Other Worlds or Ours? Sacred/Secular/Gnostic/Modern

Abstract

One might be forgiven for thinking that the likes of Hermann Hesse, Erwin Schrödinger, Alexandra David-Néel, and René Guénon are of no interest today, at least to serious scholars in fields in which the study and analysis of human difference is explicitly thematized. In mainstream anthropology, one certainly gets the impression that any attempt to revive their project of Gnostic engagement with radically different “beliefs” about the nature of reality is regarded as embarrassing, if not worthy of ridicule, the example of Carlos Castaneda’s “fraudulent” claims almost inevitably being trotted out any time someone seems to be crossing the line. And they are rarely if ever included among the intellectual ancestors of contemporary students of Asian religion, being mentioned, if at all, only as purveyors of Orientalist fantasies that have long since been eradicated from the field. It would, of course, be impossible to erase Schrödinger’s name from the histories of twentieth-century physics. But metaphysical musings on the scientific relevance of Eastern philosophy, or speculations on the unitary nature of consciousness are, as we have noted, predictably dismissed as mystical by most natural scientists these days. And, as we have noted, Hermann Hesse’s Eastern writings are rarely read today by serious literary critics and theorists at least in the Anglophone world.