Arts & Letters – Spirituality

There are many, many biographies of Edgar Allan Poe, the most exhaustive being Arthur Hobson Quinn’s, first published in 1941, the most concise Peter Ackroyd’s 2009 “Poe: A Life Cut Short.” Nearly all of them, however, are written by literary scholars, poets or novelists. By contrast, John Tresch’s “The Reason for the Darkness of the Night” situates our nation’s most influential writer, as I would claim Poe to be, against the...

“Gary Lachman is the author of twenty-one books on topics ranging from the evolution of consciousness to literary suicides, popular culture and the history of the occult. He has written a rock and roll memoir of the 1970s, biographies of Aleister Crowley, Rudolf Steiner, C. G. Jung, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Emanuel Swedenborg, P. D. Ouspensky, and Colin Wilson, histories of Hermeticism and the Western Inner Tradition, studies in existentialism and...

“Rudolf Steiner, (born February 27, 1861, Kraljević, Austria—died March 30, 1925, Dornach, Switzerland), Austrian-born spiritualist, lecturer, and founder of anthroposophy, a movement based on the notion that there is a spiritual world comprehensible to pure thought but accessible only to the highest faculties of mental knowledge. Attracted in his youth to the works of Goethe, Steiner edited that poet’s scientific works and from 1889 to 1896 worked on the standard edition of...