Restoring Paradise, livre ebook

Explores European and American esoteric traditions as reflected in literature and in art.

Explores European and American esoteric traditions as reflected in literature and in art.

Focusing on how spiritual initiation takes place in Western esoteric religious, literary, and artistic traditions from antiquity to the present, Restoring Paradise provides an introduction to Western esotericism, including early modern esoteric movements like alchemy, Christian theosophy, and Rosicrucianism. The author argues that European and American literature and art often entail a written transmission of spiritual knowledge in which writing itself works to transmute consciousness, to generate, provoke, or convey spiritual awakening. He focuses on several important figures whose work has not received the attention it deserves, including American writer and Imagist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and British painter Cecil Collins, among others. While Arthur Versluis presents a new way of understanding Western esotericism in a contemporary light, above all he has crafted a book about knowing, and about how we come to know, and what "knowing" by way of literature and language actually means.

Preface


Acknowledgments


Introduction: Initiatory Transmission and the Imagination

What is Esoteric?
Initiatory Transmission and Western Esotericism
The Esoteric Imagination

Alchemy of the Word
The Field of the Imagination
The Red Thread of Gnosis
Conclusions

Divine Service: Chivalry and the Troubadours
Books within Books: Jewish Kabbalism
The Transfiguration of Earth: Alchemical Literature
The Divine Science: Theosophic, Pansophic, Rosicrucian, and Masonic Literature

Prospero's Wand: Modern Esoteric Literature
The Western Esoteric Traditions and Consciousness
Literature, Art, and Consciousness