Abstract
This essay seeks to analyse the complex relationships between two worldviews that were developed in the West during the second half of the nineteenth century: esotericism and Anthropology as an academic discipline. I try to show that these two trends of thought are simultaneously heirs of the modernist project and critical of its basic system of values. In fact, Anthropology and esotericism are opposed to the Weberian model of rationality, defended nowadays by Habermas, which seeks to separate the spheres of science from those of morality and art, as if they were autonomous in relationship to each other. Three crucial concepts of esotericism are approached from an anthropological point of view: tradition, initiation and sacred science, which leads to a proposal of reintegrating human knowledge about religious experiences in their most diverse ethnographic manifestations.
Keywords
anthropology; esoterism; modernity; racionalism