The “Enlightenment paradigm” announced so clearly in [Christoph August] Heumann’s Acta Philosophorum was the beginning of the eclipse of “Western esotericism” in modern intellectual discourse. So far, the “pagan” philosophies associated with Platonic Orientalism had always been considered serious players in the philosophical arena; and this had happened because even their most outspoken opponents could not deny that they were part of the traditional canon of some of the most ancient and venerable philosophical schools or “sects,” the platonic one in particular. But the eclectic method changed the rules of the game entirely: it denied any established tradition the right to decide what was and what was not to be considered “philosophy” in the first place, and handed that authority over to the human faculty of rational judgment. Strongly amplified by two centuries of Protestant opposition against the Roman Catholic claim of representing “the” only universal tradition of wisdom, Enlightenment historiography specifically targeted the ancient wisdom narrative and everything that had come to be associated with it, such as the appeal to ancient oriental paganisms and initiatory schools, divinatory systems, demonologies, the kabbalah, the “occult mysteries” claimed by symbolic theology, and the “enthusiastic philosophy” known as theosophy. For an author like Colberg, all this had still been part of the dangerous heretical stream of “Platonic-Hermetic Christianity,” but in Heumann’s eyes they had lost even the dignity of a serious opponent. He was laughing in their face while waving them goodbye: “adieu, dear Philosophia Chaldaeorum, Persarum, Aegyptiorum, &c…”
Thus the foundations were established not only for the disappearance of most references to “Western esotericism” in textbooks of history of philosophy, but also for a new genre of Enlightenment literature intended for “learning and entertainment”: that of “histories of stupidity.” Christian Thomasius himself published a Geschichte der Weißheit und Thorheit (also published in Latin as Historia sapientiae et stultitiae) in 1693, but the most famous example is certainly Johann Christoph Adelung’s seven-volume Geschichte der menschlichen Narrheit, published at the height of the Enlightenment, in 1785–1789. It shows paradigmatically to what an extent “stupidity” as such had now come to be identified with adherence to quite specific beliefs and historical traditions: Adelung’s cabinet of fools includes Nicolas Flamel (“an alchemist”), Sebastian Franck (“an enthusiast”), Giordano Bruno (“a bold blasphemer”), Tommaso Campanella (“a philosophical enthusiast”), Guillaume Postel (“a chiliast”), Paracelsus (“a kabbalist and charlatan”), Nostradamus (“a diviner”), Jacques Gaffarel (“a kabbalist and diviner”), John Dee (“a crystal-gazer”), Arthur Dee (“an alchemist”), Michael Sendivogius (“another adept”), Jan Amos Comenius (“an enthusiast”), Johann Konrad Dippel (“an indifferent enthusiast”), Johannes Baptista van Helmont (“a theosophical physician”), Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont (“a pantheist”), Jacob Böhme (“a theosopher”), Friedrich Breckling (“a mystic”), Johann George Gichtel (“a theosopher”), and many others. But even at this time, on the eve of the French Revolution, the legacy of anti-apologeticism had not been forgotten, on the contrary. […]
Even here, then, we still encounter the two central characteristics that we have seen so often before: the system of emanation based upon belief in the eternity of the world, and the emphasis on inner illumination.
– Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (2012), pp. 136-7