Swedenborg's Rosicrucian Chemical Wedding

In the Age of Enlightenment, scientific knowledge of our immediate nature became a central concern of natural sciences, introducing Cartesian dualism into the modern thought. However, while esoteric thinkers and theosophers stayed true to the Gnostic principle of liberation from ignorance, and thus viewed science favourably, they also insisted on a relationship between matter and the invisible―a system incompatible with modern rationality. This esoteric reasoning is depicted in Rosicrucian Chemical Wedding and its symbolic imagery, in Emmanuel Swedenborg 's conception of matter, comprised of the divine essence, or Franz Mesmer 's animal magnetism.
This link between observable phenomena and esoteric sensibility was crucial for speculative natural

In the nineteenth century, this became a central concern of contemporary esoteric movements, attempting to investigate nature in a way that would justify the existence of non-human entities outside of the visible spectrum.
Consequently, occultism emerged as an approach to theurgy that would respond to new socio-cultural conditions, or, as Hanegraaff (1996) terms it, to the 'disenchantment ' of the world, linked to increasing secularisation and rationalisation of human lives Alphonse-Louis Constant (also known as Eliphas Lévi, 1810-1875) became one of the leading figure of this movement, attempting to create a system that would be consistent with Gnostic-Hermetic correspondences between microcosm and macrocosms, Boehme 's theosophy and modern spiritual identities Thus, occultists would be able to achieve gnosis through active imagination, while drawing on personal experience of the modern

Marked by alienation and uncertainty, one 's spiritual and intellectual life could no longer find adequate support in the Christian idea of community, with a limited space for individual human experience .
Thus, in years leading to the Great War, we ascertain a new culture that would attest to the esoteric disillusionment of the previous decades, and promote a distinctly Gnostic type of self-exploration. Modernist artists exemplified a new sense of creative imagination, in which―through the crisis of the modern world―a new spiritual sensibility could be achieved. What Gnosticism viewed as an inherent struggle of light and darkness now corresponded to the Archonic world of material exploitation, industrialisation and a fragmentation of the individual Self, depicted through intellectual and artistic imagery―a creative form of