What they say. . .

In 1877, a little-known Russian woman called Madame Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, published her first book, Isis Unveiled, which attacked the reigning scientific consensus on evolution with an unlikely thesis: Consciousness, not matter, is the fundamental component of the cosmos, and physical evolution is only one part of a much larger metaphysical process. Blavatsky’s ambitious work, which was quite popular in her day, presented a strange cocktail of ideas—some surprisingly prescient, some downright bizarre—and it helped set the cultural stage for a whole new group of evolutionary thinkers. These Esoteric Evolutionists understood evolution as a process that unfolds according to secret metaphysical laws or blueprints or archetypes hidden in the workings of consciousness itself. Many offered elaborate descriptions of metaphysical realms and saw evolution as ascending through a series of “bodies” (physical, astral, etheric, causal, etc.) or chakras or planes or levels of consciousness. With their detailed metaphysics and their stage-oriented conceptions of evolution, these esoteric thinkers owed much to perennial wisdom, to the Neo-Platonists, and to earlier occult traditions.

Despite their evolutionary bent, many Esoteric Evolutionists, past and present, harken back to the ancient idea of a cyclical cosmos, claiming that whatever is evolving in the universe must have already been involved, or buried in latent form, in matter. Some have even noted that current ideas in physics regarding multiple universes may provide evidence that even the evolution of the universe might be taking place within a larger cycle of cosmic involution and evolution.

What it means. . .

While there are contemporary thinkers who fit within the Esoteric Evolution category, the phrase more appropriately denotes a whole range of ideas that came of age in the first part of the twentieth century, which have been enormously influential in shaping our postmodern spiritual culture. Even the phrase “evolution of consciousness” was, until recently, most widely associated with the Esoteric Evolutionists.

In some respects, these thinkers straddle the line between the modern and the premodern, pioneering a rational understanding of the universe while at the same time often embracing occult, mythical, or scientifically unpopular notions like numerology (Norelli-Bachelet), astrology (Tarnas), or esoteric physics (Airaudi). In contrast to other modern schools of evolutionary thought, their metaphysics tends to be more extensive, their research based more on esoteric insight than empirical investigation, and their view of the future more predetermined. This goes against the grain of recent conceptions of evolution, from Whitehead to Wilber, which place an emphasis on contingency and creativity, allowing more room for surprise and novelty in the evolutionary process.

“Everything on earth is subject to the laws of evolution, and this is particularly true for the human soul.”

Rudolf Steiner