Modern English

Modern English belongs to the West Germanic branch of the Indo-European family, and for most of its history it was a receiving language for religious material rather than a composing one. The texts that shaped English religious life arrived in translation: the Latin Vulgate, then Wycliffe, Tyndale and the King James Version out of Hebrew and Greek; the Buddhist and Hindu canons out of Pali and Sanskrit in the nineteenth century; the Islamic sources out of Arabic. English readers met almost everything at one remove.

That changed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when English became a language in which whole religious and esoteric systems were first written down rather than a language they were carried into. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn drafted its rituals and its tables of correspondence in English. Theosophy, founded by a Russian-speaking writer, published its major works in English. Thelema, Wicca and the wider modern Pagan revival composed their liturgies in English from the start, as did a long line of new religious movements from the Latter-day Saint tradition onwards.

The distinction matters whenever a claim is made about what language something was written in. A text composed in English and a text merely available in English are different objects, and the difference decides where its vocabulary came from, who could read it first, and what a translator has already done to it on the reader's behalf. This atlas keeps the two claims apart and treats the language a text was composed in as a fact about the text, not about its audience.

The sharpest cases are the systems whose foundational vocabulary was coined in English by English speakers rather than carried into English from somewhere older. Where a Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek or Latin term reaches a modern reader through a translator's choice, an English-coined term reaches the reader as its author left it, and an argument about what it means is an argument about English usage rather than about a rendering.

Much of nineteenth and twentieth century Western esotericism sits in that second class. The Golden Dawn's grade names and ritual scripts, the working vocabulary of modern ceremonial magic, the terms of Wicca and of the wider Pagan revival, and the language of a great many twentieth century new religious movements were all written first in English by writers whose own language it was.

The contrast is easiest to see where one system exists in two languages at different removes. Guido von List's Armanen runic system was composed in German in 1906 and 1908, and everything an English reader knows of it arrives through a translator. Its later English-language reception, the commentary and elaboration written about it by English speakers, is a separate body of material composed in English about a German original.

Naming which of the two a statement is about is not a technicality. It decides whether a disputed term is List's or his translator's, and on more than one occasion the two have not agreed.