The Islamic Renaissance had its obscurantist opponent in al-Ghazali who wrote The Destruction as an attack on the Socratic Theodicy of ibn Sina, et al. It is provably the case as noted by Dante's Divine Comedy that the route of reviving the methodology of Socratic reason to escape from the dark ages ran through the works of those inspired scholars. Of which, the Abyssinian Caliphate of Harun al-Rashid is said to have valued great books more than gold in erecting his great House of Wisdom library.
So too, the European Golden Renaissance was plagued by its own obscurantist oligarchical enemies. The touchstone for this for English speaking audiences in the U.S. at least comes by way of the imperial British magical cults. William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe valiantly and polemically opposed the Venetian spawned sorcerer's apprentices like John Dee. One such was Robert Burton who wrote the ponderous tome of forgotten superstitious babble named The Anatomy of Melancholy. I read this because I was curious as to the origin of Keats' poem The Eve of St. Agnes in that volume. The concluding stretto of all of Burton's monotonous praise of magical nonsense like using precious stones to cure all manner of illness, I was soon to find out was none other than an advertisement for Rosicrucianism.
(I may be one of the few that have read this as well as Alexander von Humboldt's magnificent antidote The Cosmos, in English translation.)
Just now, I ran across a very sad example of a trend that has been running rampant for some months in the babblings of pseudoscientific researchers promoting psychotomimetic drugs like LSD as therapeutics. These lost souls are every bit the heirs of erstwhile Nazi doctors. Here is a Google search on "LSD as social therapy." It lists "About 1,910,000 results (0.51 seconds)" I hear Oregon has decriminalized all illicit drugs... Democracy at work...
The beat goes on... As we descend circling upon the wings of Geryon into the abyss of the Inferno where sits Satan frozen in Hell.
Gustave Dore Dante's Inferno
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