Reading Hidden Order: Divination and Western Esoteric Disciplines

Divination is recorded here as the umbrella discipline for ways of gaining insight into a question by ritual or practice, which Wikipedia describes as reading signs, events or omens. It comes first because the later stops are separate methods grouped under this idea.

Augury is divination by watching birds, their flight and cries. In Roman practice it was a public procedure run by a college of priests who took the auspices before acts of state, asking only whether the gods assented to proceeding now.

Astrology treats the apparent positions of celestial objects as information about human affairs. The atlas records it as an umbrella discipline and notes that it has been recognized as pseudoscientific since the 18th century, so its standing as a comparative category is disputed.

Alchemy aimed outwardly at perfecting metals and inwardly at purifying the soul, moving through the blackening, whitening and reddening of the great work. It carried through Egypt, the Islamic world and Europe and became an ancestor of chemistry.

Kabbalah is the mystical tradition of Judaism, centered on the Tree of Life with its ten Sephiroth and twenty-two paths. Scholem argued for composition of the Zohar in thirteenth-century Castile, a conclusion traditional Kabbalists reject.

Christian Kabbalah is the Renaissance reading of kabbalistic material by Christian scholars, beginning with Pico della Mirandola in 1486 and Johannes Reuchlin. It is the channel through which kabbalistic vocabulary entered Western ceremonial magic.

Sacred geometry reads forms such as the vesica piscis and the five Platonic solids as an encoded divine order. Plato assigned the regular solids to the elements and the cosmos, and Euclid proved that exactly five exist.

This discipline maps ordered hierarchies of spirits, including the nine choirs of Christian theology and the seventy-two angels of the Shem ha-Mephorash. Each spirit is given a name, seal, rank and sphere of influence.

Demonology classifies demons and evil spirits across many religions. The Western grimoire tradition catalogued them, most famously the seventy-two spirits of the Goetia in the Lesser Key of Solomon, and Weyer published his 1563 list as part of an argument that the business was delusion.

Enochian Magic is the ceremonial system built from the angelic conversations John Dee and Edward Kelley recorded between 1582 and 1589. It passed into later ceremonial magic through the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and it is still practised today.