Antoine 'Tony' Faivre was Professor of Germanic studies at the University of Haute-Normandie, director of the Cahiers del Hermétisme and of Bibliothèque de l'hermétisme, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies and Chair of the History of Esoteric Currents in Modern and Contemporary Europe at École Pratique des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne, and served as editor of Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism along with Wouter J. Hanegraaff. He was awarded the Ordre National du Mérite in 2009.

Faivre was the first to define "Western esotericism" as a legitimate field of interdisciplinary academic study and is held to be one of the foremost scholars in the field he pioneered.