On January 6, 1979, Andrew Harvey, the youngest person to be made a Fellow of the ultra-elite All Souls College at Oxford, stood on the south coast of India and watched a 17-year-old girl emit an aura of brilliant light. From that moment, he said, he abandoned the scientific and rationalist account of reality and embraced instead a mystical and transcendental one.
He described the experience in his book Hidden Journey: A Spiritual Awakening (1991), relating how he went to study at the ashram of Mother Meera, the girl in question, first at Pondicherry and subsequently in northern Germany. Now resident in the United States, he still teaches English literature but has also published books on spiritual and devotional topics, as well as volumes of poetry and poetry-in translation.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that he should have developed an interest in the 13th-century Islamic poet and mystic Jalal-ud-Din Rumi, currently the subject of enormous enthusiasm in California and elsewhere, and a veritable New Age cult figure.
Harvey, while clearly seeing Rumi as one of the greatest mystical writers the world has known, believes the New Age has created what he calls a Rosebud Rumi, a sweet, hazy figure conveniently unrelated to the political, and especially environmental, issues confronting us at the turn of the millennium.
What Harvey sees is a planet in crisis, with humanity on the edge of crucifying Nature itself in a suicidal orgy of pride, ignorance and greed. This impending environmental apocalypse will only be countered by a mystical renaissance that is struggling to be born. The teachings of Rumi, correctly understood, constitute the supreme charter for change in the coming battle.
The great literary critic Harold Bloom is fond of quoting the 18th-century Italian philosopher Giovanni Vico, who believed that civilisations progress through four cycles - the theocratic, the aristocratic, the democratic, and the chaotic.
