Antoine Faivre

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, and he was the first-ever person to be appointed to an academic chair in the discipline. 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.
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.
Thought
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". Those doctrines believe in alchemic transmutation and on an initiatric transmission of knowledge from a master to his pupil.
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". Hanegraaff also traces Faivre's notion of "correspondences" back to the Neoplatonic concept of sympatheia.
Personal life and death
Faivre died on 19 December 2021 at the age of 87.
Bibliography
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
References
External links
Official website
1934 births
2021 deaths
20th-century French historians
Academic staff of the École pratique des hautes études
Writers from Reims
University of Paris alumni
Western esotericism scholars