[1] As his biographer R. A. Gilbert described him, "Waite's name has survived because he was the first to attempt a systematic study of the history of Western occultism—viewed as a spiritual tradition rather than as aspects of protoscience or as the pathology of religion.
"[2] The more formal academic study of Western esotericism was pioneered in the early 20th century by historians of the ancient world and the European Renaissance, who came to recognise that—although it had been ignored by previous scholarship—the impact which pre-Christian and non-rational schools of thought had exerted on European society and culture was worthy of academic attention.
[3] One of the key centres for this was the Warburg Institute in London, where scholars like Frances Yates, Edgar Wind, Ernst Cassier and D. P. Walker began arguing that esoteric thought had had a greater impact on Renaissance culture than had been previously accepted.
[5] In 1979 the scholar Antoine Faivre assumed Secret's chair at the Sorbonne, which was renamed the "History of Esoteric and Mystical Currents in Modern and Contemporary Europe".
[9] By 1994, Faivre could comment that the academic study of Western esotericism had taken off in France, Italy, England and the United States, but he lamented that it had not done so in Germany.