Book Review: Esoteric Religions Cross-Breed and Mutate on the Silk Road from Pre-History to circa 1400s #deleuze
*make sure to get the 2010 version. Global History is being re-imagined at a breakneck pace. I blame the Internet. This is highly readable, short and guaranteed to re-orient your view of Human history over and over again. The silk route was the perpetual Deleuzian Periphery where the Heretics fled. A periphery of last resort in the foothills of the Himalayas for much of recorded history.
*This book is a Landmark in the new Global Histories. Foltz takes Globalization back into prehistory. We have always already been a global soup of Syncretic thought systems. The the Ancient Irani- trades routes through the Himalayas is where recombinant ideas from China, India, Persia and Greece combined, mutated and infected the Major Civilizations. It is in this context that we can talk about Tantric Christianity, Gnostic Buddhism and Christian Buddhism.
Religions of the Silk Road:Overland Trade and Cultural Exchange from Antiquity to the Fifteenth CenturyEver since the label was coined in the late 19th century, the idea of the Silk Road has captivated the Western imagination with images of fabled cities and exotic peoples. Religions of the Silk Roadlooks behind the romantic notions of the colonial era and tells the story of how cultural traditions, especially in the form of religious ideas, accompanied merchants and their goods along the overland Asian trade routes in pre-modern times. As early as three thousand years ago Hebraic and Iranian religious ideas and practices traveled eastwards in this way, to be followed centuries later by the great missionary traditions of Buddhism, Christianity, Manichaeism, and Islam. But the Silk Road was more than just a conduit along which these religions hitched rides East; it was a formative and transformative rite of passage, and no religion emerged unchanged at the end of the journey. |
