Tag Archives: traditional religion

The Dark Side of the Enlightenment

The Dark Side of the Enlightenment: Wizards, Alchemists, and Spiritual Seekers in the Age of Reason by John V Fleming, from W W Norton, is a new release that may be of interest [HT Arts & Letters Daily, also].

John V Fleming's The Dark Side of the Enlightenment from W W Norton

 

“Why spiritual and supernatural yearnings, even investigations into the occult, flourished in the era of rationalist philosophy.

In The Dark Side of the Enlightenment, John V. Fleming shows how the impulses of the European Enlightenment—generally associated with great strides in the liberation of human thought from superstition and traditional religion—were challenged by tenacious religious ideas or channeled into the ‘darker’ pursuits of the esoteric and the occult. His engaging topics include the stubborn survival of the miraculous, the Enlightenment roles of Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry, and the widespread pursuit of magic and alchemy.

Though we tend not to associate what was once called alchemy with what we now call chemistry, Fleming shows that the difference is merely one of linguistic modernization. Alchemy was once the chemistry, of Arabic derivation, and its practitioners were among the principal scientists and physicians of their ages. No point is more important for understanding the strange and fascinating figures in this book than the prestige of alchemy among the learned men of the age.

Fleming follows some of these complexities and contradictions of the ‘Age of Lights’ into the biographies of two of its extraordinary offspring. The first is the controversial wizard known as Count Cagliostro, the ‘Egyptian’ freemason, unconventional healer, and alchemist known most infamously for his ambiguous association with the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, which history has viewed as among the possible harbingers of the French Revolution and a major contributing factor in the growing unpopularity of Marie Antoinette. Fleming also reviews the career of Julie de Krüdener, the sentimental novelist, Pietist preacher, and political mystic who would later become notorious as a prophet.

Impressively researched and wonderfully erudite, this rich narrative history sheds light on some lesser-known mental extravagances and beliefs of the Enlightenment era and brings to life some of the most extraordinary characters ever encountered either in history or fiction.”

Religion Without Revelation

Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews Religion Without Revelation by Julian Huxley:

Julian Huxley's Religion Without Revelation

 

Most of this volume is committed to elaborating a theory of religion that, while refreshingly sound in its definition of religion, was already rather dated in much of its details when biologist Julian Huxley composed it in the 1950s. In particular, he is greatly beholden to J.G. Frazer and that scholar’s evolutionary systematization of magic-religion-science (e.g. 53-60, 96). He has a somewhat naïve view of historical religions as being each “the creation of a single personality” (82), and he does not impress with his facile dismissal of historical accounts of demonic possession as being uniformly attributable to “mental disorders” (94). His attempt to launder trinitarian doctrine into humanistic symbolism is not quite up to the standard for that project set over a century earlier in Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity.

Still, there is much to like in this book. Huxley apologizes for an autobiographical chapter that demonstrates appropriate scholarly “reflexivity” far ahead of its academic time. And his ultimate solution to the conflict between traditional religion and modern science is to call for the formulation of a new scientific religion, of the sort invoked by Aleister Crowley’s illuminist agenda. The comparison might seem strange, given Huxley’s derision for the world-view of ancient and historical magic, but that world-view is not shared by Crowley’s non-supernaturalist Magick, which instead emphasizes exactly the sort of criteria that Huxley advances for “Evolutionary Humanism.” The Nietzschean “transvaluation of values” (201) for which Huxley calls is to understand that “Man’s most sacred duty, and at the same time his most glorious fulfillment … includes the fullest realization of his own inherent possibilities” (194).

The mention of “sacred” in the previous quote points up the fact that Huxley is indeed calling for a new religion, a sacred humanism, not merely granting a franchise of quasi-religious prerogative to secular humanism. There must be ritual, symbol, and narrative to appeal to the perennial human appetite for sanctity, and an intellectual apparatus to connect these with the ordering of society and personal discipline. Being trained in the methods of natural research rather than those of sacerdotal art, Huxley admits to not being able to formulate all of this from the principles that he hopes will ground it.

The point on which Huxley and Crowley are at odds in their visions of scientific religion is evident in Huxley’s title. Crowley insists on the revelation that Huxley says we should do without. Huxley sees the institutional certification of “revelation” as grounding “the unfortunate tendency of … religion to become an unduly conservative force, [which] has often led to religious thought and practice being below the general level of its times” (179). Crowley, by contrast, calls for revelation to become both epidemic and idiosyncratic: each man and woman should strive for his or her own life-governing message. And even when Crowley asserts the universal jurisdiction of the Thelemic revelation communicated to him (in Liber AL vel Legis), he cautions that each adherent should be at full intellectual liberty in the interpretation of that oracle. While Huxley rejects “the so-called revelation of Scripture” (88), Crowley’s own new scripture instructs that “All words are sacred and all prophets true; save only that they understand a little.”

In connection with Huxley’s categorical dismissal of divine revelation, he also claims that “The beliefs of theistic religions thus tend inevitably to be authoritarian, and also to be rigid and resistant to change” (185). There have been in fact many non-theistic authoritarians (e.g. Stalinists) as well as theistic antinomians (e.g. Ranters and Muggletonians). As I’ve remarked elsewhere, authoritarian religionists will naturally insist that antinomians be disqualified as irreligious, but there’s no reason to let the authoritarians own the category. If Huxley was willing to contest their ownership of religion, I don’t see why he shouldn’t have joined me and Crowley in doing so for revelation as well. [via]

 

 

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