Philosophies

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• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Bauls of Bengal

  A heterodox order of wandering minstrels of Bengal whose songs carry a body-centred 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-centred 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.

• 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 Renaissance Christian appropriation of Jewish Kabbalah, read by its authors as confirming Christian doctrine — a current whose claim about hidden continuity scholarship treats as theirs, not as fact.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 scholarly umbrella for a family of Western currents — Hermeticism, Kabbalah, alchemy, astrology, occultism — and the academic field that studies them as one field of inquiry.

• 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, organized in London 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 — held by its practitioners as a working diagram of the cosmos and the self.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Jewish Mysticism

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

• 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.

• Kabbalah

  The principal tradition of Jewish mysticism — a body of teaching on the hidden life of God, the sefirot, and the soul's ascent, gathered above all around the Zohar.

• 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.

• Lurianic Kabbalah

  The system of Jewish mysticism taught by Isaac Luria in sixteenth-century Safed, in which creation begins with a divine withdrawal and the world's repair becomes a human task.

• 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.

• 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.

• Mandaeism

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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-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.

• Neoplatonism

  The modern name for 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.

• 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 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 soul's kinship with the Good, knowledge as recollection — and the long tradition of readers who carried it forward.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Renaissance Hermetism

  The Renaissance revival of the Hermetic writings — read as ancient Egyptian wisdom — and the world-picture of magic, correspondence, and dignity it underwrote, from Ficino through Bruno.

• Renaissance Neoplatonism

  The fifteenth-century Florentine revival of Plato and Plotinus, led by Ficino and Pico, that fused Platonic metaphysics with magic, Hermetism, and a new account of human dignity.

• Rhineland Mysticism

  The fourteenth-century current of Dominican mystical thought along the Rhine — Eckhart, Tauler, Suso — centred 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 off by three anonymous early-17th-century German manifestos announcing a hidden brotherhood, its legendary founder, and a coming reform of all knowledge.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 body of Hermetic writing composed and transmitted in Arabic — astrology, alchemy, and talismanic magic gathered around Hermes, and the channel by which he 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.