The first centuries of Christianity were an age of giving new meaning to an old heritage. The questions of how humans interact with the world of gods and spirits, the visible and the invisible – such as the end of the world, death and resurrection – were considered afresh through the prism of the new Age of Pisces. Almost every one of these questions laid the foundations for a new discipline: eschatology became the study of the end of the world, soteriology the study of salvation, and thanatology the study of death.
At first this was not the achievement of the new Christians; a new era had simply begun. The first Christians were uneducated people from the lowest social strata of a single community – the Jews of Palestine.
At first it was the Christianity of the apostle Peter, later the first bishop of Rome. The apostle Paul, by contrast, came from a wealthy and educated Jewish family. Peter was the apostle to the Jews and Paul the apostle to the Gentiles, preaching the word of God throughout the Mediterranean basin. There were many teachers at the time. For a while a third force was Simon the Sorcerer, a 1st-century man from Samaria also known as Simon Magus.
Educated people of the time found it hard to limit themselves to faith alone, as the uneducated did – all the more so because writings on the apocalypse, eschatology and Hermeticism already existed.
At this time Christians tried to rework this knowledge and adapt it to their own views and needs.
In 313 the Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, which recognised Christianity as a religion with equal rights alongside all others.
Divination and religion
A year later, the Lateran Palace was placed at the disposal of the bishop of Rome – a forerunner of the Vatican.
The first monastic orders and their rules appeared, and Christian asceticism began to take shape as the mortification of the flesh. A new category of people emerged: Christian saints. Christians began to create their own literature, theory and systems of teaching, from the Gospels, Acts and Epistles through to theological treatises.
The huge body of accumulated, refined and subtle texts and theories sometimes overwhelms researchers, and provides rich food for minds that think differently.
Christians gave new meaning to the square by transforming it into the cross.
In the first quarter of the millennium, besides Christianity itself, two main currents of esoteric thought could be distinguished: a pluralistic one, which saw Christianity as one of many teachings about the world and humanity – better than others in some respects and worse in others; and a monistic one, which considered Christianity the most important teaching, but one requiring many corrections and additions.
The first was linked to the philosophical mysticism of Neoplatonism, the second to the religion of Gnosticism.
In the 2nd century AD the Orthodox Church of Alexandria arose, its founder being the apostle Mark. The Coptic Church, which emerged around the 5th century, was the work of Patriarch Dioscorus. Both exist to this day. Sects also existed in Alexandria itself, and their followers are known as Gnostics. By “sect” we do not mean a community’s beliefs that are demonic or false, but rather ones that lay outside mainstream Christianity (that is, today’s Catholic Church).
The Gnostics sought the Truth. They regarded its foundation as gnosis – “knowledge”, “secret knowledge of God, the world and the true spiritual nature of humankind, revealed by prophets and preserved by esoteric tradition”. The Gnostics believed that Sabaoth was the true and unknowable God, who gave birth to the Pleroma – the fullness of spirituality, made up of spiritual spheres joined in pairs.
Another “sect” was the Valentinians. They were originally Christians of a Neoplatonic bent, but they soon turned into a school similar to the Pythagorean school, where the basics of the Christian faith were taught, while the enlightened were taught about Sabaoth and Yaldabaoth.
Valentinus, the founder of the movement, was a Jew from Alexandria and a philosopher. According to his followers, a human being consists of body, soul and mind. The body comes from the earth, and the soul from the mind that was formed and created. Everything a person has was received from God (the world of emanation). This is why there are three kinds of people: spiritual, psychic and somatic.
In practice, however, they were concerned with healing and astrology, and with choosing talismans, amulets and various spells.
Like the Valentinians, the Ophites distinguished between a higher and a lower God, Sabaoth and Yaldabaoth, and worshipped the former – but in the form of a serpent, as a symbol of wisdom. For them, Jesus was merely another incarnation of the serpent, the eternal enlightened one.
There were a great many similar movements. For this reason the first philosophers of the Church dealt mainly with apologetics – working out the principles of Christian religious philosophy and defending them against heresies. Of all the currents of philosophical thought of the time, it was Neoplatonism that offered the new Christian philosophers the most highly developed apparatus of concepts and categories.
One of the most esoteric non-Christian philosophers was Iamblichus (280–330), who formulated the doctrine of the universal harmony of the secret knowledge of all times and peoples. He had a great influence on the development of occultism and on the Christian Kabbalists and other Western esotericists of the Renaissance.
He also saw the difference between esotericism and religion, and between esotericism and philosophy – and he ranked esotericism above philosophy.
He was also involved in magic, astrology, divination and the practice of ecstatic passage into supersensory realms.
The most significant of the Church Fathers of the time was St Augustine, who, after a long search, found and gave deep meaning to Christian dogma. He took an interest in two ideas: the Kingdom of God and salvation.
This was not only the beginning of the theological idea of the Church Triumphant and the Church Militant, but also the beginning of esoteric Christianity, whose aims converge with those of Buddhism, where the path to salvation is open to all.
St Augustine believed that only divine grace could heal the sick human soul. To receive it, you must strive to know God – and to do that, you must know yourself.
By the 5th century Christianity had finally found its feet and become multinational. There were no longer any Jews among the new Christians. The canon of four Gospels, 21 Epistles, the Acts of the Apostles and the Apocalypse took shape.
A new way of counting time was introduced – from the birth of Christ. Gnosticism died out at this time, as Christianity was present in almost every European state. In the 6th century Christianity declared Platonism to be paganism, and the Platonic Academy was closed.
Between the 10th and 11th centuries, crusaders conquered old pagan temples and converted them into Christian ones. For more than two hundred years the crusaders failed to take control of the East, and they were eventually driven out of the Holy Land by the Saracens, that is, the Arabs.
The knights brought back from those lands all kinds of tales of science, mysticism, magic, black magic, vampires and the terrible power of a woman’s curse, which shook the faith of Christians. They also brought back the cult of the Devil, whose purpose was the ruin of good Christians.
The knightly and monastic orders – more than twenty of them – were founded during the Crusades to defend Christian shrines and missions. They received the Pope’s blessing and in time generally grew into influential organisations.
A few of them studied Eastern esotericism, but after the destruction of the Knights Templar such studies ceased.
The Templars were an order of knights founded by Hugues de Payens and Godfrey de Saint-Omer. They wished to maintain peace on Earth and the unity of all nations, and to this end they carried out esoteric research and sought a universal Church based on Gnostic teachings. From the Gnostics they borrowed the symbol of androgyny in its original sense, an image of the unity of the whole universe. The trouble was that the figure had a goat’s head, whose horns, beard and ears formed an accursed pentagram, and so Christian bishops associated it with the Devil. The Templars called it Baphomet – a term they used for the emanation of the universal “we”, an astral wind able to lead people along the path of self-perfection towards universal peace and brotherhood. It cost them dearly: they were accused of adopting Islam and declared heretics.
Deities and idols depicting a goat (gods of abundance and revelry) were a problem for the Church. It therefore tried to turn them into embodiments of the Devil and evil – and it succeeded.
In time, witches – women who practised magic – began to be burned at the stake. They were innocent women who fell victim to fear, hysteria and the unrestrained Catholic Church of the time. Jews were also tortured as bearers of diabolical knowledge. All pagan deities and spirits were declared to be forms of the Devil. Out of necessity, exorcism arose – techniques for driving the Devil or his helpers out of the people they possessed. This was mainly the work of the Cistercians, Dominicans and Jesuits.
The Catholic Church created the Devil for its own purposes, in order to rule the people and completely destroy ancient knowledge and worship.
Simple folk came to believe in black magic and witches, while educated people decided to deal with all this on their own.
They began to collect and study old Jewish, Arabic and Greek books. Lay people paid for this with exile or prison. At that time the Church rid itself of researchers and thinkers such as Albertus Magnus, who created the first conception horoscope; the alchemist Arnaldus de Villanova, author of many works on medicine, alchemy and magic; and the Franciscan monk Ramon Llull, who was the first to study the Kabbalah and developed a philosophical and mystical system.
The Benedictine monk known as Trithemius assembled a great library of works on alchemy, magic and other esoteric sciences.
Another famous figure was Paracelsus, who applied Agrippa’s theories to medicine. He showed that there is a close bond between nature and humankind, so that knowledge of the two forms an inseparable whole.
A follower of Paracelsus, Michel de Nostredame – Nostradamus – was a physician and also a visionary. He saw the future, but could describe it only in the terms of his own time. Some things did not even have names then, because they did not yet exist, which is why he used allegorical language.
First published (Polish original): 27 May 2012. Written by astrologers and esoteric specialists working with our editorial team; edited and translated for HOROSCOP.SPACE. © All rights reserved.
