If Siddhartha was a story of Eastern enlightenment, Demian is very much a European, a Western Journey. I swallowed it whole. It's seems like a fever dream, and my dreams became more vivid while I read it.
What's funny, much of the language of the novel is inspired by Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche and yes, even that Jesus Dude... it's the search for the authentic self... it seems like the essential work...
But now 100 years later much of that language has been replaced by Neuro-biology, by drug therapy, by pharmacology...
It seems people today in our culture no longer search for the authentic, instead they fill their lives with POP CULTURE and PRESCRIPTION DRUGS... I wonder how that all works out...