1 Now the whole earth had one language and one speech. 2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there. 3 Then they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They had brick for stone, and they had asphalt for mortar. 4 And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” 5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. 6 And the Lord said, “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. 7 Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city. 9 Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
The Card of the tenth Arcanum therefore teaches, through its actual context, an organism of ideas relating to the problem of the Fall and the Reintegration, according to Hermetic and Biblical tradition. It portrays the whole circle, including ascent as well as descent, whilst the "transformism" of modern science is occupied with only half of the circle, namely the half of ascent or evolution.
However, it in no way changes the fact that science works on the basis of the fundamental supposition that the minimum is the ancestor of the maximum, the simple is the ancestor of the complicated, and that it is the primitive which produces the more developed organism and consciousness, although for thought (i.e. reason) this is absolutely unintelligible.
All determinism and fatalism—including naturalism and pantheism—places the responsibility somewhere beyond the moral human being: in Nature, in God, in the stars. . This is because all determinism or fatalism is a manifestation of the mentality and psychology of a passenger.
Here we have arrived at the heart of the "exotericism — esotericism" problem. Exotericism lives in "processes", esotericism in tragedies and dramas. The ancient mysteries were tragedies and dramas— it is here where their esoteric character lies. Exotericism corresponds to the mentality and psychology of a passenger, esotericism to that of a member of the crew.
Queen of Life, why is all so joyous all around you?
According to Hanegraaff, Faivre's criteria for what constitutes Western esotericism can be seen as essentially describing an "enchanted" worldview, as compared to Max Weber's notion of "disenchantment". Hanegraaff also traces Faivre's notion of "correspondences" back to the Neoplatonic concept of sympatheia.
Tijl Uelenspiegel, the Flemish tramp from Damme, near Bruges —the hero of numerous popular accounts of mystification and farce, and also the tragic hero of the epic by Coster —is the archetype of revolutionary anarchism who. as a consequence of complete disenchantment in human authority, has neither faith nor law. His is the spirit of rebellion against all authority in the name of the freedom of the individual — the freedom of a vagabond who has nothing, who obeys no one, who is afraid of nothing, who expects no recompense and who fears no chastisement, beyond as well as here below. . . the mocking spirit who, at the same time, turns the temples and altars of humanity upside down, making them collapse by means of his magic wand: ridicule.