Now that my upcoming introductory book on archetypology is in the last stages of preparation for release (thank god!), I thought it might be worth spending a post or three outlining some of the main elements of the model. To a large extent, the model is the refinement of the ideas I’ve been developing over the past several years. One of the main motivations for that work has been to account for the dominance of psychology in modern politics, especially public political discourse. Another way to look at the same dynamic is the idea that politics and science have become “religions”.
Of course, the question we never ask about statements like “politics has become a religion” is why we think that politics and religion should be independent in the first place. If we look at anthropological and historical studies, we find that very few societies have the idea that politics and religion should be separate. For example, in pre-Reformation Europe, the Catholic Church had its own army, levied taxes, and passed laws. Many of its functions were those we would now associate with the bureaucratic apparatus of the modern state. For centuries, nobody had a problem with that, and nobody had a problem with it in ancient Rome where the Church had its origins.
This raises the question: what is the difference between the medieval Catholic Church and the modern bureaucratic state? We like to say that one of the big differences is that religion plays no role in the modern bureaucratic state. But is that really true? Doesn’t the modern bureaucratic state have its own set of ideals that it works by? And isn’t the modern bureaucratic state fully prepared to coerce those who don’t agree with those ideals (cough, cough, covid, cough, cough) just like the Catholic Church did? At an abstract level, is there any difference between the set of ideals and beliefs of the modern bureaucratic state and those of the Catholic Church or any other religion?
To answer that question, we need a conceptual model that can compare and contrast between these two systems. The discipline of anthropology would be the natural place to start, but we would also need a model that can incorporate the psychological aspects. This is especially relevant to modern Western culture where psychology dominates politics. There is a reason why psychoanalysis and modern psychology had to be invented in the West. Our turn away from the formal aspects of politics and religion, which began with the Reformation, has pushed the underlying issues more and more into the psychological realm.
To begin building our model, we take two concepts that relate directly to this distinction between the psychological and anthropological ways of looking at the world. The first concept is called the esoteric. Esoteric comes from the ancient Greek, where it simply means “within” or “inner”. By esoteric, we denote all the properties of human existence that are concerned with inner states. This includes things like emotions, feelings, and thoughts, since these are inner phenomena that are not directly visible to the outside world. The esoteric also includes beliefs and mental models about the world, including political and religious beliefs. Thus, the broad category of esoteric incorporates the disciplines of psychology alongside philosophy and theology.
The second concept we need is another Greek word that means the opposite of esoteric. Exoteric means “outer” or “external”. The exoteric aspects of human life are all those things that can be seen by a third-party observer. This includes our physical appearance, such as hair, eye and skin colour, body type, height, and weight. It also includes the markers of our social status, such as the clothes we wear, our accent and vocabulary, where we live, etc. In relation to our beliefs about the world, the exoteric markers of those beliefs include the rites and ceremonies that we partake in and any symbolic markers on our body or our possessions.
By itself, the esoteric-exoteric distinction is a useful analytical tool when applied to both individuals and cultures. A person who keeps to themselves and has a rich inner life can be described as esoteric (introverted) as opposed to those social butterflies who live exoterically (extroverts). We can characterise cultures in the same way. Ancient Greece and Rome were exoteric in nature. The Romans in particular were very tolerant of the religions of other cultures, but only if those religions was practiced exoterically, as Roman religion was. The one thing the Romans did not like was secretive (esoteric) religious practices, and they tended to clamp down on those. Similarly, Roman and Greek politics was exoteric in nature. Democratic voting in ancient Greece, for example, was conducted by a public show of hands rather than a secret ballot in most cases.
By contrast, modern Western culture has become progressively more esoteric. In the religious sphere, this originally manifested in the Protestant rejection of the exoteric rites and ceremonies of the Catholic Church in favour of a direct esoteric connection with the divine. Meanwhile, pre-democratic European politics was mostly conducted behind closed doors, and even in the democratic era we find the need for concepts like the “deep state” or the “shadow government” to explain how politics actually works.
Although the esoteric-exoteric distinction is useful in and of itself, it does tend to coagulate a great many other concepts that we would normally want to keep separate. For example, we would normally want to analyse a philosophy or underlying belief structure separately from emotions such as sadness, joy, or anxiety, even though all these technically belong to the esoteric realm of human existence. If we want to answer the question that we began this post with (“Why has politics and science become religion?”), we need to be able to distinguish different aspects of our exoteric and esoteric existence so that we can identify the relationships that exist within and across these broad categories. To do that, we will need a second set of concepts.
Now, I’ve been trying to find good names for these categories for the best part of two years. What I’ve been hoping to do is to create labels that don’t have a lot of ideological baggage around them. That is possible, but it’s easy to swing to the other extreme of having labels that are either overly vague or trivial. Anyway, what I’ve ended up with is a three-part distinction based on the levels of being (or great chain of being) concept that goes back to antiquity. This gives us the three categories of biological, socio-cultural, and higher esoteric. Importantly, each of these has an exoteric and an esoteric aspect. This gives us six combinations as follows:-
| Exoteric | Esoteric |
| Higher esoteric | Higher esoteric |
| Socio-cultural | Socio-cultural |
| Biological | Biological |
The astute reader may have noted that the top-right term is a pleonasm—the higher esoteric is already esoteric. That is true, but I’ve come to think of this as a feature, not a bug, of the classification system. What is the higher esoteric? It is both “above” and “inner”. It is the most important domain of our esoteric existence. Therein lies a value judgement, of course, which says that the higher esoteric (whatever that is) is superior to the biological and socio-cultural esoteric.
We won’t attempt to justify that position in this post. We simply note that what the levels of the being concept adds to our classification system is that there are differences between the esoteric states that are related to the biological sphere (hunger, thirst, cold), those related to the socio-cultural sphere (shame, guilt, happiness), and those related to the higher-esoteric (spiritual ecstasy and terror). The same goes for the exoteric domain too. In next week’s post, we’ll flesh out these distinctions in more detail, and then we’ll be ready to apply them to the problem of why modern Western culture has taken a big jump into the esoteric.