It all began when I joined the University of Halle in the autumn of 1993. I was appointed there as a historian responsible for the early modern period, but more important for the story that will follow was my collaboration with the recently reorganized Interdisciplinary Center for Enlightenment Research. This may seem surprising at first sight, for if one searches for “Hermes in the Academy,” one will probably not do so at a research institute focused on the Enlightenment. Nevertheless that was my point of departure. Who “Hermes” was, I did not even know at the time.

Instead, the focus of my interest was on the Freemasons. I had come across them during my studies on late-Enlightenment society, and began to consider the Masonic movement of the 18th century as my topic for research at the Center. Much about it still seemed unexplored, and thus the field looked promising. At the same time, however, I perceived a serious danger of getting lost in a multitude of historical details and that with a movement which seemed to have a rather marginal place in scholarly and historical research. Although I was certainly very interested in questions of historical detail, I experienced the need for a larger perspective that would lend broader relevance to such research.

In this search, it did not take me long to come across the concept of esotericism. “Esoteric” is an adjective that traditionally spooks through the literature on Freemasonry and Secret Societies, and I vaguely suspected that here I might find the larger perspective for which I was looking. But what was esotericism? I found some first intimations in a Lexikon esoterischen Wissens1 that I had bought in the bookstore of a station while waiting for my next train. Early in 1994, when the Lessing Academy in Wolfenbuttel invited me for a lecture, I decided to speak about “Esoteric Orders and Bourgeois Society: Developments toward Modernity in the 18th-Century Milieus of Secret Societies.”

The lecture was expanded into a small volume that appeared in 1995 in a series called “Kleine Schriften zur Aufklärung.” In the meantime I had, of course, gone beyond the lexicon mentioned above, and had been reading everything available that seemed somehow connected to the theme.