RELIGIOUS MOTIFS CONSTITUTE a sizeable and complex body of references in Ernest Hemingway’s Under Kilimanjaro. As the quasi-fictional narrator, Hemingway gradually prepares the reader for the birth of a “new and unknown religion” (UK, 168). First cautiously and then eagerly, the reader steps into the narrator’s religious experiences as they unfold in the lee of Kilimanjaro. Although the narrator leavens his exploration of religion with jokes, he often feels it necessary to assure his wife, Mary, and ultimately the reader, that his “new religion” is “not a joke” (420). I do take this assurance seriously.

In what follows, I intend to explore these religious motifs, their origin, and their course of development to discover what their newness consists of and what may qualify them as “unknown.” I would like to state at the outset that the essential or defining factor of this “new and unknown religion” is that it founds itself on direct, unmediated, lived experiences of what phenomenology designates as the “thing-in-itself,” or what constitutes the object of our consciousness and our senses. Such experiences disclose to the narrator and eventually to the reader that the cosmos in its entirety is a sentient — that is, self-aware — series of material phenomena. In other words: all that exists, whether it exists as organic or nonorganic matter, possesses self-awareness. Such a sentient materialism suggests a sacral universe, and thus contrasts sharply with both speculative and Marxian materialisms. As we shall see, sentient materialism has deep roots in the history of science, philosophy, and religion.