Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (15 January 195329 August 2012) was a British historian and professor of Western esotericism at the University of Exeter, best known for his authorship of several scholarly books on the history of occultism in Nazism and Western esotericism, including The Occult Roots of Nazism, Hitler's Priestess, and Black Sun.

He edited and translated several other books, and edited two academic book series on religion and esotericism. Goodrick-Clarke was the founder and director of the Exeter Centre for the Study of Esotericism (EXESESO), and the co-founder of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism.

Early life and education

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke was born in Lincoln, England, on 15 January 1953, to David and Phyllis Goodrick-Clarke (). His father was a lawyer.

Goodrick-Clarke was an Open Exhibitioner at Lancing College. He studied German, politics, and philosophy at the University of Bristol, and gained a Bachelor of Arts with distinction in 1974.

Career

During his education he worked as a schoolmaster, first in Perth, Scotland from 1978 to 1980, before moving to Schelklingen in West Germany until 1981, and at Cambridge until 1982. From 1982 to 1985, he was the manager of the Chase Manhattan Bank in London. He also worked on a fundraiser for the Campaign for Oxford. He was also the director of IKON Productions starting in 1988.

In 2002, he was appointed a Research Fellow in Western Esotericism at the University of Lampeter. In 2005 he was appointed to a personal chair of western esotericism in the Department of History at Exeter University. It was the third university to create a chair dedicated to esotericism. His 1982 Oxford Ph.D. dissertation, The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany, 1890–1935: Reactionary Political Fantasy in Relation to Social Anxiety, was the basis for his most influential work, The Occult Roots of Nazism.

This book is about the connections between Nazism and occultism. Goodrick-Clarke wrote that he found the previous discussion of the connection to be "a literature rich in mystery and suggestion, but short on facts and hard evidence", but that after looking into it he found "there was a hard kernel of truth" to the connection, the improbable accounts disregarded, once he had done historical research. He wrote another book as a follow-up to The Occult Roots of Nazism, Black Sun, published in 2002, focusing on modern occult kinds of neo-Nazism. His final book, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction, was published by Oxford University Press in 2008. He also contributed several chapters to academic edited volumes and encyclopedias. which was later reissued as part of the Western Esoteric Masters series.

The 2021 academic book Innovation in Esotericism from the Renaissance to the Present, edited by Georgiana D. Hedesan and Tim Rudbøg, was dedicated to him. The editors describe him as "one of the foremost pioneering scholars of the academic study of Western Esotericism".

Bibliography

Authored

Edited

Translations

References

  • EXESESO (Exeter Centre for the Study of Esotericism)