Joscelyn Godwin’s Golden Thread of the Western Mystery Tradition

Since at least as early as people began recording history, a strange thread of thinking has wound itself through the human story.

It’s a thread that tells us that reality is not what appears to be, but even that we are not what we appear to be. The thread tells us that we were truly made in the image of God, like fractals of the bigger fractal, and that we can feel the inner workings of God’s mind in our own minds. Furthermore, it tells us that reality is something that responds to our individual consciousness, to varying degrees, and that we are cocreators as well as being the created.

This thread has gone through multiple variations and multiple schools of thinking yet, at its core, its central tenets have remained the same as it wound its way through the rise and fall of nations. Empires have sought to wipe it out forever and have nearly succeeded. So too have natural calamities threatened to extinguish the flame.

Yet, through it all, this strange line of thinking, which we can only call the “Western mystery tradition” or the “Western esoteric tradition” has persisted. In his book, The Golden Thread, Joscelyn Godwin (what a marvelously apt last name) calls this line the “golden thread.”