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Western Esotericism
Academic study of Western esotericism is an academic field of research, scholarship, and education that focuses on the history of European and Middle Eastern Esotericism.
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Faivre’s starting point is the observation of a “family resemblance” between various religious and philosophical currents in the history of Western culture. He assumes that this family resemblance is based on a common “form of thought” that one can call “esoteric” and that is distinct from other typical forms of Western thought, such as the theological or the scientific. He further claims that it is possible to identify a number of characteristics that are at the basis of the esoteric form of th
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― Esotericism Emergent: The Beginning of the Study of Esotericism in the Academy
― Esotericism Emergent: The Beginning of the Study of Esotericism in the Academy
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…the importance of the study of Western esotericism goes far beyond a mere “academic interest” in some historical currents and ideas that happen to have been neglected by earlier generations. On the contrary, this domain of research should be recognized as centrally important to historians of religion and culture because it is only by virtue of excluding its basic components—as imagined in the polemical imagination—from the realm of the acceptable that Western culture as such has been able to de
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― Forbidden Knowledge: Anti-Esoteric Polemics and Academic Research
― Forbidden Knowledge: Anti-Esoteric Polemics and Academic Research
