The Emergence of "Esoteric" as a Comparative Category: Towards a Decentered Historiography

[IR] https://www.doi.org/10.1558/imre.23260 Implicit Religion (print) ISSN 1463-9955 Implicit Religion (online) ISSN 1743-1697 The Emergence of “Esoteric” as a Comparative Category: Towards a Decentered Historiography Julian Strube University of Vienna julian.strube@univie.ac.at This case study contributes to ongoing debates about religious comparativism by focusing on the emergence of the notion of “esoteric” as a de facto comparative category since the seventeenth century. Scholars have so far restricted their studies to a preconceived “Western esoteric corpus” that limited our view on the majority of source material. This obfuscated the fact that notions such as “esoteric,” “gnosis,” or “Cabala” have been widely employed historically to discuss subjects ranging from the Arabic and Persianate world via India to East Asia. Since the eighteenth century, “esoteric” language formed an integral part of orientalist scholarship, which explains its omnipresence in (South) Asianist scholarship today. This immediately relates to broader issues of religious comparativism: I argue for the necessity of a decentered historiography to understand the development of categories such as “esotericism” and “religion,” not as a unilateral process of “Western” diffusion and projection but through entangled historical exchanges. Based on the approach of global religious history, I provide preliminary insights into what conditioned and structured these exchanges. From European to global religious history This survey will shine light on how the notion of “esoteric” served as a prominent comparative category across chronological, geographical, and cultural contexts, stretching from Europe to Asia. My exploration of the development of this category serves two related purposes: one, Keywords: esotericism, religious comparativism, global religious history, orientalist studies, European religious history, religion in Asia © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023, Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield, S1 2BX The Emergence of “Esoteric” as a Comparative Category it will allow for illuminating insights into the history of “religion” and the genealogy of its academic study. Two, it will underline the necessity to reflect on the use of present-day scholarly vocabulary, specifically when it emphatically is restricted to “the West.” The case of the term “esoteric” is particularly instructive because it is mainly being studied under the rubric of “Western esotericism,” the conceptualization of which largely overlaps with German studies preferring the non-geographically limited term Esoterikforschung, as will be seen below. The latter is often linked to the paradigm of Europäische Religionsgeschichte (European religious history). Both models have focused on eighteenth-century Europe as a crucial period of transition that shaped the terms “esotericism” and “religion,” respectively. I hold that expanding on these geographically or “culturally” restricted models is not least necessary because the eighteenth century, with the emergence of orientalist scholarship and colonialism in Asia, conditioned and structured the emergence of comparative religion and, eventually, religious studies in the sense of Religionswissenschaft—not as a unilateral process of “Western” diffusion and projection but through entangled historical exchanges (Strube 2021). It will become evident that the notion of “esoteric” stood at the center of contemporary efforts to unveil a primitive universal origin of language, “religion,” “nation” (or, increasingly, “race”), and “civilization” in the broadest sense. Indeed, its associations with secrecy, “mysteries,” “gnosis,” and “Cabala” figured prominently during the progressing professionalization and institutionalization of orientalist scholarship and the emergence of comparative religion. The article’s objective is not to set up another definition of “esoteric” but to understand how this term was related by historical actors to certain practices, (alleged) traditions, and other terms. Such a source-based approach opens up constructive ways out of ongoing debates about religious comparativism and cultural exchange, as it avoids the tendentially distorting integration of sources into grand narratives; the necessarily contested establishment of fixed definitions; or the claim that terms such as “esotericism” or “religion” “belong” to certain cultural spheres (Strube 2022, 1–37). When scrutinizing “the notion of esoteric,” I am not interested in discovering its essence or a universal point of reference, but in providing insights into its globally entangled historical development, whose enormous heterogeneity and contextuality may in themselves be the object of analysis. Rather than suggesting a linear development, the following exploration will serve to illustrate a veritable tangle of cultural exchanges that © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023 Julian Strube resulted in highly various and contested identifications of “esoteric” aspects or currents of different “religions,” a common origin of which was often presupposed. My intention is not to unveil a universal esotericism, and neither do I argue that present understandings of “it” had their “origin” in eighteenth-century or earlier debates: quite the contrary, I aim to demonstrate that present-day conceptualizations of “esotericism,” and by extension of “religion,” often tend to rest on a selection and focus on “Western” sources that overlap with late nineteenth-century understandings (Strube 2021, 2017b). While this limited selection has produced important insights, it did not consider the manifold global connections that shaped understandings of both “religion” and “esotericism.” By consequence, concrete suggestions have recently been made for how to expand the model of European religious history into a more complex and comprehensive global religious history (e.g., Hermann 2021; Maltese and Strube 2021; Bergunder 2016a, 2016b). This approach requires a consistent historization of our scholarly categories and the development of a decentered historiography, of which this article represents one step leading to further research (also see Strube forthcoming a; forthcoming b). The starting point of my exploration is eighteenth-century Bengal, which at the time flourished as an intellectual hotspot and trading center powered by complex cultural dynamics. Direct contacts with Europeans were established since the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese created a trading hub before they were driven out by the Mughals. Under Emperor Jahangir, European trading posts were again established in the early seventeenth century. When Mughal influence declined from the early eighteenth century, the increasingly independent ruler of Bengal, the Nawab, established trading routes with several European East India Companies, among which the British would eventually gain the upper hand. Their defeat of Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 was followed by the establishment of the Bengal Presidency, where Calcutta was declared the capital of British India in 1772 (Phillips 2021, 207–246). One of the most important centers of learning at that time was the court of raja Krishnachandra (1710–1783) at Krishnagar in the region of Nadiya. Krishnachandra actively sought to legitimize his reign through Brahmanical patronage and the promotion of Shaiva-Shakta traditions that are still characteristic of Bengali culture (Bordeaux 2015, 21; McDermott 2001, 20–22). The raja’s support for learning was so eminent that Krishnagar became known as the “Oxford of Bengal” in the early colonial period © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023 The Emergence of “Esoteric” as a Comparative Category (Bordeaux 2015, 11). Gopal Nyayalankar, one of the court’s most important scholars, assembled a team of pandits to compile a legal handbook for Governor Warren Hastings, called Vivādārṇavasetu (A Bridge Over Troubled Waters of Litigation). In Nathaniel Brassey Halhed’s translation, it became the famous Code of Gentoo Laws (1776) (Bordeaux 2015, 66–67). Gopal also assisted William Carey in the translation of the Bible into Sanskrit. It was in that sphere where William Jones learned Sanskrit and received a legal handbook that would later become Colebrooke’s Digest of Hindu Law on Contracts and Successions (Brown, Frykenberg, and Low 2002, 51). These are just some illustrations for the well-documented intense and far-reaching cultural exchanges that marked the region (Ganeri 2011, 13, 17, 39–59). As one might expect, Krishnachandra’s relationship with the Company was complicated. A recent discovery by Joshua Ehrlich allows us a direct glimpse into interactions between the local ruler and a European delegation. While the latter “made friendly gestures towards Krishnachandra, they also solicited information that might be useful to Hastings in governing. What is more, they explored how Hastings might absorb some of the raja’s politically advantageous reputation for scholarly patronage” by asking how the British administration could support the Brahmanical colleges of Nadiya (Ehrlich 2020, 161–162). As Ehrlich succinctly put it, this was “an arena of competition as well as cooperation,” which becomes tangible in the protocol of a meeting between a European delegation and Krishnachandra around 1772–1777, when the raja was about 70 years of age. Krishnachandra, in Ehrlich’s words, demonstrated his intellectual mastery by “not only expounding the contents of Brahmanical learning and rebuffing challenges, but also winning over his audience” (Ehrlich 2020, 162–163). Particularly striking for the subject of this article is the following dialogue from the perspective of the European delegation: [Krishnachandra] asked from whence the Europeans had derived their knowledge of Astronomy? & from what period? [W]e replied that the Sciences were generally supposed to have travelled from East to West[,] that we could clearly trace them eastward into Greece, which received them from Egipt[,] and possibly Egiptians might derive them from the Hindoos; that there appears upon the ruins and Medals discovered in Egipt great similarity in many circumstances between that people and the present Hindoos as well as with those of ancient times as far back as history could inform us[,] but as Egipt had become subject to the Mahomedans and the original histories were lost, we were unable to ascertain which was the most ancient of the two[.] (Ehrlich 2020, 166) © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023 Julian Strube The raja’s response readily confirmed the theory of his guests: [T]he Country of Egipt[, he] said[̣,] is well known to us, and is mentioned in our histories, with a trifling variation of name[.] [W]e have had an intercourse with its Inhabitants from time immemorial, & I rather suppose, they would have drawn their knowledge from us. [S]o far is past all doubt, that the Hindoos are a very ancient people & Learning has been cultivated amongst them from times of the most remo[te] antiquity. However there is an extraordinary tradition amongst the Learned that even when by some accident, the Hindoo Books of Science were injured or distroyed they were recovered by Copies obtained from Egipt[.] (Ehrlich 2020, 167) This speech did not fail to amaze the Europeans, who found Krishnachandra “upon the whole the most enlightened native we had ever met with, and his conversation remarkably free from all appearance of Superstition or Artifice” (Ehrlich 2020, 169). Indeed, Krishnachandra did not only fulfil the delegation’s expectations but also laid claim to the authority of Indian learning. This was possible due to the common scholarly assumption of historical links between ancient Egypt and India, if not the former learning’s origin in “the East.” In what follows, I will offer an explanation of how that claim was plausible in its historical context. This is not only relevant for an understanding of an episodical exchange between learned men from Europe and India, but for far-reaching historical developments in the historiography of religion since the seventeenth century. As I have shown in my recent study of Tantra in Bengal from the perspective of global religious history (Strube 2022), theories about a common origin of Egyptian and Indian culture would later inform discourses about the origin of “esoteric” wisdom in India. This served learned Indians to assert the superiority of their own culture over that of the colonizers. It also opened a decidedly comparativist and often universalist perspective on “religion,” or, more precisely, “true religion” handed down in different yet interconnected cultures over the ages. The famous Bengali intellectual Pyarichand Mitra (1814– 1883), for instance, professed that Vedantic philosophy, as the supposedly noblest expression of “Aryan” thought, could also be found in Egypt, as well as in Persia: “The Sufees were Vedantists to the backbone.” Moreover, “the doctrines of the New Platonists were tinged with Vedantism. Paul was thoroughly Vedantic in this teaching,” and the same applied to modern European philosophy, as represented by Hume and Fichte (Mittra 1879, 12–14). In an 1880 book on Spiritualism, Pyarichand speculated © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023 The Emergence of “Esoteric” as a Comparative Category that ancient Egypt had received its wisdom from Hindus who had spread their culture on their great travels from the Indus: “The Chaldians, like the Egyptian priests and Aryas, were given to divination and occultism” (Mittra 1880, 1). He also asserted that the mastery of mesmerism, electrobiology, and magnetism was common among the ancient Aryans (Mittra 1879, 16, 49). These references to nineteenth-century currents that many scholars today would subsume under the category of “esotericism” were widespread in both Bengali and European orientalist discourse. The prominent author Shishirkumar Ghosh (1840–1911) supported the notion that Spiritualism had originated in India, even claiming that Krishnachandra himself had employed the service of an Indian medium in order to contact the great sixteenth-century Bengali Vaishnava, Chaitanya, “more than a hundred years ago, long before the Fox family, the founders of modern spiritualism, came into existence” (Ghose 1906, 18; also see Bhatia 2020). In a momentous contribution to the Theosophical flagship journal, The Theosophist, the Tantric intellectual Baradakanta Majumdar explained that “[t]he Tantriks like the Freemasons and Rosicrucians studiously hide their books and secrets from the outside world” (Majumdar 1880, 173), a conviction that was also expressed by Rajnarayan Basu (1826–1899), a leader of the highly influential Brahmo Samaj, when he referred to Shiva as “the Grand Master of the Tantric Masonhood” (Kumar 1883). Such views were enthusiastically received and propagated by esotericists such as the members of the Theosophical Society, but it bears emphasis that they had also—and earlier—been articulated by prominent orientalists. The British Professor of Sanskrit Monier Williams, for example, compared Indian yantras to “the inverted triangles of the Freemasons supposed to possess occult powers,” concluding that “the Tantras are generally mere manuals of mysticism, magic, and superstition of the worst and most silly kind” (Williams 1878, 126, 129). In a less polemical fashion, Edward Cockburn Ravenshaw, who had worked for the India Office already in the 1820s, stated in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society from 1852 that the symbolism of the Shri Yantra may be linked to “esoteric” initiatory mystery cults in Egypt, Gnosticism, and Freemasonry (Ravenshaw 1852, 76–77). These nineteenth-century developments contributed to the omnipresence of “esoteric” language in Indological and (South) Asianist scholarship today, for instance in the many comparisons drawn by leading experts between Indian traditions, Gnosticism, and Hermeticism (Strube 2022, © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023 Julian Strube 65–68, 101–102). It is often unclear whether such vocabulary is employed in a rather colloquial way (esoteric “simply” meaning secret, hidden), phenomenologically (e.g., “gnosis” as a universal mode of attaining knowledge or enlightenment), or whether they suggest actual historical links between ancient Mediterranean and Indian traditions. More research is needed to comprehend the genealogy of this comparative vocabulary and to explain what made it historically possible, what conditioned and structured the underlying cultural-linguistic exchanges. This article will offer some initial observations and explanations of these circumstances, focusing on sources spanning the period from the seventeenth to the first half of the nineteenth century, which will offer a basis for subsequent research focused on India and other non-European contexts. Beyond the “Western esoteric corpus” Building on previous studies that have concentrated on how the notion of “esoteric” emerged within European contexts, I will expand on the discussion with respect to two central aspects: first, scholars have so far restricted their studies to contexts that many experts today would readily identify as “esoteric”: most prominently, Freemasonry and early modern debates revolving around subjects such as Kabbalah, Rosicrucianism, Gnosticism, or what was then referred to as Theosophy (e.g., the writings of Jacob Böhme). Second, related polemics were integrated into a narrative about “rejected knowledge in Western culture” at the root of the paradigm of “Western esotericism.” Both angles are not simply wrong, but they are incomplete, due to a heuristic limitation that narrows our view on the majority of source material. With regard to the first aspect, Monika Neugebauer-Wölk argued in ground-breaking articles that Masonic writings were decisively responsible in the second half of the eighteenth century to shape understandings of “esoteric” that largely concur with the present-day model of “Western esotericism” (Neugebauer-Wölk 2010; Neugebauer-Wölk 2013). Departing from a search for nouns reflecting the formation of “concepts” (Begriffsbildung), Neugebauer-Wölk revised the assumption that the French ésotérisme should be considered the first -ism related to the subject. That noun had allegedly been coined by the Alsatian scholar Jacques Matter (1791–1864) in his 1828 Histoire critique du gnosticisme, from whence it made a career in the writings of the supposed “founder of occultism,” Éliphas Lévi (i.e., Alphonse-Louis Constant, 1810–1875), and from there through the writings of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), co-founder of the © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023 The Emergence of “Esoteric” as a Comparative Category Theosophical Society, and other contemporary esotericists. NeugebauerWölk correctly pointed out Matter’s links to Freemasonry and his thesis that Gnosticism was linked to Pythagoreanism (Neugebauer-Wölk 2010, 226–226; Neugebauer-Wölk 2013, 38–40). A crucial discovery of hers was the first use of the German noun Esoterik in the multi-volume Urgeschichte (Primordial History) by Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827), a professor at the university of Göttingen. More precisely, the noun was an addition to the 1790 redaction of the work, originally published anonymously in 1776/1779. It was added by Eichhorn’s student Johann Philipp Gabler (1753–1826), who alluded to “the esotericism of the order” of the ancient Pythagoreans (Neugebauer-Wölk 2010, 222–227; Neugebauer-Wölk 2013, 41). The respective discussion about Pythagoras was linked to the controversy about Egyptian influences on Moses, which, as Neugebauer-Wölk has pointed out, was inherently intertwined with the emergent Masonic and other secret societies. This connection becomes especially clear in the writings of Christoph Meiners (1747–1810), a colleague of Eichhorn’s in Göttingen. As early as in 1772, Meiners had published an anonymous tract with the title Revision der Philosophie, which possibly contains the first mention of an individual Esoteriker in German (Neugebauer-Wölk 2013, 42). In 1779, Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788) published a work with the ominous title Konxompax, which contains the possibly first mention of Esoterismus and was motivated by the work of both Meiners and a study by Johann August von Starck (1741–1816), the founder of the Clerics of the Knights Templar. Neugebauer-Wölk concluded that the term Esoterismus was introduced to refer to a specific form of religion in the eighteenth century that covered the spectrum from Enlightenment rationalism to Neo-Platonic theurgy, supposedly guarded by the secrets of Freemasonry (Neugebauer-Wölk 2013, 57; Neugebauer-Wölk 2010, 225–226). While there can be little doubt about the importance of these Masonic debates for the sedimentation of the term “esoteric” throughout the eighteenth century, it must be noted that it was also a comparative category mainly geared towards Asia, especially with regard to Islam, Persia, India, China, and Japan. This was not only prior to Masonic discourse but also a much more extensive, and arguably more significant, development. It bears emphasis, then, that the participants on the debates outlined by Neugebauer-Wölk were not simply Freemasons but also theologians and, crucially, orientalists. Starck was a trained expert of “oriental languages” and Eichhorn’s chair in Göttingen was dedicated to their study. The same © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023 Julian Strube holds true for Matter, who professed that the ésotérisme allegedly typical of Pythagoreanism and the School of Alexandria existed “throughout antiquity, from China to Gallia,” and that “the Greek doctrine is simply that of India, altered and materialized through its passage via Egypt” (Matter 1828b, 83; Matter 1820, 4; also see Strube 2016, 118, 398–399). The Gnostics, but also the Kabbalists, had received Indian “and perhaps even Chinese” ideas (Matter 1828a, 88–89). As I have demonstrated in my study of Éliphas Lévi, the “founder of occultism” derived his ideas precisely from so-called neo-Catholic scholarship that was based on orientalist studies and the emerging historical-critical Bible studies, as well as contemporary socialist discourses that similarly debated “true religion” and its origin in “the Orient” (Strube 2016, esp. 193– 196, 625–626). Lévi did not continue an “esoteric tradition,” nor did he have to rely on sources that might be reasonably considered “esoteric.” Nor did Matter, Eichhorn, Starck, Meiners, or the other scholars mentioned above. While the importance of those sources for Masonic discourse is beyond question, they were themselves not confined to an “esoteric” sphere, and in most instances they had little to nothing to do with Freemasonry. The language of “esoteric” was commonplace in theological and orientalist discourse, and not at all exclusive to the considerations of Masons. Wouter Hanegraaff, in turn, focused on eighteenth-century Protestant polemics and identified the tension between an admiration for supposed ancient wisdom from “the Orient” and the rejection of alleged errors, superstition, and enthusiasm. On one hand, we find an “ancient wisdom narrative” rooted in antiquity, praising a tradition handed down from India via Chaldea to Egypt, and from there to the schools of Greek philosophy, especially Pythagoreanism. This narrative gained in popularity during the Renaissance, where the concepts of prisca theologia and philosophia perennis were subject to learned debates about true wisdom (Hanegraaff 2012, 5–76; Stausberg 1998). Although Hanegraaff’s use of the notion of “Platonic Orientalism” to describe this veneration for “the Orient” is disputed and would warrant a more in depth-discussion (Hanegraaff 2012, 12–17; cf. Burns 2021, 20–29 and Saif 2021, 72–74), it may suffice here to note Hanegraaff’s central thesis that “the ancient wisdom narrative of the Renaissance, grounded in Platonic Orientalism and patristic apologetics, created the conceptual foundation of the initial “referential corpus” of Western esotericism” (Hanegraaff 2012, 73). On the other hand, Hanegraaff argued that “anti-pagan” polemics culminated in an outright rejection of the very same “corpus” in the eight© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023 The Emergence of “Esoteric” as a Comparative Category eenth century (Hanegraaff 2012, 77–152). Among others, Hanegraaff highlighted the work of the Protestant Enlightenment polymath Christoph August Heumann (1681–1764), especially his Acta philosophorum (1715–1727). According to Hanegraaff, “[t]he “Enlightenment paradigm” announced so clearly in this writing was the beginning of the eclipse of “Western esotericism” in modern intellectual discourse” (Hanegraaff 2012, 136). “Western esotericism,” then, is based on a specific “corpus” that became “rejected” in the eighteenth century. In order to delineate this corpus, Hanegraaff cites the following passage from Heumann’s Acta: However, for the reasons set out so far, I am certain that all these Collegia sacerdotum Ægyptorium, Orphaicorum, Eumolpidarum, Samothracum, Magorum, Brachmanum, Gymnosophistarum and Druidum, which [the polymath Daniel Georg] Morhof sometimes calls occulta, sometimes arcana, sometimes secreta and secretiora . . . that all of these were schools, not of wisdom, but of foolishness… (Heumann 1715/1716, 210). It might not have escaped the reader that this historiographical “corpus” prominently referred not only to Egyptians and (Chaldean) magi, but also to Brahmins and, as Heumann noted elsewhere, the Chinese I Ching. This points to the limitations of subsuming these debates under the heading of “Western esotericism,” the appropriateness of which might already be interrogated in view of the prominence of Egypt, the Middle East, and Persia. What is more, the crucial period in the development of the term “esoteric” identified by both Neugebauer-Wölk and Hanegraaff coincided with the development of orientalist studies and the establishment of colonialism in India outlined above, a point that has been highlighted by Urs App (2010, 2–3). To be sure, the “ancient wisdom narrative” is itself of great antiquity, but the seventeenth- and certainly the eighteenth-century authors in question were familiar, not only with Greek and Hebrew but also with Persian and Arabic, followed by an increasing engagement with Asian languages such as Sanskrit. The fact that the sedimentation and exponential growth of the word field of “esoteric” happened just at that time suggests that references to things esoteric, secret, occult, or arcane formed an integral part of comparativist vocabulary within orientalist scholarship. The fundamental problem is that the identification of a “Western Esoteric Corpus” results from a selection of sources that matched a preconceived template. As I have argued elsewhere, the notion of “Western esotericism” was shaped towards the end of the nineteenth century within occultist polemics against “Eastern esotericism” (Strube © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023 Julian Strube 2017b). These historical developments point far beyond what many experts would understand as “esoteric” today. Their frame of reference was not restricted to Christianity, Judaism, or Europe. The emergence of an “esoteric” language and the “esoteric distinction” The Greek terms esōterikós, esōteriká, and esōterikói were used as early as in the second and third centuries CE, before they proliferated in Latin during the Renaissance and, from there, in various vernaculars (Riffard 1990). Clement of Alexandria differentiated between writings by Aristoteles that were exclusive to certain disciples, esōteriká, while the others were exōteriká. Prior to this distinction was the notion of akroamatikós (“relating to an oral teaching”) instead of esōterikós, another much-debated notion that was not simply replaced by the latter but that remained prominent until the nineteenth century. Iamblichus mentioned the esōterikoí among the disciples of Pythagoras, who were allowed to behold the face of the master during his lectures, while the others had to listen behind a curtain (Neugebauer-Wölk 2013, 66–68). The distinction was also applied to other philosophical schools, for instance to the Stoics, about which we can learn in a sixteenth-century Latin Galen translation that they did not explain the meaning of some of their words, “because it is internum, so to speak, and, as they call it, esotericum, and arcanum” (Galen 1535, 26). In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, then, differentiations between esotericus and exotericus were quite commonplace in learned discourse on ancient philosophy, although it is telling that these terms were often paired with an explanatory internus and externus. Combinations with acroamaticus were notable, for instance in Franciscus Patricius’s discussion of “Aristotelis libiri acroamatici, epoptici, exoterici, encyclii, ecdedomeni,” where it becomes further clear that most philosophical schools had their inner and outer teachings: “not only did the Pythagoreans and Plato conceal [occultabant] many things, but also the Epicureans say that there are some secrets [archana] among them, and that they do not permit all to read those writings.” The same goes for others, for instance the Stoics and “the Aristotelians who say that some of their writings are esōteriká, that is internal, while the others are public and exōteriká, that is external” (Patricius 1571, 43). We observe how the ancient differentiation between secret and public teachings formed part of Renaissance debates, without being restricted to a particular school or type of doctrines. Neugebauer-Wölk has pointed © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023 The Emergence of “Esoteric” as a Comparative Category out how this distinction played an important role in seventeenth-century struggles about Pythagoreanism, when the Renaissance fascination for the figure of Hermes Trismegistus gave way to that of Pythagoras. The reason was Isaac Casaubon’s debunking of the supposed antiquity of the Hermetic writings in 1614, which shifted the focus from Hermes to Pythagoras, allowing some contemporaries to nominally replace Hermeticism while not abandoning the ideas associated with it (Neumann 2013, 171–8; Mulsow 2002a). A crucial role was played in this process by the Cambridge Platonists, especially by Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688) and Thomas Burnet (1635–1715), who in his Archaeologiae philosophicae sive doctrina antiqua de rerum originibus (1692) related the distinction between a “doctrina vulgaris & doctrina arcana” to the doctrines of ancient Egypt (Burnet 1692, 84). Their colleague Thomas Stanley (1625–1678) had published his History of Philosophy from 1655–1660, wherein we can read, probably for the first time in English, that “[t]he Auditors of Pythagoras […] were of two sorts, Exoterick and Esoterick: The Exotericks were those who were under probation, which if they well performed, they were admitted to be Esotericks” by choice and then trial (Stanley 1701, 372). This distinction was also employed by the theologian of dissent Theophilus Gale (1628–1678), who tried to prove, in his Court of the Gentiles (1669–1671), that all true knowledge and philosophy derived from the ancient Hebrews, which had been corrupted by the Gentiles. An advocate of a reformed Platonism, Gale regarded the teachings of Aristotle as inferior and argued for Plato’s indebtedness to “Jewish Traditions, which he had imbibed partly from the Pythagorean Philosophie, and partly by means of his own personal conversation in the Oriental parts, he thereby obtained great notices of Divine Mysteries.” Gale then discussed the distinction between “Acroaticks, or Acroamaticks” among the disciples of Aristotle and other schools (Gale 1670, 368). This confirms that a discourse about “the esoteric” emerged since the late seventeenth century, juxtaposing inner and outer, exclusive and public teachings (a systematic approach to “the Esoteric” has been proposed by Stuckrad 2010). These qualities were attributed to very different actors, and they came with very different value judgements. It is true that this development parallels the establishment and differentiation of Masonic lodges, as Neugebauer-Wölk points out (2013, 61), but it also parallels a rapidly increasing engagement with non-European, non-Christian sources. Whereas references to “Oriental” doctrines around 1700 appear to be rather abstract, the emergence and development of orientalist © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023 Julian Strube scholarship drastically changed the discourse on “esoteric” throughout the century. A good starting point for illustrating this development is John Toland (1670–1722), a prominent voice in the debates about Pythagoreanism and the “esoteric distinction.” In 1696, Toland published Christianity not Mysterious, or, A Treastise shewing that there is nothing in the Gospel contrary to reason, nor above it and that no Christian doctrine can be properly call’d a mystery, whose main thesis is quite concisely encapsuled in its title. Toland discussed how the Gospel “was a future Dispensation totally hid from the Gentiles, and but very imperfectly known to the Jews,” claiming that the ancient world was “overstock’d with the Acroatick Discourses of Aristotle, with the Esoterick Doctrines of Pythagoras, and the Mysterious Jargon of the other Sects of Philosophers,” whereas “the Christian Religion has no need of such miserable Shifts and Artifice” (Toland 1696, 95–96). A later work by Toland published in 1720—Clidophorus; or of the Exoteric and Esoteric Philosophy, that is, of the External and Internal Doctrine of the Antients (part of the multi-volume Tetradymus)—was identified by NeugebauerWölk as the crucial moment when the “esoteric distinction” became a “fundamental principle of the search for truth,” juxtaposed to established religions (Neugebauer-Wölk 2013, 62). Indeed, Toland discussed what he himself called the “esoteric distinction” in exceptional detail, but he did not restrict his discussion to the ancient Greeks. In fact, the latter were only a later stage in a much longer and farther-reaching development: This double manner of teaching was also in use among other oriental nations, especially the Ethiopians and Babylonians, the ancient and modern Bramins, the Syrians, Persians, and the rest, principally instructed by Zoroaster. The Druids of the Gauls and Britons wou’d by no means deliver their mysteries or secret doctrines, to any except the initiated: that I may say nothing of the Hestruscans, and other Occidental nations, no more than of the present Chinese, Siamese, and Indians properly so call’d; the thing being too notorious, as to be deny’d by no body. (Toland 1720, 72) Toland perceived of the “esoteric distinction” as a universal phenomenon, a fundamental principle indeed that was neither restricted to “the West” nor to the discourse about Freemasonry. As Martin Mulsow has pointed out, Toland’s Clidophorus might be viewed as the expression of a contemporary tendency to combine the idea of a Deistic natural religion with the prisca theologia, a kind of “Hermetic rational religion as esotericism” (Mulsow 2002b, 105). While the idea of such a philosophia perennis © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023 The Emergence of “Esoteric” as a Comparative Category was not new, it now became increasingly expressed in “esoteric” language; the idea of an arcane school for the few often became replaced by the idea about “true religion” and “true knowledge” (Neugebauer-Wölk 2013, 62–63). Contemporaries endeavored to unearth the ur-religion and ur-language, which took on a comparativist thrust towards “the Orient.” Yogis, Sufis, and “Cabala” Since early European experts in “oriental languages” specialized in Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian, it is not surprising to see that the quest for the origin of “true religion” and a universal language turned towards sources from the “Near East.” The above-mentioned debate about the relationship between Egyptian, Pythagorean, and Jewish remained prominent, and we have met Gale as a representative of those claiming Hebrew at the root of human learning, which certainly played a role in many authors’ interest in the Kabbalah (or what they understood as such) as an “esoteric” doctrine that holds the key to primordial wisdom. The Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), for instance, wrote of a “Cabala Aegyptiorum,” a “Cabala Pythagorica,” and a “Cabala Saracenica,” effectively employing the term in a comparativist manner (Saif forthcoming; Kilcher 1998, 167–168). As we shall see, the semantic relationship between secrecy, things “esoteric,” and Cabala became widespread in sources that compared or identified different ideas and practices. The period marks the emergence of hugely successful travel literature and missionary reports engaging with Indian culture on a spectrum ranging from fascination to condemnation. While this literature is too vast to be charted here, some examples may serve to illustrate the central role it played in the formation of a comparative “esoteric” language. A good starting point are the famed travelogues by the French doctor François Bernier (1658–1670), who stayed in India from 1658 until 1670, much of it in Bengal. He was attached for a while to the son of emperor Shah Jahan, Dara Shikoh, who famously had the Upanishads translated into Persian, which in turn formed the foundation for Abraham Hyacinthe AnquetilDuperron’s Latin Oupnek”hat (App 2010, 155–159). After recording the prince’s violent downfall at the hands of his brother who subsequently became emperor Aurangzeb, Bernier became a medical doctor at the latter’s court. His extensive and fascinating records about Indian philosophy and religion are of particular interest to us, for instance, when he discusses the practices of yogis (“Jauguis”) while employed as a physician by Danechmend Khan, a high official at the Mughal court. After describing © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023 Julian Strube some ascetic yogic practices, he explains: However, I know that this Rapture, and the means of entering it, are the great Mystery of the Cabala of the Yogis, as it is of the Sufis [Soufys]; I say Mystery, because they keep it hidden among themselves, and if it had not been for the pandit or Hindu doctor, whom Danechmend Khan employed […], I should not have discovered so much… (Bernier 1709, 128) Bernier then went on to state “that none of our Friars [Religieux] or European Hermits should think that they have the upper hand in this respect, nor even in general over all the Asiatic Friars, who witness the life & fasts of the Armenians, Coftes, Greeks, Nesstorians, Jacobites & Maronites.” Admitting that “we are only novices among all these Friars,” Bernier described some techniques of self-mortification that would have cast a shadow on a Simon Magus (Bernier 1709, 128–130). Discussing more philosophical matters at a later point, Bernier also drew comparisons between “some Stoics, the Kabbalists of Persia and the Brahmins of India,” pointing to the idea that “there is something Divine in man” (Bernier 1709, 191). It is notable that Bernier expressed his obligation to the works of Kircher, which he had consulted upon his return and made use of his examples of Sanskrit characters and Hindu iconography (Bernier 1709, 145). This underlines that we are dealing with the period of increasing fascination for Sanskrit and the knowledge communicated through it, for an understanding of which Europeans had to rely on informants such as the pandit in Danechmend Khan’s retinue. Bernier also highlighted his indebtedness to the Dutch Calvinist minister Abraham Roger (1609–1649), whose De Open-Deure tot het Verborgen Heydendom had been published in 1651. The book has been termed the “single most important seventeenthcentury contribution to European knowledge of Indian religions” and was praised by both Anquetil-Duperron and Friedrich Max Müller, not least because it included the first published Sanskrit text translated into a European language and its comprehensive depiction of what was thought to be a unified Hindu religion (Sweetman 2003, 89; Patterson 2022, 80). A major reference throughout the sixteenth century and beyond, it was translated into German as Offne Thür zu dem verborgenen Heydenthum in 1663. The year 1670 saw the French translation, Le theatre de I’idolatrie, ou la porte ouverte, Pour parvenir à la cognoissance du paganisme caché, as well as the English A Door Open’d to the Knowledge of Occult Paganism. The semantic meaning of “occult” in the sense of the German and Dutch verborgen, as well as the French caché, all signify secret or hidden. As Roger explained, © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023 The Emergence of “Esoteric” as a Comparative Category he had relied on a “Bramine” named Padmanaba in order to discover “alle de verborgentheden van t’Heydendom” (all the secrets of paganism) described in the book (Roger 1915, 1). These depictions prominently emphasize secrecy and initiation supposedly typical of certain Indian, Persian, Egyptian, and Greek doctrines and practices. The association with different understandings of “Cabala” is particularly notable at that time and is also expressed in the writings of another famous traveller, Jean Chardin (1643–1713). In his Voyages en Perse et autres lieux de l’Orient from 1711, he discussed the “Théologie mystique” of the “soufys,” professing that it was “very difficult to know the sentiments and doctrines of these Sufis precisely, as I have said; because this is a Cabale into which it is very difficult to be initiated, and where secrecy is the first and most important precept” (Chardin 1711, 154). Islam, then, was included in the language of Kabbalah, secrecy, and initiation—and it was also discussed under the notion of “esoteric.” In the foreword to the English translation of the Qurʾan from 1734, we find a passage about the “Bātenites, which name is also given to the Ismaelians by some authors, and likewise to the Karmatians. […] The word signifies Esoterics, or people of inward or hidden light or knowledge” (The Koran, 186). This translation is reproduced in the French edition as ésotériques, and cemented in the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1810 (vol. 3, 68). In a German translation of the famed Syriac Orthodox theologian Gregory Bar Hebraeus from 1785, we find a footnote stating that “the above-mentioned Batenites were an enthusiast sect, literally the people of the inner light, esoterici” (Barhebraeus 1785, 115). We can conclude, then, that “Cabala” became established as a comparative category linked to secrecy, initiation, and “mysteries,” as well as the terms “esoteric” and “occult.” The appliance of these notions was by no means restricted to European, Christian, or Jewish contexts. Linking Europe, Egypt, and Asia The scope of such comparisons was increasingly expanded to encompass India and China, for instance in the work of the Lutheran theologian Jacob Friedrich Reimmann (1688–1743), a representative of early Enlightenment universal history. His Historia universalis atheismi from 1727 attempted to cover all forms of atheism, even of those who had never been accused of it, following a rigid schematism that aimed at establishing universally applicable scholarly terms (Lehrbegriffe) (Sparn 1998, 83–85; Völkel 1998, 246). We can observe how the “esoterica” classification functioned as such a term when Reimmann professed that “India is the birthplace of Eastern © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023 Julian Strube Atheism, in which it was first born and from which time it has advanced into the region of the Chinese and Japan. […] For then Xekia, who was later named Foë, […] first introduced atheism into the schools and Churches of the Indians, and created the circumstances for the division of Theology into Exoterica and Esoterica” (Reimmann 1725, 90–91).1 Thus atheism “hid under the bland title of Theologia Esoterica” until the second century CE, before it became “exoteric” and diffused into China. Reimmann relied on the Flemish Jesuit missionary Philippe Couplet (1623–1693), who in his Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (1687) preferred the terminology of arcana, and Kircher’s China illustrata (1667), likewise marked by the language of arcana and, of course, Cabala. It is against that background that we now turn to Johann Jacob Brucker (1696–1770), the celebrated historian of philosophy singled out by both Neugebauer-Wölk and Hanegraaff as a pivotal author in the grouping of “esotericism.” According to the state of scholarship, we encounter in his Kurtze Fragen aus der philosophischen Historie from 1731–1736 and its hugely influential Latin successor, Historia critica Philosophiae, not only the first German adjective esoterisch but also a denunciation of “all currents which today we would consider elements of the Esoteric Corpus” (NeugebauerWölk 2013, 65). Brucker’s position was diametrically opposed to that of Toland, while his view on the history of philosophy followed that of Stanley. This also applies to his depiction of Pythagoreanism, although he rejected its Neo-Platonic development and identified Hermeticism as reprehensible paganism (Neumann 2013, 115–119). In his view, the Kabbalah, too, is not connected to Christianity through a philosophia perennis but to paganism: the esoteric “Distinction,” as Brucker wrote, becomes a polemical tool of systematization and classification (Neugebauer-Wölk 2013, 95; cf. Hanegraaff 2012, 137–147). While this snapshot of Brucker’s work might hold true, the bigger picture tells us more about his groupings of currents and the notion of “esoteric,” which was by no means restricted to the currents in the spotlight of previous scholars of esotericism (cf. App 2010, 4–6). Already the Kurtze Fragen contained chapters on Chaldean, Persian, Indian, Arab and Sabian, 1. The underlying “dogma arcanum” was this: “Emptiness and inanity is the first principle of all things. There is nothing to be sought, nothing is in which our hope may be placed” (Reimmann 1725, 91, cf. 96–97). Several later works, for instance the Histoire des différens peuples du monde by André Guillaume Contant d’Orville (1730–1800), published in 1772, described the Buddhist “doctrine ésotérique” in similar ways (Contant d’Orville 1772, 235). Also see App 2010, 125–132. © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023 The Emergence of “Esoteric” as a Comparative Category Phoenician, Egyptian, and “Moorish and Libyan” philosophy. While the German version almost exclusively prefers the terminology geheim and Geheimnis (secret, secrecy), the Latin Historia critica abounds with the world field esotericus, which contributed significantly to its dissemination and sedimentation. Brucker mainly focused on the “Philosophiae Pythagoreo-Platonico-Cabbalisticae” and “Theosophicis” so vehemently denounced by him especially in volume six of the Kurtze Fragen and in volume two of the Historia, where we find a discussion of the “philosophia iudaeorum esoterica, sive cabbalistica,” linked to other expressions such as “arcanam sive mysticam” (Brucker 1742, 916; cf. Brucker 1733, 622, where we read “Cabbalistische geheime Philosophie”). This philosophy was linked to “esotericae arcanaeque Aegyptiorum doctrinae” and Pythagoreanism, as we learn in the first volume, but it was also paralleled by and related to the farther East: especially to the Indians, who “were famous because of their philosophers already in the most ancient times.” Also known as “Brachmanen” or “Gymnosophistae,” they had been of “immense piety, virtuousness, and respectability” (Brucker 1731, 129– 131; their philosophies are extensively discussed in the seventh volume). These words of praise notwithstanding, Brucker refuted the widespread idea that Apollonius and Pythagoras had been instructed by those wise Brahmins, but he did concede that they had been in contact with each other (e.g., Brucker 1732, 230, 236). Referring to the Histoire du christianisme des Indes by the orientalist Maturin Veyssière de La Croze (1724), who in turn had relied on the reports by the first German missionary in India, Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1682–1719), Brucker discussed “esoteric” currents in the appendix to his Historia, where we also find the echo of Reimann’s work. For instance, Brucker referred to the “esoteric system of Buddha or Foë” followed by the sammanae (i.e., śramaṇas) (Brucker 1767, 92). As pointed out by Neugebauer-Wölk, then, the “Esoteric Distinction” became important part of contemporary intellectual dynamics, but at no point was it restricted to either a European context or to debates limited to Freemasonry, Hermeticism, and so forth. Respective references grew exponentially in orientalist scholarship throughout the eighteenth century. The association between “Cabala” and things “esoteric” in India, China, Egypt, and ancient Greece sedimented in the process. For instance, in 1735, when the Lutheran professor of philosophy and theology, Johann Friedrich Cotta (1701–1779), published his Exercitatio historico-philosophica de philosophia exoterica atque esoterica, sive de veterum doctrina externa et interna: we learn therein about the transmis© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023 Julian Strube sion of “esoteric” doctrines among “peoples who in Asia and Africa pursued the study of philosophy,” the Indian Brahmins, the Chinese, and of course the Egyptians and Pythagoreans (Cotta 1735, 15–39). Similar associations can be found in the work of the reformed theologian and orientalist Paul Ernst Jablonski (1693–1757), who had learned Coptic under La Croze in Berlin. In his Pantheon Aegyptiorum from 1752, he maintained that Pythagoras had received astronomical wisdom from the Egyptians, which he taught in his school among the “dogmata esoterica et arcana,” which led Jablonski to believe “that the same was also disseminated from the disciples of the ancient Egyptians to the Brahmans of the Indians” (Iablonski 1752, 100). By 1756, such narratives were so firmly established that the Encyclopédie could matter-of-factly state under the lemma “éxotérique & ésotérique” that “[t]he magicians of Persia, the druids of the Gauls and the Brahmins of India, all similar to the Egyptian priests […], had in the same way and in the same view their public doctrine and their secret doctrine” (274). The same narrative was echoed in the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1797 (69). We find it in a study by the materialist professor of philosophy in Göttingen, Michael Hißmann, who insisted that India had received its knowledge from Egypt, including “esoteric religious doctrines” (“esoterische Religionslehren,” Hißmann 1777, 1201, 1208). The Code de l”humanité from 1778 described “esoteric” doctrines in Japan, India, Egypt, among the Jews, and among the disciples of Plato and Pythagoras. For reasons that have become apparent at the outset of this article, the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed an influx of first-hand accounts from India, specifically from Bengal, where the British East India Company had established its bridgehead and first colonial administration. None other than Eichhorn referred to the “esoteric and exoteric education” at the “cloister universities and temples” of Nadiya (“Nuddeah”), where Brahmins were instructed in the “secrets of the Vedam” (Eichhorn 1817, 374–375). When Eichhorn wrote these pages, he could rely on several extensive sources. Among these authors was John Zephaniah Holwell (1711–1798), who spent about 30 years in Bengal and published his widely received Interesting Historical Events, Relative to the Provinces of Bengal, and the Empire of Indostan Interesting Historical Events, Relative to the Provinces of Bengal, and the Empire of Indostan from 1765 to 1771, contributing significantly to the idea of a unified religion that came to be called “Hinduism” (Patterson 2022, 70–112; App 2010, 297–362). Holwell turned around the prevalent narratives about the origin of ancient wisdom by insisting that the “mythology” and “cosmogony” of the Brahmins was, in fact, the © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023 The Emergence of “Esoteric” as a Comparative Category pure original that had later been corrupted by Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans (Holwell 1766, 3–4). It was not the “Gentoos” who had borrowed their ideas from the Persians and Egyptians, but vice versa (Holwell 1767, 23–24), which was evident because “the original divine in institutes of Bramah are simple and sublime,” in contrast to the convoluted doctrines of later times (Holwell 1767, 60). Holwell was particularly interested in the doctrine of metempsychosis, which had originated with the Brahmins and was then “embraced by the Egyptian Magi, and by some sects among the Chinese and Tartars,” as well as Pythagoras (Holwell 1767, 64–65).2 It was also taught in its “pure” form “by the ancient Britons” (Holwell 1771, 26). He explained: It is worthy notice that the Metempsychosis, as well as the three grand principles taught in the greater Eleusinian mysteries; namely, the unity of the godhead, his general providence over all creation, and a future state of rewards and punishments; were […] preached by the Bramins, from time immemorial to this day, through out Indostan: not as mysteries, but as religious tenets, publicly known and received, by every Gentoo of the meanest capacity… (Holwell 1767, 25). In later times, however, the true doctrine of the “one God” continued to be preached as “mystery,” opaque to the public (Holwell 1771, 17, 49–51). The implications were immense: Holwell claimed that the ancient Indian “shastah” (śāstra) could unlock, not only the meaning of ancient pagan doctrines but also the “secret” meaning of the Bible. In a later writing about the Original Principles, Religious and Moral, of the Ancient Brahmins from 1779, he even posited a “primitive truth” at the root of all creeds that anticipated the tenets of comparative religion: That—howsoever mankind, either of Europe, Asia, Africa or America, may differ in the exterior modes of worship paid to the Deity, according to their various genius; yet, that there are same fundamental points of every system, wherein all agree and profess unanimous faith; as may be gathered, either from their express doctrines, or evidently implied, from their modes, or ceremonials of worship, howsoever differing in manner and form, from each other. (Holwell 1779, 3–4) It does not come as a surprise, then, that references to “esoteric doctrines” were increasingly related to theories of language and the primordial ori2. Metempsychosis was, indeed, a recurring central element in our sources that has to be neglected here for the sake of brevity. See Zander 1999. © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023 Julian Strube gin of religion. We find this notion in the work of Friedrich Victor Leberecht Plessing (1749–1806), who had immersed himself in the elevated literary circles of the Sturm und Drang period, where he became a minor but prolific author (a veritable animal scribax, according to Hamann) and completed a doctorate under the deaconship of Kant in 1783. Plessing considered the latter’s Idealism largely in line with the philosophy of the ancients, based on metaphysics: “All cultivated nations of antiquity had […] adopted this system and established the doctrines of their esoteric religion on these foundations; yes, the influence of the same continues well into our times” (Plessing 1788, 13). More famously, Friedrich von Schlegel echoed the scholarship surveyed so far in his seminal Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1808), when he discussed “the Fo of the Chinese” as “the real, essential, and esoteric doctrine” (Schlegel 1808, 140). This and many other references show how Schlegel perceived of “esoteric” elements of religion as traces of a primordial language, a primordial nation (Urvolk), which implied, in line with the thought of his time, that “[t]here was a primordial religion [Urreligion], from whence all religions of antiquity have flown,” including the Egyptians, Indian, Greeks, and Romans (Schlegel 1819, 435). The institutionalization of Orientalist studies Schlegel’s admiration for India as the origin of civilization is representative of an important shift away from Hebrew, which we have observed to be prominent around 1700, to the recently learned Sanskrit language. The discovery of the linguistic relationship between Sanskrit, Persian, Latin, Greek, and modern European languages in the second half of the eighteenth century led to a revolution in scholarship and the emergence of comparative philology, as well as comparative religion (Halbfass 1988). Raymond Schwab has famously coined the notion of the Oriental Renaissance towards the end of the eighteenth century, which reconfigured European learning in ways that paralleled the Hellenic Renaissance: just like scholars prided themselves of being Hellenists in the years around 1500, they now were Orientalists, spawning whole new academic disciplines and fields of study (Schwab 1984). The gravity of these developments becomes tangible in a letter sent by Schlegel from Paris to his friend Ludwig Tieck in 1803: “Here is really the true source of all languages, of all the thoughts and poems of the human spirit; everything, everything came from India without exception” (Holtei 1864, 329). Schlegel went on to inaugurate the systematic comparative study between languages. © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023 The Emergence of “Esoteric” as a Comparative Category Many contemporaries were convinced that this would herald a new age in the history of religion and culture in its broadest sense—like Schelling, who very frequently spoke of “the Esoteric” (das Esoterische) and “esoteric religion,” proclaiming in one of his lectures that the Esoteric must come forth and, freed from its shell, shine for itself. The eternally living spirit of all formation and creation will dress it in new and more lasting forms, as there is no lack of the stuff opposed to the Ideal, Occident and Orient have approached each other in One and the same formation, and everywhere where opposites meet, new life is sparked. (Schelling 1803, 208–209) This demonstrates how the notion of “esoteric” stood at the center of the search for the origin of a universal language and, by consequence, “civilization” in the broadest sense. Related notions such as “religion,” “nation” or “race” were conceptualized in highly diverse and often contradictory ways, yet many subscribed to the idea of a public or exoteric (supposedly degenerated, corrupted) doctrine that was differentiated from a secret or esoteric (true, pure) one. Anquetil-Duperron’s Latin Oupnek”hat (1801– 1802) played a crucial role in this process, not least because it announced the secretum tegendum opus ipsa in India rarissimum, continens antiquam et arcanam, seu theologicam et philosophicam, doctrinam. The promise of a “secret” whose unveiling would allow for revolutionary insights into the links between Europe and India, into the doctrine of the Ens supremum, the unity of all in “God,” resonated strongly with the scholarship we have scrutinized so far and would inspire scholars up to the present day. In line with the literature we have explored so far, Anquetil-Duperron drew major comparisons between Indian doctrines and both Kabbalah and Gnosticism. Referring to Burnet, for instance, he likened the process of emanation from the Ens supremum to the Kabbalistic doctrines found in scriptures such as the Zohar or Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s Cabbala denudata (1677–1684) (Anquetil-Duperron 1801, li-liii), as well as to Neo-Platonic ideas (cf. Winter 2021, 256–262). He also speculated that the Greek term bythos “could be Asian, Indian, and accepted by the Gnostics, who were imbued with the Oriental system”—it equalled, indeed, the Sanskrit bhūta. This “Oriental system” joined Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Pythagoreanism, Platonism, and the Indian doctrine expounded in the Oupnek”hat (Anquetil-Duperron 1801, 561–566, 593). Several authors concluded from these supposed connections that there was a distinction between true, esoteric, and monotheistic “Hindu doc© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023 Julian Strube trines,” on the one hand, and false, superstitious ones on the other. An impressive example is Edward Moor’s famous Hindu Pantheon from 1810, largely illustrated by William Blake. Its very first paragraph reads: The religious doctrines of the Hindus may be divided, like those of most other people whose scriptures are in a hidden tongue, into exoteric and esoteric; the first is preached to the vulgar, the second known only to a select number: and while the Brahmans are admitted to possess a considerable portion of unadulterated physical, and moral truths, the exoteric religion of the Hindus, in general, consists in gross idolatry and irrational superstition. (Moor 1810, 1) Again, we observe how the distinction between esoteric and exoteric was comparatively attributed to “most people,” and how this distinction functioned as a legitimizing and condemning factor within the colonial discourse on supposed superstition and the degeneration of “Oriental wisdom.” Such allusions to the pristine but secret wisdom of the Brahmans were also taken up by the various authors who associated “Oriental” and especially Indian doctrines with contemporary theories of mesmerism, magnetism, and magic—a subject that had also been of interest for Meiners, who published Ueber den thierischen Magnetismus (About Animal Magnetism) in 1788. Later historiographers such as Karl Josef Windischmann, Joseph Ennemoser, Carl Alexander Ferdinand Kluge, and Johann Carl Passavant eagerly related accounts about fakirs, Sufis, and yogis to magic, somnambulism, clairvoyance, ecstasy, meditation, contemplation, Gnosticism, Kabbalah, and Theosophy (Baier 2009, 200–243; Hanegraaff 2012, 260–277; Strube 2020). All this makes it abundantly clear that Matter’s study of Gnosticism as an ésotérisme linked to India and China was, with regard to the genealogy of the language of “esotericism,” utterly unspectacular in the sense that it shared in broader trends. Indeed, sources discussing things “esoteric” became so exponentially numerous in the years around 1800 that it is impossible to even superficially address them in the remainder of this article. It has become evident that discussions of secrecy, “mysteries,” “gnosis,” and “Cabala” formed an integral part of the formation of orientalist scholarship and comparative religion. The links between Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, Kabbalah, Egypt, Greek philosophy, Islamic “mysticism,” and India were emphasized and discussed by eminent philosophers and historians such as Herder (1774, 345) or Schopenhauer (1819, 511), as well as by theologians and orientalists as diverse as Johann von Horn © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023 The Emergence of “Esoteric” as a Comparative Category (1805, iv-viii, 60, 345), Frank Othmar (1808, 4, 105, 148), Joseph HammerPurgstall (1818, 98; cf. Strube 2017a, 54–73), or Ferdinand Baur (1824, 202), who introduced the historical-critical method in the study of the New Testament and founded the younger Tübingen school of theology. Unless one were prone to categorizing these authors as “esotericists,” the established historiography within the study of esotericism urgently needs to expand its scope and look beyond the confines of what it has previously identified, more or less explicitly, as its “Esoteric Corpus.” In turn, a consistent historization of these developments would also allow for a better understanding of terminology widely employed in the study of Asian religion and philosophy, for instance the notion of an “esoteric” Buddhism that sedimented in the nineteenth century, as in the work of Abel Rémusat (e.g., Rémusat 1825, 118; cf. a Zhuhong translation from 1831, 40, 114). In the first volume of the Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, Henry Colebrooke discussed the “esoteric brāhmana” (Colebrooke 1827, 450), while Brian H. Hodgson explained in Asiatic Researches that the words Tantra and Purana were “vaguely expressive of the distinction of esoteric and exoteric works” (Hodgson 1828, 422), and Horace H. Wilson highlighted the “Esoteric doctrine” of the Buddhists (Wilson 1832, 384) in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. These distinguished publications did not only help to cement academic disciplines and advance the study of Indian culture, but they also sedimented a terminology whose history is a lot more complex than a narrow focus on the “Western esotericism” paradigm would allow us to realize. Conclusion We can now better comprehend the claimed association between India and Egypt in the dialogue between Krishnachandra and his European delegates, but we are also prepared for a fuller understanding of a crucial part of scholarly vocabulary: the language of “esoteric” as a heterogeneous comparative category that has emerged in the seventeenth century, sedimented in the eighteenth, and entered the recently institutionalized orientalist studies in the nineteenth. We have seen how links between Kabbalah, Gnosis, Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, Freemasonry, Sufism, Yoga, Brahmanism, Buddhism, and other Asian contexts became commonplace through countless cross-references within highly diverse sources of varying historical accuracy. This article had to neglect the huge range of approaches and value judgements of these alleged historical connections, which would require a more fine-grained, extensive study. © Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2023 Julian Strube What has become clear, however, are crucial associations and links made historiographically, thus forming a foundation on which the term “esoteric” may serve for future, theoretically reflected comparative studies (cf. Strube 2022, 68, 251). In the sources surveyed here, these associations often revolved around (1) a primordial religion or wisdom handed down through the ages; (2) secrecy and initiation; and (3) alleged special powers and practices linked, for instance, to magic, “yoga,” and “Cabala.” Until future research will further explore such historical acts of comparison and their relation to present-day religious comparativism, this article allows for highlighting two key conclusions: first, the term “esoteric” was not restricted to a specific corpus, let alone one that may be reasonably delineated as “Western.” Second, the term “esoteric” can only be grasped in very limited ways if it is simply understood as relating to something marginal or even rejected—it formed an integral part of academic discourse, specifically in orientalist studies, and was debated by leading theologians, historians, and philosophers. The language of “esoteric” played a central role in the development of religious comparative vocabulary that is applied up to the present day in disciplines and fields of study that would benefit from a more systematic dialogue among each other (cf. Strube 2022, 1–33, 242–251). In addition to a more in-depth analysis of the sources presented here, a concrete next step will consist in an exploration of the actual objects of comparison from the geographical spheres of Asia and Africa, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, among others, on the basis of vernacular sources examined through a decentered historiography: for instance, how have Indian scholars, perhaps those surrounding Krishnachandra or the numerous Parsis and pandits who informed learned Europeans, engaged with the developments surveyed here? 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