The purpose of Western esoteric tradition, writes Versluis, is “the restoration of paradise, which could also be expressed as the ending of objectification, or division into self and other.” For this to occur, a change of consciousness (or rather a transcendance of consciousness into awareness) is required. In the Western tradition, this change is codified in text providing both the means and the method of personal transformation. The word (lettter, number, glyph, what have you) is sacred because it is both the method of transformation and the desired outcome.

For this restoration of paradise to be literally true requires (at least) a three-layer reality that is unified through language and where the imagination is a place apart from the human brain. On one page he divides reality into “humanity, the cosmos, and the divine,” where the divine “transcends and links both humanity and the cosmos.” As a system it seems to have the habit of expanding so that by the time you get to the end of the book, the layers look to be at least four-part (and at an earlier place at least five).

Above we have the point of origin, the origin not only of language, but of the cosmos itself. This transcendent point gives birth to duality, the yes and the no, the light and the dark, love and wrath, and these in turn give birth to the qualities or archetypes inherent in the entire cosmos. From these archetypes then emerge the natural and human realms, where they are incarnated or manifested in the everchanging panoply of history.

Divine Unity—the No-thing
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Duality: The Yes and the No, Love and Wrath
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The Archetypal Realm of the Imagination: Divine Language
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The Manifested or Elemental World
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Language belongs above all to the archetypal realm, intermediate between nature below and the divine above. Thus language belongs also to the intermediate human realm, for it is only humanity that can mediate between sky and earth, between the divine and the natural. Language is the means by which this process of mediation or reconciliation is effected: it is, in other words, divine in its origin. As are nature and humanity. Indeed, as we have see, in Western esotericism generally, language is said to inhere in the entire cosmos. If humanity and the cosmos itself are fallen, or divided from the divine, then language must reflect this division, just as, conversely, a path beyond this separation and suffering must go through language.

This hierarchy of creation flowing down from the “origin point” reminds me very strongly of Plotinus and (I’m afraid) triggers all my alarm bells. Restoring Paradise is really a book of theology.

So what of it? It is what it is. (Can I get another platitude in here do you think, without tripping the irony alarm?)

The philosophical difficulties of such a view of the world are logically insurmountable (not to mention the biological and neurological problems of seeing humans as “the only” with respect to our abilities), so to get around that I would have to pan logic — as many of the authors Versluis cites do (and ignore everything I have learnt from biology and other sciences). Yet, I think Restoring Paradise shows that the basic belief structures of Western Esotericism, and probably, I think the Western mind altogether, display most clearly in full-on esoteric literature and that they are not limited to those examplars.

Take (well thought of and even philosophically and scientifically central) ideas of the singular value of language in determining the nature of human kind (as one example) to the extreme, and esotericism is where it ends up. I mean think about Wittgenstein’s recourse to language as the shining and defining structure that is what it means to be human: reading him on the structure of language is a bit like reading a prophet of some arcane symbolic faith. Still, I don’t think there is much doubt that language, numbers, symbols and text are key structuring elements of the Western Mind.

What does this say? Does it say that the received notions of a hierarchical reality emenating from a unified origin are actually the case, as Versluis seems to believe?  Or does it say something much more interesting, and perhaps even true?

It’s this second that will have me running down the books he suggests in his “Suggestions for Futher Study,” but it is the first that requires me to take a break from Versluis for the nonce.