Overview
Shows how cosmopolitan religious innovation formed common spiritual affinities in Europe and India
Reveals how heterodox religious movements intersected with the scientific, social and political domains
Shows the relationship between spiritual tenets and the domestic domain
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (10 chapters)
-
Front Matter
-
Spiritual Science: Evolution for the Soul and Spiritual Historiography
-
Front Matter
-
-
Spiritual Imperialism: Cosmopolitan Religious Partisans in Their Societies and Nations
-
Front Matter
-
-
Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
Reviews
With this highly innovative study, Perry Myers illuminates for us a subject matter that has, to a large extent, remained hitherto unexplored. Indeed, Spiritual Empires is destined to fill an important gap in our understanding of late 19th and early-20th century heterodox spirituality. The book guides us with great insight through the entanglements of religion(s) and politics, mainly between Western Europe and India, as exemplified by the Theosophical Society and Annie Besant’s efforts to promote a cosmopolitan vision of universal brotherhood across cultural and geopolitical borders. Apart from being an intrinsically fascinating topic, the emergence of such a syncretic, non-confessional religious field, fused with domestic socio-political agendas, is shown to have aimed at no less than restoring world harmony and redeeming civilization. In this erudite and intricately argued opus, Perry Myers provides us with a ground-breaking analysis of the political effects, in an era prone - like ours - to social and spiritual utopias, of invoking the divine in the public sphere, that is of assuming a purported mystical guidance to be an essential factor of community-making amongst mankind.
—Jean-Pierre Brach, Director of Religious Studies, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris
Spiritual Empires examines global forms of esotericism in the 19th and early 20th centuries in terms of the relationship between their common cosmopolitan spiritual precepts and local practice. The book perspicaciously unravels the complex and often contradictory links between religion and political schemes, which equally demonstrates the importance of a comparative perspective in understanding the combination of cosmopolitan visions and nationalized agendas in these forms of esoteric spirituality. Moreover, Perry Myers work insightfully unmasks how their articulated claim to “scientific spirituality” makes the supposedly firm boundaries between religion and the secular appear extremely fragile.
—Michael Bergunder, Professor Religious Studies and Intercultural Theology, Heidelberg University, Germany
Perry Myers, in this splendid new study, follows the varied reception of Theosophy and kindred esoteric spiritual movements appealing to intellectuals, in four countries, India, Britain, France and Germany. He gives us a new, larger, more complex picture of such movements as international phenomena reshaped by the national crises of the twentieth century.
Perry Myers’s highly ambitious and thoroughly absorbing Spiritual Empires in Europe and India explores how fin-de-siècle disillusion with the shortcomings of material progress spawned an array of cosmopolitan spiritual movements across the globe. The study demonstrates the international commonalities of movements such as theosophy, anthroposophy and monism, yet Myers also, with admirable subtlety and finesse, shows how their acclimatisation varied within individual national polities (Britain, France, Germany, India), producing sometimes very divergent results.
—Colin Jones, Professor Emeritus, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Spiritual Empires in Europe and India
Book Subtitle: Cosmopolitan Religious Movements from 1875 to the Interwar Era
Authors: Perry Myers
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81003-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-81002-3Published: 31 October 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-81005-4Published: 31 October 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-81003-0Published: 30 October 2021
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIX, 333
Number of Illustrations: 9 b/w illustrations
Topics: World History, Global and Transnational History, History of Religion, Intellectual Studies, History of Modern Europe, History of South Asia