What is the place of esotericism in modern culture? The guiding question of this volume presents us with more than one theoretical problem. We have to answer subsets of questions, such as:

1. • What is esotericism?

2. • What is the West?

3. • What is modernity?

All three questions would merit a book-length discussion. In fact, the debate about what characterizes Western modernity – or, rather, modernities – has become one of the major controversies in the social sciences and in the academic study of religion. The study of “Western esotericism” has only insufficiently taken notice of this debate.

In what follows I present the outline of an interpretational model that intends to add to our understanding of the place and function of religion and esotericism in the contemporary Western world. Put more precisely: I am proposing a model that locates the religious and the esoteric in contemporary European and North American fields of discourse. In doing so, I proceed from theoretical considerations that I have elaborated in earlier contributions. My theoretical framework operates with the dynamic of a twofold pluralism that characterizes European history of religion – a pluralism of religious options and a pluralism of societal systems and domains that interact with religious systems in manifold ways. Within these pluralisms, discourses of perfect knowledge can be addressed as “esoteric discourse”. The notion of esoteric discourse helps us to reconstruct the genealogies of modern identities in a pluralistic competition of knowledge.