In Western religious traditions, God is conventionally conceived as a humanlike creator, lawgiver, and king, a being both accessible and actively present in history. Yet there is a concurrent tradition of a God who actively hides, leading to a tension between a God who is simultaneously accessible and yet inaccessible, both immanent and transcendent, present and absent. Western Gnostic, esoteric, and mystical thinking capitalizes on the hidden and hiding God. Histories of the Hidden God explores this tradition from antiquity to today. The essays focus on three essential themes: the concealment of the hidden God; the human quest for the hidden God, and revelations of the hidden God.

Introduction: In search of the hidden God: By April D. DeConick Part I - Concealment of the Hidden God1 - Who is hiding in the Gospel of John? Reconceptualizing Johannine theology and the roots of Gnosticism2 - Adoil outside the cosmos: God before and after Creation in the Enochic tradition3 - The old gods of Egypt in lost Hermetica and early Sethianism4 - Hidden God and hidden self: The emergence of apophatic anthropology in Christian mysticism5 - God's occulted body: On the hiddenness of Christ in Alan of Lille's AnticlaudianusPart II - The Human Quest for the Hidden God6 - Obscured by the scriptures, revealed by the prophets: God in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies7 - How hidden was God? Revelation and pedagogy in ancient and medieval Hermetic writings8 - From hidden to revealed in Sethian revelation, ritual, and protology9 - Shamanism and the hidden history of modern Kabbalah10 - Dreaming of paradise: Seeing the hidden God in IslamPart III - Revelations of the Hidden God11 - Revealing and concealing God in ancient synagogue art12 - The invisible Christian God in Christian art13 - On the Mothman, God, and other monsters: The demonology of John A. Keel14 - Hidden away: Esotericism and Gnosticism in Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam15 - Conscious concealment: The repression and expression of African American Spiritualists16 - Occulture in the academy? The case of Joseph P. FarrellAfterword: Mysticism, Gnosticism, and esotericism as entangled discoursesBibliographyIndex