Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley spent his last two decades chasing a single question: do the world’s mystical traditions point at the same thing? He was a novelist first, the author of Brave New World (1932), but by the 1940s he’d turned toward Christian mysticism and its counterparts across Asia, and the result was The Perennial Philosophy (1945), an anthology of St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, the Bhagavad-Gita, and Taoist texts, arranged so the overlaps did the arguing for him. Meister Eckhart gets more citations than anyone else in the index, five lines’ worth, which tells you where Huxley’s sympathies actually sat even inside a book that refused to found a religion. The publisher’s own jacket copy called it an attempt to find the “Highest Common Factor of all theologies,” and that phrase is about as close as Huxley ever came to a mission statement.

He came to this late, and it cost him something to get there. His mother died when he was fourteen; an eye infection left him nearly blind not long after; his brother took his own life a few years on. That’s a lot of loss for one adolescence, and the Oral Cancer Foundation’s biography is right to link it to the “life-long preoccupation with transience” that runs under everything he wrote afterward, comedy included.

What’s striking, reading him now, is how little interest he had in picking a winner among traditions. He wasn’t syncretizing for effect. He genuinely seems to have believed the mystics were reporting the same territory in different dialects, and he’d rather quote an obscure line from William Law than a famous one, because familiarity breeds a “reverential insensibility” that dulls the actual claim being made. That’s a generous way to read scripture, and it’s one FireSoul shares more than it lets on.

The Doors of Perception (1954) came later and pointed the same instinct at mescaline instead of monks. By the time he died in Los Angeles on 22 November 1963, the same day as Kennedy’s assassination, he’d spent a career insisting that the wisdom traditions weren’t rivals. They were dialects of one grammar.