The Esoteric Orders and Their Work

Fortune’s opening move clears away a lot of fog. Esotericism begins where exotericism ends: the word names whatever lies just past the edge of ordinary knowledge, and that edge keeps moving.

Her examples are deliberately homely. Reading, writing and arithmetic, she says, were once occult arts. What was taught to the initiates of Egypt is now taught to the schoolchildren of England.

Then she pushes it a step further. A man who flies like a bird or heals the sick looks miraculous to someone who does not know the laws involved, yet he has not stepped outside law at all. Neither has the adept. He gets his results by knowing natural laws that most people have not learned yet.

She has an image for how the two kinds of knowledge relate. Ordinary science is raising a great stone dome. Esoteric science is the timber scaffolding that holds the unfinished walls in place, and as each new course of masonry goes in, some of the timber comes out.

That has a consequence people miss. If a tradition were defined by its secrets, it would shrink a little every time one of those secrets turned into a schoolbook.

So when Fortune says the Western tradition has its own shape, she does not mean a private stock of facts. She means a way of working: which forces a school handles, how it trains a person, and what it keeps in balance.

Fortune held that reading, writing and arithmetic were once occult arts.

True✓Correct answer

True. It is her own example: what was once taught only to initiates became ordinary schooling, because the line between esoteric and everyday knowledge keeps moving.

Read enough occult literature and the schools start to sound alike. Their teachings and symbols line up so closely that, Fortune says, an initiate of one can read the scriptures of another just by translating the terms.

The easy conclusion is one universal mysticism in local costume. Fortune refuses it. The schools are not identical, she writes, “for although the form is the same owing to their common origin, the force that animates them is entirely different”.

Many students, she notes, see the likeness, write off the differences as quirks of pronunciation, and treat the methods as interchangeable. The power behind them all may be one, she allows, but that does not make them the same tool. Same form, different force: the difference lies in what a school actually works with, not in its vocabulary.

How does Fortune account for the way different occult schools resemble each other?

• The Western schools copied their teaching and symbols from Eastern ones
• They are one mysticism, and the differences come down to local names
• They look alike on the surface but teach opposite truths underneath
• They share a form from a common origin, but a different force drives each✓Correct answer

The form is shared because the schools have a common origin, while the force animating each one differs. Treating the differences as mere names and pronunciation is exactly the mistake she warns students against.

So what is the shape of the Western tradition? Fortune gives it three aspects, each with its presiding figure.

First comes the Nature aspect, whose master on its higher levels is Orpheus, the sweet singer. Then the Wisdom aspect, the training of the mind, with Hermes at its head. Last, the Devotional and Spiritual aspect, whose Master of Masters is Jesus of Nazareth.

And then the sentence this whole part rests on: “These three great aspects form the full Western Tradition, and each without the other two is but partial.” They are not three options on a menu. They are three strands of one rope, and someone who picks up a single strand has not yet picked up the tradition.