Western Esotericism

"Western esotericism is often seen as a sideline curiosity or footnote to history—at best an early, failed attempt at science. It also tends to be cast in an oppositional role to mainstream religious denominations and movements." "The Western esoteric “tradition” has mostly been only sporadically organized, with groups often working in isolation from or even at cross purposes to each other; one would struggle to find core dogmas for the Western tradition, as its ideals and praxis shift significantly between groups and individual practitioners. Even when it does involve large organized groups, like Freemasonry, the history of the Western tradition is still less one of group efforts, let alone large-scale religious revivals, than it is of ideas passing between individuals or small collectives of intellectuals, often at a distance of centuries. These thinkers—such as Dee, Newton, Crowley, and many more—have in turn exercised massive influence on the wider culture, often in oblique and nonintuitive ways. A useful and not altogether unconnected parallel can be drawn with Western philosophers like Kant, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, who often lived marginal, secluded, and outwardly even feeble lives, yet whose intellectual work caused undeniable and irreversible sea changes in Western civilization, often after their deaths. These changes were not effected by organized conspiracies but by the power of new ideas to rapidly spread between minds and upend entire cultures in the process."
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Esotericism; Revelation; Tradition; Western Esoteric Orders
Esoteric Protestantism