Universities (Occult)

In many works on the occult sciences, allusions are made to schools and universities and the instruction of those who were drawn to them. The idea for such schools derived from the philosophical schools and academies of the ancient Greek teachers. In the early Christian era, Gnosticism was taught in such schools. Since that discipline was centered upon gnosis or knowledge, a school (rather than a temple or church) was the natural form that its group life assumed.

While a few similar schools might have existed in the Dark Ages, the idea of such institutions was largely a myth used to credential otherwise informally and self-taught occultists or to refer to the places where alchemists and occultists quietly gathered to consult with each other. It was the practice of those on the faculties of the universities and those who operated independently to draw students around them, and professors of the occult sciences were no different.

There is no doubt that during the Middle Ages many lecturers taught alchemy and kindred subjects at great universities. Thus Paracelsus lectured on alchemy at the University of Basel, and he was preceded and followed there and elsewhere by others who taught that and other occult arts.

Louis Figuier, in his book L'alchimie et les alchimistes (1854), alluded to a school in Paris frequented by alchemists that he himself attended in the middle of the nineteenth century. The school—an ordinary chemical laboratory during the day— became in the evening a center of the most elaborate alchemical study, where Figuier met alchemical students, visionary and practical.

The novelist Balzac alludes to an occult school in the story "The Secret of Ruggier," which he placed at the time of Catherine de Medici. He stated: "At this epoch the occult sciences were cultivated with an ardour which put to shame the incredulous spirit of our century…. The universal protection accorded to these sciences by the ruling sovereigns of the times was quite remarkable."

He goes on to say that at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Ruggier was a member of a secret university for the study of the occult sciences, where astrologers, alchemists, and others studied several branches of hidden knowledge. Balzac gives no details as to its locality, or as to the exact nature of its curriculum.

The College of Augurs in Rome and the Calmecac of ancient Mexico are distinct examples of institutions for the study of divination, and in this connection, the House of Wisdom of the Ismaelite sect at Cairo, Egypt, may be mentioned.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky insisted that a great "school" of illuminated occult adepts flourished in Tibet, but nobody except herself and her immediate friends ever saw them or had any dealings with them. Prior to 1959, Tibet was the home of a large number of monasteries that were also the schools of Tibetan Buddhism and its esoteric practices.

Instructional centers for people who studied the occultism integral to Hinduism, Buddhism, and other Asian systems did exist (and continue to exist) across Asia. These centers, remote and mysterious prior to the transportation and communications revolution of the twentieth century, took on a mythical character in the occult literature of the nineteenth century. Those associated with these Asian schools were rumored to have extraordinary occult prowess.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries attempts have been made to recreate these ancient occult schools. For example, the School for the Discovery of the Lost Secrets of Antiquity flourished for a generation in San Diego, California. It was founded by Katherine Tingley late in the nineteenth century and taught Theosophy. A decade earlier, Blavatsky founded the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society, an organization carried on by Theosophists associated with the Theosophical Society.

One modern equivalent of ancient occult universities are the secret magical orders, such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where occult and mystical subjects are taught to students, with grades of advancement. Many such orders, based in part on a format adopted from Freemasonry, exist.

One outstanding attempt to recreate the ancient Gnostic schools, with an intense course in esoteric training, is Ramtha's School of Enlightenment in Yelm, Washington, opened in 1988 by JZ Knight. Ramtha, a channeled entity, instructs students through the entranced Knight.