Asked by the New York Times in 2023 what books he avoids, novelist Aleksandar Hemon replied with lettered-class oblige: “No advice books, least of all self-help manuals…”
The moment a category is pinned on something — a person, a type of literature, a politics — its relationships and parameters are fixed. In his new book, Seven Games of Life and How to Play, scholar of esotericism Richard Smoley brings a sledgehammer to that party.
At risk of further labeling, I think it is fair to say that Smoley, perhaps today’s most penetrating interpreter of Western esoteric tradition, has produced an anti-self help book. Since the esoteric tradition of which Smoley is a leading scholar posits that life exists on a sliding scale of polarities (“as above, so below”), it is a given that opposition completes.
In1616, the late-Renaissance alchemist Michael Maier (1568–1622) published an allegorical work called Lusus Serius, Latin for a “serious game.” This is Smoley’s view of life: not as a series of problems to be solved, boxes to be checked, emotions to be resolved, or even a “self” to be actualized; but as a deadly serious drama from which none of us, barring extreme countervailing measures, is free to sit out.