Edward Said’s notion of the complicity between colonialism and Orientalism is well known. In this study, I explore an avatar of Orientalism, namely, neo-Orientalism, which has emerged with sharp definition in the post-World War II era. Like Orientalism, neo-Orientalism continues to shape actual knowledge of the “Orient” into a collection of fragments about the “East” in order to tame it; once tamed, it is the “West’s” to excavate for its “gems.” In the present, we continue to mine the religions of the East for their spiritual wealth. As I will show in a study of academics, music, and ideas about sexuality and therapy in the 1990’s, this is usually done within the Orientalist imagining of a resemblance between East and West, and of the East as the West’s salvation, without concern for the religious significance of what is being mined.
