Introduction The Idea of India in the Imaginary of Western Occultism

Abstract

There is a network of related notions, representations, and attitudes toward reality, whose characteristics and mutual relationships in varying degrees overlap, intertwine, and resemble each other, and which among others include categories such as myth, fiction, construct, imagination, and māyā.¹ From what may be defined as a conventional, historicist, or (more pejoratively) literalist position, any worldview aspiring to veracity that is anchored in the above-mentioned categories is considered invalid, flawed, erroneous, and fake. But from an alternative perspective, the presence of imaginative construction or fiction is an inescapable condition in the formulation of any account about reality. Reality is structured as fiction (Lacan). There are no facts, only interpretations (Nietzsche). The priest, the poet, the scientist, and the historian are each and every one, from this other point of view, in the final instance all storytellers, and only their respective genres, with their associated discursive conventions and methodological rules, mutually differ. It follows, from this line of thought, that fiction (the map) is an indispensable and perhaps in the final reckoning the only possible model for engagement with reality (the territory).