Litet esoterisk lexikon (The Basic Esoteric Dictionary)

Ever since 1984 the Institute for Hylozoic Studies has worked to promote the study of the esoteric knowledge of life, especially in its Western, hylozoic (Pythagorean) form. At the very outset of our work, the publishing of an esoteric vocabulary appeared particularly desirable, not least in order to counteract the confusion of ideas prevalent in this sphere.

Without any claims whatever to treat of the subject-matter in its entire depth or to describe exhaustively its terminology, the Institute in December 1986 published the first Swedish edition of the present work to the Scandinavian readers. After this first edition ran out of print 1991, the work at a new edition was begun, and in 1996 this second edition was published. The present English edition is a translation of the 1996 Swedish edition.

The Esoteric Dictionary is primarily an inventory of the terminology used by Henry T. Laurency, secondarily of the terminology used in theosophy and the works of Alice A. Bailey. The Dictionary is intended to be more than a mere vocabulary. It contains more than 500 entries, the majority of which besides definitions of the terms also cite excerpts from The Knowledge of Reality and The Philosopher’s Stone by Henry T. Laurency, The Knowledge of Reality in particular, since it is the more important book where the elementary study is concerned. Actually, the main body of the text of the dictionary is made up of such excerpts. When compiling this Dictionary, the selection of terms to be entered as well as the formulation of the texts appended to them was made with a view to presenting esoteric students with a practical tool that they would find interesting enough to study as a work in its own right, beside the works of Laurency.

References to the works of Laurency are given using the same method as is consistently used in the Internet edition of his works; that is, not by pages, but by sections, chapters, and paragraphs. This has been sufficiently explained on the Official Website of the Henry T. Laurency Publishing Foundation (Introduction to the works of Henry T. Laurency).

References between entries are not very numerous. From an educational point of view, it should prove more expedient that the students go through the Dictionary several times over and so doing discover for themselves the natural, logical connections there are between the entries.

The attention of the students is called to the fact that one and the same entry sometimes is explained twice, as a Laurency term and as a theosophical and/or Bailey term. MONAD and TRIAD are two such instances where the same terms have different meanings in different authors. Esoteric students who study both Laurency and theosophy/Bailey will appreciate the necessity of making such distinctions.

The Esoteric Dictionary can be used by both beginners and more advanced students to study hylozoics in a new and interesting way.

Lexicon Editorial Staff