As the holder of the Chair of Western Esotericism at the University of Exeter it gives me pleasure to acknowledge the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the Center for the History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents (GHF) and its associated Chair, occupied by my colleague and friend Professor Dr. Wouter Hanegraaff at the University of Amsterdam.

The Chair at Amsterdam has been a decisive factor in the recent development of academic studies in Western esotericism in Britain. However, their beginnings lie further back in the late 1950s and may be traced through to the 1970s. In the first place, the work of scholars at the Warburg Institute, University of London, was pivotal in shaping the scholarly study of magic, astrology and kabbalah in the Renaissance. Such works as D.P. Walker's Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (1958) and Dame Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972), and The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (1979) were landmarks in the scholarly exploration of the history of esotericism. True to the original vision of its founder, Aby Warburg (1866-1929), the Institute's library provided a taxonomic resource for research in Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, alchemy, magic, and related subjects. My own interests in this field began when I was a postgraduate student at Oxford in the 1970s. That decade saw a major wave of research and publications on the modern occult revival, the Golden Dawn, and Theosophy, by such authors as Ellic Howe, Robert Gilbert, Leslie Price, James Webb, Christopher McIntosh and myself. As a German historian, I had a special interest in late-19th-century intellectual currents, and it was my encounter with Ellic Howe and fellow scholars in the modern occult revival in 1976 that advanced my studies and forged my links with the Warburg. My Oxford doctorate on the political uses of occultism in the service of modern nationalist and racialist ideology, was later published as The Occult Roots of Nazism (1985) and translated into many languages.