstood suspicion, persecution and annihilation. They are the shadow religions of arcane rites, gods once thought extinct and newer animistic philosophies entirely void of gods. This is the tandem spiritual realm of the occult. From Heku, the magic of Egypt’s high priests to The Eleusinian Mysteries of 1500 BC and Medieval Alchemy and the 19thcentury Spiritualist movement, followed by the current New Age revival of Wicca and Ancient Earth worship, we have sought contact with something that exists solely between the cracks of parochial dogma and fixed doctrine. Some succeed in achieving communication with forces within as well as with the spirits. Occult is controversial and misunderstood, demonized and trivialized. Within the sphere is a multifaceted tree of mystical, magickal, even blasphemous practices whose complexities and myriad offshoots rival those of dominant religions. Over the course of history, those considered magicians, witches, sorcerers, necromancers and any other like-minded,
heretical believers have been vilified, banished, tortured — even killed. But the practices survive. Pop culture softens some of the fear; child wizard Harry Potter waves a wand over a generation. Gandalf battles Saruman in a death match of good-versus-evil magick. Fantasy novels, comic books, role-playing and video games draw inspiration from deranged and heroic deities, angelic spirits and demonic forces. Many other non-Western faiths, and even pagan beliefs, have enjoyed tolerance, if not acceptability. The image of a burning pentagram and cloaked figures circled around it in the moonlight, however, is as terrifying now as it was centuries ago. Based on characteristics that define the occult, some believe Jesus Christ was, in fact, a teacher of the occult. This may be controversial, but the King of Kings behaved in a way strikingly similar to the clandestine. He imparted to his apostles one knowledge and taught the masses another. When asked by the apostles why he spoke to the multitudes in parables, Christ admonished them: “Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but unto them it is not given” (Matthew 13:11). That is, by definition and example, an esoteric, or interior, teaching. The gathered crowds received a more softened, clear-cut teaching; the outer exoteric. Throughout the Gospels, Christ teaches his apostles to perform miracles, like teaching Peter how to walk on water (Mark 14:28-31). That lesson, in the context of recurring spiritual motifs, suggests Christ was really showing Peter the rite of walking on water.