7 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
British-American philosopher and prolific writer who became the primary interpreter of Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and Vedanta for mid-20th-century Western audiences — dissolving the Eastern/Western philosophical boundary for a generation of countercultural seekers.
Huston Smith's 1976 argument for the perennial philosophy — that the world's major religious traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Indigenous) share a common metaphysical structure of hierarchically ordered levels of being (terrestrial, intermediate, celestial, infinite) that modern reductionist science has displaced.
American scholar of comparative religion who wrote The World's Religions — the most widely used world religions textbook in the United States — and Forgotten Truth — arguing for the perennial philosophy's account of a common metaphysical hierarchy underlying all the world's major religious traditions.
American professor of Religion at Rice University who has written extensively on the relationship between mysticism, the paranormal, and human sexuality — including Kali's Child (on Ramakrishna), Authors of the Impossible (on paranormal researchers), Mutants and Mystics (on comic books and the paranormal), and The Superhumanities.
American professor of literature and mythologist — author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces — who created the monomyth (Hero's Journey) framework by synthesizing world mythology — whose work was the intellectual foundation for George Lucas's Star Wars.
Joseph Campbell's 1949 synthesis of world mythology — arguing that all myths share a common structure (the monomyth or Hero's Journey) derived from Jungian archetypes — the foundational text for narrative theory and screenwriting.
Russian-American occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society (1875). Her major works claimed contact with Mahatmas and synthesized Eastern religion with Western occultism, launching the modern spiritual movement known as Theosophy.