What I mean by esoteric psychology

Readers of this blog know that I have been circling one idea for years, and lately naming it openly: esoteric psychology. The name needs a word of explanation, because it does not mean what it seems to mean.

It is not the psychology of people who believe strange things. It is not a psychoanalysis of magicians, and it is not a new spiritual doctrine wearing a lab coat.

Esoteric psychology, as I use the term, is a descriptive discipline. It studies what systematic inner training does to the human being who undergoes it, and it studies this from within, through the trained first-person observation of the practitioner, rather than from the outside, through history, sociology or brain scans. Those outside perspectives are valuable.

Historians of esotericism have mapped the traditions superbly. But nobody in the academy is studying the thing itself: what actually happens in a person who follows a serious inner training, step by step, year after year.

The Inner Laboratory

That is the gap my current book project tries to fill. I am completing a book called The Inner Laboratory, appearing first in Dutch, which treats the inner life the way a craftsman treats a workshop. Its two central figures are the witness, the quiet capacity to observe one’s own experience without immediately reacting to it, and the operator, the capacity to act deliberately within inner experience, to hold an image, direct attention, sustain an intention.

Both, I argue, are trainable. The book gives the reader the language and the exercises to begin that training, drawn from sources as different as the magi Franz Bardon (1909-1958), the Gurdjieff work, Husserl’s phenomenology and modern neuroscience. The wager of the whole project is simple: inner experience is not a fog to be interpreted but a field to be worked, and working it is a skill with a history.

Which brings me to an ancient text I had, to my embarrassment, never properly read until this month, and which turns out to be one of the oldest complete specimens of exactly this kind of skill-with-a-history.

An instruction, not a creed

The so-called Mithras Liturgy survives in the great Paris magical codex as PGM IV.475-829, copied in the fourth century. Its famous name is modern: the philologist Albrecht Dieterich (1866-1908) attached it in 1903, and scholars have argued about it ever since, because the text is not “Mithraism” in the archaeological sense of cave sanctuaries and bull-slaying reliefs.

It belongs to the world of Greek-Egyptian ritual, solar theology and theurgical imagination. The standard edition and commentary today is Hans Dieter Betz’s ( 1931), and Betz’s central observation is the one that matters here: this is not a statement of belief. It is a set of instructions.

Modern readers approach such texts with the questions of the historian of religion. What did these people believe? Which god is meant, Mithras, Helios, Aion? Those questions are legitimate, and without them we lose precision. But they pass over the most striking feature of the document. The text tells the practitioner what to do. How to breathe. What to say. Where to look. What to expect. How to respond when the expected arrives. It is, in plain terms, a protocol.

What the text tells you to do

Consider a few of its instructions. The practitioner must draw breath from the rays of the sun, three times, as deeply as possible, and will then feel himself lifted upward, as if suspended in mid-air, while the noise of human affairs falls away.

When the divine powers rush toward him, and the text is calm about the fact that they will, he must place a finger on his lips, say “Silence! Silence! Silence!”, and pronounce a series of hissing and popping formulae, after which the powers withdraw to their own order.

Near the summit he asks that the divine life should dwell in his soul and not abandon him. And at the climax he declares that while being born again he is passing away, that while growing he is dying: a controlled collapse of ordinary identity, after which, the text notes, he will be weak in soul and “not in himself,” yet will afterwards remember the oracle he received infallibly.

Emergency procedures do not lie

Notice the conditional form of these instructions. “When you see the gods rushing at you, do this.” Nobody writes threshold-management rules for an experience nobody has. I

nstructions of this shape are calibration: they presuppose that someone went through the sequence, met the difficulty, and recorded the countermeasure. A purely literary fantasy of heavenly ascent does not bother to include emergency procedures.

The boring appendix is the point

The second thing deserving attention is what surrounds the ascent, and here I want to reverse the usual reading, including my own first instinct. After the visionary climax, the text continues into material that most readers, ancient and modern, find frankly boring: rules of purity and abstention, the requirement of a fellow-initiate, criteria for judging whether another candidate is worthy, directions for repeating the rite, instructions for transmission.

The temptation is to treat all this as ritual machinery, an appendix to the real event. I now think the opposite is true. The appendix is the point. A vision is an occurrence; a curriculum is an institution. Admission criteria, a co-student, repetition schedules, rules of conduct and a procedure for handing the practice on: strip away the late-antique costume and what remains is a syllabus.

The spectacular ascent tells us what the training aimed at. The dull appendix tells us that it was training, ordered, supervised and transmissible, rather than a private ecstasy someone happened to write down.

Why this matters for esoteric psychology

A recurring objection to esoteric psychology is that its object is a modern construction, a nineteenth-century occultist invention retrojected onto history.

The Mithras Liturgy quietly demolishes that objection. Here, seventeen centuries before Bardon built his ten-step training system, is a complete specimen of the genre: preparation of the body, a staged sequence of inner operations, techniques for stabilising the practitioner at the dangerous moments, a stated goal of lasting transformation rather than mere experience (“dwell in my soul” is the difference between an event and a result), and a pedagogical apparatus for repetition and transmission.

The genre of the inner training protocol is not modern. It is ancient. The discipline proposed to study it is younger than its own subject matter by rather more than a millennium and a half.

And for the Inner Laboratory the text is a gift of a specific kind: it shows that the witness and the operator I write about were already being schooled, under other names, in the fourth century. The finger on the lips is operator work. The capacity to remain present while “not in oneself” is witness work. The vocabulary is mine; the training is not.

What I am not claiming

None of this requires deciding what the practitioner “really” saw, and I have deliberately said nothing here about the content of the visions. Whether the staged imagery of the ascent reflects experience actually witnessed at the inner threshold, or simply the inherited cosmology of the age, doors, Fates and Pole-Lords supplied by doctrine rather than by sight, is a genuinely separate question, and a harder one. It deserves its own piece, and it will get one.

For now the conclusion is modest and, I think, solid. In the fourth century of our era, someone possessed a curriculum for the systematic transformation of consciousness, complete with breathing technique, crisis management, admission standards and a transmission rule. Esoteric psychology does not have to invent its object.

Its object has been waiting, with a syllabus, for seventeen hundred years.