Esoteric Coffeehouse

The other day, being hit with an annoying bout of cold, I was (re)reading a short treatise by the medieval Iranian philosopher Suhrawardi. Suggestively called “A Tale of the Western Exile”, the story follows the saga of a wisdom-seeker in the “Western” lands (1). In this story of esoteric initiation, the “West” stands as a negative symbol of materialism and bodily pleasure. Suhrawardi was heretic philosopher who was executed in 1191 by the Sultan. Yet, if you ask an average Middle Eastern man today, chances are that he will hold similar views regarding the West being decadently materialistic. The resilience of this perspective of the West coming from the East is remarkable. Yet the views of the West in Europe were often different. Let’s now briefly switch to another mythical tale, this time written on the other extremity of the medieval world, in Ireland. Here, the adventures of St Brendan tell us how the saint sailed to the fairy islands in the West. The voyage takes him to the borders of Christian paradise whence he must return (2). Here we have a dramatically different view of the West as a spiritual, if real, land of the blessed.

This over-simplistic analysis is not meant to say that the Westerners always looked to the West and Easterners to the East for salvation. Things are much more complicated than this, and they probably go to the core of what we feel about the cardinal points of East and West. They are obviously linked with the Sun’s path in the sky. In the East, the Sun is just rising, foretelling a new day. Hence the East is about renewal, hope, the promise of a new beginning. The West is the mysterious end – the unknown at the end of the road. The West is about death, afterlife, the latter times, and frequently about the hopes of earthly survival beyond natural death.

Indeed, the Greeks, Celts and other cultures viewed the West as the direction souls departed after death. Yet the good souls did not simply vanish, but would continue to dwell in the “Western” islands. Hence mythologies such as the Greek Islands of the Blessed and Avalon of the Britons focused on the existence of islands where dead souls continued on living. These islands were physical places in the people’s minds at the time: Christopher Columbus himself believed in the existence of St Brendan’s Island (3).

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