The Esoteric Orders and Their Work

Fortune’s opening move clears away a lot of fog. Esotericism begins where exotericism ends: the word names whatever lies just past the edge of ordinary knowledge, and that edge keeps moving.

Her examples are deliberately homely. Reading, writing and arithmetic, she says, were once occult arts. What was taught to the initiates of Egypt is now taught to the schoolchildren of England.

Then she pushes it a step further. A man who flies like a bird or heals the sick looks miraculous to someone who does not know the laws involved, yet he has not stepped outside law at all. Neither has the adept. He gets his results by knowing natural laws that most people have not learned yet.