This invaluable anthology examines histories of esotericism, mysticism and occultism in modern Asia, understood here as the period roughly stretching from the late-nineteenth through the twentieth century, and paving eventually the way for the so-called ‘New Age’. The idea of ‘histories’, in plural, has to do with the complexities of their lineages, the many pathways through which their affinities, encounters and entanglements flowed and/or developed during the period under review. The contributors hail from different disciplines – history, literature and religious studies, for instance and, in what accounts for a cutting edge of the book, provide truly multidisciplinary insights on the subject in one single volume. Their select case studies illuminate key aspects of contemporaneous socio-religious processes. They explicate how aspects of mysticism, esotericism and occultism were closely tied to wider socio-political and intellectual processes of the period that were at once transregional, even global, and frequently transcultural and/or cosmopolitan in character. Postgraduate students, research scholars and academics in general working in the fields of religious studies and/or Asian religions in modern times will find this collection to be of great interest.
