Movements — 41 entries | Encyclopedia of Mystery

Movement · Christian Mysticism · 1129

The Knights Templar

Suppressed Order, Invented Descent

Destroyed by its royal debtor; today's Templar descent runs from 18th-century lodges, not from 1314.

What it meansIn the lodges that adopted them, the Templars mean unbroken transmission — knowledge carried intact through a suppression, by men sworn not to explain it. The appeal is structural: an order destroyed in public is the perfect vessel for a secret, because its silence is documented.

The FindingThe confessions of idol worship were extracted under torture after 13 October 1307, in a prosecution most historians attribute to Philip IV's debts to the order — so every later Templar secret descends from evidence manufactured by their creditor.

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Movement · 1986

Shadow Work

The Phrase Jung Never Used

Named for Jung's shadow and sold as a practice he never described, to be done in a notebook.

What it meansIts promise is that the disowned can be met, named and reclaimed by a person working alone with a notebook. Whatever else is true of that, it is a therapeutic practice rather than a Jungian one — Jung's analysis required another person in the room, and he said so.

The Finding"Shadow work" is not a phrase Jung used — it assembles from Robert Bly's 1986 A Little Book on the Human Shadow onward and becomes a genre with the 1991 anthology Meeting the Shadow; and Aion §19, the chapter the market invokes, calls the archetypal shadow the hardest case of all, where owning one's relative evil is possible but facing absolute evil is rare and shattering.

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Movement · the 50s BCE

The Druids

No Word of Their Own

The learned class of Iron Age Gaul and Britain: described only by outsiders, reinvented after 1700.

What it meansCaesar reports that they held their learning too sacred to write, memorising for up to twenty years — which is why nothing of theirs survives. The prohibition is the only doctrine we can be reasonably confident of, and it is the reason we know nothing else.

The FindingNo druid left a surviving word of his own: the white robe, oak and golden sickle are one paragraph of Pliny, and the triads, Awen and bardic circles sold as druidic wisdom were written by Iolo Morganwg himself between about 1790 and 1826.

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