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Anarchism and Mysticism Paul Cudenec, The Anarchist Revelation: Being What We're Meant to Be Sussex: Winter Oak Press, 2013; 144pp; ISBN 978-0957656604.
As I opened this present book, with a cover embellished with an anarchist symbol, two thoughts came to mind. One was that I noticed the book was prefaced with a quotation from the Bhagavad Gita, implying that humans were 'immortal' beings. What on earth, I thought, had such nonsense to do with anarchism? A second thought was evoked by the memory of a banner hung at the recent anarchist bookfair; it read: 'Religion is stupid; murderous, bigoted and sexist crap'.
Why then was a book purporting to be about anarchism trumpeting Hindu mysticism?
This book, in fact, consists of two quite separate themes, or rather, it is about two ideologies that the author Paul Cudenec seeks to promote and unite, namely anarchism and mysticism. The first offers his reflections on anarchism as a political tradition and movement which, quite misleadingly, Cudenec tends to equate with primitivism, thus heralding a blanket dismissal of 'civilisation' in all its aspects. The second is on religious mysticism to which he aligns Jung's psychology and thoughts on existentialism, mostly of religious existentialists such as Karl Jaspers and Colin Wilson. The work purports to forge a new and profound philosophy for the twentyfirst century. In reality Cudenec simply regurgitates, with endless quotations, a rather sterile version of medieval religious mysticism - otherwise known as 'traditionalism', 'perennial philosophy', 'theosophy' or 'esotericism' - a mysticism that entails a 'metaphysical' account of some 'divine reality' that transcends our earthly existence. Cudenec thus outlines and advocates a form of religious mysticism associated with such reactionary scholars as René Guénon, Seyyed Hossein Nasr (who doesn't get a mention), Martin Lings, Frithjof Schuon and Ananda Coomaraswamy, none of whom can really be described as anarchists, although they may have been associated with the cultural avant-garde.
Anyone who is conversant with the history of the real anarchist movement, welldescribed in Michael Schmidt's recent book, Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism (2013), will recognise that there has hardly been a connection between anarchism and mysticism. Although, of course, many mystics may have expressed an anarchist sensibility - Lao Tzu, William Blake, Nicolai Berdyaev, Aurobindo Ghose and Leo Tolstoy are...