Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

At the center of Islamic civilization, running through its heart like a hidden river, flows a current of mystical experience that the religion's more legalistic forms have often tried to contain and sometimes to suppress — and that has always found a way to express itself anyway, in poetry, in music, in the ecstatic turning of the body, and in some of the most exquisite visual art ever produced in the history of human civilization. This current is **Sufism** — *tasawwuf* in Arabic — the inner dimension of Islam, its esoteric heart, the path of direct experience of the divine that runs alongside and sometimes athwart the path of law and doctrine. The name's origins are debated: some derive it from *suf* (wool), referring to the coarse woolen garments worn by early Muslim ascetics; others from *safa* (purity); others from the Greek *sophia* (wisdom). What is not debated is what Sufism seeks: *fana* — annihilation of the ego in the divine Beloved — and *baqa* — subsistence in tha...

In the museums of Cairo, London, Paris, and New York, in climate-controlled cases with precisely calibrated lighting, lie some of the most extraordinary documents in human history: papyrus scrolls, painted in vivid pigments that have survived three and a half millennia, filled with hieroglyphic text and luminous illustrations depicting the most audacious project the human imagination has ever undertaken — a detailed, operational manual for surviving death. These are the papyri of what we call the **Egyptian Book of the Dead**, and they are the culmination of a tradition of funerary literature stretching back to the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts of 2400 BCE: the ancient Egyptian belief that death is not an ending but a passage, and that the correct knowledge — the right spells, the right divine names, the right answers to the challenges of the underworld — could guide a soul safely through the treacherous terrain of the *Duat* (the Egyptian underworld) to a state of eternal existence in the...

In the libraries and monasteries of medieval Europe, between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, scribes and illuminators produced one of the most extraordinary genres in the history of books: the **bestiary**. Part natural history, part moral theology, part symbolic encyclopedia, the bestiary described the animals of the known world — and many beyond it — not primarily to inform the reader about nature, but to reveal the spiritual meaning encrypted in every creature by divine design. God, the medieval mind held, had written two books: Scripture and Creation. The bestiary was a key to reading the second. The tradition descended from the **Physiologus** — a Greek text of uncertain authorship, probably composed in Alexandria between the second and fourth centuries CE, that described some fifty animals, plants, and stones, each accompanied by a moral allegory. The Physiologus was translated into Latin, Ethiopian, Armenian, Syriac, Arabic, and eventually every major European vernacular, ...

In 1875, in a New York City apartment, a Russian noblewoman, an American Civil War colonel, and a small circle of seekers founded a society that would transform the landscape of Western spirituality more profoundly than almost any other single institution of the modern era. The woman was Helena Petrovna Blavatsky — known as HPB — arguably the most influential occultist of the nineteenth century, author of two of the most ambitious and controversial books in the history of esoteric thought, and the figure through whom much of what we recognize as New Age spirituality, modern Western esotericism, and the revival of interest in Eastern traditions in the West can be traced. The Theosophical Society she co-founded with Henry Steel Olcott and William Quan Judge had three stated objectives: to form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or color; to encourage the study of comparative religion, philosophy, and science; and to inve...