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Sixteen Systems That Read a Hidden Order Into the World

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Sixteen Systems That Read a Hidden Order Into the World

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Cosmological Disciplines gathers sixteen systems that each read a structure, order or correspondence into the cosmos and then use it to guide practice, moving from the Jewish, Christian and Chinese traditions that produced them into their later Western esoteric elaborations.

Kabbalah, the mystical tradition of Judaism, is the root of the largest sub cluster: its Tree of Life of ten Sephiroth was later read by Christian scholars as Christian Kabbalah, beginning with Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in 1486, and elaborated within Judaism itself as Lurianic Kabbalah, Isaac Luria's sixteenth century system of tzimtzum and tikkun that reshaped most later kabbalistic thought. Kabbalah is itself a registered restricted tradition, and this entry follows its own public account of its structure and history rather than its inner instruction.

A Chinese cluster spans feng shui and its later Flying Star school, Xuan Kong Fei Xing, which adds time to feng shui's reading of direction, alongside Wu Xing, the five phase scheme organising Chinese medicine, divination and the calendar, and the Ten Heavenly Stems, part of the same calendrical system.

A third cluster gathers Western esoteric systems built from correspondence and geometry: sacred geometry, chakras, drawn from Hindu and Buddhist tantra, alchemy, angels and spirits and demonology, which catalogue the hierarchies on either side of that divide, and the enneagram, a modern personality model built on older symbolism. Animal spirits and Vastu Shastra, India's traditional science of siting buildings, complete the group, and Alawite Batin Teaching, the closed inner reading of scripture within Alawite tradition, is recorded here only by its public history, never its inner teaching.

Cross-Tradition Connections

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Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Sources
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source
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