Marsilio Ficino and the New Platonic Academy of Florence of 1462.

“In the second half of the fifteenth century there gathered around the Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) a group of learned men that eventually became known as the “New Platonic Academy” at Florence, supposedly founded in 1462.

It was in the intellectual milieu around Ficino and his followers that Western esotericism, as it is viewed today, emerged from the various sources of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Christian mysticism, Neoplatonism, ancient and medieval magic, gnosticism, and Jewish Kabbalah merged together with the hermetism of the Corpus Hermeticum.”

—-Henrik Bogdan, Western Esotericism and Rituals of Initiation, 2007, pg. 54.