Philosophies

← Encyclopedia

• Adamites

  A name attached, across many centuries, to Christian groups said to seek the sinless innocence of Eden — sometimes by worshipping unclothed.

• African Initiated Churches

  The Christian churches founded and led by Africans rather than foreign missionaries, in which prophecy, healing, and the spirit world are read through both the Bible and indigenous experience.

• Agama Hindu Dharma (Balinese Hinduism)

  Living Balinese form of Hinduism fusing Shaivism, Buddhism, and animism through temple ritual and tri hita karana cosmology.

• Akan Religion

  Akan and Asante religion of the sky-god Nyame, lesser abosom spirits, ancestors, and Akom priestly possession, centered in Ghana.

• al-ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya (transcendent theosophy)

  The philosophical school of Mullā Ṣadrā in Safavid Persia — a seventeenth-century synthesis of Avicennan demonstration, Suhrawardī's illuminationism, Ibn ʿArabī's mysticism, and Shiʿi scripture, built on the primacy of being.

• Albigenses

  The dualist dissenters of medieval Languedoc, named for the town of Albi — the movement and region against which the papacy launched the Albigensian Crusade.

• Alexandrists

  A current of Renaissance Aristotelians, centred at Padua, who followed Alexander of Aphrodisias in reading Aristotle to mean that the individual soul dies with the body.

• Ancient Astronaut Belief

  The modern current that reads myths, monuments, and scriptures as records of prehistoric contact with extraterrestrial visitors mistaken for gods.

• ancient Roman religion

  The public and domestic cult of polytheistic Rome — a religion of correct practice and reciprocal obligation between the city and its gods, rather than of creed or conversion.

• Aristotelianism

  The philosophy of Aristotle and the Peripatetic school, from the Lyceum's covered walk to its long medieval afterlife as the framework Christendom, Islam, and the academy all reasoned within.

• Astral and Talismanic Magic

  The art of drawing the powers of the stars and planets into specially made images and talismans — a current running from late-antique cosmology through the Arabic Picatrix to Renaissance Florence.

• Atlantis in Esoteric Tradition

  The afterlife of Plato's Atlantis as esoteric myth — a vanished high civilization recast, from Donnelly to Theosophy, as the lost source of the world's wisdom.

• Aztec (Nahua) Religion

  The Mexica cosmology of the Five Suns, Huitzilopochtli, Tlaloc and Quetzalcoatl, with sacrifice sustaining the world.

• Bauls of Bengal

  A heterodox order of wandering minstrels of Bengal whose songs carry a body-centered mysticism, drawing on Vaishnava, tantric, and Sufi sources and refusing the boundaries between them.

• Beguine Mysticism

  The vernacular love-mysticism of the medieval Beguines — laywomen of the Low Countries and the Rhineland who wrote of minne and of a soul annihilated into God.

• Bhakti Movement

  The long wave of Indian devotional religion centered on loving surrender to a personal God — sung by the Tamil Alvars and Nayanars and the later sant poets, often across the lines of caste and creed.

• Bhedabheda

  The Vedānta position of "difference and non-difference" — that the self and brahman are at once distinct and not distinct — held against both strict monism and strict dualism.

• Bogomilism

  The medieval Balkan dualist heresy, from tenth-century Bulgaria onward, which held the visible world to be the devil's work and rejected the established church, its hierarchy, and its sacraments.

• Bon

  The indigenous religious tradition of Tibet, distinct from Buddhism yet closely entwined with it — organized as Yungdrung ("Eternal") Bon around its own founder-buddha, Tonpa Shenrab.

• Bosnian Church

  The autonomous Christian church of medieval Bosnia, in communion with neither Rome nor Constantinople — long alleged, on disputed evidence, to have been dualist.

• Brahmanism

  The priest-centered sacrificial religion of post-Vedic India — the ordered world of the Brahmin, the fire altar, and the ritual that was held to keep the cosmos running.

• Brahmo Samaj

  The nineteenth-century Bengali reform movement of imageless, rational monotheism — worship without idol or rite, grounded in the Upanishads and founded by Ram Mohan Roy.

• Brazilian Ayahuasca Religions

  The twentieth-century Brazilian churches — Santo Daime, the União do Vegetal, and Barquinha — that take the ayahuasca brew as a sacrament within a Christian, spiritist, and indigenous synthesis.

• Breslov Hasidism

  The Hasidic movement founded by Rebbe Nachman of Breslov — known for solitary spontaneous prayer, a body of symbolic tales, and a lineage that never named a successor.

• Buddhism

  The family of traditions descended from the teaching of the Buddha in northern India — a path out of suffering grounded in the claims that all things are impermanent and that the self is not what it seems.

• Burmese Vipassana Revival

  The modern Burmese movement that reframed insight meditation as a practice for ordinary lay people — and, through its teachers, seeded the global mindfulness movement of the later twentieth century.

• Bwiti

  Initiatory religion of Gabon and the Fang/Mitsogo, using the psychoactive iboga root in nightlong rites of ancestor contact and rebirth.

• Byzantine Platonism

  The current of Platonic study that ran through the Christian East from Constantinople to Mistra — and, in its last pagan-leaning phase, helped set off the Platonic revival of Renaissance Florence.

• Cambridge Platonism

  The mid-seventeenth-century circle of Cambridge divines who revived Plato and the Neoplatonists to defend reason and the soul against both Calvinist predestination and the new mechanical philosophy.

• Camisards

  The Protestant peasant rebels of the Cévennes who rose against Louis XIV after 1685 — fighters whose campaign was driven by waves of ecstatic prophecy, later carried to London as the "French Prophets."

• Cartesianism

  The philosophy descending from René Descartes — a method of systematic doubt, a sharp division of mind from matter, and a physics that explained the body as machine.

• Catharism

  The name given to a dualist Christian movement in the medieval West, holding the visible world the work of an evil power — and the chief heresy of the Albigensian Crusade.

• Central Asian Sufism

  The Sufi orders rooted in the Turco-Persian lands east of Iran — above all the Yasawiyya and the Naqshbandiyya, and the lineage of masters known as the Khwajagan.

• Chinese Popular Religion

  The lived, unorganized religion of much of China — ancestor worship, a vast pantheon of gods and immortals, temple cult, divination and geomancy — drawing freely on Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist strands.

• Chishti Order

  The Sufi order that took root in South Asia, named for the Afghan village of Chisht, and best known for devotional music, service to the poor, and the shrines that grew up around its saints.

• Christian Kabbalah

  The movement, opened by Pico's theses of 1486 and given systematic form by Reuchlin, in which Christian scholars read Jewish Kabbalah as the hidden confirmation of Christian doctrine — and whose Latin translations, above all the Kabbala Denudata, were Europe's principal access to Kabbalistic texts for two centuries.

• Christian Mysticism

  The contemplative strand within Christianity that seeks direct, transforming union with God — reached, its writers held, through love and a knowing that passes beyond images and words.

• Christian Neoplatonism

  The Christian reception of Neoplatonist metaphysics — the One, emanation, and the soul's return reworked around the God of scripture, from Augustine through Dionysius to Eriugena and Cusa.

• Christian Science

  The American religious movement founded by Mary Baker Eddy, which holds that reality is wholly spiritual and that sickness and matter, rightly understood, are unreal — and treats healing as prayer.

• Christian Theosophy

  The visionary speculative current descending from Jacob Boehme — an attempt to read God, nature, and the divine Sophia from within, distinct from the later Theosophy of Blavatsky.

• Christianity

  The monotheistic religion centred on Jesus of Nazareth, held by its adherents to be the incarnate God whose death and resurrection redeem humanity — and carrying, alongside its creeds, a long undercurrent of mystical practice.

• Church of the East

  The East Syriac church centered in Persia and beyond Rome's frontier, which carried Christianity along the Silk Road to India and Tang China while holding a distinct two-nature Christology.

• Comparative Mysticism

  The comparative study of mystical experience across traditions, and the contested claim that beneath its many idioms lies a single shared core.

• Confucianism

  The Chinese tradition of ethics, ritual, and government descended from the teachings of Confucius — a discipline of self-cultivation aimed at a rightly ordered person and a rightly ordered world.

• Cynicism

  The ancient Greek movement that took self-sufficiency to its limit — living according to nature, in deliberate poverty, against the conventions most people never think to question.

• Dadu Panth

  The devotional community gathered around the sixteenth-century Rajasthani sant Dadu Dayal, holding to a formless God reached through the inward name rather than image or rite.

• Divine Science

  One of the principal New Thought denominations, founded in the United States in the 1880s and 1890s on the teaching that God is the only presence and the source of healing.

• Docetism

  The early-Christian view that Christ only seemed to have a body and to suffer — that his humanity was apparent, not real — a tendency that ran strongest among Gnostic Christians.

• Dönmeh

  The community descended from Jews who followed Sabbatai Zevi into outward conversion to Islam after 1666, while privately holding to a Sabbatean Kabbalah of their own.

• Druidism

  The priesthood of the pre-Roman Celtic peoples — known almost entirely from outsiders — and the modern revival, born in the eighteenth century, that took its name.

• Dzogchen, Terma, and the Nyingma

  The "Great Perfection," the highest teaching of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism and of Bon — a path founded on rigpa, the mind's already-present awareness of its own nature.

• Early Kabbalah

  The formative phase of Jewish Kabbalah in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Provence and Catalonia — the Bahir and the Gerona circle — before the Zohar recast the tradition.

• Eastern Orthodox Christianity

  The communion of self-governing Eastern churches whose theology centers on theosis — the soul's transformation into the divine likeness — pursued through liturgy, icons, and contemplative prayer.

• Ebionites

  An early Jewish-Christian movement, known chiefly from its opponents, that kept the Mosaic Law and held Jesus to be a man chosen by God rather than a pre-existent divine being.

• Elchasaites

  A Jewish-Christian baptizing sect of second-century Mesopotamia, known only through its enemies — and the milieu from which Mani of Manichaeism emerged.

• Emblematics

  The Renaissance emblem-book genre — motto, picture, and epigram read as one — from Alciato's 1531 Emblemata to the alchemical emblems of Michael Maier.

• empiricism

  The position that knowledge comes chiefly from sensory experience rather than from reason working on its own — the long counterweight to rationalism in Western thought.

• Enochian Magic

  The system of angelic language, calls, and aethyrs recorded by John Dee and Edward Kelley in the 1580s, and revived by the Golden Dawn three centuries later.

• Epicureanism

  The Hellenistic philosophy of Epicurus: an atomist physics, an empiricist canon of truth, and an ethics of tranquil pleasure that taught the mortal soul to stop fearing the gods and death.

• Eranos

  The annual gathering at Ascona, from 1933, where Jung, Eliade, Corbin, Scholem and others built a comparative, symbol-centred study of religion long entangled with the perennialist current.

• Esotericism

  The family of Western currents — Hermeticism, Kabbalah, alchemy, astrology, magic, occultism — that carry a claim to inner, transmitted, transformative knowledge, and the academic field that has studied them as one since the 1990s.

• Essenes

  An ascetic Jewish movement of the Second Temple period, known from ancient reports and widely linked — though not certainly — to the community behind the Dead Sea Scrolls.

• Falsafa (Islamic Philosophy)

  The Arabic philosophical tradition that took up the Greek inheritance — Aristotle read through a Neoplatonic frame — and carried it, refashioned, into both Islamic theology and the Latin West.

• Father Divine's Peace Mission

  The American movement that gathered around Father Divine from the 1920s, whose followers held him to be God in person and built integrated communal households through the Depression.

• Fatimid Neoplatonism

  The Neoplatonic cosmology developed by the Ismaili missionary movement under the Fatimid caliphate — emanation, a Universal Intellect and Soul, and scripture read for a hidden inner sense.

• Five Percent Nation

  The African-American movement founded by Clarence 13X in 1964, teaching that the Black man is God and the universe is legible through the Supreme Mathematics.

• Flagellants

  Medieval penitential movements whose members scourged themselves in public procession as an act of atonement, surging across Europe during the crises of the fourteenth century.

• Frankism

  The antinomian Sabbatean movement of Jacob Frank in eighteenth-century Poland — preaching redemption through transgression and ending in mass conversion to Catholicism.

• Freemasonry

  The fraternal initiatic order of speculative masonry, traditionally dated to a London founding in 1717, working a moral and symbolic system drawn from the imagery of the medieval building trade.

• French Occultism

  The nineteenth-century French occult revival — the movement, from Éliphas Lévi through Papus and Péladan, that gave modern ceremonial magic much of its vocabulary and its institutions.

• Gauḍīya Vaishnavism

  The Bengali devotional tradition founded by Chaitanya in the early sixteenth century, centred on ecstatic love for Krishna and Radha as the highest end of human life.

• Habad/Lubavitch

  The intellectual stream of Hasidism founded by Shneur Zalman of Liadi, which made contemplative study of the divine mind the road to devotion — later a global outreach movement.

• Hasidei Ashkenaz

  The medieval Jewish pietist movement of the German Rhineland — ascetic, penitential, and esoteric — gathered around the Kalonymus family and the ethical handbook Sefer Hasidim.

• Hasidism

  The eighteenth-century revival movement within Eastern European Judaism that set joyful, immediate devotion and the charismatic holy man at the center of religious life.

• Hebrew gematria / Kabbalah

  The mystical tradition of medieval and early-modern Judaism, in which the letters and numbers of the Hebrew text are read as a structure of the divine rather than a mere record of it.

• Hegelianism

  The philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel and the schools that formed around it — an account of reality as Spirit coming to know itself through history, and the fractious tradition his death set loose.

• Hekhalot / Merkavah mysticism

  The earliest known strand of Jewish mysticism — a body of late-antique literature describing visionary ascent through the heavenly palaces to the throne-chariot of God.

• Helfta convent mysticism

  The visionary devotional current that flowered at a thirteenth-century Saxon women's monastery, where three writers recorded encounters with Christ centered on his heart and wounds.

• Heresy of the Free Spirit

  The name medieval churchmen gave to a mystical current they held to teach that a soul wholly united with God passes beyond sin and beyond the law — and whose very existence as an organized sect is now disputed.

• Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor

  A late-nineteenth-century initiatic order teaching a Western practical occultism, including sexual magic — a self-declared rival to Theosophy that fed several later magical currents.

• Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

  The late-Victorian British magical order that gathered Kabbalah, tarot, astrology, alchemy, and Enochian into one graded system of initiation, and shaped most of the modern Western magic that followed.

• Hermetic Qabalah

  The Western occult adaptation of the Jewish Kabbalah, in which the Tree of Life is mapped onto tarot, astrology, and ceremonial magic — a working diagram of the cosmos and the self.

• Hermetic-Kabbalist

  The Western esoteric current that fuses Hermetic philosophy with Jewish Kabbalah, reading the divine names, sefirot, and emanations of one tradition through the cosmology of the other.

• Hesychasm

  The Eastern Orthodox contemplative tradition of inner stillness, built around the Jesus Prayer and the claim that God's energies can be known as light.

• Hindavi vernacular poetry

  The tradition of allegorical romances composed by Indian Sufis in early North Indian vernacular, in which a hero's love for a distant heroine is read, station by station, as the seeker's love for the divine.

• Hindu nada-yoga/Tantra

  The Hindu yoga of inner sound — the tantric and hatha-yogic discipline of attending to a sound said to arise within the body and to draw the mind toward absorption.

• Hindu reform

  The broad nineteenth- and twentieth-century movement to reinterpret Hinduism in response to colonial rule, Christian critique, and social pressure — recovering an older core while shedding what reformers judged accretion.

• Hindu reform / Brahmo Samaj

  The nineteenth-century movement to reform Hinduism along rational and monotheist lines, centred on the Brahmo Samaj that Ram Mohan Roy founded in Calcutta in 1828.

• Hindu Tantra

  The esoteric ritual and contemplative current within Hinduism, built on the Tantras — turning on mantra, the divine body, and the polarity of Śiva and Śakti.

• Hindu Tantra / Śākta

  The Tantric current within Hinduism centred on the worship of the Goddess as Śakti — the active divine power held to constitute and animate the whole of reality.

• Hindu Vedānta / Tantra

  Two of the major streams of Hindu metaphysical and spiritual practice — Vedānta, drawn from the Upaniṣads, and Tantra, the later esoteric current of mantra, ritual, and the body.

• Hinduism

  The family of religious traditions native to the Indian subcontinent — less a single creed than a vast web of texts, deities, and practices held together by shared scriptures and a common idiom.

• Hinduism (Śaiva/Vaiṣṇava tantra)

  A broad body of ritual, yogic, and theological traditions revealed in the tantras and āgamas — the Śaiva centered on Śiva and the Goddess, the Vaiṣṇava on Viṣṇu — that worked outside, and sometimes against, the older Vedic order.

• Historical Vedic Religion

  The sacrificial religion of the Indo-Aryan peoples of northern India between roughly 1500 and 500 BCE, known from the Vedas and ancestral to later Hinduism.

• Hyperspace philosophy

  The late-nineteenth-century current that read the mathematics of higher- dimensional space — the fourth dimension — as a doorway to the spirit, the afterlife, and unseen worlds.

• Hypsistarians

  A late-antique current in Asia Minor that worshipped a single Most High God, Theos Hypsistos, standing between Greek paganism and Judaism without belonging wholly to either.

• Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (Brethren of Purity)

  An anonymous circle of tenth-century philosophers in Basra, authors of the Rasāʾil — a fifty-two-epistle encyclopedia fusing Greek philosophy with Islamic faith.

• Illuminati

  A short-lived Bavarian Enlightenment secret society founded in 1776 — and the far larger conspiracy myth that has borrowed its name ever since.

• Illuminationism (Ishraq)

  The Persian "philosophy of illumination" founded by Suhrawardi, in which reality is graded light and the deepest knowing is held to be a direct presence rather than a chain of proofs.

• Ilm al-Huruf (Science of Letters)

  The Islamic esoteric science of the Arabic letters and their hidden numerical and cosmic powers — encompassing jafr divination and the Hurufi movement that read the letters as the very substance of God's self-disclosure.

• Inca Religion (Inti and Viracocha)

  State sun-worship of Inti and the creator Viracocha, organized around huacas, ceque lines, and ancestral mummy veneration.

• Indian Mantrayāna

  The "Vehicle of Mantras" — the esoteric, ritual stream within Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism, organized around mantra, maṇḍala, and consecration, and the matrix from which later Tantric Buddhism grew.

• Integral Yoga (Aurobindo)

  The synthesis of yogic disciplines taught by Sri Aurobindo, aimed not at liberation from embodied existence but at transforming earthly life by drawing a higher consciousness down into it.

• Iranian Islamic philosophy (Corbin)

  The strand of Persian Islamic thought — Illuminationist and Shiʿi theosophical — as reconstructed by Henry Corbin, who read it as a living metaphysics of visionary experience.

• ISKCON

  The International Society for Krishna Consciousness, a Gaudiya Vaishnava devotional movement founded in New York in 1966 and known popularly as the Hare Krishna movement.

• Islam

  The monotheistic faith founded on the revelation Muslims hold was given to Muhammad in seventh-century Arabia — and, in its Sufi current, a developed tradition of mystical knowing.

• Islamic astrology / alchemy / astral magic

  The interlocking medieval Islamicate sciences of the stars, of transmutation, and of drawing celestial power into matter — held to read and to work the bonds between heaven and earth.

• Islamic falsafa

  The tradition of Greek-derived philosophy in the medieval Islamic world — the reading of Aristotle and the Neoplatonists in Arabic, from al-Kindī to Averroes.

• Islamic Neoplatonism

  The current within medieval Islamic philosophy that read the cosmos as a descent from God through Intellect and Soul — Plotinus and Proclus received in Arabic and rebuilt within a monotheist frame.

• Islamic philosophy

  The tradition of philosophical inquiry that grew in the Islamic world from the ninth century, fusing Greek thought with the questions of a monotheist revelation.

• Islamic prophetology / doxography

  Two linked strands of Islamic intellectual life — the theory of what a prophet is and how prophecy works, and the genre that cataloged the opinions of the earlier philosophers.

• Islamic Sufism

  The mystical and inward dimension of Islam — the pursuit of direct knowledge of God through purification, devotion, and stages of the soul, organized over time into teaching orders.

• Islamicate occultism

  The body of occult sciences — astrology, alchemy, lettrism, talismanic and natural magic — cultivated across the medieval Islamic world and the cultures it shaped.

• Isma'ilism

  The esoteric branch of Shia Islam built on a reading that every revealed text carries an inner meaning, guarded and disclosed by a living line of imams.

• Jainism

  An ancient Indian religion teaching that the soul is liberated by non-violence and renunciation, freeing it from the matter that bonds it to rebirth.

• Japanese mountain asceticism (sangaku shinkō)

  The Japanese complex of mountain worship and ascetic practice in which sacred peaks are entered as a domain of power, death, and rebirth — the matrix of Shugendō and its yamabushi practitioners.

• Jewish Mysticism

  The long line of Jewish traditions reaching for direct contact with God — from the ancient chariot-visionaries through medieval Kabbalah to Hasidism.

• Jewish mysticism (pre-Zoharic)

  The strands of Jewish mystical thought and practice that ran from late antiquity to the thirteenth century, before the Zohar gave Kabbalah its classic form.

• Jewish negative theology (Maimonides, Bahya)

  The medieval Jewish doctrine that God can be described only by denial — that every positive attribute distorts a being beyond all comparison, knowable in what it is not.

• Jewish philosophy

  The tradition of reasoned reflection on God, scripture, and the good life carried on within Judaism — from medieval thinkers working in Arabic to the Jewish philosophers of modern Europe.

• Joachimism

  The apocalyptic theology of history descended from Joachim of Fiore, which read the Trinity into time as three successive ages and shaped centuries of Western expectation of a coming spiritual age.

• Jōdo Shinshū / Shin Buddhism

  The Japanese Pure Land tradition founded on Shinran's teaching that rebirth in Amida Buddha's land is received as a gift, not earned — salvation by other-power rather than effort.

• Judeo-Sufism

  A medieval Jewish pietist movement in Egypt that adopted Sufi devotional practice and language, holding it to be the lost discipline of the Hebrew prophets, recoverable from the Muslims who had preserved it.

• Kabbalah

  The principal tradition of Jewish mysticism — the received teaching on Ein Sof, the ten sefirot, and the repair of the world, from the Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar to Safed, Sabbatianism, and Hasidism.

• Kabbalah (ecstatic / prophetic)

  The strand of medieval Jewish mysticism aimed not at mapping the divine world but at reaching it — a discipline of letters, names, and breath held to carry the mind into prophecy and union.

• Kabbalistic musar

  Jewish ethical literature written in a kabbalistic key — Safed-era treatises, beginning with Cordovero's Palm Tree of Deborah, that ground moral conduct in the doctrine of the sefirot.

• Kabīr-Panth

  The North Indian devotional community formed around the poet-saint Kabīr, teaching an inward, image-free devotion to a formless divine reached through the recited name and a living guru.

• Kashmir Shaivism

  The nondual school of Shaiva tantra that flowered in medieval Kashmir, teaching that all reality is the self-expression of a single consciousness identified with Shiva.

• Kaula Tantra

  A "left-hand" current of tantric Shaivism and Shaktism centered on the clan of goddesses and yoginis, holding that what ordinary religion shuns can become the very means of liberation.

• Kejawen (Javanese Mysticism)

  Javanese syncretic mystical tradition blending Hindu-Buddhist, Sufi, and indigenous thought in a quest for inner unity.

• Kongolese Catholicism

  The distinctive form of Roman Catholicism adopted by the Kingdom of Kongo from 1491, in which Christian belief and indigenous Central African cosmology were fused into a single, self-sustaining tradition.

• Korean (Silla) Buddhism

  The Buddhism of the Silla kingdom and the unified Korea it founded — a state-sponsored faith that became, in the seventh century, a center of Mahāyāna thought in its own right.

• Kotzk/Izbica

  A radical strand of nineteenth-century Polish Hasidism — the demanding, truth-obsessed school of Kotzk and the determinist theology of Izbica that branched from it.

• Krama

  A non-dualist Śaiva tradition of medieval Kashmir centered on the goddess Kālī, which read liberation as a recurring sequence the knowing mind passes through in every act of awareness.

• Krishna-bhakti

  The Indian devotional current centered on Krishna — loving attachment to a personal god held to save by relationship rather than by knowledge or rite.

• Lalitā Tripurasundarī cult

  The South Asian Tantric current — known as Śrīvidyā — that worships the goddess Lalitā Tripurasundarī through mantra, the Śrī Cakra diagram, and graded initiation.

• Late-antique Iranian-Mesopotamian gnosis

  The family of dualist, salvation-by-knowing religions that arose in the Aramaic- and Iranian-speaking world of late antiquity — Manichaeism, Mandaeism, and their kin — east of the Greek Gnostic currents.

• late-Quattrocento prophetic messianism

  The apocalyptic-prophetic ferment of late-fifteenth-century Italy — Joachimist expectation, printed prophecy, Savonarola's Florence — in which renewal of church and world was widely held imminent.

• Latin American esotericism

  The reception and reworking of Western esoteric currents — Spiritism, Theosophy, Freemasonry, New Thought — across Latin America, braided with Catholic, African-diaspora, and Indigenous religion.

• Latin medieval alchemy

  The tradition of alchemical theory and practice in the Latin West from the twelfth century, built on translated Arabic sources and the promise of transmuting base metals into gold.

• Latin Platonism

  The Platonic tradition as it passed into the Latin-speaking West — read largely through translation and commentary rather than Plato's own dialogues, and carried into the Middle Ages.

• Law of Attraction culture

  The modern self-help milieu built on the claim that focused thought draws matching circumstances to it — that like attracts like in the mental as well as the material world.

• Liberal Catholic Church

  A small sacramental church formed in 1916 that keeps the Catholic Mass and apostolic orders while leaving every point of belief to the individual, read through a Theosophical lens.

• Lollards

  Dissenting heirs of Wycliffe in late-medieval England who held that any person might read scripture and answer to it directly — and a number of whom were burned for it.

• Longmen lineage

  The "Dragon Gate" branch of Quanzhen Daoism — the monastic ordination lineage that became the dominant institutional form of organized Daoism in late imperial China.

• Lullism (combinatorial art)

  The tradition stemming from Ramon Llull's Art — a system of rotating lettered figures meant to generate and demonstrate truth by combination, and its long afterlife in memory, logic, and esoteric thought.

• Lurianic Kabbalah

  The system of Jewish mysticism taught by Isaac Luria at Safed in 1570–1572, in which the Infinite contracts to make room for the worlds, the vessels of creation shatter, and the repair of the broken order falls to every soul through commandment, intention, and rebirth.

• Lutheran-Paracelsian reform

  The late-sixteenth-century current in Protestant Germany that fused Paracelsus's chemical natural philosophy with radical Lutheran spiritualism, seeking a single reform of religion, medicine, and learning.

• Madhyamaka

  The Buddhist "Middle Way" school founded by Nāgārjuna, which argues that all things are empty of inherent existence and analyses reality through two truths.

• Madhyamaka (śūnyatā)

  The Mahāyāna Buddhist "Middle Way" school founded by Nāgārjuna, built on śūnyatā — the claim that nothing whatever possesses an independent, intrinsic existence of its own.

• Mahāsiddha tradition

  The medieval Indian movement of the "great adepts" — tantric Buddhist masters, counted by convention as eighty-four, held to have reached liberation through unorthodox means outside the monastery.

• Mahāyāna

  The "Great Vehicle" — the broad current of Buddhism built around the bodhisattva ideal: that the highest aim is not one's own release but the awakening of all beings.

• Maimonidean Rationalism

  The rationalist theology of Moses Maimonides — a reading of Judaism through Aristotle, in which God can be described only by negation and reason and revelation are held to agree.

• Maktab-i Iṣfahān

  The flowering of Shīʿī philosophical theology in Safavid Isfahan, fusing Avicennan metaphysics, Illuminationist and mystical thought, and Twelver theology into a single contemplative current.

• Mandaeism

  The surviving Gnostic religion of southern Iraq and Iran — a baptizing community that honors John the Baptist, holds the visible world a flawed making, and seeks the soul's return to the World of Light.

• Manichaeism (Religion of Light)

  A dualist world religion founded in third-century Mesopotamia by the prophet Mani, teaching a cosmic struggle of Light against Darkness and a path to free the light trapped in matter.

• Manichaeism in Central Asia and China

  The eastward life of Manichaeism — the dualist religion founded by Mani in third-century Mesopotamia — along the trade roads of Central Asia, where it became the state faith of the Uyghur steppe empire and survived in Chinese communities into the later Middle Ages.

• Martinism

  The Christian theosophical and initiatic current descending from Martines de Pasqually and Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, concerned with the Fall and the reintegration of humanity into divine unity.

• Medieval agronomy & talismanic magic

  The medieval strand in which treatises on farming carried astral and talismanic magic alongside practical husbandry — the soil worked by the stars as much as by the hand.

• Medieval Jewish Neoplatonism

  The current in medieval Jewish thought that read the God of scripture through the Neoplatonic scheme of emanation — the world flowing, by degrees, from a One beyond being.

• medieval visionary literature

  The medieval genre of vision-narratives — otherworld journeys and the waking revelations of seers such as Hildegard of Bingen — long read as the ground from which Dante's Commedia grew.

• Medieval women's mysticism

  The flowering of visionary and contemplative writing by women in the Latin West, roughly the twelfth through fifteenth centuries — much of it claiming direct, unmediated experience of God.

• Mesmerism / Animal Magnetism

  The late-eighteenth-century healing theory of Franz Anton Mesmer, which held that an invisible fluid pervades all bodies and that its blocked flow could be rebalanced to cure disease.

• Mesopotamian religion (Sumerian/Akkadian)

  The polytheistic religion of ancient Iraq, attested in Sumerian and Akkadian cuneiform from the third millennium BCE — a world of city-gods, temples, and reading the gods' intentions in signs.

• Messalianism (Messalian controversy)

  A fourth-century ascetic movement of Syria and Asia Minor, condemned as heresy for holding that ceaseless prayer, not baptism, expels the demon dwelling in every soul.

• Métapsychique

  The French name and program for a would-be science of psychical phenomena — coined by Charles Richet to study, without spiritualist commitments, what ordinary physiology could not explain.

• Mevlevi Order (Mevleviyya / Whirling Dervishes)

  The Sufi order founded in thirteenth-century Konya around the poet Rūmī, known in the West for the turning ceremony its members perform as a form of prayer.

• Meykaṇṭa Śāstra scholasticism

  The systematic Tamil theology of Śaiva Siddhānta — fourteen canonical treatises, headed by Meykaṇṭār's Civañāṉapōtam, that argue the relation of Lord, soul, and bond.

• Mikkyō

  The esoteric stream of Japanese Buddhism — Shingon and the Tendai esoteric rites — that holds enlightenment to be reachable in this very body through mantra, gesture, and mandala.

• Minne-mysticism (Middle Dutch)

  The thirteenth-century strand of mysticism in the Low Countries built on minne, the Middle Dutch word for love, in which union with God is figured as a fierce reciprocal desire.

• Mithraic mysteries

  The Roman mystery cult of the god Mithras — initiatory, secret, and spread across the empire — whose central image was the slaying of a bull.

• mitnaggedic opposition

  The organized rabbinic resistance to early Hasidism, led from Vilna under the authority of the Vilna Gaon, whose bans of 1772 and 1781 sought to halt the new movement.

• Modern ganzfeld / experimental parapsychology

  The twentieth-century attempt to test claimed psychic abilities under controlled conditions — centered on the ganzfeld, a mild sensory-deprivation protocol said to favor telepathy.

• Modern Hermeticism / Hermetic revival

  The post-Renaissance reception and reinvention of the Hermetic tradition — the long afterlife of texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, recovered, redated, and rebuilt into modern occultism and, at last, a university discipline.

• Modern Paganism

  The family of twentieth-century movements — Wicca, reconstructionism, Druidry and the Goddess currents — that set out to revive, or reimagine, the pre-Christian religions of Europe and the Near East.

• Modern popular numerology

  The popular divinatory practice of reducing names and birth dates to single digits to read character and destiny — a modern system that claims ancient, largely Pythagorean, descent.

• Moorish Science

  An early twentieth-century African American religious movement teaching that Black Americans are Moors of Asiatic descent, founded by Noble Drew Ali on a recast esoteric Islam.

• Mu / lost-continent occultism

  The modern occult tradition of a sunken Pacific motherland of humanity — Mu, sister-myth to Lemuria — held to be the cradle of a lost primeval civilization and its forgotten wisdom.

• Mustaʿlī-Ṭayyibī (Bohra)

  The branch of Ismāʿīlī Shīʿa Islam that holds its imam to be in concealment and is led in his absence by a deputy — surviving today mainly among the Bohra communities of western India.

• Mystery religions

  The initiatory cults of the Greco-Roman world — Eleusis, the Bacchic and Orphic rites, Samothrace, Isis, the Great Mother, Mithras — whose secret rites of initiation changed the initiate's standing toward the gods and toward death, and whose central acts were never divulged.

• Naqshbandiyya-Khalidiyya

  The reforming nineteenth-century branch of the Naqshbandi Sufi order founded by Khalid al-Baghdadi, which spread across the Ottoman lands and the Caucasus.

• Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya

  The reformist Indian branch of the Naqshbandi Sufi order, named for Ahmad Sirhindi, whose followers titled him the Renewer of the Second Millennium of Islam.

• Nāth / Haṭha-yogic substrate

  The medieval lineage of Indian yogis around Gorakhnāth, and the body-centred haṭha yoga it transmitted — the practical bedrock beneath much later yoga.

• Naturalism

  The philosophical position that nature is all there is — that whatever exists belongs to the one natural order and is in principle open to natural explanation, with nothing standing outside or above it.

• Nāyaṉār bhakti Śaivism

  The devotional Śaivism of the Tamil south, carried by the Nāyaṉārs — poet-saints whose hymns to Śiva, sung from roughly the sixth to ninth centuries, reshaped Tamil religion around love of the god.

• Neidan

  Daoist internal alchemy — a body of practice and theory that treats the human body as the crucible, refining its vital forces toward an inner self said to outlast death.

• Neo-Advaita

  A loose contemporary Western teaching current, descended from Ramana Maharshi, that points directly to non-dual awareness while setting aside most of classical Advaita's preparatory discipline.

• Neo-Confucianism

  The Song-dynasty revival of Confucian thought — the "learning of principle" systematized by Zhu Xi — which gave the old ethics a metaphysics able to answer Buddhism and Daoism on their own ground.

• Neo-Vedanta

  The modern reformulation of Advaita Vedānta that took shape in nineteenth-century India — non-dualism recast as a universal religion of inner realization, engaged with the world rather than withdrawn from it.

• Neochalcedonian Christology

  The sixth-century Byzantine attempt to read the Council of Chalcedon through the language of Cyril of Alexandria — holding the two natures of Christ together with Cyril's stress on their single subject.

• Neoplatonism

  The last great school of pagan Greek philosophy — the reading of Plato, from Plotinus to the school's closing in 529, in which all reality descends from the One and the soul's work is the return.

• Neopythagoreanism

  The revival of Pythagorean thought in the Roman world, joining number-mysticism and ascetic discipline to a Platonic metaphysics, from roughly the first century BCE onward.

• New Bön (bon gsar)

  A current within the Tibetan Bön tradition, arising mainly from the seventeenth century, that drew the treasure-revelation and Padmasambhava material of Nyingma Buddhism into a Bön frame.

• New Thought

  The loose American metaphysical movement, rooted in mental healing, that holds the mind to shape health and circumstance — and treats thought itself as the lever on reality.

• Newar Buddhism

  The surviving Sanskritic tantric Buddhism of the Kathmandu Valley, carried not by celibate monks but by a hereditary, married priesthood — the last living form of Indian Mahāyāna-Vajrayāna.

• Nizārī Ismāʿīlism

  The branch of Ismāʿīlī Shia Islam that follows a living, present imam through the line of Nizār — the community of Alamūt in the medieval period and of the Aga Khan today.

• Occultism

  The current of occult sciences and secret knowledge that crystallized in nineteenth-century France and Britain — magic, the Kabbalah, the tarot — and the modern revival that carried it.

• Ordre Martiniste

  The initiatic society organized in Paris in 1891 by Papus, which gave the older Martinist current a graded ritual structure and a working membership.

• Orisha Religion

  Yoruba religion of Olodumare and the orisha deities, centered on Ile-Ife; ancestral root of Santeria, Candomble and Lucumi worldwide.

• Orphism

  The ancient Greek mystery current of initiation, theogony, and afterlife hope ascribed to the singer Orpheus, attested by gold burial tablets and the Derveni papyrus.

• Ottoman Sufism

  The tariqa-based Sufism of Anatolia and the Ottoman lands — the Mevlevi, Bektashi, and Khalwati orders, organized around lodges, lineages, and the veneration of saints.

• Ouspenskian cosmology

  The cosmological scheme P. D. Ouspensky drew from Gurdjieff's teaching — a graded descent of worlds governed by two laws, in which a human being is fixed at a definite cosmic level, and which Ouspensky deepened with his own doctrine of multi-dimensional time.

• Pagan Platonic theology

  The systematic theology built by the late Platonists, who read Plato as sacred scripture and ranked the gods of Greek cult as the order of divine powers descending from the One.

• Palamism

  The theology of Gregory Palamas — its defining move the distinction between God's unknowable essence and his uncreated energies, by which God is held to be truly participated without ceasing to be hidden.

• Pali Abhidhamma

  The systematic philosophy of early Theravada Buddhism — the third basket of the Pali Canon, which breaks experience down into its smallest constituent events.

• pansophism

  The seventeenth-century program of universal knowledge — all things taught to all people from nature, mind, and Scripture — pursued by Comenius and the reformers around the Rosicrucian furor.

• Paracelsianism

  The medical and alchemical movement that grew from the work of Paracelsus — chemical medicine, the three principles, and the doctrine of signatures, set against the reigning Galenic tradition.

• Patristic heresiology

  The early Christian genre of cataloging and refuting movements judged heretical — the writings that long supplied, and distorted, what was known of Gnostic and other rival currents.

• Paulicianism

  A medieval Christian movement of Armenia and Asia Minor, dualist in the hostile sources that describe it, that rejected the material world, the sacraments, the cross, and the established Church.

• Paulicians

  A medieval Christian movement of Armenia and Byzantine Asia Minor, reported by its enemies as dualist, and long regarded as an early link toward the Bogomils and Cathars.

• Persian poetic mysticism

  The tradition of mystical verse written in Persian from the eleventh century on, in which love poetry's vocabulary — the beloved, wine, the tavern — is read as a language for the soul's longing for God.

• Philadelphian Society

  The late-seventeenth-century English mystical circle around Jane Lead and John Pordage, devoted to the divine Wisdom, visionary experience, and the hope that all things would at last be restored to God.

• Philosophical Jewish esotericism

  The medieval Jewish current that read the Torah's hidden meaning through the vocabulary of Greek and Arabic philosophy — Neoplatonist and Aristotelian rather than mythic — treating metaphysics itself as the secret of scripture.

• Phoenician religion

  The civic cults of the Iron Age Levantine cities — Tyre, Sidon, Byblos and their colonies — a Canaanite inheritance reshaped around city-gods and carried across the Mediterranean.

• Pietism

  A renewal movement within Lutheranism, arising in the later seventeenth century, that stressed inward conversion and lived devotion over doctrinal correctness.

• Platonism

  The philosophy descended from Plato — the theory of Forms, the Good beyond being, knowledge as recollection — and the school that carried it from the grove of the Academy through skepticism to the eve of Plotinus.

• Popol Vuh (Maya Creation Cosmology)

  Sacred K'iche' Maya book of creation and the Hero Twins, the foundational text of Maya cosmology and mythic worldview.

• Port-Royal Catholicism

  The rigorist Augustinian movement within seventeenth-century French Catholicism, named for the abbey of Port-Royal and known to its opponents as Jansenism, condemned by Rome over the doctrine of grace.

• Positivism

  The nineteenth-century doctrine, framed by Auguste Comte, that genuine knowledge rests only on observable fact and the laws science draws from it — with metaphysics and theology set aside as outgrown stages.

• Pratyabhijñā

  The "Recognition" school of non-dual Kashmir Śaivism, which held that liberation comes not from attaining anything new but from recognising the self as already identical with universal consciousness.

• Pre-Buddhist Tibetan 'nameless religion'

  The scholars' name for the indigenous Tibetan religious substratum — a cult of local gods, spirits, and fortune underlying both Buddhism and organized Bön, which it predates and outlasts.

• Pre-Lurianic Safed Kabbalah

  The flowering of Jewish mysticism in sixteenth-century Safed before Isaac Luria — the systematizing Kabbalah of Cordovero and his circle, in the generation that turned a Galilean town into the movement's center.

• Protestant mysticism

  The strand of inward, experiential piety that grew within the Protestant world — seeking a felt union with God beyond doctrine and outward observance, often in tension with the churches that produced it.

• Proto-Sāṃkhya / pre-classical Sāṃkhya

  The early, unfixed phases of Sāṃkhya thought before its classical form — a loose body of enumerative, dualist speculation scattered across Upaniṣads and epic, often still theistic.

• Provençal Kabbalah

  The earliest documented stratum of theosophical Kabbalah, emerging in late-twelfth-century Languedoc around the circle of Isaac the Blind, before the tradition passed to Catalonia.

• Pseudo-Babylonian / Nabataean Hermetica

  A body of Arabic texts on agriculture, astral religion, and magic that claim to translate the lost wisdom of ancient Babylonia, gathered around Ibn Waḥshiyya's tenth-century Nabataean Agriculture.

• Pure Land Buddhism

  The devotional Mahayana stream centered on the Buddha Amitabha and rebirth in his western paradise Sukhavati, where liberation is received from another's vow rather than won by one's own effort.

• Pythagorean arithmology

  The doctrine, ascribed to Pythagoras and elaborated by later Greek thinkers, that the first numbers carry fixed qualitative meanings — that number is the hidden order of things, not merely their count.

• Pythagorean-Platonic harmonics

  The ancient doctrine that the same whole-number ratios governing musical consonance also order the soul and the cosmos — held to make number, sound, and being a single structure.

• Pythagoreanism

  The teaching ascribed to Pythagoras and his followers — number as the principle of reality, the soul reborn across lives, and a shared ascetic life — and a deep root of later Western esotericism.

• Qigong fever (qigong re)

  The mass enthusiasm for qigong that swept the People's Republic of China from the late 1970s into the 1990s — a boom in healing breath-work, charismatic masters, and claims of extraordinary power.

• Quakerism (Religious Society of Friends)

  The Christian movement that arose in mid-seventeenth-century England around the conviction that an inward divine light is given to every person, and that it, not clergy or sacrament, is where God is met.

• Quakers

  The Religious Society of Friends — a Christian movement risen in 1650s England on the conviction that an inner light of God speaks directly in every person, without priest or sacrament.

• Quanzhen

  The "Complete Perfection" school of Daoism, founded in twelfth-century northern China — monastic, ascetic, and built around inner alchemy and the refining of body and spirit.

• Ravidassia

  The devotional movement centered on the medieval poet-saint Ravidas — long held within the Sikh and Sant fold, and since 2010 declaring itself a distinct religion.

• Reformed Christianity

  The branch of Protestantism descended from the Swiss Reformation and from Calvin's Geneva, marked above all by the sovereignty of God and the doctrine of election.

• Religion of Light (Míngjiào)

  The Chinese form of Manichaeism — Mani's dualist religion of light and darkness as it took root under the Tang, was persecuted, and survived for centuries in the southeast.

• Renaissance astro-magic

  The Renaissance art of drawing down planetary influence — through diet, music, scents, gems, and talismanic images — set out above all in Ficino's medical-philosophical handbook of 1489.

• Renaissance Hermetism

  The Renaissance revival of the Hermetic writings — read as Egyptian wisdom as old as Moses — and the world-picture of correspondence, dignity, and learned magic it underwrote, from Ficino's 1463 Pimander to Casaubon's 1614 redating.

• Renaissance magic

  The learned magic of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, which held that a scholar could draw on hidden powers in nature and the heavens by knowledge rather than by pact.

• Renaissance natural philosophy

  The study of nature in Europe between roughly 1450 and 1650 — a contested field in which recovered ancient texts, Christian theology, and magic shared the ground later claimed by science.

• Renaissance Neoplatonism

  The revival of Plato and Plotinus that began in fifteenth-century Florence under Ficino and Pico and ran into the late sixteenth century, fusing Platonic metaphysics with natural magic, Hermetic wisdom, and the doctrine of love as the ladder of the soul's ascent.

• Rhineland Mysticism

  The fourteenth-century current of Dominican mystical thought along the Rhine — Eckhart, Tauler, Suso — centered on detachment and the uncreated ground of the soul.

• Rodnovery

  The modern Slavic Native Faith — a family of reconstructionist Pagan movements in Russia, Ukraine, and the wider Slavic world, holding that a pre-Christian ancestral religion can be recovered and revived.

• Rosicrucianism

  The esoteric current set moving by three anonymous manifestos printed in the German-speaking lands between 1614 and 1616, announcing a hidden brotherhood, its founder Christian Rosenkreutz, and a general reformation of the whole world.

• Russian Religious Philosophy/Sophiology

  The current of Russian Orthodox-rooted speculative thought from Solovyov onward, marked above all by sophiology — the contested doctrine of Sophia, Divine Wisdom, as a principle joining God and the world.

• Russian Silver Age esotericism

  The occult and mystical currents that ran through Russian art and thought from the 1890s to the Revolution — Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and a homegrown mysticism of the divine Sophia.

• Russian Sophiology

  The current in modern Russian Orthodox thought that treats divine Sophia, Wisdom, as a distinct reality between God and creation — speculative, contested, and condemned by church authority.

• Sabbateanism

  The Jewish messianic movement formed around Sabbatai Zevi, proclaimed messiah in 1665, which survived his conversion to Islam by reinterpreting the apostasy as a hidden stage of redemption.

• Sabian (Ḥarrānian) astral religion

  The star-centered pagan religion of medieval Ḥarrān, whose adherents adopted the Qurʾānic name "Sabian" to survive under Islam and claimed Hermes among their prophets.

• Sadducees

  The priestly and aristocratic party of Second Temple Judaism, centered on the Jerusalem Temple, who held only the written Torah authoritative and denied the resurrection of the dead.

• Sahajiyā

  A family of tantric devotional movements in eastern India built on sahaja, "the innate" — the conviction that liberation lies in a natural state already present, recovered through cultivated love rather than renunciation.

• Samaya / Dakṣiṇācāra current

  The "right-hand" strand of Tantra — the line of practice that keeps worship internal and Veda-conformant, set against the antinomian rites of the left-hand path.

• Sant Tradition

  The North Indian devotional movement of poet-saints who addressed a formless (nirguna) divine, holding that interior love, not ritual or caste rank, was the way to it.

• Sant tradition (nirguṇa bhakti)

  The North Indian devotional movement of the later medieval period, centered on love of a formless divine without image or attribute, voiced in vernacular song.

• Sasanian-Iranian wisdom tradition

  The sapiential current of late pre-Islamic Persia — Middle Persian counsel, ethics, and learning, framed by Zoroastrian cosmology and carried into the Islamic world.

• Scholasticism

  The medieval method of teaching and argument that brought logic to bear on faith — pressing doctrine into question, objection, and reasoned reply in the cathedral schools and early universities.

• Scottish fairy and apparition lore

  The body of Scottish folk belief concerning fairies, the dead, and the gift of second sight — a tradition of unseen neighbours and warning apparitions, preserved chiefly in Highland and Lowland accounts.

• Second Sophistic

  The name, taken from Philostratus, for the flowering of Greek display oratory under Rome (c. 60–230 CE), when sophists were celebrities and the classical past a performance.

• Second Temple Judaism

  The five centuries of Jewish religious life bounded by the completion of the Second Temple in 516 BCE and its destruction by Rome in 70 CE — the period in which the Torah became the axis of Jewish identity, the great sects emerged, apocalyptic and angelological literature exploded, and the matrices of both Gnosticism and early Christianity were laid down.

• Serer Religion

  Indigenous religion of the Serer of Senegal, venerating the supreme Roog, pangool ancestral spirits, and the cosmic Yoonir (Sirius) star.

• Sethianism

  The Sethian or Barbeloite current of classic Gnosticism, which traced the saving knowledge to Seth, the third son of Adam, and whose own scriptures — the Apocryphon of John among them — surfaced at Nag Hammadi in 1945.

• Shangqing (Highest Clarity)

  The "Highest Clarity" school of Daoism, born of fourth-century revelations — a tradition of interior visualization and body gods, aimed at ascent to the heavens of the Perfected.

• Shingon (Japanese esoteric Buddhism, mikkyō)

  The Japanese school of esoteric Buddhism founded by Kūkai in the early ninth century — mantra, mudra, and mandala practice held to realize buddhahood in this very body.

• Shīʿī philosophy

  The philosophical tradition of Shīʿī Islam — from Ismāʿīlī Neoplatonism to the Safavid school of Isfahan — centered on the Imam as bearer of revelation's inner meaning.

• Sikhism

  The monotheistic tradition founded in the Punjab by Guru Nanak, transmitted through ten human Gurus and now through its scripture, held to be the living Guru itself.

• Southern Lineage (Nanzong)

  The "Southern Lineage" of Daoist internal alchemy, traced to Zhang Boduan's Awakening to Reality — a retrospective line of five patriarchs, later merged into the Quanzhen order.

• Spinozism

  The system of Benedictus de Spinoza — one infinite substance, God or Nature — and its afterlife as accusation, pantheist creed, and contested cousin of Kabbalah.

• Spiritism

  The doctrine codified in 1850s France by Allan Kardec — communication with the dead organized into a moral system, distinguished from Anglo-American spiritualism by its insistence on reincarnation.

• Spiritualism

  The nineteenth-century movement built on the claim that the dead survive and can be reached — usually through a medium — and that contact with them can be demonstrated rather than merely believed.

• Śrīvaiṣṇavism

  The South Indian tradition worshipping Viṣṇu with the goddess Śrī — Tamil Āḻvār devotion joined to Rāmānuja's Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta in temple ritual, later divided into Teṉkalai and Vaṭakalai schools.

• Stoicism

  The Hellenistic school that taught the universe is ordered by an immanent reason and that the good life lies in aligning the self with that order, surrendering what lies outside one's control.

• Sufi tariqa institution

  The Sufi order as institution — the master–disciple bond, the recited chain of masters traced to the Prophet, and the lodges that organized Islamic mysticism from the twelfth century onward.

• Sufi-Fakir (Bengali)

  A Muslim-background current of renunciant mystic-singers in Bengal, kin to the Bauls, whose songs — Lalon Fakir's above all — seek the divine within the human body.

• Sufism

  The mystical and inward current of Islam — a tradition of disciplined practice, devotion, and orders, oriented toward the direct knowledge of God and the passing-away of the self.

• Sufism and the Comparative Mystics

  The long habit of reading Sufism alongside other mystical traditions — and the disputed question of whether the likenesses mark shared roots or independent arrival.

• Swabian biblical realism (Bengel school)

  The Württemberg Pietist school of J. A. Bengel, which read Scripture as a real history of salvation with a computable end — widened by F. C. Oetinger into a biblical theosophy.

• Swedenborgianism

  The body of Christian thought and the church that grew from Emanuel Swedenborg's reported visions — built on correspondences, a hidden spiritual sense of scripture, and a single divine Lord.

• Swedenborgianism / New Church

  The religious movement built on the visionary theology of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), organized after his death as the New Church, or Church of the New Jerusalem.

• Syriac Christian mysticism

  The contemplative tradition of Syriac-speaking Christianity, from Ephrem's theological poetry to the East Syriac monastic mystics Isaac of Nineveh and John of Dalyatha.

• Tamil Śaiva Siddhānta

  The Śaiva theology of the Tamil south — Śiva, souls, and bonds held eternally real, with liberation as union in grace that never erases the soul.

• Tamil Vaiṣṇava bhakti

  The devotional movement of the Āḻvārs, Tamil poet-saints of Viṣṇu of roughly the sixth to ninth centuries CE, whose hymns the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition came to hold as revelation.

• Taoism

  The Chinese tradition, at once philosophy and organized religion, built around the Tao — the nameless way and source of all things — and the art of acting in accord with it.

• Thai Forest Tradition

  The ascetic forest-monk lineage of Thai Theravāda, revived around Ajahn Mun and Ajahn Chah, holding strict monastic discipline and meditation to the earliest standard and later carried to the West.

• The Arabic Hermetica

  The Hermetic literature of the Islamic world — the triple Hermes who is the prophet Idrīs, the Arabic birthplace of the Emerald Tablet, and the channel by which Hermes reached the Latin West.

• The Cappadocian Fathers

  The three fourth-century Greek theologians of Cappadocia — Basil of Caesarea and the two Gregorys — who fixed the language of the Trinity and opened a mystical theology of ascent into divine darkness.

• The Fourth Way

  The esoteric teaching of G. I. Gurdjieff, transmitted largely through P. D. Ouspensky, holding that ordinary human life is a kind of waking sleep from which a person can be roused by sustained inner work.

• Theosophy

  The esoteric movement founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott — the channel through which karma, reincarnation, and the idea of an ancient universal wisdom entered the modern West.

• Theosophy/Anthroposophy

  Rudolf Steiner's "spiritual science" and its 1912–13 secession from the Theosophical Society — a Christ-centered esotericism claiming exact investigation of supersensible worlds.

• Theravada Buddhism

  The "Teaching of the Elders" — the surviving branch of early Buddhism that holds to the Pali Canon and the arhat's path, dominant across South and Southeast Asia.

• Tiantai (Tendai) Buddhism

  The first great systematizing school of Chinese Buddhism, founded on Mount Tiantai by Zhiyi, carried to Japan by Saichō as Tendai, and built on the Lotus Sutra, the threefold truth, and three thousand realms in a single thought.

• Tibetan Buddhism

  The form of Buddhism that took root across Tibet and the Himalaya — Mahayana doctrine joined to the tantric methods of Vajrayana, organized around lineage and the teacher.

• Tibetan Vajrayana

  The tantric Buddhism that became the dominant form in Tibet — the "Diamond Vehicle," which holds that the goal can be reached in a single lifetime through ritual, mantra, and the visualized presence of a deity.

• Tirumantiram / Tamil Siddhar tradition

  The Tamil Shaiva poem of some three thousand verses attributed to Tirumular, foundational to the Siddhar current of poet-yogis who held the body to be liberation's instrument.

• Tondrakians

  A medieval Armenian religious movement of the ninth to eleventh centuries, condemned by the Armenian Church for rejecting its hierarchy and sacraments, and known almost wholly through hostile sources.

• Traditionalism/Perennialism

  The twentieth-century school of Guénon, Coomaraswamy, and Schuon, which holds that one primordial truth underlies the world's orthodox religions — and that modernity is the history of its loss.

• Transhumanism

  The modern movement that proposes to carry humanity beyond its present form by technology — ending aging, enlarging minds, outlasting death — and that counts the alchemists among its own ancestors.

• Transpersonal Psychology

  The "fourth force" in psychology — Maslow, Sutich, and Grof's attempt to bring mystical and self-transcendent experience inside the discipline rather than dismiss it, and the contested marginal science that resulted.

• Twelver Shi'ism

  The largest branch of Shia Islam, holding to a line of twelve divinely appointed Imams whose last is hidden in occultation, awaited as the Mahdi.

• UFO Religions

  The contemporary religious movements that place salvation in the hands of extraterrestrials — Theosophy's hidden Masters relocated from the Himalayas to other planets and the flying saucer.

• Ugaritic / West Semitic religion

  The cult and mythology of Late Bronze Age Ugarit and the wider West Semitic world — El, Baal, Asherah, Anat — recovered from tablets found at Ras Shamra from 1928.

• Unity Church

  The New Thought movement founded by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore in 1889, built around affirmative prayer, mental healing, and the divinity held to reside in every person.

• Valentinianism

  The most refined of the Gnostic schools, a second-century Christian movement of the Pleroma, the fall of Sophia, and salvation by gnosis, recovered in the texts of its own teachers after 1945.

• Varkari (Marathi)

  The Marathi bhakti tradition of western India, centered on the god Vitthal of Pandharpur — the sant-poets from Jnaneshwar to Tukaram, and the walking pilgrimage that gives the movement its name.

• Vedanta (Advaita, Visistadvaita, Dvaita)

  The Hindu school built on the Upanishads, and its three classical readings — Śaṅkara's non-dualism, Rāmānuja's qualified non-dualism, Madhva's dualism — divided over the soul's relation to brahman.

• Victorian psychical research (SPR)

  The London society founded in 1882 to examine telepathy, apparitions, and mediumship by scientific method — the Victorian attempt to test, rather than simply believe or dismiss, spiritualism's claims.

• Virashaiva/Lingayat

  The Kannada Śaiva devotional movement gathered around Basava in twelfth-century Karnataka — wearers of a personal linga who set the body against the temple and left the vachana poems.

• Wahdat al-Wujud

  The "unity of being" — the strand of Sufi metaphysics descending from Ibn Arabi in which all that exists is held to be the self-disclosure of the one Real.

• West African Vodun

  Fon and Ewe religion of the vodun spirits, rooted in Dahomey (Abomey/Ouidah); source tradition of Haitian Vodou and Louisiana Voodoo.

• Yezidism (Yazidism)

  The religion of the Yazidis of northern Iraq — veneration of Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel, centered on the shrine valley of Lalish and long misnamed devil-worship by outsiders.

• Yogacara

  The Mind-Only school of Mahayana Buddhism, founded by Asanga and Vasubandhu, which holds that the world we take for external is a transformation of consciousness, anchored in a storehouse that carries the seeds of action.

• Zen Buddhism (Rinzai / Sōtō)

  The meditation school of Mahāyāna Buddhism — Chinese Chan carried to Japan, where its Rinzai and Sōtō lines hold awakening to pass mind to mind, outside the scriptures.

• Zhengyi Daoism

  The "Orthodox Unity" order of Daoism, descended from the second-century Way of the Celestial Masters — a tradition of talismans, registers, and ritual led by a hereditary Heavenly Master.