Table of Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: A Strange Charm 1. Against All Heresies: Gnosticism before Modern Scholarship 2. The Era of Gnosis Restored: Nineteenth-century Gnostics 3. The Alien God: Gnosticism as Existentialism 4. A Crack in the Universe: Jung and the Eranos Circle 5. No Texts, No History: Nag Hammadi 6. A Revolt Against History: Gnostic Scholarship After Nag Hammadi 7. Tongues and Misunderstandings: Messina 1966 8. Takes a Gnostic to Find a Gnostic: Contemporary Gnostic Groups 9. The Third Way: Gnosticism in Western Esotericism 10. Knowledge of the Heart: The Gnostic New Age 11. The Greatest Heresy: Jeffrey Kripal’s Gnostic Scholarship 12. Elite Knowledge: Gnosticism and the Study of Religion Bibliography Index

Promotional Information

Uses Gnosticism as a case study in the process of essentialization in the contemporary study of religion.

About the Author

David G. Robertson is Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University, UK. He is co-founder of the Religious Studies Project, and co-editor of the journal Implicit Religion. He is the author of UFOs, the New Age and Conspiracy Theories (Bloomsbury, 2016) and co-editor of After World Religions: Reconstructing Religious Studies (2016) and the Handbook of Conspiracy Theories and Contemporary Religion (2018).

Reviews

The book covers a lot of ground at high altitude and high speed ... Gnosticism and the History of Religions presents a story well worth telling ... Particularly valuable is Robertson’s choice to bookend the more well-trodden territory of twentieth-century Continental thought with the chapters on the nineteenth-century currents anticipating the History of Religions school and the reception of academic scholarship in contemporary Gnostic religious movements.
*Journal of the American Academy of Religion*

In this valuable volume, David G. Robertson critically analyzes diverse constructions of “Gnosticism” with impressive insight and skill. This book is a unique contribution and deserves a place as essential reading for anyone with serious interest in the topic of “Gnosticism” so-called.
*Michael A. Williams, Professor of Comparative Religion and Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, University of Washington, USA*

Both scholarly and accessible, David G. Robertson’s book is challenging and original and will prove essential reading for students and scholars of “Gnosticism” alike for decades to come. David G. Robertson’s work reconfigures how we speak about “Gnosticism,” but perhaps more importantly, how we speak about religion and spirituality in the contemporary world. A must-read!
*Bernard Doherty, Lecturer in History, School of Theology, Charles Sturt University, Australia*