Modern Esoteric Spirituality

by Antoine Faivre, Jacob Needleman (Editor)

Part of the Wold Spirituality series, this is a broad-ranging, illustrated, scholarly treatment of core topics in esoteric spirituality, from one of the world's great authorities on esoterica.

Genres: Religion, Spirituality

448 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1993

About the author

Antoine 'Tony' Faivre was Professor of Germanic studies at the University of Haute-Normandie, director of the Cahiers del Hermétisme and of Bibliothèque de l'hermétisme, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies and Chair of the History of Esoteric Currents in Modern and Contemporary Europe at École Pratique des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne, and served as editor of Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism along with Wouter J. Hanegraaff. He was awarded the Ordre National du Mérite in 2009.

Faivre was the first to define "Western esotericism" as a legitimate field of interdisciplinary academic study and is held to be one of the foremost scholars in the field he pioneered.

Reviews

[Christopher Plaisance · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume is a collection of fourteen essays comprising a historiographical survey of Western esotericism from Hellenistic and Medieval sources to modern manifestations such as Theosophy and Jungian psychology. As each individual essay was written by a leading expert in the field of Esoteric Studies, the overall quality of the volume maintains high standards of academic rigor. However, the fact that these papers were written apart from each other as stand-alone works, there is a disjointed feel to the volume, with some essays (those of Antoine Faivre, Roland Edighoffer, and Jean Borella in particular) providing easily accessible histories of their topics and others (G. Mallary Masters, Heinrich Schipperges, and Edmond's pieces) comprising obtusely structured papers which zero in on particular aspects of their respective topics without providing the necessary background information for a reader unacquainted with the specific subject. All of this combines to make a stylistically incongruous compendium that, while treading the same historical territory as other such surveys, does so in a manner which lends itself much less easily to students.