The sapiential dimension which lies at the heart of...

The sapiential dimension which lies at the heart of tradition had become too weakened in the West to enable tradition to become revived during this century without authentic contact with the Oriental traditions which had preserved their inner teachings intact in both their doctrinal and operative aspects.

Truncated and fragmented teachings of an originally esoteric nature issuing from the salons of Paris and other European cities were themselves too depleted of the presence of the sacred to enable modern Western man to rekindle the fire of the metaphysically penetrating intelligence and to enable the phoenix of sapience to arise from the ashes of a debilitating rationalism through recourse to what these circles offered.

Already in the nineteenth century, what remained of knowledge of an originally sacred character had become more or less reduced to either occultism or a purely theoretical philosophy divorced from the possibility of realization, while even as theory it remained incomplete.

That is why those who sought to rediscover sacred knowledge were attracted to the Orient despite the impossibility in most cases of gaining authentic knowledge of the Oriental traditions, especially as far as their inner dimensions were concerned.

The “lure” of the Orient is to be seen already in the eighteenth-century fascination in many European circles with China and also Egypt which, as far as the sources of traditional teachings are concerned, must be considered as an integral part of the Orient and the home of one of the most remarkable of traditional civilizations.

Supposedly esoteric knowledge derived from Egypt, China, and other Eastern sources became a subject of discussion of occultist circles especially in France and such “restitutions” as the Egyptian Rite of Cagliostro were carried out within Freemasonary.2 Egyptology, as well as Orientalism in general, were closely associated at this time with the quest for a kind of knowledge which seemed to have been already lost in the mainstream of European thought.