Antoine Faivre

Antoine Faivre (5 June 1934 – 19 December 2021) was a French scholar of Western esotericism. He played a major role in the founding of the discipline as a scholarly field of study, and he was the first-ever person to be appointed to an academic chair in the discipline. Together with Roland Edighoffer he founded the predecessor to the journal Aries in 1983, which in 2001 was relaunched with Wouter Hanegraaff as its editor.

Until his retirement, he held a chair in the École Pratique des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne, University Professor of Germanic studies at the University of Haute-Normandie, director of the Cahiers del Hermétisme and of Bibliothèque de l'hermétisme.