Olav Hammer is Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Southern Denmark. He is author of Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age (2001) and co-editor of Polemical Encounters: Esoteric Discourse and its Others (with Kocku von Stuckrad, 2007), The Invention of Sacred Tradition (with James R. Lewis, 2007) and the Brill Handbook of the Theosophical Tradition (with Mikael Rothstein, 2012).