Authority control databases
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| People | |
| Other | |
Antoine Faivre | |
|---|---|
| Born | 5 June 1934 |
| Died | 19 December 2021 (aged 87) |
| Nationality | French |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Western esotericism |
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]
