“Gnosis” as term and concept in the esoteric movements of the modern West: an attempt at periodization

“Esotericism” has at least five meanings (Faivre 2012: 3–7), one of which, common but too general, is that of secret knowledge reserved for the initiated. We understand it here in the sense of the “esoteric movements of the modern West” (“modern” to designate the period which stretches from the Renaissance to our times), an object of study constructed by historians from empirical observations, and not from a philosophical or religious model which had been postulated a priori. Sufficiently specific for three university chairs to be dedicated to its study, it includes the currents of thought among which figure, from the end of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, Alexandrian Neo-Hermeticism, Christian Kabbalah, so-called “speculative” alchemy and astrology, Rosicrucianism, Christian theosophy, and thence their continuations into the eighteenth century, and later the movement known as “Occultism” (Faivre 2012: 7–9). It is these that are intended when, for the sake of brevity, we write “Western esotericism,” or “esoteric Literature,” or even simply “esotericism.”