The Word 'Esotericism'

The French noun 'ésotérisme' appeared only in 1828, and Antoine Faivre's 1992 definition by four intrinsic traits shows how recently the field was formalised. Wouter Hanegraaff later reframed it as knowledge rejected by mainstream religion and science, a grouping he traces to Protestant and Enlightenment polemics of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Jacques Matter, Histoire critique du gnosticisme (1828); Antoine Faivre, L'ésotérisme (1992); Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (2012), chs. 2–3