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Some notes:
1. The central claim of Perennialism is that there is the same core kernel of universal truth contained within every major world religious tradition. However this just raises the following question: are these universal truths naturally inherent within each tradition or do these truths eventually assert themselves within the practices and theological speculations of these traditions?
2. Most (if not all) of the 20th century Perennialist authors seem to imply in their writings that the former is the case. Admitting the latter as even a remote possibility opens up a can of worms that those who wish to remain within good standing of their respective mainstream religion of choice would rather avoid opening.
3. That can of worms is the notion that perhaps several of the world's major religions arose as fallible literary creations of men and thus NOT perfect/infallible divine revelations from above. The concept of "revelation" we know of today is actually peculiar to a single historical culture that Oswald Spengler termed the "Magian culture." Another term for this would be the Arabian or Aramean worldview that emerged during the late Iron Age and the high Classical era, just around the time after the Iranian Medes and Persians had crushed the old empires of Assyria and Babylon and took over the region.
4. The new spiritual paradigm was a cross fertilization of Sabean-Chaldean astrotheological mysticism and Iranian-Zoroastrian dualism. This was a time of great spiritual inspiration, probably owing to the destruction of the archetypal great-evil globalist empire, i.e. the brutal Assyrians; represented by the Tower of Babel motif. Also around this time, we see a very sudden disappearance of the Ziggurat temple form; a form that had dominated institutional worship in Mesopotamia for the prior 3,000 years. The Magian worldview eventually encroached upon the dying Apollonian-classical paradigm of the Greco-Roman world. And thus we saw the rapid spread and flowering of various Magian religions and philosophical-spiritual systems, i.e. Christianity, a constellation of various Gnostic sects, Manicheaism, Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, Mithraism, Orthodox Zoroastrianism, ect.
5. In this age of huge empires and conquests, the more esoteric Magian teachings of seers and mystics eventually distilled down into concrete belief systems for the common man. These scripture-based doctrines were the creations of institutional priesthoods. The first of these was the Temple priesthood of Jerusalem during the Persian and Hellenistic period. This priesthood, originally a group of scribes and tax collectors working for the Achaemenid Persian crown (At the time, Judea was a part of the Persian imperial province of Trans-Euphrates, basically Syria or the Levant region) who were tasked with presiding over the cultural affairs of the local region. The scribe-priests created a new narrative from scratch, essentially weaving together various myths and legal doctrines of neighboring/preceding cultures into a synthetic new ethnic identity, i.e. Judaism, and imposing this new doctrine on the locals who were largely still practicing polytheistic Canaanite customs. The scribe-priests may have been scholarly survivors of the old Assyrian-Babylonian regime whom the Persian rulers relocated out of the Assyrian heartland and into an alien region where they'd be unable to stir up too much trouble (i.e. rebellion) among a new local population they would have no kinship ties to. We should remember that large-scale population relocations was a common practice among Iron Age Near Eastern empires. The Persians would have merely copied what their Babylonian and Assyrian predecessors had been doing prior. The OT/Tanakh perfectly illustrates this practice via the Babylonian Exile narrative.
6. By the Hellenistic period, i.e. after the fall of the Persians to Alexander's armies and the subsequent establishment of Macedonian empires upon the region, the Jerusalem corpus seems to have been consolidated into a totalizing doctrine with a central narrative of common ancestry and nationhood. What was probably once a mere encyclopedia of various teachings, myths, poetry and legal codes of the broader Near East region, was then put through an editing and redaction process whereby the various gods, goddesses, heroes and other personages once featured in constituent texts were transformed into narrative cogs. The higher and most potent characters were consolidated into a single tribal All-God (Yahweh); the rest were re-branded as various patriarchs and prophets. And at some point, the priesthood presented the entire corpus to the masses as being an unequivocally-divine and inerrant "revelation" from the new All-God. And thus the common rabble could not dare question any element of the doctrine in question; the written doctrine itself became a sacred object ('Can't touch this!') and of course this eventually devolved into a text-based type of idolatry we can call Bibliolatry . Not long after this first synthetic literary creation came to be (Judaism), various copycats would repeat the same process. And thus we now know the naked essence of exoteric Magian dogma and the revelatory mask it hides behind.
7. More than 2000 years later, modern Perennialist authors are passing off these synthetic narratives as being on equal footing with the genuine mystical teachings of sages, seers and magi. We could say that the latter contains what we can truly call Perennial teachings. But yes, major world religions based on synthetic narratives do indeed include Perennial truths, but this is a result of what I would speculate as being the work of said sages, seers and magi within the respective traditions who re-infused Perennial wisdom into these systems, gradually over time. And thus the synthetic doctrines are not the SOURCE of Perennial wisdom, but rather vessels of such wisdom; and only under the right conditions.
1. The central claim of Perennialism is that there is the same core kernel of universal truth contained within every major world religious tradition. However this just raises the following question: are these universal truths naturally inherent within each tradition or do these truths eventually assert themselves within the practices and theological speculations of these traditions?
2. Most (if not all) of the 20th century Perennialist authors seem to imply in their writings that the former is the case. Admitting the latter as even a remote possibility opens up a can of worms that those who wish to remain within good standing of their respective mainstream religion of choice would rather avoid opening.
3. That can of worms is the notion that perhaps several of the world's major religions arose as fallible literary creations of men and thus NOT perfect/infallible divine revelations from above. The concept of "revelation" we know of today is actually peculiar to a single historical culture that Oswald Spengler termed the "Magian culture." Another term for this would be the Arabian or Aramean worldview that emerged during the late Iron Age and the high Classical era, just around the time after the Iranian Medes and Persians had crushed the old empires of Assyria and Babylon and took over the region.
4. The new spiritual paradigm was a cross fertilization of Sabean-Chaldean astrotheological mysticism and Iranian-Zoroastrian dualism. This was a time of great spiritual inspiration, probably owing to the destruction of the archetypal great-evil globalist empire, i.e. the brutal Assyrians; represented by the Tower of Babel motif. Also around this time, we see a very sudden disappearance of the Ziggurat temple form; a form that had dominated institutional worship in Mesopotamia for the prior 3,000 years. The Magian worldview eventually encroached upon the dying Apollonian-classical paradigm of the Greco-Roman world. And thus we saw the rapid spread and flowering of various Magian religions and philosophical-spiritual systems, i.e. Christianity, a constellation of various Gnostic sects, Manicheaism, Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, Mithraism, Orthodox Zoroastrianism, ect.
5. In this age of huge empires and conquests, the more esoteric Magian teachings of seers and mystics eventually distilled down into concrete belief systems for the common man. These scripture-based doctrines were the creations of institutional priesthoods. The first of these was the Temple priesthood of Jerusalem during the Persian and Hellenistic period. This priesthood, originally a group of scribes and tax collectors working for the Achaemenid Persian crown (At the time, Judea was a part of the Persian imperial province of Trans-Euphrates, basically Syria or the Levant region) who were tasked with presiding over the cultural affairs of the local region. The scribe-priests created a new narrative from scratch, essentially weaving together various myths and legal doctrines of neighboring/preceding cultures into a synthetic new ethnic identity, i.e. Judaism, and imposing this new doctrine on the locals who were largely still practicing polytheistic Canaanite customs. The scribe-priests may have been scholarly survivors of the old Assyrian-Babylonian regime whom the Persian rulers relocated out of the Assyrian heartland and into an alien region where they'd be unable to stir up too much trouble (i.e. rebellion) among a new local population they would have no kinship ties to. We should remember that large-scale population relocations was a common practice among Iron Age Near Eastern empires. The Persians would have merely copied what their Babylonian and Assyrian predecessors had been doing prior. The OT/Tanakh perfectly illustrates this practice via the Babylonian Exile narrative.
6. By the Hellenistic period, i.e. after the fall of the Persians to Alexander's armies and the subsequent establishment of Macedonian empires upon the region, the Jerusalem corpus seems to have been consolidated into a totalizing doctrine with a central narrative of common ancestry and nationhood. What was probably once a mere encyclopedia of various teachings, myths, poetry and legal codes of the broader Near East region, was then put through an editing and redaction process whereby the various gods, goddesses, heroes and other personages once featured in constituent texts were transformed into narrative cogs. The higher and most potent characters were consolidated into a single tribal All-God (Yahweh); the rest were re-branded as various patriarchs and prophets. And at some point, the priesthood presented the entire corpus to the masses as being an unequivocally-divine and inerrant "revelation" from the new All-God. And thus the common rabble could not dare question any element of the doctrine in question; the written doctrine itself became a sacred object ('Can't touch this!') and of course this eventually devolved into a text-based type of idolatry we can call Bibliolatry . Not long after this first synthetic literary creation came to be (Judaism), various copycats would repeat the same process. And thus we now know the naked essence of exoteric Magian dogma and the revelatory mask it hides behind.
7. More than 2000 years later, modern Perennialist authors are passing off these synthetic narratives as being on equal footing with the genuine mystical teachings of sages, seers and magi. We could say that the latter contains what we can truly call Perennial teachings. But yes, major world religions based on synthetic narratives do indeed include Perennial truths, but this is a result of what I would speculate as being the work of said sages, seers and magi within the respective traditions who re-infused Perennial wisdom into these systems, gradually over time. And thus the synthetic doctrines are not the SOURCE of Perennial wisdom, but rather vessels of such wisdom; and only under the right conditions.
