Karolina Maria Hess, an ethnology and cultural anthropology, and pedagogy graduate, is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. She is a member of several international academic societies devoted to studies of Western Esotericism and Religious Studies, and co-founder and secretary of the Polish Society for the Study of Western Esotericism. She wrote numerous papers on Esotericism in Eastern and Central Europe; currently she's working on a dissertation on Theosophy in Poland.