ABSTRACT
No less than in our own twenty-first-century world, the nineteenth century, the period in which modern Egyptology crystallized, was a period of intense spiritual controversies. But those controversies were not, as some may now suppose, limited to the struggle between conservative, traditional Christianity and scientific modernity. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Christianity found its preeminence in the European tradition challenged not only by scientific theories like those of Charles Darwin or Charles Lyell but by a widespread interest in what may be loosely described as “esotericism”: alternative practices that led directly to what is often today defined as “new age” spirituality.
