Re-imagining Jakob Böhme: David Lindsay’s “A Voyage to Arcturus”

Re-imagining Jakob Böhme: David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus

Eric Wills

Abstract

In this article, I show how David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus is modelled on imagery and ideas in the philosophy of seventeenth century Christian mystic, Jakob Böhme. Explaining how key tenets of Böhme’s metaphysics are re-imagined by Lindsay, I go on to address the question of Lindsay’s pessimism, drawing some distinctions around the influence of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. I argue that Lindsay’s notion of the Sublime is founded on a re-sacralisation of experience drawn on Böhme’s account of God’s self-realisation in Creation. The supposition that Lindsay advanced a dualistic Gnosticism then stands to be rejected, and his pessimism tempered by the prospect of a spiritual ascent through immersion in experience.

About the Author:

Eric Wills gained his PhD from the University of Staffordshire with a thesis examining Nietzsche’s use of figurative language. He is currently interested in how ideas in the German philosophical tradition were taken up by literary authors in the early decades of the last century.

---

Published: 2026 – 06 – 01