esotericism including those of W. Hanegraaff that is popular today among European
scholars and its alternatives developing in the USA and the United Kingdom. The author
argues that these methodologies should be understood as competitive „research
programmes‟ inside the complex field of the academic study of esotericism and can‟ t be
described in terms of „old‟ and „new‟ paradigms like Hanegraaff tends to do it.