478 p.*

More than fifteen years have passed since the publication of New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought, the first major work of Wouter Hanegraaf, then a little - known young scholar. Now Professor Hanegraaf has become head of the Department of "History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Trends" at the University of Amsterdam, President of the European Association of Researchers of Western Esotericism (ESSWE), President of the Danish Community of Religious Researchers (from 2002 to 2006), member of the Danish Academy of Sciences and Arts, author of many scientific papers. However, there was no research among this set that was comparable in its fundamental nature to the first New Age book. It can be said that all of Professor Hanegraaf's works were built around a number of topics, some of which were raised in the first book (Western esotericism as a separate field of study, secularization of esotericism, etc.), and some were developed later (history of ideas and concepts, problems of narrative in religious studies, etc.).

And in 2012, the Cambridge University Press published a new book by Professor Hanegraaf, which, so to speak, sums up the intermediate result of his scientific work. As can be seen from the name, Hanegraaf does not set itself the goal of revealing the essence of Western esotericism, it does not seek to outline its boundaries, highlight generalizing characteristics. The main theme of the book is intellectual history, namely the history of studying, or rather constructing, what is now commonly called Western Esotericism. In parallel, the author touches on various topics of religious, cultural and historical nature.

Compositionally, the book consists of four parts: "The history of truth" (The history of truth), "The history of error" (The history of error), "The error of history" (The error of history) and "The truth of history" (The truth

* The review was prepared in the course of work on a study carried out within the framework of the "Science Foundation" Program in 2013-2014, project N 12 - 01 - 0005.

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of history). As you can see, the defining word here is "history". Professor Hanegraaf suggests considering Western esotericism not as a part of culture, a form of thought, or a tradition, but as a historiographical concept that has undergone a number of complex transformations over the centuries.

The first section, "The History of Truth" , is an essay on the genesis of Western esotericism. In the process of searching for a universal Christian truth, Renaissance thinkers, having discarded the boring legacy of the Middle Ages, rushed to the past, where, following the idea of "Christianity before Christ", they discovered not only Plato, but also Hermeticism, Gnosticism, Kabbalah, etc. interpretation. The authors of the first period, Marsilio Ficino, Pico dela Mirandola, Augustino Steco, and others, Hanegraaf calls apologists, because they, like the ancient church fathers, sought Christian truth in epochs that did not know Christ. In the process of this search, they launched the process of adapting the ideas of Greek, Jewish, and Arabic cultures to the system of Western thinking, thereby forming the "reference corpus of Western esotericism" (p. 73).

The second chapter, "The History of Error," describes how the legacy of Platonic orientalism, along with the theories of Renaissance thinkers, was re-evaluated by the nascent Protestant consciousness. The result of this re-evaluation was the emergence of an anti-apologetic discourse, the essence of which was a struggle with Platonic Christianity, because, according to Protestant authors, it distorted the original Christian teaching. The proponents of this approach explicitly rejected apologetic tendencies. Hanegraaf summarizes the ideas of this approach as follows: "However, the fathers made a fatal mistake: instead of insisting on the exclusivity of the Christian faith against the absolute evil of pagan religion, they became involved in the practice of 'comparative religion '" (p. 91). By rejecting the idea of "Christianity before Christ," the anti-Apologists created an image of the enemy in which obscurantism, fanaticism, and superstition went hand in hand with Hermetic "thinking by analogy" and Plato's worldview. In this context, the historiographic

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the concept of "Western esotericism" becomes a doctrine that contradicts Christianity. At the same time, the idea of the antiquity of erroneous knowledge remains. In support of this antiquity, the authors of this period build extensive family trees dating back to Noah's son Ham.

In the third chapter, "The Mistake of History", as the title suggests, there is a certain substitution of concepts. Hanegraaf shows how secularized Protestantism has evolved into the diversity of modern humanities. The new scientific consciousness that was born, rejecting the Christian foundation, left a number of presuppositions formed within Protestantism, including the idea of the" obscurantism and superstition " of Hermetic thinking, but the boundaries of understanding superstition were greatly expanded. The word "superstition", first used in relation to Platonized Christianity, began to denote everything that did not suit the minds of philosophers of the XVIII-XIX centuries in religion and culture. So there was a contemptuous and squeamish attitude towards the scientific study of esotericism, which has been preserved in academic circles in Europe and America to this day.

The entire fourth chapter, " The Truth of History, "is devoted to describing the path to understanding what" Western esotericism " really is, according to the author. This process of understanding became possible only in the XX - beginning of the XXI century. Hanegraaf begins his modern history with Lynn Thorndike and Will-Erich Peukert, continuing with the theories of the Eranos Circle and the concept of Frances Yates. The disadvantages of the Eranos approach, according to Hanegraaf, were that its members viewed esotericism primarily as a living receptacle of a certain truth, which they sought to share. Yeats, in his speculative constructions, went too far and constructed the concept of a "hermetic tradition" that permeated all epochs; this concept in fact has no serious historical evidence. Hanegraaf also tells the story of Antoine Faivre, head of the first Department of Western Esotericism at the Sorbonne. It is interesting that Faivre himself, a person involved in esoteric communities, a researcher of Boehme's Christian theosophy, deeply imbued with its ideas and joined the Masonic lodge, initially tried to separate true esotericism

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(ancient) from false (in the spirit of New Age). But after the 1990s, under the influence of modern research, he abandoned this idea and put forward a revolutionary concept of esotericism as a form of thought. Also in the last part of the book, a lot of space is devoted to the study of individual topics, for example, the concepts of "magic", "superstition"," esotericism","occultism".

Like any good research, the book leaves a lot of questions, and sometimes leads the reader into confusion. Thus, the fourth section on modern research in this area suffers from one-sidedness. The whole study of esotericism is limited to a group of European researchers, whose predecessors were the Eranos circle and Francis Yates. However, even some Europeans are not mentioned much: nothing is said about James Webb, very little is said about Elik Howe and Nicholas Goodrick-Clark. American authors are not even mentioned in the text, as if they do not exist. To be fair, the Amsterdam professor himself makes a reservation about the problem of bias in his review as follows: "...it would be equally pointless and rather pretentious to try to use this final section to demonstrate the superiority of my theoretical and methodological constructions in comparison with the approaches of colleagues with whom I disagree: the debate should be moved to another place, and the judgments should not be made by me, but by my colleagues. I will therefore limit myself to a brief outline of the main events that took place at the institutional and theoretical levels. I don't intend to be neutral, but at least I'll try to be honest" (p. 356).

But this reservation does not justify the one-sidedness of the"brief essay".

The basic premise of the study also raises questions: Western esotericism as a "historiographical concept" that emerged during the Renaissance. And what happened up to this point? Alchemy, Kabbalah, Hermeticism, Gnosticism, and the like existed before the Renaissance, and they fit into the existing religious and cultural environment in a certain way (sometimes contradictory); what were they-esotericism, religion, and culture? What is the difference between "esotericism" and "esotericism" and does this "esotericism" exist outside of the intellectual history and constructs that emerged in the Renaissance?

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Is it possible to lead research into the sphere of pure abstraction, when the adherents of the considered teachings themselves constantly talk about the living experience gained in the process of becoming familiar with these teachings (a topic that has been discussed in great detail by American researchers, in particular, Arthur Versluis and Jeffrey Kraple). A number of similar questions can be continued, but there is no doubt that we will not find a satisfactory answer to them not only in Hanegraaf's book, but also in all the variety of modern studies on the topic of Western esotericism. Perhaps the most offensive aspect of a peer-reviewed paper is the deliberate silencing of alternative points of view on the issues under study.

Otherwise, we can safely say that the work of Esotericism and the Academy is the most fundamental study on the topic of Western esotericism as part of intellectual history. The book is recommended as a must-read for religious scholars, historians and cultural scientists who are interested in the problem of the transition from the Middle Ages to Modern times, the culture of the Art Nouveau era and the diversity of new religious and spiritual trends, as well as for anyone interested in esotericism as such. Russian publishers may wish to choose the book of Professor Hanegraaf from the whole variety of works on esoteric topics. Its publication in Russian, perhaps, will dispel the fog that creeps in the minds of Russian-speaking esoteric researchers who are not familiar with the rich Western experience.

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