Esotericism and Religious Studies: Historical Relationships and Contemporary Challenges

Abstract The emergence of the academic study of Esotericism was closely linked to both Religious Studies and Sociology. In the 1970s sociologists Colin Campbell, Marcello Truzzi, Edward A. Tiryakian, and Patricia A. Hartman, with historian of religion Mircea Eliade, wrote pioneering studies on occult and esoteric subjects. These initially marginal works gained traction in the study of new religious movements ( NRM s) and of non-religious subcultures. The study of Western Esotericism proper is dated to the publication of Antoine Faivre’s Access to Western Esotericism (1994); in the three decades since, the field has expanded, developed, and fissured. This article argues that the same process of rejection of universalist typologies and text-based studies (which were popular in the mid to late twentieth century) to focus on lived experience can be mapped in both Religious Studies and Esotericism Studies. This shift established deconstructive relativism as the dominant mode in both Esotericism Studies and (to a lesser extent) Religious Studies. Current methodological frameworks have changed of late, with the postmodern trends of previous decades giving way to a retheorized realism, albeit one aware of researcher positionality and contested access to knowledge.