A Treasury of Mystic Terms – 6 Volumes

These volumes are an amazing editorial achievement on the part of John Davidson and his team. Trained as a scientist at Cambridge, John wrote a number of books on biological principles in the 1980s and has spent much of the last 20 years in India where the research team for this work is based. The six volumes are handsomely produced on fine paper with gold-embossed lettering on the cover. In other words the quality of the books and their contents are well matched.

The titles and sections of each volume of this Part I, Principles of Mysticism are as follows: 1 – The Universe of Spirituality 2 – The Divine Eternity 3 – The Divine Creative Power 4 – The Hierarchy of Creation 5 – Man and the Cosmos 6 – The Soul in Exile Some of these volumes contain further sub-sections, but, apart from the first, they all follow the same dictionary format of alphabetical entries on the themes, with illustrative quotations from scripture, poems, philosophy and other spiritual literature. There are over 5,000 quotations in the six volumes as a whole. John explains that his aim is both information and instruction. The slant of the information is to show parallels between the traditions through comparative analysis of mystic terms and specific metaphors within the framework of a universal understanding of spirituality. The inspiration comes from the quotations, and the volumes as a whole are arranged so that the reader can browse freely.

The first volume on the universe of spirituality takes a historical approach beginning with Sumeria and Mesopotamia. The principal world faiths are well represented – Judaism, Islam, Indian Traditions, Buddhism and Taoism. In addition, there are sections on Gnosticism, the Mandaeans, Mani, Greek Mystics and Philosophers, Native Cultures and a short note on the perennial philosophy. The biggest gap here is the lack of treatment of the school of perennial philosophers that include Frithjof Schuon, Rene Guenon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Seyyed Hossein Nasr and others. Then there is equally no treatment of New Religious Movements, many of which have a gnostic or mystical basis. These movements are very much part of the contemporary 'universe of spirituality', but space may have excluded them. In the second part of the first volume there is an extensive biographic and bibliographic glossary of texts and mystics. Then at the end of this volume a 60-page bibliography and a 30-page index.

Space precludes detailed analysis of all six volumes so I will confine myself to volumes 3 and 6. Volume 3 (480 pp.) treats the Divine Creative Power, with a special section on Divine Music. Key entries in this volume include Bread, Breath of God, Life Stream, Living Water, Tree of Life and Logos, to name only some of the Western terms. Both Indian, Hebrew and Islamic terms are considered in equal detail. Breath of God extends to six pages, starting with both textual and etymological remarks and moving on to specific usages and quotations from diverse sources. Breath is an infusion of spirit that brings life. The water entries include the metaphor of the Fountain as the flowing word of God in the 'parched desert of the world'. Logos runs to over ten pages, starting with definitions and illustrating its historical development, especially in Gnostic texts. There are quotations from Heraclitus, Plato, Plotinus, Philo, Sextus Empiricus, Justyn Martyr, Antony the Great and Maximos the Confessor – which gives an idea of the extent of John's illuminating scholarly treatment.

Volume 6 – The Soul in Exile – has three parts: Evil, the Devil and the Negative Power, The Veil of the Physical, and Reincarnation, Destiny and the Law of Cause and Effect. Here the structural assumption of the work is evident: that the Divine is both immanent and transcendent, that the soul is essentially one with the Divine Source, that she has become separated by falling into forgetfulness, that the physical body is a limitation and the physical world at one level an illusion, and that the fundamental goal of all religions is a personal relationship with that primal Source. Here the emphasis is on 'experience over belief and dogma, direct perception over philosophy and theology'. The veil of the physical is variously evoked through words such as darkness, ignorance (avidya, literally 'not seeing), desert, illusion, shadow and so on. The final section includes a 10-page entry on karma and very extensive discussions (reminiscent of those in the famous Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics) on reincarnation and transmigration in ancient Greek philosophy, Christianity, Judaism and Manichaeism, amounting to over 75 pages. The discussion is historical, philosophical and mystical, stressing the inner process involved. As I said at the beginning, these volumes are a formidable editorial tour de force that should find a place in the library of any reader engaged on a mystical or more specifically gnostic spiritual path.