Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Passages about Earth An Exploration of the New Planetary Culture by William Irwin Thompson Passages about Earth: An Exploration of the New Planetary Culture by William Irwin Thompson. 1 See E. R. Dodd?s ?From Shame-Culture to Guilt-Culture? in The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 28-63. 2 Leon Botstein, ?Let Teen-Agers Try Adulthood,? Op-Ed page essay, The New York Times, May 17, 1999, p. A21. 3 William Irwin Thompson, Passages About Earth: an Exploration of the New Planetary Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). p.21. 4 Jean Gebser, Everpresent Origin, trans. Noel Barstad with Algis Mickunas (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1991). 6 The Kingfisher Illustrated History of the World, ed. Jack Zevin (New York: Larousse Kingfisher Chambers, 1993).The Times History of the World , ed. Geoffrey Barraclough (London: Times Books, 1999). 7 See Remo H. Largo, Die Kinderjahre (Zvrich: Piper Verlag, 1999). There is also evidence that in mammals the close bonding, nursing, and fondling of mother and infant serves to activate gene expression and select for a healthy organism with a fully functional immune system. See Meany, M.J., Diorio, J., Francis, D., Widdowson, J., LaPlante, P., Caldji,C., Sharma, S., Seckl, J.R., & Plotsky, P.M. (1996), 'Early environmental regulation of forebrain glucocorticoid receptor gene expression:implications for adrenocortical responses to stress', Developmental Neuroscience 18, pp. 49-72. 8 See Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image (New York: Viking, 1998). 9 For a discussion of the negative side-effects and permanent neurological damage done to children through the over-prescription of psychostimulant drugs, see Jaak Panksepp Affective Neuroscience: the Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 320-323. 10 Robert Graves, Chapters X and XI " The Tree Alphabet (1) and (2), The White Goddess (New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux,1975). 11 Lawrence Kushner, The Book of Letters: A Mystical alef-Bait (New York: Jewish Lights, 1991). 12 Stan Tenen, A Matrix of Meaning for Sacred Alphabets ( San Anselmo, California : Meru Foundation, P.O. Box 1738, San Anselmo, CA. 94979,1991). 13 For a comparison of the evolution of the early city in China and Mesoamerica, see Paul Wheatley's The Pivot of the Four Quarters (Chicago: Aldine, 1971). 14 See A. F. Aveni, World Archaeoastronomy ( London: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 15 The Exaltation of Inanna, eds. William W. Hallo and J. A. Van Dijk (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968). 16 Leonard Shlain, Op. Cit.. 17 For a discussion of these two works, see my The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality, and the Origins of Culture (New York: St. Martin?s Press, 1981). 18 See George G. Joseph, The Crest of the Peacock: the Non-European Roots of Mathematics (Tauris: London, 1991). 19 Willis Barnstone, Sappho and the Greek Lyric Poets (New York: Shocken, 1962), p. 80. 20 See Merlin Stone?s When God Was a Woman (New York: Dial Press, 1976). 21 See Derek A. Welsby, The Kingdon of Kush: The Natapan and Meroitic Empires (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1998). 22 For a less mystical approach to the Axial Age, see Gore Vidal?s novel, The Creation (New York: Ballentine, 1981). 23 See The Upanishads, trans. Eknath Easwaran (Tomales Calif: Niligri Press, 1987), p. 111. 24 The Dhammapada: the Sayings of Buddha , translation and commentary by Thomas Cleary (New York: Bantam Books, 1995). 25 Lao-Tzu, Te-Tao Ching, trans. R. G. Henricks (New York, Ballantine Books, 1989). For a discussion of Lao Tzu?s work as a revival of the prehistoric goddess religion, see the chapter, ?The Road Not Taken? in my Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness (New York; St. Martin?s Press, 1998). 26 The Essential Confucius, trans. Thomas Cleary, (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1992). 27 For translations and introductory essay, see my Blue Jade from the Morning Star: a Cycle of Poems and an Essay on Quetzalcoatl (Hudson, New York: Lindisfarne Press, 1983). For a different interpretation, see Enrique Florescano?s The Myth of Quetzalcoatl (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). See page 135 for his discussion of Olmec ceremonial centers. For the presence of the iconography of the Plumed Serpent in Olmec culture, see The Olmec World: Ritual and Rulership, ed. Jill Gurthrie (Princeton, NJ: The Art Museum, Princeton University, 1996), p. 84. My own, highly poetic and speculative interpretation is that the poetry and the artifacts show a conflict between an archaic shamanic tradition and an emergent prophetic religion. In the archaic tradition of animal possession, the shaman projects his subtle body into a jaguar and brings about the birth of a half-human, half-jaguar baby. To propitiate this spirit, human sacrifice of foetuses in the womb are offered up?hence the presence of all these infants with jaguar features. Quetzalcoatl tries to suppress this tradition with a higher morality, and he establishes his palace and temple, but the sorcerers come to bring him down and return to their archaic ways of human sacrifice. 28 See Cyrus Gordon, Before Columbus (New York: Crown, 1971), and Barry Fell, America B.C. (New York: Quadrangle, 1977), also Ivan Van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America (New York: Random House, 1977). 29 Consult the works of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock, and Leonard Shlain for discussions of the role of the alphabet in the formation of Greek society. 30 For an alternative to the party-line on Plato, see Adriana Cavarero's In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1995). 31 See Richard C. Foltz, Religions of the Silk Road (St. Martin?s Press: New York, 1999). 32 The Cassell Atlas of World History (Cassell: London, 1997). The Times History of the World , ed. Geoffrey Barraclough (London: Times Books, 1999). 33 See Amin Malouf, The Crusades through Arab Eyes (New York: Schoken Books, 1989). An excellent globalist view of the interacting world civilizations of this time can be found in Archibald Lewis?s Nomads and Crusaders, AD 1000-1368 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988). 34 The helmet of the knight in the paintings of this book bears the emblematic device of a winged heart, which is the primary icon of Sufism. See King Ren]?s Book of Love (New York: Braziller, 1980). 35 Alfred W. Crosby sees this shift as occurring before the Renaissance. "Then, between 1250 and 1350, there came, not so much in theory as in actual application, a marked shift. We can probably pare that century down to fifty years, 1275 to 1325." See his The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society 1250-1600 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge and New York, 1997), p. 18. Since this is the time of Giotto and Dante, it makes some sense to see the intellectual breakthrough occurring then, followed by the calamity of the Black Death, and then the economic and social reconstruction of Europe that we associate with Florentine capitalism and Renaissance art. Cultural historians as different as Alfred Crosby and Rudolf Steiner both see the thirteenth century as the time of the bifurcation in the evolution of consciousness, so perhaps it is more informed to push the Renaissance back, before the Black Death. The new mentality would then be seen to be expressed in Arabic music and poetry, inspiring Provencal poetry and Dante's dulce stil nuovo, as well as the new mathematical sensibility. The Algebraic mentality could then be seen as a transition state between the Geometrical and the Galilean Dynamical to come. Unlike the Geometrical Mentality, however, the Algebraic is too esoteric and does not externalize itself as an entire civilization with its corresponding architectural monuments. 36 See William H. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 37 See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese, (Honolulu: Monographs of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy, No. 4, University of Hawaii Press, 1977.) 38 See Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, Volume III, The Perspective of the World (London, Fontana Press, Harper Collins, 1984), p. 32. 39 See Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery (London: Verso Books, 1997). 40 Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Cambridge Illustrated History of China. (London, Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 209. 41 Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (London, Macmillan, 1996), pp. 370, 371, 375, 376. 42 A good work to consult here is Frances Yates?s The Roscicrucian Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1972). 43 This painting was exhibited in the Metropolitan?s exhibition, ?Possessing the Past? and is reproduced on page 538 of the catalogue-book.) 44 See The Beethoven Quartet Companion, ed. Robert Winter and Robert Martin (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 11- 27. 45 See Jacques Attali, Noise: the Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 31, 32. 46 See Michel Serres's "Turner Traduit Carnot" in La Traduction (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1974). 47 See Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Volume III, The Perspective of the World (London and New York, Harper Collins/Fontana Books, 1984), p. 272. 48 See "War, Money, and the Nation-State" in Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers:1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1988). See also Fernand Braudel's "England's greatness and the national debt" in Civilization and Capitalism, 15th -18th Century, Volume III, The Perspective of the World (London and New York: Harper Collins/Fontana, 1984), pp. 375-379. See also Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: an Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Knopf, 1987), 49 See Lord Macaulay's The History of England (London: Penguin Classics, 1979), pp. 488, 505. 50 See E. P. Thompson's classic, The Making of the English Working Class, (New York: Random House, 1966). Paul Kennedy, op. cit., p. 109. 51 For an understanding of Blake's dissenting background, with its antinomian rejection of polite bourgeois culture, see E. P. Thompson's Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (The New Press,: New York, 1993). 52 See John A. Crow, The Epic of Latin America (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1992), p. 436. 53 I think the best (and briefest) study of this social phenomenon is still A. F. C. Wallace's classic paper from almost a half century ago, "Revitalization Movements," American Anthropologist, LVIII (April, 1956), 264-281. This paper used to be available in the journal's reprint series. 54 See Eleanor Rosch, Evan Thompson, and Francisco Varela, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience ( MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1991); also Thompson and Varela?s Why the Mind is Not in the Head (Harvard University Press, in press). 55 David Jordan, Transforming Paris: the Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 172. 56 See Juliet Wilson-Bareau, Manet, Monet, and the Gare Saint-Lazare (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); 57 See Giulo M. Gallarotti, The Anatomy of an International Monetary Regime: the Classical Gold Standard 1880-1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 58 See Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: the White Man?s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912 (Avon Books: New York, 1993), p.311. 59 See Lewis P. Curtis Jr., Apes and Angels: the Irishman in Victorian Caricature (New York: George Braziller/Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971); also, Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York & London: Routledge, 1995). 60 For a fascinating study of the relationships between science and art in the twentieth century, one written by a world-famous scientist, see C. H. Waddington's Behind Appearance: A Study of the Relations between Painting and the Natural Sciences in this Century (Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh Press, 1969). 61 See Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State 1945-1954 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 62 See Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1963), p. 116. 63 Walter Benjamin, ?Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX Jahrhunderts,? Illuminationen: Ausgewaehlte Schriften (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1974), 170-184. 64 See Giulo M. Gallarotti, op. cit., see note 56. 65 See Frantisek Kupka: Die Abstrakten Farben des Universums, ed. Dorothy Kosinski and Jaroslav Andel (Verlag Gerd Hatje: Ostfildern bei Stuttgart, 1998). 66 On more than one occasion, younger scholars have accused me of using the ideas of Baudrillard without due citation. My approach to writing on contemporary culture was certainly influenced by Marshall McLuhan, whom I encountered both at MIT and the University of Toronto, but my wrtings on Los Angeles come twenty years before I read Baudrillard. In 1967, I wrote ?Los Angles: Reflections at the Edge of History,? which was published inThe Antioch Review in 1968; it became the first chapter of my book, At the Edge of History in 1971. Because this book was nominated for The National Book Award, it was translated into popular editions in French and Italian, where both Baudrillard and Eco could easily encounter it. I went on to write on Disneyland and fake history in the introduction to the 1988 reissue of this book and in my subsequent work, The American Replacement of Nature (New York: Doubleday, Currency Books, 1991). I now delight in Baudrillard?s outrageously French and his own arrogantly footnoteless style, but my approach comes from having grown up in Los Angeles and having been a teenager with a car at the time of the opening of Disneyland. 67 Braudel's perception of this shift is brilliant. "Can one suggest that a highly convenient rule might operate in this context, to wit, that any city which is becoming or has become the centre of a world-economy, is the first place in which the seismic movements of the system show themselves, and subsequently the first to be truly cured of them? If so, it would shed a new light on Black Thursday in Wall Street in 1929, which I am inclined to see as marking the beginning of New York's leadership of the world." See Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism,15th-18th Century, Volume III, The Perspective of the World (London: Fontana, Harper Collins, 1984), p. 272. 68 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p. 130. 69 See Nancy Jack Todd and John Todd, From Eco-Cities to Living Machines:Principles of Ecological Design (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1994). Revised 06 Nov 2000 by Ralph Herman Abraham. Passages about Earth: An Exploration of the New Planetary Culture by William Irwin Thompson. Selected Passages from the Writings of William Irwin Thompson. The cosmic food-chain is an energy symbiosis, from the plants that feed off the sun to the devas and asuras that fed off the astral emanations of collective human thought. Just as we corral beasts to keep them in their place for our use, and as we sit on the fence and watch them ruminate all day long, we wonder how they can stand to eat all the time; so do the gods and demons corral us in history, and as they sit on the edge, they wonder how we can stand to think all day long. Within our corrals of history they come to stir up our wars and passions, so that we can be fat with the astral emanations that sustain them. Knowing that we are afraid of death, they catch us with its linked opposite, sexuality. Eros is thus the attractive jailkeeper in the prison of Thanatos. William Irwin Thompson, Passages About Earth. To understand contemporary culture, you have to be willing to move beyond intellectual definitions and academic disciplines. You have to be willing to throw your net out widely and be willing to take in science, politics, and art, and science fiction, the occult, and pornography. To catch a sense of the whole in pattern recognition, you have to leap across the synapse and follow the rapid movement of informational bits. You treat in a paragraph what you know could take up a whole academic monograph, but jugglers are too restless for that: the object of the game is to grasp the object quickly, and then give it up in a flash to the brighter air. William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order. America's esoteric destiny seems to be one of breaking down all the cultures of the world in preparation for a new global culture that will become humanity's second nature. The Muslims, whose genius was born in the Middle Ages, have a point when they call America "the Great Satan," for this second nature is so artificial, so opposite to anything that a traditional person would wish to call cultural or natural, that it appears on the horizon of the human as something inhuman, monstrous, and evil. (113) William Irwin Thompson, The American Replacement of Nature. With the death of the last male Shaker, America had lost that reverence for the profound simplicity of the craft. Everything that was cheap, shoddy, and deceitfully wrapped in "country farms" packaging rose in my mind and turned in my stomach. I could see a picture of coast-to-coast food distributors serving all the restaurants the same frozen cardboard French-fries, water-injected ham steaks, papier-mâché peas, and a carbonated water called beer. Orwell had good sense when he characterized 1984 as a time when good food was as unobtainable as sexual love. William Irwin Thompson, The Edge of History. So there are some signs in the cultural evolution of America that, while the cold-blooded dinosaurs are tearing up the landscape, there are some tiny mammals around with warm blood in their hearts. William Irwin Thompson, Darkness and Scattered Light. America's critical role in the planetization of humanity does seem to be that of the catalytic enzyme that breaks down all the traditional cultures of the world, be they Asiatic, Islamic, or European. With Disneyland in Paris and Tokyo, the United States is well on its way to dissolving all the world cultures, and I do not think any nativistic revolt of Islam will succeed in stopping it any more than Marxist-Leninism did. (79) William Irwin Thompson, The American Replacement of Nature. Art grows out of culture and is fed by culture. If art has to feed upon itself for mythology, it will die; like a stomach with nothing in it, it will soon digest itself. William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order. I imagine a future architecture in which you turn on a building the way we now turn on the lights. These buildings will be temporary, like concerts, and not enduring like the pyramids; and so when the use of the building is finished, the people can move on. The culture will be similar to the nomadic way of life of the old Paleolithic hunters and gatherers; the people will carry their culture in their souls, and so familiar will they be with earth, wind, and stars that civilization will be unnecessary. Perhaps, rather than imagining the future, I am merely seeing the past. Perhaps even before Atlantis the hunters and gatherers of the past were not savages but initiates in cosmic mysteries. Past or future, it does not matter, for the distant future will see a return of the remote past. William Irwin Thompson , Darkness and Scattered Light. Any peasant with a dumb cow can make whipped cream, but it takes a chemical factory to make Cool Whip. It is the technological process and not the natural product that is important, and if it tastes bad, well, that's beside the point, for what that point is aimed at, is the escape from nature. In America, even the food is a moon shot, a fast food rocket aimed away from the Earth. William Irwin Thompson, The American Replacement of Nature. The record of civilization is over, and like a record at its end, it keeps going on with the noise of a needle stuck in its ruts: the revolution of the workers, the protest of the young, the new creations of the avant-garde, the rise of new forms of sexual liberation, the appearance of new religions. This side of history is over, and on the other side is myth. William Irwin Thompson, Passages About Earth. A university can provide you with a library, but what makes the book you are not looking for fall off the shelf into your hands to give you the material you need is not understood by any university. William Irwin Thompson , Darkness and Scattered Light. Levi-Strauss has said that "myth is an act of faith in a science yet unborn," but that point of view is still too close to Frazer; it sees myth as a foreshadowing of something which will be truly known through science. You could just as well say that science is an act of faith in a mythology yet unborn, and that when we truly know the universe of which we are a part, we will see that the way DNA spirals in our cells and the way nebulae turn in space are all related to a particular dance of idea and pattern. William Irwin Thompson, Darkness and Scattered Light. Home means a lot to moralists, but the mystic is society's alien and is not allowed to have a home smaller than the universe, and any time he tries to settle for less, to settle down, and to set up fences, God appears as the moving whirlwind. William Irwin Thompson, The American Replacement of Nature. We are experiencing the initiation of the human race into a new level of consciousness, and that is a very terrifying experience. It does no good to turn and run from the terror of our darkness into light; we must sit it out: zazen . We must take our counsel from The Tibetan Book of the Dead and realize that these frightening projections of famines, economic disasters, ecological catastrophes, floods, earthquakes, and wars are all only the malevolent aspects of beneficent deities. If we sit and observe them, do not identify with them, but remember our Buddha-nature, we will not be dragged down by them into an incarnation of the hell they prefigure. If we run from them, we validate them; we give the projections the very psychic energy they need to overtake us. Then, as Jung has pointed out, the situation will happen outside as fate. William Irwin Thompson, Evil and World Order. There seems little chance of getting out of this century with the same human nature with which we entered it. William Irwin Thompson, The American Replacement of Nature. [The CNN Center in Atlanta is] a rendering of Teilhard de Chardin's noosphere . . . a planetary lattice of satellites in which non-stop 24-hours-a- day news gives us the experience of time under control-history under new American management. William Irwin Thompson, The American Replacement of Nature. Cosmic exploration? Passages About Earth; An Exploration of the New Planetary Culture. By William Irwin Thompson. Illustrated. 206 pp. New York: Harper & Row. $6.95. Treating a book like this with less than tenderness is enough to make a reviewer feel like The Grindge Who Stole Christmas. William Irwin Thompson is not so much writing about culture as witnessing to a faith that he has apparently been seeking for years. After spend ing his twenties teaching Humanities at various multiversities, Thompson embarked on what he likes to call “my Canadian retreat"—that is, he left M.I.T. and took a post at York University in Toronto. There he began to study yoga, to contemplate the limitations of rational‐technocratic society and sense the possibilities of a “cosmic awareness.” His preliminary explorations of the cosmos are recorded in his previous book, “At the Edge of History,” to which the present volume is a companion piece. That study was nominated for a National Book Award in 1972, an honor that says more for the current fascination with visions of the New Life than it does for the book. In it, Thompson describes how he “danced in the twentyfirst century” at a folk festival at Esalen, and derives the social organization of all civilization past, present and future from a four‐member hunting band he saw in an anthropological film. He also discusses the prophecies of Edgar Cayce and declares that he “believes in” Atlantis. Thompson thinks that in post‐industrial society, a vital distinction between “charismatic‐ideational” institutions such as Church or University, and “routine‐operational” ones such as government, has been lost. The routine‐operational mentality has taken over everything. We no longer have sources of spiritual authority unpolluted by secular power and bureauc: racy, and we cannot even imagine possibilities not contained in our technology and behavioral science. Thompson, however, sees signs of a new “mythic” consciousness springing up through the cracks, in a host of esoteric and sci‐fi cults, and he believes these body forth the shape of things to come. “This side of history is over,” he announces in ‘Passages About Earth,” “and on the other side is myth.” The new book is a Pilgrim's Progress of the mythic consciousness. Thompson visits Indian yogis and German physicists also studying yoga. He glances at the work of Paolo Soleri and Doris Lessing, broods over the mysteries of Stonehenge, and meditates at the ruined Celtic monastery of Lindisfarne. He finishes his trip in the community at Findhorn, Scotland, where attractive and friendly people get in touch with the “etheric web” and geographical “power points,” talk to elves and devas, and grow luxuriant gardens in sand. Along the way, he discovers several pleasing “synchronicities"; according to the Findhorn community, the universe entered a new phase at midnight, Dec. 31, 1967, and on that very night Thompson was prompted by intuition not to celebrate, but to greet the New Year quietly meditating. He also gently rejects several false visions; the salvation schemes of Yogi Gopi Krishna and of Aurelio Peccei of the Club of Rome are too patently elitist for his taste. The realization is given to him that what the world needs is a combination of the mysticism of the East and the democracy of the West. His quest is consummated in his return to Long Island to abandon conventional teaching and establish his Lindisfarne Association. Association. The uninitiated reader, unfortunately, is less apt to feel that he has been on a pilgrimage than on a sightseeing tour of provincial monuments with a local patriot who doesn't omit the home of the regional poet or the place where he himself went to school. Most of us know better than to criticize another's religion, so we need not consider the blend of yoga, Christianity, ecology and science fiction that makes up Thompson's new faith. His writings are another matter. All the internal evidence suggests that Thompson could write good books; he is sensitive, witty and observant. However, he has not made up his mind what he is trying to do, and so does several things sloppily, apparently counting on his purity of heart to supply the place of. His cultural commentary is often provocative: a separation of spiritual authority from secular power has much to recommend it in an age when mil lions of Americans, faute demieux, worship the President; and the theory that our corrupted charismatic institutions have been replaced by “the individual as institution” persuasively explains Norman Mailer and Ken Kesey. But a cultural historian ought to know that there has rarely been a time when priest (or god) and ruler were widely separated, and Mark Twain or even Samuel Johnson could qualify as cultural institutions in their time. This book is also stuffed with portentous pronouncements that prove on examination to be meaningless, such as the statement that novelists in our day “have walked out of print and into life.” Thompson's approach to culture is intuitive, hit‐or‐miss. He scores several hits, but this hardly validates the method in a time when established institutions are such easy targets that a boy with BB gun could draw blood. On the other hand, this book is no Autobiography of a Soul, either. The modest revelations and transformations the author has undergone are as trivial in print as most people's drug experiences. Nor is it a serious study of visionary literature. Thompson constantly invokes Blake and Yeats, froth names with great power to protect, but never discusses their writings. A solemn exposition of kundalini yoga, a handful of quotations from this or that prophet, and some sketchy physics comprise his treatment of esoteric beliefs. Thompson is less seriously exploring anything than proclaiming that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. The souls of the faithful, radiating the etheric glow, will light up this dingy globe like a power grid. “The recovery of our lost cosmic orientation will probably prove to be more historically significant than the design of the Saturn V rocket.” Millions in the historic churches—which Thompson completely overlooks in his search for the cosmic—have been believing something like this all. The “new” consciousness, in fact, is not too different from that of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel or the one cultivated in American history classes a few decades ago: the universe has labored through the ages to produce us and we must now spread the good news. The favorite conceit of a broad class of writers, including the behavioral engineers Thompson detests, is that the whole world is waiting for the sunrise, and we happy few in our time— shall not only witness it but bring it about. Chacun a son goute. Thompson's writings, with all their occasional virtues, belong to the ever‐increasing body of Inspirational Literature—a hip “Power of Positive Thinking.” Book Reviews. WITCHCRAFT IN THE MIDDLE AGES. By Jeffrey Burton Russell . AMERICAN PAINTING: A GUIDE TO INFORMATION SOURCES. Edited by Sydney Starr Keaveney . RUGS AND WALL HANGINGS: PERIOD DESIGNS AND CONTEMPORARY TECHNIQUES. By Joan Scobey . THE END OF INTELLIGENT WRITING. By Richard Kostelanetz . THE OCCULT SCIENCES IN THE RENAISSANCE, A STUDY IN INTELLECTUAL PATTERNS. By Wayne Shumaker . ONCE UPON A PEDESTAL. By Emily Hahn . WILLIAM STYRON. By Melvin J. Friedman . TV: THE MOST POPULAR ART. By Horace Newcomb . INNOCENTS AT HOME: AMERICA IN THE 1970s. By Tad Szulc . THE WAR OF IDEAS. By Georgi Arbatov . NEOCOLONIALISM: METHODS AND MANOEUVRES. By Vasily Vakhrushev . THE GREAT COVERUP: NIXON AND THE SCANDAL OF WATERGATE. By Barry Sussman . THE WAR OF IDEAS: AMERICA'S INTERNATIONAL IDENTITY CRISIS. By George N. Gordon and Irving A. Falk . THROUGH “POVERTY'S VALE”—A HARDSCRABBLE BOYHOOD IN UPSTATE NEW YORK, 1832-1862. By Henry Conklin . JOHN STEINBECK AND EDWARD F. RICKETTS: THE SHAPING OF A NOVELIST. By Richard Astro. WILL ROGERS. By E. Paul Alworth . JACK LONDON. By Earle Labor . DOCUMENTARY EXPRESSION AND THIRTIES AMERICA. By William Stott . AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISM, 1830-1860: AN INTELLECTUAL INQUIRY. By Paul F. Boller, Jr. LONGTIME CALIFORN': A DOCUMENTARY STUDY OF AN AMERICAN CHINATOWN. By Victor and Brett De Bary Nee. THE NEW WEST: LANDSCAPE ALONG THE COLORADO FRONT RANGE. By Robert Adams. BEYOND THE WASTE LAND. By Raymond Olderman. THE MALE MACHINE. By Marc Feigen Fasteau. PASSAGES ABOUT EARTH: AN EXPLORATION OF THE NEW PLANETARY CULTURE. By William Irwin Thompson. THE AMERICAN DREAM OF SUCCESS: THE SEARCH FOR THE SELF IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. By Lawrence Chenoweth. THE HUMANE IMPERATIVE: A CHALLENGE FOR THE YEAR 2000. By Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C. WOMEN AND THEIR SEXUALITY IN THE NEW FILM. By Joan Mellen. DIVES AND PAUPER. A Facsimile Reproduction of the Pynsen Edition of 1493, with an Introduction and Index by Francis J. Sheeran. THE LONG DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL: THE AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL LEFT AND THE VIETNAM WAR. By Sandy Vogelgesang . FREDERICK'S OF HOLLYWOOD: TWENTY-SIX YEARS OF MAIL ORDER SEDUCTION. By Laura and Jan Gottwald. SAINT WITH A GUN: THE UNLAWFUL AMERICAN PRIVATE EYE. By William Ruehlmann . Passages about Earth: An Exploration of the New Planetary Culture by William Irwin Thompson. Hooray! You've discovered a title that's missing from our library. Can you help donate a copy? If you own this book, you can mail it to our address below. You can also purchase this book from a vendor and ship it to our address: Better World Books Amazon More Bookshop.org. When you buy books using these links the Internet Archive may earn a small commission. Benefits of donating. When you donate a physical book to the Internet Archive, your book will enjoy: Beautiful high-fidelity digitization Long-term archival preservation Free controlled digital library access by the print-disabled and public † Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit.