[W]e enter a period in which Christianity slowly but surely loses its hegemonic position in intellectual discourse, while academic historians of philosophy abandon the currents and ideas associated with “Platonic Orientalism” as unworthy of serious study. Although the frameworks and background assumptions typical of the ancient wisdom discourse would continue to exert a strong residual influence, a radically new perspective established itself during the eighteenth century: that of science and natural philosophy as the dominant framework for interpretation in all domains of thought. With respect to the study of “Western esotericism,” this resulted in a momentous shift of attention away from metaphysical questions concerning theology and philosophy, such as the nature of the soul, towards a new concentration on the “secrets of nature.” For reasons that will be analyzed below, this development went hand in hand with a process of critical reorientation in which the intellectual and academic elites abandoned the field almost completely, leaving its study – including its historiography – to whomsoever else might happen to take an interest in it. As a result, it became the domain of amateur scholars.
The attitudes of these authors covered the complete spectrum from utter skepticism and hostility to “the occult” via antiquarian curiosity about the quaint beliefs of bygone ages to an enthusiastic embrace of “higher religious truths,” but their common emphasis on the natural sciences led all of them to perceive the field from a new angle: rather than (crypto)pagan philosophy or “Platonic-Hermetic Christianity,” what they saw was a set of traditional ways of understanding nature, exemplified by what now came to be known as the “secret” or “occult” sciences of natural magic, astrology, and alchemy. Such a shift of emphasis was easy enough, for the first two of these – and particularly their combination in the form of astral magic – had been part and parcel of the worldviews defended in the context of the ancient wisdom narrative since Ficino, and we will see how the final one had become practically inseparable from it somewhat later, particularly in the wake of Paracelsus and his followers.
[…]
If [Cartesian Balthasar] Bekker has become indirectly responsible for Max Weber coining his famous notion of Entzauberung – central to which is the disappearance of mysterious and unpredictable powers and forces from the natural world – his own brand of Cartesian philosophy represented only one of the many ways in which nature could be understood from the perspective of the new science. The familiar standard narrative, according to which belief in witchcraft and other forms of immaterial or spiritual agency simply declined in direct proportion with the advance of modern science, has been thoroughly deconstructed by historians during the last three decades, who have pointed out that many of the most central pioneers of the scientific revolution were preoccupied with avoiding atheism by preserving immaterial agency (exemplified by the activities of witches, demons and spirits) as a significant factor even – or rather, especially – in the context of the mechanical philosophy. Far from reflecting any simple dualism of science against magic or superstition, learned opinion appears to have varied along a wide scale. Mechanical concepts of nature as reducible to matter in motion could be defended on religious grounds because they emptied the world of demonic beings while preserving the divine transcendence of its Creator and sovereign Ruler; but they could also be criticized as a danger to religion because, along with any other spiritual agency, they were seen as driving God himself out of his own world, making him into an irrelevancy while emptying his creation of any mystery. On the other hand, “enchanted” concepts of nature as a kind of organism animated by a spiritual force could be defended precisely because they seemed to preserve God’s universal presence and activity in the world; but they were vulnerable to the criticism that they did so by blurring any distinction between God and his creation, leading to the dreaded position of pantheism. It will be remembered that precisely such a concept (the coeternity of God and the world) had been highlighted by Jacob Thomasius as the core doctrine of all pagan error, and sharply contrasted with the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. This basic theological perspective, of which Thomasius Sr. was only one representative, was particularly prominent in Protestant circles, and eventually came to dominate the mainstream of Enlightenment thought even among atheist thinkers. That it greatly facilitated the acceptance of the mechanical philosophy is an understatement, and it certainly made it easy to perceive any panentheist concept of “living nature” as tainted with pagan superstition. The “victory of science,” then, was more than just scientific: to a considerable extent, the new science succeeded because it supported the theological battle against paganism.
– Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (2012), pp. 153-6