The present study is not intended as a catalogue of the opinions of the various Esoteric positions. To discuss general or theoretical aspects of the Modern Esoteric Tradition without entering into the empirical specifics leaves the reader in a fog of abstractions; referring exhaustively to a vast corpus of source texts entails the risk of constructing a under-theorized descriptive study. In order to strike a balance between the descriptive and analytic goals of this study, the author resorted to using case studies from the consulted sources as exemplars. These particular cases are subjected to a symptomatic reading, a mode of interpretation that uses empirical data to highlight a broader point. Although the narrow focus and the chosen approach are, as in any other case, a compromise, at least it has the double advantage of extendability and falsifiability.