At the time of the Renaissance, the mystical tradition, as demonstrated in the fourth chapter, takes on a strong esoteric colouring. The Hermetic Corpus and the central texts of the Kabbalah, translated into Latin and understood as pagan and Jewish prefigurings repectively of the coming of Christ, become authoritative teachings, which, although ultimately marginalised, feed through Jakob Boehme and others into modern Orthodox thinking on theosis.

Chapter 8 examines the way in which the life of the Buddha was ‘demythologised’ so that he was then worthy of comparison with other great men of history. He became the Light of Asia, the Indian Luther, a competitor of Jesus, and the philosopher of a new rational philosophy and a this-worldly ethics for a disenchanted age. This was now a very human Buddha, neither a god nor a superman. This historical Buddha was to become normative within the West in the twentieth century, available for absorption into new forms of enchanted and disenchanted Western spirituality. The chapter ends with a discussion of the relation between myth and legend in the life of the Buddha in the modern West. It argues that the ’historical Buddha’ cannot be found behind the Buddhist texts.