Studies on Western Esotericism in Central and Eastern Europe [antikvár]

György E. Szönyi IntroductionWith this volume the Research Group for Cultural Iconology and Semiography of the University of Szeged launches its new series of books. Studies in Cultural Iconology. Our purpose is to provide a forum for our own research, which has its roots in the 1980s but has been catching up with the development of scholarship ever since, having yielded fruits in various international cooperation projects and conferences organized by us. Our previous publications include the Hungarian language series, Ikonológia és müértelmezés (Iconology and Interpretation), featuring fifteen volumes between 1997 and 2019; and several English volumes touching upon various aspects of cultural iconology and emblem-atics that have been published under the labels of Papers in English and American Studies, Studia Poetica, or appeared as individual titles. From now on, we also invite new and cutting-edge results in the field of cultural iconology that we shall be delighted to present to the international scholarly community.The present volume collects essays discussing esoteric cultural representations from the Central- and Eastern European region, looking through many centuries. The study of esotericism has grown in importance since the middle of the tewntieth century. While in the premodern world (up to the end of the seventeenth century) such topics as alchemy, astrology, angelology, and magic were natural ingredients of the organic world picture; since the Enlightenment these fields of interest have become constituents of anti-rationalist counter culture or sensational topics for the Romantic imagination. Positivistic scholarship rediscovered Western esotericism, and during the nineteenth century started collecting and publicizing data, with no, or condescending value judgements, backed by Max Weber's famous dictum about "disenchantment," expecting that irra-tionalism and even religion will disappear with the advance of science.By now we know that this did not happen and will not in the future. Today we are already deeply permeated with the resurrected interest in the transcendental, called by sociologists, scholars of religious studies, and cultural historians "re-enchantment".The serious scholarly study of these tendencies started with the new War-burgian approach to medieval and Renaissance hermeticism, initiated by Aby