Science & Tech Quote by Gustave Meyrink

Meyrink’s line reads like an occult dare disguised as comparative literature. “Read the sacred writings of all the peoples on Earth” sounds ecumenical, even humanist, until the sentence pivots: the religions aren’t being honored for their doctrines but strip-mined for a single “hidden Science.” That capital-S “Science” is doing sly work. It borrows the authority of modern rationality while insisting the real method has been smuggled inside myth, ritual, and scripture. The promise isn’t salvation; it’s technique.

The “red thread” image is a subtle rebuke to surface-level piety and to the era’s anxious hunger for systems. Early 20th-century Europe was thick with Theosophy, Hermetic revivals, and psychological experimentation; Meyrink, a writer steeped in esotericism, frames spirituality as a pan-cultural manual for consciousness rather than a set of competing truths. He’s not asking you to convert, he’s asking you to decode.

“Attaining and maintaining wakefulness” lands with double force. On one level it’s mystical vigilance: lucidity, presence, the refusal to sleepwalk through existence. On another, it’s a jab at modern stupor - a culture of habit, conformity, and secondhand belief. Meyrink implies the sacred texts are less about God than about attention: practices designed to keep the mind from collapsing into automatic life. The subtext is elitist but energizing: anyone can read the texts, but only a disciplined reader finds the method running underneath like contraband.