Aleister Crowley Reads Occult Poetry in the Only Known Recordings of His Voice (1920)

in Literature, Poetry, Religion | October 18th, 2016

Image by Jules Jacot Guillarmod, via Wikimedia Commons

Last week, we brought you a rather strange story about the rivalry between poet William Butler Yeats and magician Aleister Crowley. Theirs was a feud over the practices of occult society the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; but it was also—at least for Crowley—over poetry. Crowley envied Yeats’ literary skill; Yeats could not say the same about Crowley. But while he did not necessarily respect his enemy, Yeats feared him, as did nearly everyone else. As Yeats’ biographer wrote a few months after Crowley’s death in 1947, “in the old days men and women lived in terror of his evil eye.”

The press called Crowley “the wickedest man in the world,” a reputation he did more than enough to cultivate, identifying himself as the Anti-Christ and dubbing himself “The Beast 666.” (Crowley may have inspired the “rough beast” of Yeats’ “The Second Coming.”) Crowley did not achieve the literary recognition he desired, but he continued to write prolifically after Yeats and others ejected him from the Golden Dawn in 1900: poetry, fiction, criticism, and manuals of sex magic, ritual, and symbolism—some penned during famed mountaineering expeditions.

Throughout his life Crowley was variously a mountaineer, chess prodigy, scholar, painter, yogi, and founder of a religion he called Thelema. He was also a heroin addict and by many accounts an extremely abusive cult leader. However one comes down on Crowley’s legacy, his influence on the occult and the counterculture is undeniable. To delve into the history of either is to meet him, the mysterious, bizarre, bald figure whose theories inspired everyone from L. Ron Hubbard and Anton LaVey to Jimmy Page and Ozzy Osbourne.

Without Crowley, it’s hard to imagine much of the dark weirdness of the sixties and its resulting flood of cults and esoteric art. For some occult historians, the Age of Aquarius really began sixty years earlier, in what Crowley called the “Aeon of Horus.” For many others, Crowley’s influence is inexplicable, his books incoherent, and his presence in polite conversation offensive. These are understandable attitudes. If you’re a Crowley enthusiast, however, or simply curious about this legendary occultist, you have here a rare opportunity to hear the man himself intone his poems and incantations.

“Although this recording has previously been available as a ‘Bootleg,’” say the CD liner notes from which this audio comes, “this is its first official release and to the label’s knowledge, contains the only known recording of Crowley.” Recorded circa 1920 on a wax cylinder, the audio has been digitally enhanced, although “surface noise may be evident.” Indeed, it is difficult to make out what Crowley is saying much of the time, but that’s not only to do with the recording quality, but with his cryptic language. The first five tracks comprise “The Call of the First Aethyr” and “The Call of the Second Aethyr.” Other titles include “La Gitana,” “The Pentagram,” “The Poet,” “Hymn to the American People,” and “Excerpts from the Gnostic Mass.” (Find a complete tracklist at Allmusic.)

It’s unclear under what circumstances Crowley made these recordings or why, but like many of his books, they combine occult liturgy, mythology, and his own literary utterances. Love him, hate him, or remain indifferent, there’s no getting around it: Aleister Crowley had a tremendous influence on the 20th century and beyond, even if only a very few people have made serious attempts to understand what he was up to with all that sex magic, blood sacrifice, and wickedly bawdy verse.

Aleister Crowley The Great Beast Speaks 1920 — 1936 is available on Spotify. If you need to download Spotify’s software, get it here. It will be added to our list, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.

Aleister Crowley: The Wickedest Man in the World Documents the Life of the Bizarre Occultist, Poet & Mountaineer

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Aleister Crowley & William Butler Yeats Get into an Occult Battle, Pitting White Magic Against Black Magic (1900)

in Poetry, Religion | October 10th, 2016

Aleister Crowley—English magician and founder of the religion of Thelema—has been admired as a powerful theorist and practitioner of what he called “Magick,” and reviled as a spoiled, abusive buffoon. Falling somewhere between those two camps, we find the opinion of Crowley’s bitter rival, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who once passionately wrote that the study of magic was “the most important pursuit of my life….. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”

Crowley would surely say the same, but his magic was of a much darker, more obsessive variety, and his success as a poet insignificant next to Yeats. “Crowley was jealous,” argues the blog Rune Soup, “He was never able to speak the language of poetic symbol with the confidence of a native speaker in the way Yeats definitely could.” In a 1948 Partisan Review essay, literary critic and Yeats biographer Richard Ellmann tells the story differently, drily reporting on the conflict as its participants saw it—as a genuine war between competing forms of practical magic.

Having been ejected from the occult Theosophical society for his magical experiments, writes Jamie James at Lapham’s Quarterly, Yeats joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, “an even more exotic cult, which claimed direct descent from the hermetic tradition of the Renaissance and into remote antiquity.” At various times, the order included writers Arthur Machen and Bram Stoker, Yeats’ beloved Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, and famous magicians Arthur Edward Waite and Crowley. (Just below, see a page from Yeats’ Golden Dawn journal. See several more here.)

“When Crowley showed a tendency to use his occult powers for evil rather than for good,” Ellmann writes, “the adepts of the order, Yeats among them, decided not to allow him to be initiated into the inner circle; they feared that he would profane the mysteries and unleash powerful magic forces against humanity.” Crowley’s ouster lead to a confrontation in 1900 that might make you think—depending on your frame of reference—of the warring magicians on South Park or of Susanna Clark’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, or both. “Crowley refused to accept their decision,” writes Ullmann, and after some astral attacks on Yeats,

.… in Highlander’s tartan, with a black Crusader’s cross on his breast… Crowley arrived at the Golden Dawn temple in London. Making the sign of the pentacle inverted and shouting menaces at the adepts, Crowley climbed the stairs. But Yeats and two other white magicians came resolutely forward to meet him, ready to protect the holy place at any cost. When Crowley came within range the forces of good struck out with their feet and kicked him downstairs.

This almost slapstick vanquishing became known as “the Battle of Blythe Road” and has been immortalized in a publication of that very name, with accounts from Crowley, Yeats, and Golden Dawn adepts William Westcott, Florence Farr and others. But the war was not won, Ellmann notes, and Crowley went looking for converts—or victims—in London, while Yeats attempted to stop him with “the requisite spells and exorcisms.” One such spell supposedly sent a vampire that “bit and tore at his flesh” as it lay beside Crowley all night. Despite Yeats’ supernatural interventions, one of Crowley’s targets, a young painter named Althea Gyles, was “finally forced to give way entirely to his baleful fascination.”

Ellmann’s both humorous and unsettling narrative shows us Crowley-as-predator, a characterization the wealthy Englishman had apparently earned, as “responsible governments excluded him from one country after another lest he bring to bear upon their inhabitants his hostile psychic ray.” [Brenda Maddox at The Guardian gives a slightly different account of the Battle, in which “Yeats, with a bouncer, saw him off the premises, called in the police and ended up (victorious) in court.” ] Yeats and the other members’ distaste for Crowley surely had something to do with his predatory behavior. But the rivalry was also indeed a poetic one, albeit extremely one-sided.

As Crowley biographer Lawrence Sutin writes, “the earnestness of the young Crowley could not compensate, in Yeats’ mind, for the technical difficulties and rhetorical excesses of his verse.” Yeats’ opinion “infuriated Crowley,” who indulged in the magic of projection, writing “What hurt him [Yeats] was the knowledge of his own incomparable inferiority.” Crowley’s remarks are both “ridiculous,” Sutin comments, and apply “far more convincingly to Crowley himself.” Nevertheless, Crowley’s “Magick,” continued to make Yeats uneasy, and he may have invoked Crowley in his famous line about the “rough beast” slouching toward Bethlehem in 1919’s “The Second Coming.”

While the magical battle between them might provoke more laughter than curiosity about their different brands of magic, Sutin notes a crucial difference that distinguishes the two men: “whereas Crowley placed himself in the services of the Antichrist ‘the savage God’ of the new cycle, Yeats’s fidelity was to ‘the old king,’ to ‘that unfashionable gyre.’” The gyre, so central an image in “The Second Coming,” stands for Yeats’ theory of time and history, and it belongs to an old mysticism and folklore that for him were synonymous with poetry.

Crowley viewed the occult as a source of personal power—his revelations filled books devoted to explaining the philosophy of Thelema (“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will); ” Yeats was certainly more of an “organization man… in his occult activities,” writes Maddox, and sought to practice magic as a holistic activity, fully integrated into his social, political, and aesthetic life. His “public philosophy,” as he called it, writes James, “propounds an extraordinarily convoluted system that aims to integrate the human personality with the cosmos.”

To understand Crowley’s magical thinking, we can probably skip his poetry and attempt as best we can to the decipher his several arcane, technical books full of invented terms and symbols. To understand Yeats, as much as that’s possible, we need to read his poetry, the purest expression of his mystical system and symbolic thought.

via Metafilter

Rare 1930s Audio: W.B. Yeats Reads Four of His Poems

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Carl Sagan & the Dalai Lama Meet in 1991 and Discuss When Science Can Answer Big Questions Better Than Religion

in Religion, Science | September 14th, 2016

Images via Wikimedia Commons

In a 1997 essay in Natural History, Stephen Jay Gould (in)famously called the realms of religion and science “Nonoverlapping Magisteria”—a phrase that acknowledges both endeavors as equally powerful and important to human life. His theory entails “respectful discourse” and “constant input from both magisteria toward the common goal of wisdom.” Many partisans then and now have found the idea hopelessly naïve or misguided, and Gould did describe a rather specifically enlightened example of the position: a person seeking “a more spiritual view of nature” who also acknowledges “the factuality of evolution and other phenomena.” An educated skeptic, with mystical and poetic sensibilities.

The majority of religious believers do not fit this description. But some do. So too did Carl Sagan, to whom Gould dedicated his essay in a postscript. Sagan “shared my concern for fruitful cooperation between the different but vital realms of science and religion.” However, like Gould, Sagan gave the scientific method the override, and strenuously advocated that we all do likewise or become easily duped by charlatans or by our own flawed perceptions. Sagan acknowledged the cosmos as a great mystery—one he wanted to understand, not worship. And he spoke of the natural world with the kind of lyrical awe and reverence often reserved for the supernatural.

Sagan, in fact, organized and attended the meeting at the Vatican that occasioned Gould’s essay. He also found himself, in the early 1990s, connecting deeply with another world religious leader, the Dalai Lama. The exiled Tibetan Buddhist and the astrophysicist first met in Ithaca in 1991, sitting down for the discussion recorded in the video above. Unfortunately, the production quality renders this recording nearly unwatchable. Their conversion is audible but they both disappear into a pixelated blue blur. That said, the conversation merits preservation in any form (you can also read a transcript of their talk here).

Sagan puts to the Dalai Lama the question he asked every major religious leader he met with: “What happens if the doctrine of a religion—Buddhism let’s say—is contradicted by some finding, some discovery—in science, let’s say—what does a believer in Buddhism do in that case?” The answer below came very much as a surprise to Sagan, who later said the Dalai Lama “replied as no traditionalist or fundamentalist religious leaders do.”

DL: ‘For Buddhists that is not a problem. The Buddha himself made clear that the important thing is your own investigation. You should know the reality, no matter what the scripture says. In case you find a contradiction—opposite of the scriptures’ explanation—you should rely on that finding, rather than scripture.’

CS: ‘So, that is very much like science?’

DL: ‘Yes, that’s right. So I think that the basic Buddhist concept is that at the beginning it is worthwhile or better to remain skeptical. Then carry out experiments through external means as well as internal means. If through investigation things become clear and convincing, then it is time to accept or believe. If, through science, there is proof that after death there is no continuity of human mind, of life, then—theoretically speaking—Buddhists will have to accept that.’

Of course, many Buddhists may not find this surprising at all. The principles the Dalai Lama outlines are clearly outlined in the Kalama Sutta, a supposed discourse of the Buddha in which he issues a “Charter of Free Inquiry” as one interpretation has it. It is indeed a unique feature in world religions, though the Dalai Lama did add—“mischievously,” said Sagan—that “it will be hard to disprove reincarnation!” In such areas where a proposition cannot be falsified, religion and science may agree to disagree—civilly or otherwise—or change the subject. In the course of their acquaintance, Sagan and the Dalai Lama disagreed on very little.

When it comes to Buddhism, the Dalai Lama points out that the conversation between science and religion is hardly one-sided: “Some scientists also show a genuine and keen interest in Buddhist explanations…. One thing is quite clear: As far as mental sciences are concerned, Buddhism is very highly advanced.” The interest researchers and neuroscientists have shown in Buddhist psychology and meditative therapy has only increased in the past twenty-five years, such that entire departments devoted to mindfulness meditation have sprung up at venerable universities and respected medical schools.

And since Sagan’s death in 1996, the Dalai Lama has continued to reflect on the convergences between scientific discovery and Buddhism in his books and talks. And Sagan’s widow Ann Druyan has carried on Sagan’s legacy, sharing the awe and wonder of science with a popular audience through film, print, and television. In 2007, Druyan appeared at Cornell to talk about the affinities between Sagan and the Dalai Lama during their first and subsequent meetings. You can see her talk in full here.

Carl Sagan Issues a Chilling Warning to America in His Final Interview (1996)

The Dalai Lama on the Neuroscience of Compassion

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The History of Spiritual Jazz: Hear a Transcendent 12-Hour Mix Featuring John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Herbie Hancock & More

in Jazz, Music, Religion | September 12th, 2016

Jazz has inspired a great many things, and a great many things have inspired jazz, and more than a few of the music’s masters have found their aspiration by looking — or listening — to the divine. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they subscribe to traditional religion. As befits this naturally eclectic music that grew from an inherently eclectic country before it internationalized, its players tend to have an eclectic conception of the divine. In some of their interpretations, that conception sounds practically all-encompassing. You can experience the full spectrum of these aural visions, from the deeply personal to the fathomlessly cosmic, in this four-part, twelve-hour playlist of spiritual jazz from London online radio station NTS.

“During the tumultuous ’60s, there was a religious revolution to accompany the grand societal, sexual, racial, and cultural shifts already afoot,” writes Pitchfork’s Andy Beta. “Concurrently, the era’s primary African-American art form reflected such upheaval in its music, too: Jazz began to push against all constraints, be it chord changes, predetermined tempos, or melodies, so as to best reflect the pursuit of freedom in all of its forms.”

This culminated in John Coltrane’s masterpiece A Love Supreme, which opened the gates for other jazz players seeking the transcendent, using everything from “the sacred sound of the Southern Baptist church in all its ecstatic shouts and yells” to “enlightenment from Southeastern Asian esoteric practices like transcendental meditation and yoga.”

It goes without saying that you can’t talk about spiritual jazz without talking about John Coltrane. Nor can you ignore the distinctive music and theology of Herman Poole Blount, better known as Sun Ra, composer, bandleader, music therapist, Afrofuturist, and teacher of a course called “The Black Man in the Cosmos.” NTS’ expansive mix offers work from both of them and other familiar artists like Alice Coltrane, Earth, Wind & Fire, Herbie Hancock, Gil Scott-Heron, Ornette Coleman, and many more (including players from as far away from the birthplace of jazz as Japan) who, whether or not you’ve heard of them before, can take you to places you’ve never been before. Start listening with the embedded first part of the playlist above; continue on to parts two, three, and four, and maybe — just maybe — you’ll come out of it wanting to found a church of your own.

Discover the Church of St. John Coltrane, Founded on the Divine Music of A Love Supreme

Sun Ra’s Full Lecture & Reading List From His 1971 UC Berkeley Course, “The Black Man in the Cosmos”

Sun Ra Plays a Music Therapy Gig at a Mental Hospital; Inspires Patient to Talk for the First Time in Years

The Cry of Jazz: 1958’s Highly Controversial Film on Jazz & Race in America (With Music by Sun Ra)

Space Jazz, a Sonic Sci-Fi Opera by L. Ron Hubbard, Featuring Chick Corea (1983)

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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How to Get Started with Yoga: Free Yoga Lessons on YouTube

in Health, How to Learn for Free, Religion | September 9th, 2016

If you’ve dipped even a toe into the yoga world lately, you’ve perhaps noticed controversies raging from East to West about the Hindu practice of meditative postures (āsanas). Is yoga religious? If so, does practicing it in schools violate religious freedoms; does the Indian government’s endorsement of yoga slight Indian Muslims? Is yoga an ancient spiritual practice or modern invention? Is Western yoga “cultural appropriation,” as both campus groups and Hindu groups allege? Is there such a thing as “Real Yoga” and is “McYoga” killing it?

These questions and more get debated on a daily basis online, on campus, and in statehouses and councils. No one is likely to find resolution any time soon. However, you may have also heard about the health benefits of yoga, trumpeted everywhere, including Harvard Medical School and the Mayo Clinic, and you can safely ignore the politics, and learn the physical practice in any number of ways.

Like millions of other people, you may find that it helps you “fight stress and find serenity” as Mayo writes; or become a “mindful eater,” boost “weight loss and maintenance,” enhance fitness, and improve cardiovascular health, according to Harvard.

Various teachers and schools will make other claims about yoga’s practical and spiritual effects. These you are free to take on faith, experience yourself, or check against scientific sources. And when you’re ready to get out of your head and connect your mind and body, try a yoga class. Skip the gym and Lululemon. You don’t even have to leave your home or get out your wallet. We have several free online yoga classes represented here, from reputable, experienced teachers offering poses for beginners and for experienced yogis, and for all sorts of ailments and types of physical training.

The first, Yoga with Adriene, opens things up gently with “Yoga for Complete Beginners,” at the top, a 20 minute “home yoga workout” that requires no special props or prior experience. From here, you can browse Adriene’s Youtube channel and find playlists like the 38-video “Foundations of Yoga” and 10-video “Yoga for Runners” sequence, further down. You can also read a profile of Adriene in The New York Times.

Should Adriene’s approach strike you as too casual with the yogic tradition, you might find the instruction of Sri K. Pattabhi Jois more to your liking. His one-hour “Primary Series Ashtanga” video, above, opens with this disclaimer: “The following video is NOT an Exercise Video. It is intended for educational, artistic, and spiritual purposes only.” The text also warns that Master Sri K. Pattabhi Jois’ yoga practice is taught “to six highly experienced students,” as will become clear when you watch his video.

Other courses—from yoga video series by Kino Yoga and Yoga Journal—gesture to both ends of the purely fitness-based and purely spiritual-based spectrum, and both have beginner series, above and below. It’s up to you to decide where you stand in the yoga wars, if anywhere. You’ll find, if you look, no shortage of reportage, think pieces, academic articles, and rants to fill you in. But if you want to learn the physical practice of yoga, you needn’t look far to get started. In addition to the resources here, take a look at some curated lists of online yoga classes from New York Magazine, Huffington Post, and Elle UK. Thanks go to our Twitter followers, who gave us some helpful hints. If you have your own tips/favorites, please drop them in the comments section below.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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William Blake’s Masterpiece Illustrations of the Book of Job (1793–1827)

in Art, Literature, Poetry, Religion | September 9th, 2016

Orthodox thinkers have not often found the answers to suffering in the Book of Job particularly comforting—an early scribe likely going so far as interpolating the speech of one of Job’s more Pollyannaish friends. The gnarly metaphysical issues raised and never quite resolved strike us so powerfully because of the kinds of things that happen to Job—unimaginable things, excruciatingly painful in every respect, and almost patently impossible, marking them as legend or literary embellishment, at least.

But his ordeal is at the same time believable, consisting of the pains we fear and suffer most—loss of health, wealth, and life. Job is the kind of story we cannot turn away from because of its horrific car-wreck nature. That it supposedly ends happily, with Job fully restored, does not erase the suffering of the first two acts. It is a huge story, cosmic in its scope and stress, and one of the most obviously mythological books in the Bible, with the appearance not only of God and Satan as chatty characters but with cameos from the monsters Behemoth and Leviathan.

Such a story in its entirety would be very difficult to represent visually without losing the personal psychological impact it has on us. Few, perhaps, could realize it as skillfully as William Blake, who illustrated scenes from Job many times throughout his life. Blake began in the 1790s with some very detailed engravings, such as that at the top of the post from 1793. He then made a series of watercolors for his patrons Thomas Butts and John Linell between 1805 and 1827. These—such as the plate of “Behemoth and Leviathan” further up—give us the mythic scale of Job’s narrative and also, as in “Job’s Despair,” above, the human dimension.

Blake’s final illustrations—a series of 22 engraved prints published in 1826 (see a facsimile here)—“are the culmination of his long pictorial engagement with that biblical subject,” writes the William Blake Archive. They are also the last set of engravings he completed before his death (his Divine Comedy remained unfinished). These illustrations draw closely from his previous watercolors, but add many graphic design elements, and more of Blake’s idiosyncratic interpretation, as in the plate above, which shows us a “horrific vision of a devil-god.” In the full page, below, we see Blake’s marginal glosses of Job’s text, including the line, right above the engraving, “Satan himself is transformed into an Angel of Light & his Ministers into Ministers of Righteousness.”

Other pages, like that below of Job and his friends/accusers, take a more conservative approach to the text, but still present us with a strenuous visual reading in which Job’s friends appear far from sympathetic to his terrible plight. It’s a very different image than the one at the top of the post. We know that Blake—who struggled in poverty and anonymity all his life—identified with Job, and the story influenced his own peculiarly allegorical verse. Perhaps Blake’s most famous poem, “The Tyger,” alludes to Job, substituting the “Tyger” for the Behemoth and Leviathan.

The Job paintings and engravings stand out among Blake’s many literary illustrations. They have been almost as influential to painters and visual artists through the years as the Book of Job itself has been on poets and novelists. These final Job engravings, writes the Blake Archive, “are generally considered to be Blake’s masterpiece as an intaglio printmaker.”

William Blake’s Hallucinatory Illustrations of John Milton’s Paradise Lost

Allen Ginsberg Sings the Poetry of William Blake (1970)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Ultra Orthodox Rabbis Sing Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” on the Streets of Jerusalem

in Music, Religion | August 30th, 2016

Just when you thought you’ve seen it all, we give you this: Aryeh and Gil Gat, two once fairly-secular brothers-turned-ultra orthodox rabbis, playing Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” on the streets of Jerusalem. Intrigued? Ready for more? Watch them play Dire Straits “Sultans of Swing,” Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven,” The Beatles’ “Come Together,” The Eagles’ “Hotel California,” and Floyd’s “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.”

If you live in Israel, the brothers probably won’t be strangers to you. In 2013, they became stars on the top-rated TV talent show Rising Star. And, defying stereotypes about the ultra orthodox, they proved that rock and orthodox religion can go together. For Aryeh, “the power of music is above everything.” For Gil, it’s “holy, it’s God’s work, because it creates love and connection.” Watch them play Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” and let me know if you disagree.

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Hear Lost Recording of Pink Floyd Playing with Jazz Violinist Stéphane Grappelli on “Wish You Were Here”

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A 12-Hour Eastern Spirituality Playlist: Features Lectures & Readings by Joseph Campbell, Christopher Isherwood, the Dalai Lama & Others

in Religion | August 23rd, 2016

Krishna teaching Arjuna, from the Bhagavata Gita, by Arnab Dutta, via Wikimedia Commons

Opening with 19th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s quote, “The East is a career,” Edward Said’s Orientalism traced the lineage of “the Orient” as “almost a European invention.” Through discourses scientific, political, philosophical, cultural, and otherwise, European thinkers, artists, and statesmen, Said contended, “accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions and political accounts.” But at the root of a long academic tradition of comparative analyses of “East” and “West,”—a relationship of dominance—there lay the recognition, however dim, that “The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also… the source of its civilizations and languages.”

The cultural debts that Europe owed its colonies were not the kind of thing most politicians liked to discuss, but many European and U.S. writers and scholars fascinated with the East have long recognized religious and philosophical continuities between the two hemispheres. The number of conversations between so-called Western and Eastern traditions only increased as the 20th century wore on and European Empires crumbled, giving rise mid-century to a whole society of comparative East/West religionists and writers: D.T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, Herman Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg.… Although many Western scholars’ pronouncements may have overgeneralized or distorted, interest in a dialogue has only grown since the 50s and 60s, and sympathetic presentations of Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, and other “Eastern religions” proliferated.

From this atmosphere emerged the work of Joseph Campbell, famous for The Hero with a Thousand Faces, published in 1949, a work of comparative religion that adopted a philological approach to myth like that of Campbell’s own hero, Nietzsche. Campbell may have seen East and West as distinct cultural entities—titling one lecture “The Eastern Way” and another “The Western Quest”—but his theory did not allow for a strict cultural hierarchy. In his many recorded lectures, Campbell stresses the similarities and common origins of world traditions, which inhabit, he says, a “single constellation.” We have a few of those talks in full in the 12 hour Spotify playlist on Eastern Spirituality above, including lectures on “Imagery of Rebirth Yoga” and “Hinduism,” delivered in the late sixties.

We also have Christopher Isherwood reading selections from his translation with Swami Prabhavananda of the Bhagavad-Gita. Isherwood’s famed embrace of Vedanta did much to foster inter-religious dialogue, and he left behind a “tremendous cache of self-revelatory works,” writes American Vedantist, “including essays, lectures, novels, his diaries, and the autobiographical My Guru and His Disciple.” Next to Campbell and Isherwood, we have Tibetan Buddhist authority the Dalai Lama giving an introductory lecture on Buddhism and a talk on “Cultivating Happiness.” Rounding out the playlist is another introduction to Buddhism by Emma Hignett, a reading of the Tao te Ching, and a reading by Robert Hamilton of his fascinating comparative study of world religions, Caduceus.

While each of us could, of course, take it upon ourselves to learn Sanskrit, or Pali, or Chinese, translate ancient religious literature and draw our own conclusions, we can also partake of the work of scholars and writers who have invested deeply in their subject, personally and professionally, and returned with a great deal of wisdom about global spiritual traditions. The lectures on this playlist (if you need Spotify’s free software, download it here) offer an excellent sampling of that wisdom and scholarship. You’ll find much more on our site in work by Jorge Luis Borges, Alan Watts, Robert Thurman, the Dalai Lama, Herbie Hancock, Sonny Rollins, Leonard Cohen, and many more.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness.

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Aleister Crowley Reads Occult Poetry in the Only Known Recordings of His Voice (1920)

Aleister Crowley & William Butler Yeats Get into an Occult Battle, Pitting White Magic Against Black Magic (1900)

Carl Sagan & the Dalai Lama Meet in 1991 and Discuss When Science Can Answer Big Questions Better Than Religion

The History of Spiritual Jazz: Hear a Transcendent 12-Hour Mix Featuring John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Herbie Hancock & More

How to Get Started with Yoga: Free Yoga Lessons on YouTube

William Blake’s Masterpiece Illustrations of the Book of Job (1793–1827)

Ultra Orthodox Rabbis Sing Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” on the Streets of Jerusalem

A 12-Hour Eastern Spirituality Playlist: Features Lectures & Readings by Joseph Campbell, Christopher Isherwood, the Dalai Lama & Others

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