The Idea of the West: From Avalon to the Cold War

By Jo Hedesan. Published in Esoteric Coffeehouse www.esotericoffeehouse.com on 27 Feb 2009.

The other day, being hit with an annoying bout of cold, I was (re)reading a short
treatise by the medieval Iranian philosopher Suhrawardi. Suggestively called “A Tale
of the Western Exile”, the story follows the saga of a wisdom-seeker in the “Western”
lands (1). In this story of esoteric initiation, the “West” stands as a negative symbol of
materialism and bodily pleasure. Suhrawardi was a heretic philosopher who was
executed in 1191 by the Sultan. Yet, if you ask an average Middle Eastern man today,
chances are that he will hold similar views regarding the West being decadently
materialistic. The resilience of this perspective of the West coming from the East is
remarkable. Yet the views of the West in Europe were often different. Let’s now
briefly switch to another mythical tale, this time written on the other extremity of the
medieval world, in Ireland. Here, the adventures of St Brendan tell us how the saint
sailed to the fairy islands in the West. The voyage takes him to the borders of
Christian paradise whence he must return (2). Here we have a dramatically different
view of the West as a spiritual, if real, land of the blessed.

This over-simplistic analysis is not meant to say that the Westerners always looked to
the West and Easterners to the East for salvation. Things are much more complicated
than this, and they probably go to the core of what we feel about the cardinal points of
East and West. They are obviously linked with the Sun’s path in the sky. In the East,
the Sun is just rising, foretelling a new day. Hence the East is about renewal, hope, the
promise of a new beginning. The West is the mysterious end – the unknown at the end
of the road. The West is about death, afterlife, the latter times, and frequently about
the hopes of earthly survival beyond natural death.

Indeed, the Greeks, Celts and other cultures viewed the West as the direction souls
departed after death. Yet the good souls did not simply vanish, but would continue to
dwell in the “Western” islands. Hence mythologies such as the Greek Islands of the
Blessed and Avalon of the Britons focused on the existence of islands where dead
souls continued on living. These islands were physical places in the people’s minds at
the time: Christopher Columbus himself believed in the existence of St Brendan’s
Island (3).

Apparently, these beliefs in the earthly paradise of the West did not vanish with the
advent of Judeo-Christianity. As a religion born in Israel, Christianity naturally looked
East for inspiration: its earthly paradise was traditionally situated in the Eastern
Garden of Eden. The Crusades intended to recapture back the edenic land of Israel
and the heavenly Jerusalem. Yet the failure of the Crusades and subsequent
developments made Europeans turn westward. Henceforth, early beliefs in a Western
paradise and Christian hope in a new Jerusalem mixed together. An interesting
development occurred when Columbus came to believe that the Garden of Eden itself
– another earthly paradise – could be reached by sailing to the West of the European
continent (4). Amerigo Vespucci’s stories of noble savages in America also sparked
visions of a Western paradise; Thomas More’s Utopia may have been one of them (5).
The discovery of the Americas became equated with the discovery of a new worldly
paradise. This belief was further taken up by Protestant theologians of England and
the new colonies in America (6). Mircea Eliade suggests that the colonization of the
Americas began out of a fervor for the restoration of Christianity by establishing a
new earthly paradise (7).

Based on this “Western paradise” idea, the self-perception of America as the new
‘blessed land’ grew. As Eliade puts it, “it is very probable that the behavior of the
average American today, as well as the political and cultural ideology of the United
States, still reflects the consequences of the Puritan certitude of having been called to
restore the Earthly Paradise.” (8, p.99).

Surely, it wasn’t just America that created the idea of the “West” as it is understood
today. British authors contributed to the concept of “West” as cultural identity due to
the decline of the discourse of race in the early 1900s (9). Yet it was after World War
II and the rise of the Soviet Union that the ideology of the “West” became pervasive,
singling out Western Europe and the U.S. as the standard-bearers of the ideology. In
the idea of the West, writers mixed ideals originating from Christianity, the Scientific
Revolution and the Enlightenment, exacerbated by an anti-communist rhetoric. Many
were so convinced that these ideas are universal that, following the fall of the
communist regime in Eastern Europe, proclaimed the end of history (10) and sought
to explain why the West has won (11). The post-9-11 world may have proven them
wrong.

This has been a short and far from in-depth essay on some of the origins of the idea of
the West. The purpose has been to suggest that the West as it stands today is an
imaginary construct originating from mythology, religion and later ideology built by
the “West” itself. As the introduction tried to show, Easterners may have inherited
quite a different perspective of the West from their own mythology, which may stand
as an origin of their own rejection of the concept. In the end, the idea of the “West”
that we hear about every day is no more no less than a product of imagination, and
will survive as long as people invest their beliefs in it.

References

(1) Suhrawardi, S.A-D. (1976). Kitab Al-Mashari' Wa'l-Motarahat, Arabic texts ed.
by H. Corbin (Tehran: Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, and Paris: Adrien
Maisonneuve).
(2), (3) Jeans, P.D. (2004). Seafaring Lore and Legend: A Miscellany of Maritime
Myth, Superstition, Fable, and Fact (McGraw-Hill Professional).
(4) Sweet, L.I. (1986). Christopher Columbus and the Millennial Vision of the New
World. The Catholic Historical Review, 72(3), pp. 369-382.
(5) Cave, A. A. (1991). Thomas More and the New World. Albion: A Quarterly
Journal Concerned with British Studies, 23(2), pp. 209-229.
(6) Tuveson, E.L. (1980). Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role
(Chicago: University of Chicago).
(7), (8) Eliade, M. (1969). “Paradise and Utopia: Mythical Geography and
Eschatology”, in The Quest. History and Meaning in Religion (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press).
(9) Bonnett, A. (2004). The Idea of the West: Politics, Culture and History (Palgrave
McMillan).
(10) Fukuyama, F. (1992). The End of History and the Last Man. (Penguin).
(11) Hanson, V.D. (2000). Why the West has Won.(Faber & Faber).