Wessex Research Group - University of Exeter
University of Exeter - Universities & Schools |
| Title | University of Exeter |
| Venue | School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Exeter , EXETER , EX4 4RJ |
| Map | Show Location |
| Contribution | |
| Contact | Prof Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke |
| Tel | +44(0) 1626 779941 |
| ngoodrick-clarke@exeter.ac.uk | |
| Web | MA Western Esotericism |
| Schedule | MA Western Esotericism |
| Info | |
| The new MA in Western Esotericism at the University of Exeter represents the first initiative in this subject at a UK university. The subject is already taught in Continental Europe at the University of Amsterdam and at the Sorbonne, whose Emeritus Professor in the History of Esoteric and Mystical Currents, Antoine Faivre, established its disciplinary scope and methodology from the early 1970s onwards. Exeter , Amsterdam , and the Sorbonne are presently the only universities offering postgraduate courses or doctoral supervision in Western Esotericism. The Western esoteric traditions reach back to Hermeticism, Neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, and theurgy in the Hellenistic world during the first centuries AD. These early sources often reveal theosophia, wisdom or knowledge in things divine, attained through spiritual exercise, contemplation and ecstasy. The early Church Fathers regarded such theosophy and gnosis ambivalently, and their variable reception in the Western and Eastern churches during the early Middle Ages is now an expanding field of inquiry. The introduction of Greek, Arab and Jewish traditions into the medieval Latin West paved the way for the rediscovery of ancient texts and led to the scholarly revival of magic, astrology, alchemy and Kabbalah in the Renaissance. After the Reformation, these Hermetic sciences gave rise to such movements as Theosophy, Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, with their proliferation of esoteric rites and symbolic systems in the eighteenth century. The modem revival of esotericism extends from Romantic Naturphilosophie to nineteenth-century occultism involving Swedenborgianism, Mesmerism, spiritualism, the ancient wisdom-tradition, and ceremonial magic and para-masonic orders. Today, Helena Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy, C. G. Jung and his archetypal psychology, and Fourth Way movements are among the major currents of modem esotericism, providing an inspiration to contemporary thinkers and practitioners in the arts, education and medicine. Western esotericism has exerted a profound and increasingly acknowledged influence on philosophy, religion and science, culture and literature, politics and society. |