Smoley Richard, Kinney Jay. Hidden Wisdom. A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions

Quest Books, 2006. — 548 р. — ISBN 978-0-8356-0844-2It has long been debated whether religion has done more to further human progress or to hinder it. The great faiths of the world have guided and inspired millions, but they have also urged many on to hatred and bloodshed. “Such are the evils religion can provoke,” Lucretius wrote of human sacrifice in pagan antiquity, but almost all the world’s religions have cried—and are still crying—for throats to be slit in their honor. Such manifestations remain so common that by now it is clichéd to denounce them.
This issue is more pressing now than it was nearly seven years ago, when this book was first published. The mid-twentieth century envisioned our age as a clinically sanitary era when people would ZIP off to work in personal spaceships and have robots catering to their every whim. Instead we are vexed with disputes about sacred sites and holy books, and each day the cultural wars in the United States seem more and more a struggle between the rival sects of fundamentalism and secularism.
Beyond all question we are living in a time of spiritual upheaval, but in what direction is this tumult moving? From one perspective, it looks as if conservative forms of religion are reasserting themselves, as we see in the ascendancy of the religious right in American politics and in the tremendous success of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ and the Left Behind novels.
Yet viewed from another angle, the public seems desperate to grasp at any evidence that casts doubt upon the institutional faiths. We see as much in
The Da Vinci Code as well as in countless books and television programs that claim to reveal the truth about Mary Magdalene, the Gnostics, the Templars, and the Freemasons—truths that were allegedly suppressed by the religious authorities. If many of these claims range from the tenuous to the absurd, it is well to remember that scholarship has not been unwaveringly kind to the claims of mainstream religions either. Most New Testament scholars admit that the Gospels contain a heavy admixture of myth, and archaeologists have concluded much the same about the Hebrew scriptures. Summarizing recent findings in their 2001 book The Bible Unearthed, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman contend that the Exodus did not happen in any form that is recognizable from the archaeological record. The Israelites, for example, could not have escaped from the land of Egypt into Canaan, because Canaan was under Egyptian rule at the time of the supposed Exodus. For the eminence of David and Solomon, the evidence is just as scant. Archaeological findings from that era suggest that, in Finkelstein and Silberman’s words, Jerusalem in the time of David and Solomon was “perhaps not more than a typical hill country village.”¹ They go on to say that much of the description of Solomon’s glory was appropriated from the later splendors of the House of Omri—all of whom, according to the Bible, “did evil in the sight of the Lord.”