The Impact of the Orient

France already had a fascination with orientalism prior to the twentieth century. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, an increased interest in the occult had emerged among French intellectual circles “to a degree unparalleled in other countries”; the main responsibility for this lay with literary figures such as Charles Nodier, George Sand, Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé, whose works were often mixed with elements “of alchemy, occultism, spiritualism, secret societies, mystical experiences, metaphysical speculation, and the doctrine of correspondences, presented under the cloak of fiction or poetry. To read them is to gain an esoteric education, whether one is aware of it or not.” A resurgence of ancient and oriental notions was, to an extent, already on the go. The nineteenth century witnessed orientalism as an expanding field of research, increasing in prestige, reputation, and influence while orientalist periodicals and societies such as the Société asiatique, the Royal Asiatic Society, the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, and the American Oriental Society were growing. Edward Said explains that the Orient in the imagination of late-eighteenth-century Europe was “a chameleonlike quality called (adjectivally) ‘Oriental,’” standing for sensuality, promise, sublimity, and intense energy. Rudhyar, too, was seduced by such a rich conceptual repertoire, wishing to inject some of these aspects into American modernity. Although American Transcendentalist philosophers and writers had already had significant affinities with Eastern philosophies, in general the American experience of the Orient prior to the twentieth century had remained limited. According to Said, knowledge of the Orient in the United States “never passed through the refining and reticulating and reconstructing processes,” and the imaginative investment was never made, “perhaps because the American frontier, the one that counted, was the westward one.” Various East–West divides and blends within the American continent indeed generated both tension and abundance for centuries, helping shape the New World's dynamic pluralism.

Since antiquity, the relationship between the oriental and the occidental has generally been regarded as one of complementary opposites: the irrational, depraved, and the “other” vs. the rational, virtuous, and the “normal.” German critic and philosopher Friedrich Schlegel had urged upon Europeans a study of Indian thought in an attempt to defeat materialism, mechanism, and republicanism, for “a new, revitalized Europe.”