Night Journey to Buddh Gaia

In a letter to his friend Charles Ford, Jonathan Swift wrote: ‘I have finished my travells and I am now transcribing them: they are admirable things and will wonderfully mend the world.’ In Night Journey to Buddh Gaia, John Moriarty, like Gulliver, is a traveller to exotic places: ancient Egypt, Sumeria, Babylonia, Canaan, Judaea, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment and modern Europe, ending in the Waste Land of our own making. Calling them psychles (rather than cycles) of Western history, and seeking to mend them as he does so, Moriarty takes the reader on an exodus. Emerging, he concludes that our cultural pasts still sponsor ‘ecological havoc’, and calls for a Naissance not a Renaissance. He believes that we must be radically original, and refound city and psyche, the one a sacramental simulacrum of the other.

As the ancient Egyptians enacted a night journey through their Underworld to Sunrise, the scarab beetle pushing its ball of clay before it, this book charts a night journey through the darkness of nature and culture to Earthrise. Seeing our planet coming up over a lunar horizon, Moriarty names it Buddh Gaia (from the Sanskrit and Greek), suggesting enlightenment – future, present and back through the geological ages.

Here is a book in profound dialogue with the mystics and master spirits of civilization: Sophocles, Malory, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Milton and Racine are enlisted, with Buddha, Eckhart, Traherne and Browne; Blake, Hoderlin, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Melville; Pascal, Newton, Kant, Nietzsche and Heidegger; Rilke, Conrad and Yeats; Stevens, Lawrence and Muir; Picasso, Dylan Thomas, Geoffrey Hill and Robert Lowell. It follows its Bright Angel Trail down a Karmic Canyon to the depths of mind, engaging with the roots of language, mythology and archetype, with the nature of belief and un-belief, forging tools with which to think and perceive.

Whether rehearsing a personal Passion Narrative, orchestrating songs of origins, or in his inspired readings, Moriarty bequeaths to us a wisdom literature. As Europeans seek to re-imagine themselves, Night Journey to Buddh Gaia might also be seen as a possible prelude to a European constitution.