Aldous Huxley and Alternative Spirituality by Jake Poller (review)

Aldous Huxley and Alternative Spirituality is a monograph of a revised dissertation that interrogates and uncovers the intersections between Huxley's "spiritual" development and his variegated historical contexts. With a careful eye to Huxley's fiction, correspondence, lectures, interviews, and essays, Jake Poller reads Huxley (1894–1963) in a New Historicist fashion while remaining sensitized to the Western esoteric milieu in which Huxley played a key role. Writing within the context of the academic investigation into the development of the contemporary New Age through twentieth-century esotericism—occupied by such luminaries as Wouter Hanegraaff and Jeffrey Kripal—Poller makes a substantial contribution toward illuminating Huxley's position within the esoteric pantheon.

Tightly organized, Poller's account unfolds in a dialectical fashion, with stages of development being played out in Huxley's biography and fiction. The introduction supplies a brief survey of the literature and requisite definitional throat-clearing. Of note here is his definition of alternative spirituality: "[W]hat it represents was crystallizing out of the cultic milieu of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and includes spiritualism, Theosophy, the Arcane School of Alice Bailey, psychical research, astrology, Eastern religions and philosophy, the new physics, G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ousepensky, Jiddu Krishnamurti, and so on" (5). Poller then proceeds to his first chapter where he gives a broad biographical overview and the main spiritual influences on Huxley over his long career—D. H. Lawrence; Gerald Heard, a polymath and public intellectual; and Jiddu Krishnamurti, the early "world teacher" for Theosophy who later withdrew from the movement (10).

Chapters 2 and 3 chart Huxley's movement from science to his Perennial Philosophy. Poller argues that he "attempted to find a synthesis between science and alternative spirituality, and was an early adopter of the idea that the 'new physics' of relativity theory and quantum mechanics supported an idealist worldview" (10). This chapter also takes a closer look at Huxley's interest in the paranormal through his association with the Society of Psychical Research and Duke University's J. B. Rhine, a key figure in the field of parapsychology. In the third chapter, Poller spends too much time for the general reader on minutiae about the various Buddhist sects that inform Huxley's position contra other Huxley scholars. The more interesting part for religious studies scholars is how Huxley's thought is contextualized within the broader study of mysticism, flagging notable figures such as William James, Rudolf Otto, William Stace, and Steven Katz.

Chapter 4 more closely examines Huxley's mystical/pacifist turn through his relationships with Heard, Krishnamurti, and the Peace Pledge Union, while Chapter 5 is almost a stand-alone essay that analyzes Huxley's "representation of sex and body in relation to his changing spiritual convictions" (11). These "representations" are taken directly from Huxley's fiction career: 1) a romantic phase, 2) an ascetic phase, and ending with 3) a Tantric phase, "in which Huxley embraced the lifeaffirming philosophies of Tantra, Taoism, Zen and Mahayana Buddhism" (11). This chapter, in particular, requires quite a bit of familiarity with his fiction, and the real-world boundaries between life and narrative are subsumed under the daunting task of highlighting "influence."

Poller concludes with a look at Huxley's legacy vis-a-vis alternative spirituality. He underscores the strong associations between Huxley and the beginnings of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, the Human Potential movement, the New Age, and Deep Ecology. Given recent efforts at legalizing various hallucinogens, Poller's construal of Huxley's mystical reading of the psychedelic experience is particularly apropos, as is his framing of Huxley's agnostic mysticism as a precursor to the spiritual-but-not-religious emergent category.

Because of its narrow scope and $200+ price tag, Aldous Huxley is best suited to library acquisition. With a detailed bibliography and index, graduate students and scholars whose research agendas coincide with the above concerns will find a helpful entré into the Esoteric conversation. However, the New Historicist methodology (not...