This morning I am entering territory I have not traversed before. I’m thinking about the emergence of what we might term western esotericism, or western occultism, or modern spirituality. When we think about the emergence of an idea, or a set of ideas, it's worth thinking about how such ideas arose. An idea does not just appear – ex nihilo - out of nothing. The conditions, the architecture of ideas prevalent at a particular time, the softening of prior-held precepts, these are all essential prerequisites for an idea to arise. In general, I find academic genealogy a fascinating subject. Samuel Coleridge wrote ‘The dwarf sees farther than the giant, when he has the giant's shoulder to mount on.’ A variant of the well-known idiom, ‘We all stand on the shoulders of giants.’ We all benefit from the insights of bygone thinkers, and our progress, our discoveries, depend upon those who came before. Scholarship often consists of tracing back the intellectual lineage of particular ideas. And indeed, even thinkers who we might consider as remarkably original, like Newton, Freud, Darwin, or Marx, all have their intellectual forerunners who preempted their work and theories to some measure, and set the stage for their advent.

It’s not always possible to work out who has influenced who. It can be an exceedingly complex landscape. Imagine though if we had an omniscient, magical lens upon the world, which allowed us to see those lines of influence branching out from each and every individual. Some of those lines would be thick and dense, and some of those lines would be thin and transparent. If we were also to take a step back out of time, and view all of eternity at once, we would see these lines branching throughout all of human history. It would be like a great tree, a tree not dissimilar to the tree of evolution, but this would be a tree of influence, or rather the tree of knowledge. I don’t think this tree would just consist of people that existed in the flesh either, it would include purportedly real people, who probably didn’t actually ever live, like Moses, Socrates, or Hercules, who have all been exceedingly influential despite their never existing, and also it would include fictional characters, like Captain Ahab, or Gandalf, or Captain John Luc Picard, who have, again, had their impact upon us despite their never existing.

As we move further and further out from the cradle of civilization, the average amount of lines that each individual would have would gradually increase, and it would jump dramatically at particular junctures in human history - with the invention of writing, the printing press, and the internet. The more substantial lines in this tree would be perceptible to the individuals in question: unquestionably the apostle Peter was plainly aware of the thick line of influence that moved from Jesus to himself, and Jesus would have been equally aware. But that wouldn’t necessarily always be so. In many cases there would be thick lines moving from people already deceased to someone else, or lines formed unconsciously, or lines formed because ideas had been of great influence, but that idea had remained unattributed in the mind of the recipient. Or there could be a whole network of lines which connect two individuals, via a whole load of other people, meaning that they are conceptually, in terms of the development of ideas, intimately related even though they themselves may not recognise it. In that way, we can perceive such lines of influence with our omniscient, magical, timeless glasses on, that these individuals, being as candid as you like, may be unable to see, or unable to see fully.