Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Tradition

This page groups practices by the culture that gives them their inherited meaning. Wikipedia notes that Roman religious cultus was "an activity fundamental to Roman identity even when Rome as a political center had become fully urbanized." Browsing by tradition lets a visitor read every practice belonging to one culture together, rather than finding them scattered by category.

Facts
Directory
Category
Practices 1
Origins
Whose Classification This Is
Western esotericism as a single field is a twentieth-century scholarly construction: Antoine Faivre's typology of four intrinsic characteristics gave it a working definition, and Wouter Hanegraaff's later history reads the category as a container assembled by centuries of polemical exclusion. It is historians' frame, not a name the traditions gave themselves. 4
Overview
What Defines This Grouping
Practices belonging to traditions of concealed or graded knowledge - Hermetic and Kabbalistic ceremonial magic, initiatic orders, internal and external alchemy, tantric sexual yoga. The atlas describes the category and the existence of its practices from published scholarship; material a living order or lineage transmits only under initiation is recorded as existing and is not reproduced. 2
Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
Tantric sexual practice entered Western esoteric orders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through Randolph, Reuss and Crowley, in forms their Indian and Tibetan sources do not recognise. The atlas records the Western practice and the Indic practice as distinct and presents neither as the other. 3
Status
Standing as a Comparative Category
Used, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed 2
Learn More
The esoteric practices

This group holds esoteric practices, the inner or hidden disciplines of the mystical and occult traditions, transmitted to initiates and aimed at spiritual transformation, subtle physiology or contact with hidden powers. These practices are typically taught within a lineage and guarded from the uninitiated.

The browser will find esoteric practices from various traditions. The entries describe each practice's technique and aim, noting the tradition and lineage in which it is transmitted.

Tradition
Filter Results7 entries

Alexandrian Wicca

Tradition
2 entries

Dianic Wicca

Tradition
2 entries

Eclectic Solitary Wicca

Tradition
2 entries

Feri Tradition

Tradition
2 entries

Gardnerian Wicca

Tradition
2 entries

Reclaiming

Tradition
2 entries

Seax-Wica

Tradition
2 entries
Sources
1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Tree
2. Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Cambridge University Press, 2012
3. Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism
Hugh B. Urban, University of California Press, 2006
4. Access to Western Esotericism
Antoine Faivre, State University of New York Press, 1994
Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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