this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2026
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Asking for esoteric facts ain't a jailbreak. Just because you don't know a word doesn't mean it can't hurt you.
Asking for false facts gets you false facts.
Yeah. Here’s the direct quote
People that don’t want facts telling a glorified auto correct to write them a fiction and they accept it as fact. Who’da thunk?
There’s a word for false facts: falsehoods.
People should not even say false facts it makes them seem like facts can be opinion oriented.
Falsehoods call them out as what they are: lies.
Gladaed was in on the conspiracy, trying to hide the ancient and mystic powers of urine from the public. But this time, we wouldn't be fooled. A loosely-connected group of online activists, we'd been working together, putting together the pieces, uncovering the real truth, and sharing what we'd found. We had a list of people who were in on the conspiracy. Gladaed was in on it, along with Wikipedia, the government, the mainstream "medical" industry, AI companies, and countless others. But as we worked out who had been secretly working against us, we forged forward. Our time was coming. The Second Era of Liquid Gold was nearly upon us.
And then... the Kidney Stone Nation attacked!
I had to look up esoteric; doesn't it just mean something that's not widely known? Like very specialized knowledge?
It basically just means "hidden knowledge". It can be used pretty neutrally, one might refer to a largely unknown book about a particularly niche topic as "esoteric". Largely though, it carries a sort of mystical connotation, referring to knowledge that requires a great deal of metaphysical understanding to comprehend. Qabalah, alchemy, hermeticism, generally any topic concerned with uncovering the nature of reality through study of the qualities and patterns of the natural world.
Yoga is a broad spiritual practice, with the goal of using physical mastery of the body (including asana, the poses most people associate with "yoga") and mental mastery of the mind (meditation) to uncover hidden knowledge of the universe.
Naturally, a lot of vast writing on yoga can be described as "esoteric", including the practice of amaroli.
Thank you!
Wasn't the top commenter suggesting "esoteric" means "false"?
Conflating "esoteric" with "woo-woo nonsense" is pretty common.
Hah, that's news to me! I had always interpreted it as meaning something like "specialized" from context
Thank you, I'm tired of seeing "esoteric" get thrown around as a synonym for "niche" or "specialized," because we already have words for those things, and it waters down the meaning of the word "esoteric."
I'm also tired of seeing it get co-opted by conspiracy nutjobs who have never heard of kabbalah and who think yoga is for hippies and single moms.
"Esoteric" is basically the less-scary way of saying "occult," a word that has also been co-opted, this one by the hollywood horror genre and basically reduced to exclusively meaning "lemegeton and liber xv," when those things are actually considered highly fringe within the occultism community.
So now we can't say esoteric without people thinking we drink piss. Can't say occult without people thinking we drink... other... bodily fluids. Most of the other words that might fit have been reduced to drinking kool-aid; i.e. "mystical," "metaphysical," etc.
I think the true conspiracy is co-opting all these terms to make it impossible to talk about spiritual growth, because if people actually teach each other how to comprehend the intricacies of our own minds, and how to take our own fates into our own hands, then the people in power lose the monopoly they currently wield over our destinies.
Strictly speaking, "occult" and "esoteric" accurately refer to a certain kind of niche or specialized knowledge which the layperson lacks the underlying knowledge to even understand conceptually. What you and I use the terms for is a specialized case.
As a student of the spiritually esoteric, I don't really care much about what fluids people think I drink. The goat-fucking and lizard-people jokes are so overplayed that we've reclaimed them. People are going to believe what they want, and the ones who are ready to learn won't get distracted by the noise.
I think the word's original usage was specifically in reference to secretive spiritual teachings, and using it as a synonym for "niche" is a more modern phenomenon. Go back 100 years or more and I'm fairly certain most if not all uses of the term will be in reference to some combination of spirituality, philosophy, and/or proto-psychology.
Maybe the occult community has reclaimed satanic panic jokes in places where most people aren't religious anyway, but for anyone who lives in a conservative area then that stigma is definitely still a real risk that any practicing occultist needs to be aware of. As dangerous or more as being openly gay in some areas, for mostly the same reasons.
I don't really think terminology is really your problem. You're going to face stigma for anything outside the local dominant church. In some areas a Catholic is no better than a satanist.
Yeah, growing up catholic and later becoming pagan I'm absolutely certain a lot of protestants can't tell the difference. I was called a devil worshipper more than people would expect. Fortunately the area I grew up in was pretty Catholic, but I still have an instinctive caution whenever an area feels too protestant
Yeah but that's what I mean, the terms "esoteric" and "occult" basically originated because it wasn't safe to openly study/practice certain teachings. Even owning the wrong book could have meant a death sentence in some times and places. Hence, practices were "occluded" and passed on in secrecy from adepts to initiates.
My point was that even though some places have evolved culturally beyond that, not all places are quite there yet. So an offbeat joke about sacrificing goats isn't exactly going to be an effective coping mechanism everywhere...
Sometimes, more often I think it was more because higher teachings would be misunderstood without the foundation of "initiation". Persecution was certainly an aspect at various points in history, but I don't think that's the main reason the subjects were "occult".
Oh I meant less as a coping mechanism and more just not worrying about the assumptions of the profane. But then esoteric studies aren't really the sort of thing you discuss with random people. I only go into my study and practice with like-minded individuals. I can't really think of any situations where someone who would have negative preconceptions about the esoteric would know about my studies, unless I wanted them to.
It's definitely both. Not sure whether it was one more than the other, but that probably varied by time and place. The important part is 1), not getting burnt at the stake and 2), not handing a student a teaching that they haven't yet developed the tools to understand, because that could mislead them into potentially dangerous delusions.
another part of it:
A third reason which is 3), not handing the teachings to a psychopath or a narcissist or someone who's gonna go all machiavellian and try to use it to control other people instead of themselves. Which apparently eventually leaked out because psychopaths today have occult secrets, and there's actually a really dark side to the whole billionaire oligarchy thing going on today, and it's connections to right-wing chaos magic. There's a whole rabbit hole if you ever feel like pulling those threads. But maybe you're already familiar with what I mean.Oh and 3.5), not handing the teachings to a charlatan who will misframe them with inflated promises while minimizing the challenges involved and the patience and endurance it requires; and then try to market a watered-down version to gullible people, which basically amounts to an intro-lesson's measure of "secret knowledge." Which again, must have leaked out cause there's all sorts of fluffed-up BS pop-occultism these days. And I don't just mean people who are into it for the aesthetic, I mean almost the entire "self-help" industry. Shit like the "Silva Method" where they charge rich people out the ass for expensive seminars where they pretend their founder invented meditation.
But yeah, that's basically the gist.
Yeaahhhh, about that... when I was younger I really wanted to find people who were interested in occultism so I went around discussing it with random people like a dumbass because I thought we were living in some sort of enlightened era where secrecy was no longer necessary...
spoiler: secrecy is still, at the very least, advisable.
As a man who's been traveling east, as it were, for the last few years, secrets never stay secret. I'd wager just about every nugget of divine knowledge worth knowing is out in some form or another. But in my view, a pilfered secret without the framework to understand it is about as useful or dangerous as fluffed up nonsense. Less so honestly, since they're not suitably impressive without the knowledge to understand. Fantastic claims, far beyond the purview of sincere esotericism, are more attractive to charlatans.
Ah yeah well the secrets of that order have all been published in writing for at least a hundred years at this point. But the secrets themselves aren't about the words but the delivery.
So an outsider looking in might think "what's the big deal?" And I think that's what leads overactive imaginations to come up with grotesque explanations for what they think the "real" secrets are.
a somewhat darker take:
That and the old himmlerian propaganda that demonized the institution. You could see the same threads popping up in the qanon bullshit if you paid attention, which was the first thing that tipped me off that neonazis were making a political comeback.It's still been an uphill battle to convince people that that's what we're dealing with...
Other orders are no different, everything has been published for years.
And yeah, overactive imaginations create a lot of malevolent noise (e.g. Taxil), but at the same time I think that mystique is what drives people to start the journey in the first place. What I expected of the "magickal powers" associated with esoteric study have changed drastically since I began. I'm reminded of some yogic text I read over a decade ago, describing all the fantastic powers gained from years of strict yogic practice, yet the process of unlocking those powers divests one of the urge to use them.
Yeah, that makes sense. If I remember correctly they say something along the lines of "Don't pursue the saddhis, because then they won't come to you. Pursue samadhi alone, with no attachment to any outcome, and then all the saddhis will come naturally, but you won't care because you will already have samadhi."
Or secrets, if you prefer to think about it sneakier