Richard Smoley
Richard Smoley is an author and philosopher focusing on the world's mystical and esoteric teachings, particularly those of Western civilization.
Early life and education
Smoley was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1956. He attended the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, and took a bachelor's degree magna cum laude in classics at Harvard University in 1978. Smoley went on to Oxford University, where in 1980, he received a second bachelor's degree from the Honour School of Literae Humaniores. He received his M.A. from Oxford in 1985.While Smoley was at Oxford, he came in contact with a small group that was studying the Kabbalah, co-founded by the British Kabbalist and author Warren Kenton. Smoley subsequently started Kabbalah groups along similar lines in San Francisco, New York, and Knoxville, Tennessee, which no longer meet. As of 2023, he no longer works with students or groups.
Editorships
Smoley moved to San Francisco in 1980. In 1982 he began working for California Farmer magazine, the state's leading agricultural publication, and became managing editor in 1983. Smoley helped broaden the magazine's coverage to include controversial topics such as organic farming, and the California Farmer helped bring organic farming into the agricultural mainstream. Smoley left California Farmer in 1988.In the 1980s and 1990s Smoley continued his spiritual investigations, working with Tibetan Buddhism, the teachings of G.I. Gurdjieff, and A Course in Miracles. He was also a member of the board of directors of the now-defunct San Francisco Miracles Foundation, an organization sponsoring the work of A Course in Miracles.
In 1986, Smoley started writing for a new magazine called Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions, founded in San Francisco by Jay Kinney. After four years of writing for Gnosis and a brief stint as managing editor, he came on board as editor in November 1990. In his eight years as editor of Gnosis, the magazine published issues on subjects as diverse as Gnosticism, Freemasonry, G.I. Gurdjieff, the spirituality of Russia, and psychedelics in spirituality. Smoley's interest in the Kabbalah influenced the magazine's coverage of that tradition. In 1998 Gnosis won Utne Reader's award for best spiritual coverage. In 1999, largely for financial reasons, Gnosis ceased publication.
Smoley then moved to Brooklyn, New York, where he worked as guest editor for Leonardo, the journal of the International Society for the Arts Sciences and Technology, and subsequently to western Massachusetts, where he served as managing editor for the Anthroposophic Press in Great Barrington. He briefly taught philosophy on an adjunct basis at Holyoke Community College in Holyoke, Massachusetts.
From 2005 to 2015 Smoley worked as acquisitions editor for Quest Books, the publishing arm of the Theosophical Society in America. In 2008, he moved to the Chicago suburbs and became editor of Quest, the journal of the Theosophical Society in America, a post he continues to hold as of 2023.
Smoley is a consulting editor to Parabola. He has served as guest editor of Science of Mind magazine, and has served as a consultant for the New Century Edition of the works of Emanuel Swedenborg, sponsored by the Swedenborg Foundation in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He was on the board of directors of the Swedenborg Foundation from 2011 to 2019.
Writings
Smoley's publishing career began when he was an undergraduate at Harvard. He served as managing editor of The Harvard Advocate, the university's literary magazine, in 1977, and published a full screenplay entitled Spleen and the Ideal in the Advocate. He also edited First Flowering: The Best of the Harvard Advocate, 1866-1976, a selection from the magazine that included undergraduate writings by figures such as T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, e.e. cummings, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The collection included a foreword by the novelist Norman Mailer and a preface by the translator Robert Fitzgerald.At Oxford, Smoley helped revive the dormant magazine of Corpus Christi College, The Pelican, and published some short works in it.
In May 1999, Smoley's book Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions, coauthored with Jay Kinney, was published by Penguin Arkana. A revised edition was issued by Quest Books in 2006, and an audio version was released by Audible.com in 2013. Chapters cover Carl Jung, Gnosticism, the Kabbalah, ritual magic, shamanism, alchemy, G.I. Gurdjieff, Sufism, the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, Theosophy, and the New Age. Gustav Niebuhr, writing in the New York Times, characterized the book as "a new wide-ranging book about alternative spiritual paths." In Whole Earth, Jeanne Carstensen commented that Hidden Wisdom displayed "both historical rigor and a wink toward the divine."
Smoley's second and best-known book, Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition, was published in 2002 by Shambhala Publications. An audio version read by the author was released by Berkshire Media Artists in 2003. In his introduction, Smoley says he was inspired to write this book because there were at that point no good introductions to the mystical and esoteric traditions of Christianity, a situation he attempted to remedy. Library Journal characterized the book as "a solid introduction to esoteric Christianity for the general reader." The magazine The Sun featured Smoley and his work in a lengthy interview in its September 2003 issue.
In January 2006, Tarcher/Penguin published The Essential Nostradamus, Smoley's guide to the enigmatic prophet Michel de Nostradamus. The book contains new translations of Nostradamus's key prophecies, as well as an evaluation of his work and of prophecy in general. A second edition of this work appeared in 2011.
In 2006, Harper San Francisco published Smoley's book Forbidden Faith: The Gnostic Legacy from the Gospels to "The Da Vinci Code". A paperback edition, retitled Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism, appeared in 2007. In this book Smoley traces the history of Gnostic and other esoteric currents of Western civilization — including Manichaeism, Catharism, the Rosicrucian legacy, Freemasonry, Kabbalah, and Theosophy. It also explores how these currents have shaped modern trends and thinkers ranging from William Blake to Jung, and, in more recent times, Philip K. Dick and Harold Bloom.
Smoley's book Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity, was published in April 2008 by Jossey-Bass. His discussion of consciousness, causation, and the existence of God, The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe, was published by New World Library in November 2009. In a review of this book for Parabola, the magazine's executive editor, Tracy Cochran, wrote, "With clarity and verve, lays out famous arguments and articulations of the conundrum of the nature of consciousness so that they sparkle like jewels on the dark velvet of starlight."
Smoley's book Supernatural: Writings on an Unknown History, published by Tarcher/Penguin in 2013, is a collection of his essays on subjects including Atlantis, prophecy, Freemasonry, Nostradamus, hidden masters, and A Course in Miracles.
The Deal: A Guide to Radical and Complete Forgiveness, published by Tarcher/Penguin in 2015, is a guide to a process for self-liberation through releasing old grievances and grudges. Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul, commented that The Deal "covers just about every aspect of forgiveness. It's beautifully written, clear and practical."
In 2016, Smoley published How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really Saying about God and the Bible, a discussion of current scholarship about the Bible and how much of it is literally true.
Smoley’s 2019 book A Theology of Love: Reimagining Christianity through ‘A Course in Miracles” is written in two sections. The first uses sources including Gnosticism, the Kabbalah, Immanuel Kant, and C.G. Jung to explore the human predicament in terms of a deep loss of primal consciousness reminiscent of the Indian concept of maya. The second presents the teachings of A Course in Miracles as a remedy to this problem and as a path to a new Christian theology that discards old and self-contradictory dogmas.
Smoley’s 2022 book Introduction to the Occult is an edited transcript of audio-video recordings of Smoley providing basic guidance on concepts that are widely discussed but often misunderstood, including magic, occultism, thought power, psychic powers, healing, ghosts, life after death, and psychedelic spirituality.
Smoley’s Seven Games of Life and How to Play can be seen as his entry into pop philosophy. Updating previous models such as Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of values and Clare Graves’ Spiral Dynamics, he describes life as a series of games which everyone plays continually and concurrently: the games of survival, love, power, creativity, pleasure, and courage. To these, Smoley adds an optional “master game,” inspired by G.I. Gurdjieff and by Robert S. de Ropp’s 1968 book The Master Game, which entails waking from the slumber of ordinary life. Kirkus Reviews characterized Smoley’s book as “an eclectic, spicy smorgasbord of philosophical food for thought.”
Smoley lectures on his work throughout the United States and occasionally abroad. Videos of his lectures, many of them for the Theosophical Society in America, have been made available on YouTube. Organizations that have sponsored his lectures and workshops include the Bodhi Tree bookstore, the California Institute of Integral Studies, East-West Books, the Kabbalah Society, the Lumen Foundation, the New York Open Center, and the Swedenborg Foundation.
Smoley highlights his literary background in a foreword and afterword to a 2021 edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, published by G&D Media.