For folks willing to dig beneath the newsprint horoscopes, esotericism appears not only as an underground history of Western ideas but as a broiling stream of consciousness that feeds and flows through everything from science to poetry to politics. Mercurial, fecund with imagery, yet propelled by a quite modern sense of psychological dynamics and individual experiment, esotericism is the West’s magic realism, a living metaphysical poetry grounded in the transformative potential of experience.