Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (15 January 1953 – 29 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.

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke was born in Lincoln, England, on 15 January 1953, to David and Phyllis Goodrick-Clarke (née Gilbert). His father was a lawyer. Nicholas was the pair's only son, though his father had another son, Andrew.

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. Moving to St Edmund Hall, Oxford, Goodrick-Clarke obtained a D.Phil. in 1983.

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 made a visiting scholar at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge in Cambridge in 1982.

In 1987, he was involved in the investigation of Austrian president Kurt Waldheim for war crimes. With two other researchers he visited Germany, and was told to investigate Waldheim's ties to the Nazis; he acted as an interpreter, interviewer, and researcher for the investigation. He was also the director of IKON Productions starting in 1988. In 1992, he became the vice chairman of Keston College, and convinced the college to move to Oxford.

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.

Goodrick-Clarke was the founder and director of the Exeter Centre for the Study of Esotericism (EXESESO) within the College of Humanities at Exeter. He was a co-founder of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism (ESSWE), the founder of the Association for the Study of Esotericism (ASE), and was a founding member of the American Association for the Study of Esotericism. He edited Aquarian Press's Essential Readings anthology series on religion and esotericism from 1986 on. He also edited for North Atlantic Books their Western Esoteric Masters series, which gives biographies on central esoteric figures and anthologies of their writings.