The Dark Ages knew of no public initiatic schools such as had flourished in antiquity.  The Pythagorean and Orphic brotherhoods, the Platonic Academy, the Hermetic and Mithraic mystery cults--all had disappeared from Europe along with the Roman Empire.  Their vision of man as a microcosm, reflecting in miniature the whole universe and its source, and their offer of a path by which man could become divine, were almost lost. 

     The new official religion of Christianity could barely tolerate such ideas, even among its own intellectual elite. The Church's power rested on the divinity of one man only, Jesus Christ, and on one path to salvation for the rest:  that of obedience. 

     Despite this we can sometimes glimpse, like a golden chain half buried in the soul, the legacy of a Christian theosophic tradition that was very different from the mainstream.  This seems to have derived its energy from mystical experience, considered and interpreted in the light of Neoplatonic philosophy.  What characterizes this tradition is that it does not assert anything about God, but rather denies the possibility of assertion.

 -- by Joscelyn Godwin, excerpt from the article "Annals of the Invisible College" on p. 59 of Lapis magazine (the inner meaning of contemporary life) publsihed three times a year by the New York Open Center, Inc.copyright 1999   212-334-0210.