Antoine Faivre

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Antoine Faivre (5 June 1934 – 19 December 2021) was a French scholar of Western esotericism. He played a major role in the founding of the discipline as a scholarly field of study,^[1][2] and he was the first-ever person to be appointed to an academic chair in the discipline.^[1] Together with Roland Edighoffer he founded the predecessor to the journal Aries in 1983, which in 2001 was relaunched with Wouter Hanegraaff as its editor.^[1]

Until his retirement, he held a chair in the École Pratique des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne, University Professor of Germanic studies at the University of Haute-Normandie, director of the Cahiers del Hermétisme and of Bibliothèque de l'hermétisme.^{[citation needed]}

Antoine Faivre affirmed occultism, gnosticism and hermeticism share a set of common characteristics that include the faith in the existence of secret and syncretistic correspondences – both symbolic and real – between the "macrocosm and the microcosm, the seen and the unseen, and indeed all that is".^[3] Those doctrines believe in alchemic transmutation and on an initiatric transmission of knowledge from a master to his pupil.^[3]

According to Hanegraaff, Faivre's criteria for what constitutes Western esotericism can be seen as essentially describing an "enchanted" worldview, as compared to Max Weber's notion of "disenchantment".^[4] Hanegraaff also traces Faivre's notion of "correspondences" back to the Neoplatonic concept of sympatheia.^[4]

Faivre died on 19 December 2021 at the age of 87.^[5]

• Les vampires: Essai historique, critique et littéraire, Paris, Le Terrain vague, 1962
• Kirchberger et l’Illuminisme du XVIIIe siècle, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1966
• Eckartshausen et la théosophie chrétienne, Paris, Klincksieck, 1969 (reprinted with a preface by Jean-Marc Vivenza, Hyères, La Pierre Philosophale, 2016)
• L’ésotérisme au XVIIIe siècle en France et en Allemagne, La Table d’Émeraude, Seghers, 1973
• Mystiques, théosophes et illuminés au siècle des lumières, Hildesheim, Olms, 1976
• Toison d'or et alchimie, Milan, Archè, 1990. English transl. Golden Fleece and Alchemy, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1993, reprint 1995
• Philosophie de la nature (physique sacrée et théosophie, XVIIIe-XIXe siècles), Paris, Albin Michel, 1996 (Prix de philosophie Louis Liard, de l'Académie des Sciences morales et politiques).
• The Eternal Hermes (From Greek God to Alchemical Magus), Grand Rapids, Phanes Press, 1996
• Accès de l'ésotérisme occidental, Paris, Gallimard ("Bibliothèque des sciences humaines"), vol. I, 1986, 2nd ed., 1996, vol. II, 1996. English transl. vol. I : Access to Western Esotericism, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1994, vol. II: Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition, Studies in Western Esotericism, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2000
• L'ésotérisme, Paris, PUF, 1992, 3e éd., 2003
• De Londres à Saint-Pétersbourg: Carl Friedrich Tieman (1743-1802) aux carrefours des courants illuministes et maçonniques, Milan, Archè, 2018

• Official website

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