@Opus132 Bless us with your sage input
It's a complicated issue, but it basically has to do with a deviation and a degeneration in the esoteric traditions of the west. See, every religion basically has two dimensions, an outward, "exoteric" shell which is intended for the majority (I.E., normies), and an inward, esoteric core that is generally meant for a few.
In some religions, this separation is very explicit, such as in Islam (where the esoteric path is found in Sufism), or Hinduism. In others, it is less obvious, less defined, such as in Christianity (Hesychasm being an exception).
Now, esoterism, in order to be truly legitimate, must originate from Revelation. It seems that in Christianity something unusual happened though, in that Christianity
begun as an esoterism which eventually "sacrified" itself to become an exoterism. This created a kind of imbalance in that unlike something like Islam where it is clear where one ends and the other begins, in Christianity the esoteric core must be derived from the exoteric shell, which means that the Christian doctrines can hold a different meaning to different people. This was fine in an age such as that of the middle ages where the ambiance and atmosphere people lived in was imbued with the sense of the supernatural and the divine. People perceived the esoteric meaning of the doctrines naturally, without need to belong to specific spiritual orders, all though those existed too, like the Fedeli D'Amore Dante Alighieri belonged to, or the Knights Templar, or the Rosicrucian and so forth.
However, something went wrong during the middle ages, where the spiritual essence of the doctrines of the Christian religion started to become less and less transparent. Part of the problem is that the political instability which had resulted from the collapse of the Roman empire put the Church in a position where it had to become increasingly "worldly" in order to defend itself from the political ambitions of the temporal powers, who increasingly started to use the prestige of the Church for their own gain (the story of St. Thomas Aquinas, how he "refused" to serve the political ends of his family, which led to his captivity is pertinent here). Other factors were also at play (not the least the interference of a foreign hostile entity, like that of the Jews).
Be that as it may, as the religion became more worldly and political, people with a thirst for esoterism begun to look outside of it, hence, the rise of so many occult movements during the Renaissance. People always think this age was one that saw an explosion of esoteric movements, but the truth is that the reason esoterism became so apparent and widespread is that it was actually dying and becoming corrupt and degenerated. It's like with those plants that live on water. When they die you can see all the flowers popping up on the surface and if you look at it superficially it may seem like the lake is teeming with vegetable life but in truth those plants are all dead. It's the same with all the "esoterisms" that begun to pop up during the Renassance, which were driven not by a true understanding of the spiritual meaning behind the esoteric path but by a reckless search for esoteric adventures that were guided neither by tradition nor understanding. People plunged irresponsibly in Neo-Platonism, Kabbalah, or old medieval esoteric movements that were already dead and were resurrected without understanding thereby corrupting them, like Rosicrucianism, or Freemasorny.
And since this esoterism was pursued haphazardly and without a deep spiritual knowledge to act as a guide, people become to transpose the world of esoterism to the material world, so that now esoterism, or the occult became a search for power and a kind of "liberation" from the rigors of exoteric religion, which had that point had become restrictive and oppressive in the eyes of people, but also a liberation from the constraints of relative existence itself. This was the birth of magic, of the occult, and, eventually, modern science, since the "magic" of neo-Kabbalists like John Dee had an eminently "practical" aim (which was an increase in knowledge of the world and power over nature), so from Kabbalah we get to Freemasonry and from Freemasonry we got the scientific revolution which is nothing other than an attempt to "liberate" man from the limits of physical reality. But the occult aspect of this false liberation was not extinguished by the oncoming of modern science but in fact lived on in tandem with it, and eventually they developed a symbiotic relationship and we can even see that today (with Scientology being the worst offender). This was termed as "counter-initiation" by Guenon and it is basically an inverted esoterism the aim of which is a "wordly" rather than spiritual liberation. Hence, movements like the New Age, the Hippies, Spiritism, false universalist religions like Baha'i, and on and on like this.
Everywhere you look you see "liberation". Liberation from tradition, from religion, from the family, from the duality of gender, from all kind of forms (to wit: modern art), and so on. There is a thirst also for increasingly exotic foreign traditions, all of which are misunderstood and degraded, such as Hinduism, Buddhism and so on, and this is the modern world for you.
