The Latin superstitio and its earlier Greek equivalent deisidaimonia both began their career as neutral or positive terms. Deisi could mean fear, but also “awe” or “respect,” and daimones could be gods, goddesses, semi-divinities, or…
Tag: occulture
Wouter Hanegraaff on the victory of science
[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…
Wouter Hanegraaff on religionism & eclectism
Due to their utter incompatibility with the findings of modern historical criticism, these two traditional perspectives [apologetic and anti-apologetic currents] were unable to keep up with scholarly progress in the study of ancient religions, and…
Wouter Hanegraaff on the Enlightment paradigm as the beginning of the eclipse of ‘Western esotericism’
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…
Wouter Hanegraaff on Jacob Thomasius & Ehregott Daniel Colberg
As already noted, [Jacob] Thomasius was not just a critical historian of philosophy. First and foremost, he was a pious Lutheran who believed that the biblical revelation was the only reliable source of religious truth…
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Wouter Hanegraaff on a peculiar parallelism
Moreover, and as one background reason for their [authors’ who were sympathetic to the ancient wisdom] attitude of caution [about magic], one should never lose sight of the fact that in the wake of the…
Wouter Hanegraaff on the anti-apologetic foundations of the history of philosophy as a modern discipline
Like Savonarola, Gianfrancesco [Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s nephew & follower of Savonarola] points to sacred scripture as the sole, exclusive and absolutely infallible source of true knowledge: the certainty given by absolute…
Wouter Hanegraaff on George of Trebizond as a conspiracy theorist
One of the major humanists of quattrocento Italy, George [of Trebizond] was also a paranoid fanatic who believed in a conspiracy of platonists preparing the coming of the Antichrist. His Comparatio philosophorum Platonis et Aristotelis,…
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Wouter Hanegraaff on the historiographical foundations of the Western esotericism
Before moving on to the anti-apologetic reaction, it is important to provide a brief evaluation of what the preceding discussion contributes to the leading problematics of this book as a whole. I have been arguing…
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Wouter Hanegraaff on Pico della Mirandola & concealment
As Chaim Wirszubski remarks in his classic study [Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter. – GF], Pico set out to prove the Christian truth by means of Jewish kabbalah, but “as thesis after thesis yields up its…
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