Esotericism is associated with the cultivation of secrecy, and involved the creation of a secret body of knowledge.
The concept of secrecy was well established in Mesopotamia; many Sumerian and Akkadian words refer to it. Sumerian AD-HAL (secret), with the Akkadian equivalent piristu, is the most common one; etymologically, both terms are related, like the Latin word secretus, to the notion of dividing something off. Other Sumero-Akkadian word pairs referring to the realm of esoteric knowledge are NÎ-DUL = katimtu (hidden, covered) and (KI)-URU = nisirtu (guarded).
According to Mesopotamian tradition, the gods Shamash and Adad taught oil and liver divination to the legendary antediluvian King Enmeduranki, who instructed the people of Nippur, Sippar, and Babylon in it; later in the chain of transmission, the respective art was passed down from "the scholar, the knowledgeable one, who guards the secrets of the great gods," to his own son.
King Assurbanipal (669-630 BCE) of Assyria reports that he became acquainted with esoteric knowledge by reading signs written on "stones." Several groups of priests (e.g., ramku, nêsakku, and surmahhu) and bookkeepers (sassukku) were renowned for dealing with esoteric wisdom. Here, divination was of particular importance, and the power of manipulating it especially by rituals and incantations). Therefore, Mesopotamian rulers tried to control such knowledge, and it had to be kept apart from those who might misuse it.
In prehistoric times, secret lore may have been handed down orally in Mesopotamia. It is, however, only in written texts that the esoteric tradition becomes tangible for us. Remarkably, there are hints that already some of the earliest lexical lists from the end of the 4th millennium BCE were considered to be "secret knowledge of the sage." These lists, apart from their practical purpose as a repertoire of cuneiform signs, give a taxonomy of the world that might well have been regarded as esoteric.
Writing, theoretically, made the secret lore available to people from whom it should be kept apart. Therefore, access to written texts that contained esoteric knowledge had to be restricted. This was achieved, on the one hand, by considering the art of writing (tupsarrûtu) in general, or at least its more sophisticated forms, as a secret, a conception explicitly articulated in a Sumerian school text from the early 2nd millennium BCE. The academy where writing was taught was compared, in a Sumerian riddle, to a (sealed) tablet-box (cf. arcana, derived from Latin arca).
On the other hand, cryptography was used. Already in the middle of the 3rd millennium, the esoteric un-GAL-NUN orthography, a most erudite system based on various etymologies and Akkadian equivalents of Sumerian words, was invented to write texts containing mythical narratives, which were obviously considered to be secret.
Different forms of cryptography, including cipher writing and the employment of newly invented pictorial signs, remained in use in Mesopotamia until Hellenistic times. In some cases, they may have been employed in order to conceal the meaning of certain texts from those not belonging to the inner circle. In other cases, however, especially when used in colophons, the cryptographic sections were probably nothing but a playful show of erudition by the scribe who produced the respective text.
From the end of the 2nd millennium BCE onward, many texts contained clauses that identified their contents as secret lore and claimed that the knowledgeable one should reveal them only to another knowledgeable one; spreading the respective knowledge to someone uninitiated would be "a taboo of - god." Among the texts in question are lists of gods and stars, omens, magico-medical and astronomical treatises, rituals, incantations, and cultic commentaries. The exclusive character of the respective knowledge is apparent not only from these clauses but also from an anonymous letter from the reign of Esarhaddon (681-669 BCE) in which a goldsmith is accused of having hired a Babylonian to teach to his son the arts of divination and exorcism, an activity that was obviously regarded as an offense against the attempt of the king and his scholars to
Egypt
While it may be pushing the evidence too far to state that a genuine unio mystica with an absolutely transcendent deity was achievable through meditation in pharaonic Egypt, certainly identification with high deities such as Re allowed the individual to share in divine processes of renewal even before death. The panontistic nature of Egyptian religion and the cyclic nature of time, in which life and death and day and night were homologues, allowed for mystical participation in the divine otherworldly realm. Such interaction between seemingly opposed realms of existence is consonant with other ancient Egyptian paranormal practices: incubation of dreams, banqueting with the dead in tombs, and letters to the dead. The very language used to describe mysterious processes in the beyond suggests that mysticism was not inherently alien to Egyptian religious experience.
Greco-Roman period
To the extent that esotericism involves the cultivation of secrecy around religious activities and of a distinctively secret body of knowledge, priestly composers were strongly conscious of the intrinsic efficacy of writing, names, and images, so that their very literary pursuits (and indeed, the full range of temple rituals) were imbued with magical power. The preservation and ongoing reinterpretation of ancient oracles in the Demotic Chronicle, Oracle of the Lamb, and Oracle of the Potter (Ptolemaic era) likewise show priests' devotion to discerning the ongoing truth in ancient divine pronouncements, somewhat in the manner of sectarian Jewish biblical interpretation.
These esoteric forms of normative priestly work emerge as dominant motifs in Greco-Egyptian materials of the Roman period: the Greek and Demotic magical papyri (PGMIPDM) and the Hermetica.
Arcane substances of dubious nature (semen of Heracles, eyes of a bat) are listed for mundane rites, as if to preserve these rites as the priests' unique domain: temple scribes concealed their true equivalents behind encoded names, one text explains, "so that [the masses], since they do not take care, might not bother themselves [with ritual spells, being prevented] by the consequence of their failures" (PGM XII.401-6). The Hermetica similarly advertise themselves as illegitimate translations of an arcane priestly wisdom: the Egyptian language, one text insists, is fundamentally "obscure and conceals the significance of the words" and, if rendered in Greek, would be completely garbled (Corpus Hermeticum 16.1). Thus, manifestly syncretic ideas about the soul and divinity, some of which were certainly rooted in Egyptian temple traditions, are cast as secret revelations, the provenance of the House of Life.
Even in the late 5th century CE, priestly traditions are preserved and cultivated among some families as an esoteric repository of power. A philosopher named Damascius describes the priestly dedication and secret clairvoyant talents of the brothers Heraiscus and Asclepiades (floruit 48os), who could-alone in a world under Christian control-discern divinity in sacred images and had intimate connections with Egyptian gods. They seem to have considered themselves guardians of a secret tradition, linked to the dwindling temples of Egypt, in which basic priestly devotions, theurgy, ritual gesture, and mantic claims are all combined.
By Damascius's time, and even in the Hermetica, esotericism is closely linked with the achievement of self-transcendence, divine visions, and even union with the divine-that is, a sort of mysticism. But we should not expect to find mysticism in the earlier stages of priestly esotericism. Instead, one finds normative priestly activities, such as divination and mortuary preparation, that eventually become expanded into more concerted "spiritual" pursuits.
A cache of 2nd-century BCE documents found in the priestly center of Saqqara describes the peregrinations of Hor of Sebennytos, priest of Thoth, as he seeks professional guidance from Isis and other gods by incubating in various shrines. These texts show an individual's pursuit of divine presence and guidance, but for professional purposes: in which temple should he serve? which deities will be beneficial?
While of clearly personal value, Hor pursues divine visions and messages as a function of his priestly role. Other priests' votive graffiti on major Egyptian temples (Karnak, Philae) suggest that priests often circulated among principal shrines for purposes of professional incubation. The intrapriestly traditions that grew up around these pursuits concerning the "god's appearance" (ph ntr), and its ritual acquisition ed, over the course of the Greco-Roman period, both to the literary idealization of the provoked epiphany and to its commodification for paying outsiders. Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 11.13 81 includes a dramatic scene of the god Imouthes' appearance; while spell manuals such as
the "Mithras Liturgy" (PGM IV475-829), commemorative inscriptions such as the anonymous paean to a vision of the god Mandulis at the temple of Kalabsha, and even the allusive depiction of otherworldly vision in Apuleius's The Golden Ass 11.23 all promise momentous divine visions out of Egyptian ritual procedure. Meanwhile, a preponderance of revelation spells across the PGMIPDM corpus suggests that the priestly owners of these manuals may have been selling experiences once reserved for priests now to Greek and Roman outsiders, much like the Theban "old men" who initiate the author Thessalus of Tralles (1st century CE; On the Virtues of Plants 12-13).
Another kind of Egyptian mystical procedure derives from mortuary symbolism: the geography of the afterlife, its obstructing demons, and the theme of the soul's judgment and transformation. The evolution of mortuary literature such as the Amduat and Book of Gates over the Greco-Roman period shows a progressive interest in revealing otherworldly details and in discussing the soul's transformation through death in ways that reflect this-worldly spiritual ambitions, not just mortuary ritual .
Egyptian "fiction" of the same period (e.g., Setna Khaemwaset II) cultivates the theme of revelatory descents to the underworld by living heroes; and the priest Hor himself may have practiced such descents (##8, 13; Ray 1976: 43-44, 57, 131). Literature of Roman Egyptian provenance, such as the Books o f Jeu and the Apocalypse of Paul (Nag Hammadi Codex 5.2), maintains the legacy of these trends in the mortuary literature by depicting the horrific guardians through whom the rising soul must pass to transcend this world and achieve divinity. It is possible that the Egyptian "mysteries" imported to Rome and other cities incorporated a version of this mortuary mythology for the purposes of initiation.
