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The Idea of the West: From Avalon to the Cold War
 By Jo Hedesan. Published in Esoteric Coffeehousewww.esotericoffeehouse.com on 27 Feb 2009.
The other day, being hit with an annoying bout of cold, I was (re)reading a shorttreatise by the medieval Iranian philosopher Suhrawardi. Suggestively called “A Taleof 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 wasexecuted 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 decadentlymaterialistic. The resilience of this perspective of the West coming from the East isremarkable. 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 themedieval world, in Ireland. Here, the adventures of St Brendan tell us how the saintsailed 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 differentview 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 tothe West and Easterners to the East for salvation. Things are much more complicatedthan 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 endof the road. The West is about death, afterlife, the latter times, and frequently aboutthe hopes of earthly survival beyond natural death.Indeed, the Greeks, Celts and other cultures viewed the West as the direction soulsdeparted after death. Yet the good souls did not simply vanish, but would continue todwell in the “Western” islands. Hence mythologies such as the Greek Islands of theBlessed and Avalon of the Britons focused on the existence of islands where deadsouls continued on living. These islands were physical places in the people’s minds atthe time: Christopher Columbus himself believed in the existence of St Brendan’sIsland (3).Apparently, these beliefs in the earthly paradise of the West did not vanish with theadvent of Judeo-Christianity. As a religion born in Israel, Christianity naturally lookedEast for inspiration: its earthly paradise was traditionally situated in the EasternGarden of Eden. The Crusades intended to recapture back the edenic land of Israeland the heavenly Jerusalem. Yet the failure of the Crusades and subsequentdevelopments made Europeans turn westward. Henceforth, early beliefs in a Western paradise and Christian hope in a new Jerusalem mixed together. An interestingdevelopment 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 Europeancontinent (4). Amerigo Vespucci’s stories of noble savages in America also sparkedvisions 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 andthe 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 anew 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 theaverage American today, as well as the political and cultural ideology of the UnitedStates, still reflects the consequences of the Puritan certitude of having been called torestore the Earthly Paradise.” (8, p.99).Surely, it wasn’t just America that created the idea of the “West” as it is understoodtoday. British authors contributed to the concept of “West” as cultural identity due tothe 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. Inthe idea of the West, writers mixed ideals originating from Christianity, the ScientificRevolution and the Enlightenment, exacerbated by an anti-communist rhetoric. Manywere so convinced that these ideas are universal that, following the fall of thecommunist regime in Eastern Europe, proclaimed the end of history (10) and soughtto explain why the West has won (11). The post-9-11 world may have proven themwrong.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 animaginary construct originating from mythology, religion and later ideology built bythe “West” itself. As the introduction tried to show, Easterners may have inheritedquite a different perspective of the West from their own mythology, which may standas 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, andwill 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: AdrienMaisonneuve).(2), (3) Jeans, P.D. (2004).
Seafaring Lore and Legend: A Miscellany of MaritimeMyth, Superstition, Fable, and Fact 
(McGraw-Hill Professional).(4) Sweet, L.I. (1986). Christopher Columbus and the Millennial Vision of the NewWorld.
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 andEschatology”, 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 
(PalgraveMcMillan).(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).
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