Gnosticism and the History of Religions

David G. Robertson is Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University, UK. He is co-founder of the Religious Studies Project, and co-editor of the journal Implicit Religion. He is the author of UFOs, the New Age and Conspiracy Theories (Bloomsbury, 2016) and co-editor of After World Religions: Reconstructing Religious Studies (2016) and the Handbook of Conspiracy Theories and Contemporary Religion (2018).

• List of FiguresAcknowledgments Introduction: A Strange Charm1. Against All Heresies: Gnosticism before Modern Scholarship2. The Era of Gnosis Restored: Nineteenth-century Gnostics3. The Alien God: Gnosticism as Existentialism 4. A Crack in the Universe: Jung and the Eranos Circle5. No Texts, No History: Nag Hammadi 6. A Revolt Against History: Gnostic Scholarship After Nag Hammadi7. Tongues and Misunderstandings: Messina 19668. Takes a Gnostic to Find a Gnostic: Contemporary Gnostic Groups9. The Third Way: Gnosticism in Western Esotericism10. Knowledge of the Heart: The Gnostic New Age11. The Greatest Heresy: Jeffrey Kripal’s Gnostic Scholarship12. Elite Knowledge: Gnosticism and the Study of ReligionBibliographyIndex

The book covers a lot of ground at high altitude and high speed ... Gnosticism and the History of Religions presents a story well worth telling ... Particularly valuable is Robertson’s choice to bookend the more well-trodden territory of twentieth-century Continental thought with the chapters on the nineteenth-century currents anticipating the History of Religions school and the reception of academic scholarship in contemporary Gnostic religious movements.