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What Is Esotericism? Does It Exist? How Can It Be Understood? by Helmut Zander is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

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The term "esotericism" has been used by practitioners since the late 18 th century to describe non-hegemonic ideas and practices. The ideas behind this term were mainly Christian ideasor ideas from other sources (e.g. "pagan" ones), interpreted by Christians. In the 20 th century, the term esotericism became a scientific concept in Western Europe and North America, following a theological path which was opened in the 17 th century. This cultural relativity limits the possible application of this term to other regions, cultures or language traditions and claims to determine possible semantic, pragmatic or functional equivalents from a critical perspective. Consequently, there is no culturally invariant "essence" of "esotericism". Each concept applied to "esotericism" contains only possiblenot mandatoryfeatures and involves normative decisions. If one uses such a "toolbox" of features, a comparison of different phenomena or traditions is only possible with regard to specific features or a group of features. Consequence: Concrete definitions of esotericism apply only to concrete fields of researchwhich means: Different definitions of esotericism will overlap. They will have family res

Author

Helmut Zander

Publisher

De Gruyter

Published

2021

Language

EN