At the time of the Renaissance, the mystical tradition, as demonstrated in the fourth chapter, takes on a strong esoteric colouring. The Hermetic Corpus and the central texts of the Kabbalah, translated into Latin and understood as pagan and Jewish prefigurings repectively of the coming of Christ, become authoritative teachings, which, although ultimately marginalised, feed through Jakob Boehme and others into modern Orthodox thinking on theosis.

Chapter 8 examines the way in which the life of the Buddha was ‘demythologised’ so that he was then worthy of comparison with other great men of history. He became the Light of Asia, the Indian Luther, a competitor of Jesus, and the philosopher of a new rational philosophy and a this-worldly ethics for a disenchanted age. This was now a very human Buddha, neither a god nor a superman. This historical Buddha was to become normative within the West in the twentieth century, available for absorption into new forms of enchanted and disenchanted Western spirituality. The chapter ends with a discussion of the relation between myth and legend in the life of the Buddha in the modern West. It argues that the ’historical Buddha’ cannot be found behind the Buddhist texts.

The poet Rabindranath Tagore linked the scholarly quest for ‘India in Asia’ to visions of an Indian cultural renaissance, Asianist agendas and the Visva-Bharati project to inaugurate a global civilizational dialogue. This chapter examines the relationship between Orientalist scholarship, interwar Asianism and emerging visions of Indian exceptionalism. Tagore and like-minded GIS-members mobilized the ancient, transregional circulation of Buddhism to pitch Greater India as an internationalist template with contemporary relevance. Epitomizing India’s civilizational legacies abroad, the ancient Pan-Asian Buddhist ecumene was evoked as a cultural counter-geography and harmonious ‘empire of culture’. Reinforcing Theosophical visions of ancient India as Asia’s spiritual fount, and drawing on the visionary writings of the Japanese art historian Okakura Tenshin, this Buddhist past, and especially the legacies of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, were contrasted with the aggressive mode of past and present Western colonizing schemes. The topos of ‘ancient bonds’ energized calls to unite under the spiritual banner of a ‘Greater India’ and a rejuvenated ‘East’.

This chapter examines modern Kabbalah’s autonomous yet continuous relationship with premodern Kabbalah. Its autonomy is attributed to various external factors such as new technologies, geopolitical and ideological shifts, vernacular developments and dramatic historical events. These factors are evident in the self-consciousness of modern kabbalists and reflected in a shift toward larger fraternal groups, as well as increasingly disseminated personal, exoteric styles of writing. The continuity is presented through a synopsis of medieval Kabbalah, which addresses a few continuous themes: exegesis, which includes a discussion of the commitment to certain sacral texts as well as its theosophy (primarily the sefirotic system), theurgy, gender and magic (albeit with some reservation). This synopsis concludes with a comparative reflection addressing medieval Kabbalah’s relationship to Christianity and Islam. The author closes by stressing that modern kabbalists inherited not a doctrine but a series of complexities and debates, which, fueled by the dynamic processes of modernity, accounts for the richness and vastness that is modern Kabbalah.

Nothing is more characteristic of Cormac McCarthy’s literary style than what Richard Woodward has called the “biblical gravity” of his prose. While references to the Bible abound in McCarthy’s work, it is the archaic vocabulary, powerful cadence, formal and thematic repetitions, and above all the paratactic syntax of McCarthy’s style inspired by the King James Bible that provide the closest link between his fiction and the Judeo-Christian tradition. This chapter examines the convergence of religion and aesthetics in McCarthy’s work as well as the function of a biblical narrative style in the fully administered world of contemporary society. Through readings of McCarthy’s essay “The Kekulé Problem” (2017), the importance of Christian mysticism to his work, and his peculiar association with the Santa Fe Institute, the chapter shows how McCarthy’s fiction draws on the Judeo-Christian tradition in order to produce a sense of mystery in the disenchanted world of modernity. At the same time, this production of mystery entails a mystification of literature that the chapter places in the postwar literary context in which McCarthy began his writing career.

Chapter Six examines the trajectory of physical-psychical scientists in the early twentieth century.By 1900 the network of physical-psychical scientists was weaker because many had died or were too old or busy to commitment themselves to new experimental enquiries. Those strongly committed to psychical research tended to explore connections between physics and psychics via writing rather than new experiments.The writing of Lodge, Barrett, Kingsland and others explored the connections between psychical research and modern developments in physics and religion.Many thought that Lodge’s connections went too far while others did not think the connections went far enough.Among those who sought to transcend Lodge wereprofessional and amateur radio enthusiasts, and psychical researchers, and a younger generation of psychical researchers who believed relativity and quantum theories was more effective than older, mainly ether-based physics, at rendering psychical effects plausible.