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"Seven Classics"
Background Reading for Metahistory
(since 1900)
The Metahistory site contains three sections
with reviews of books recommended for reading and research:
Basic Reading,
consisting of 16 books chosen for their value in general orientation
to Metahistory.
The Arch of Metahistory introduces
the five primary themes of our discourse: Sacred Nature, Eternal
Conflict, Origins, Moral Design, Technology. For each theme,
three books are recommended and briefly reviewed, making a total
of 15 books.
Additional to these 31 books are the "Seven
Classics" suggested for reading relative to the origins
and precedents of metahistory. Reviews of the Classics are longer
than those found in the other sections, because the commentaries
on these books are meant to amplify and extend points raised
in the long essay, Background to Metahistory.
The classics are listed in order of date of
publication. As with all books cited in Metahistory.org, specifics
on publisher, year and edition cited are given in the Bibliography.
The
Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer: 1900
Developed from a series of articles begun in 1885, originally published
in two volumes in 1890, and expanded to twelve volumes by 1900, The
Golden Bough is best known through the two-volume abridgement of
1922. It stands as a literary masterpiece as well as "the fountainhead" of
many, many subsequent inventories and studies. (Doty, 169)
Harking back to Herotodus, Frazer begins with a treatment of the Heroic
Quest figured in Aeneas, the Trojan warrior celebrated as the founder
of Latium (prehistoric Rome). His opening description of the secret
grove dedicated to the Goddess Diana is so captivating that it has
hooked many a reader for the remaining 827 pages. The sacred grove
of Nemi in Tuscany stands by a lake haunted by water nymphs who test
the hero and initiate him into precious secrets. In the classical version
recorded by the Roman poet, Vergil [70 BCE — 19 CE], the Quest
involves plucking the "Golden Bough" (thought to be mistletoe)
and takes Aeneas on the perilous journey into the Underworld to commune
with ancestral spirits.
In the main segue that distinguishes his work, Frazer relates the universal
theme of the Heroic Quest to the drama of the sacrificed king, the
cental figure in theocracy. In alignment that anticipates later feminist
writing (e.g., Merlin Stone, below), he shows how the "King of
the Wood" gains or loses his authority through his connection
with the Goddess Diana (Greek Artemis). In some way the regal candidate
must satisfy the Goddess to be chosen as ruler, and he must periodically
renew his vows toward her to retain his power. In a series of brilliant,
enchantingly written passages, Frazer weaves the drama of sacred kingship
into the larger fabric of universal myth concerning the fate of dying
and resurrecting gods: Adonis, Attis, Osiris, and others.
Frazer’s metahistorical overview was extremely influential in
literature and art in his time, and afterwards. One late variant of
the dying-and-resurrecting god was the "Wounded Fisher King" of
the Grail Legend, popular fare in the Middle Ages. He appears as a
haunting presence in T. S. Eliot’s long poem, The Waste Land,
signature text of the Modernist movement (1885 — 1925). Many other
writers and painters of the era took up Frazer’s motifs. The link
between modern sensibility (especially the tragic sense of having lost
touch with the Sacred) and the timeless mythological themes delineated
by Frazer was further explored in From Ritual to Romance by
Jessie L. Weston. This book became the skeleton key to many artistic
and cultural developments in the period between the two world wars.
Frazer’s treatment of these momentous themes is all the more compelling
now that we have a fuller understanding of how the themes were historically
scripted and enacted. After 4500 BCE a caste of shaman-priests set
up the institution of kingship as a way to extend their power into
the urban centers then burgeoning across Asia, the Middle East and
Egypt. The introduction of agriculture on a large scale had effectively
deprived the shamans of their role as mediators between nature and
society. Once grain was collected and stored in temple granaries, the
crucial role of the shaman in regulating the weather was deeply undermined.
Upon the demise of magic came the rise of political authority, yet
the king remained invested with shamanic and heroic traits long after
his precedents were phased out of the social order.
In the long opening phase of social organization, the hero-king must
be initiated by the Goddess before he assumes the status of the enthroned
theocrat, the ultimate male authority figure. Eventually the Goddess
herself is also phased out. Frazer was not able to trace and articulate
all the nuances of this millennial development, but reading him today
with what we now know in mind, we can fill in the gaps and enrich his
original contribution.
Frazer is still centrally important to metahistory: what he misses
reveals what we have learned.
Sacred kingship is one of the five paramount themes in world mythology.
Another is shamanic magic (now understood to be the hidden force behind
regal male authority, as just explained), to which Frazer devotes the
opening 100 pages of his opus. Frazer introduces us to a staggering
array of motifs: tree-worship, sacred marriage, taboos associated with
sacred kingship, the sacrifice of the king, midsummer rites, particulars
of the "vegetation gods" such as Adonis, Attis, Osiris, and
Dionysos, the myth of Demeter and Persephone (central to the Eleusinian
Mysteries celebrated near Athens), the Corn Mother and other ancestral
spirits, rites of eating the Gods, propitiation of wild animals, exorcism,
scapegoats, Scandinavian redemptive deities such as Odin and Balder,
and European fire-festivals. He concludes with some thoughts on the
conception of the human soul in folklore.
Reading Frazer is a process of slow and deep enrichment and it is almost
always entertaining. I would propose a good six months to ingest The
Golden Bough. It reads best when read effortlessly and at leisure.
Myths to Live By by
Joseph Campbell: 1958 - 1971
At mid-century Joseph Campbell [1904 — 1987] emerged as the foremost
exponent of comparative mythology and the history of religions. He
taught at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, for almost
40 years. His work comprises a vast sweep of materials brought together
in the four-volume masterpiece, The Masks of God. At the end
of his life Campbell became something of a cult guru in the U.S.. He
was known for being the advisor to George Lucas on Star Wars,
for which Campbell proposed the theme of the battle between Good and
Evil, represented in Persian myth by Ormazd and Ahriman (aka Darth
Vader). In The Power of Myth, a series of viedotaped interviews
with American journalist Bill Moyers, Campbell expounded in the fluent
and eloquent style for which he was known and loved.
Myths to Live By is not the most substantial,
nor the most scholarly of Campbell’s work, but
it is the most relevant to today’s world. It comprises
twelve lectures given between 1958 and 1971 at the
Cooper Union Forum in New York City. Ranging through
such issues as "The Impact of Science on Myth," "The
Mythology of Love," and "Schizophrenia — The
Inward Journey," these talks are highly topical
and well-suited for anyone who seeks to understand
the relevance of myth both to interior personal experience
and to collective trends. Every lecture is packed with
insights that touch on the great questions of life.
Quotable passages abound by the dozens. Here is one:
Myths are telling us in picture language
of powers of the psyche to be recognized and integrated in our
lives, powers that have been common to the human spirit forever,
and which represent that wisdom of the species by which man has
weathered the millenniums. (29)
Campbell’s use of the term "wisdom
of the species" resonates closely with the aim of Metahistory:
namely, to develop versions of the human story in which the wisdom
that guides the species can be communicated. This aim is indicated
by the "mission statement" on the home page: Metahistory
proposes "engagement in a different story about how humanity
can fulfill itself." Not all myths reflect the wisdom of
the species, however. Oral and written narratives in which myths
are preserved can become corrupted over time, rather in the the
way data stored on a disk becomes corrupted. These precious stories,
originally imbued with a saving dose of human sapience, have
all too often been co-opted for cultural, religious and political
agendas that reflect the need to control others, and greed, rather
than the more enlightened motives of the species.
In Background to Metahistory, I noted
the tendency to see in figures such as Jesus a mythical persona rather
than an historical person. This tendency can be traced all the way
back to Herodotus, but it became a methodological tool with Charles
Dupuis (around 1800). Along with philology (study of the historical
development of language, reflected in ancient texts), this tendency
largely determined the modern method of comparative mythology that
emerged with Biblical criticism in the mid-19th century.
The method of reducing history to myth has to be handled carefully,
however. In some cases a figure can have both an historical identity and a
mythical profile. This applies to "Jesus of Palestine" (as
I prefer to call that character), for one or more Jesus-like characters
certainly did live in the first century of the Christian Era, although
it is extremely unlikely that any single of them behaved in
the way Jesus does in the Gospels. The Jesus of the Evangelists is
a composite of several historical figures, highly embellished with
mythological elements. The Pauline doctrine that Jesus the man was
the incarnate "Son of God" is borrowed from the lore of dying
and resurrecting gods so richly described by Frazer and others, but
not just borrowed. It is also altered with a strong ideological twist,
or "spin." In this way, a theological proposition (namely,
the promise of unique redemption through Jesus Christ) becomes adapted
to the policies of state-religion; that is, it becomes a tool for political
control and imperialist conquest.
Ideally, one tries to strike a balance between the historical and the
purely imaginative aspects of myth. Campbell was a sanguine person,
sometimes prone to take extreme views. He hated Catholicism, and often
blasted
it full bore. Generally his aim was excellent, but he could also distort
the materials or disorient his readers with the force of his passions.
One instance always stands out to me. In the second lecture, "The
Emergence of Mankind," Campbell says: "Nor does it matter
from the standpoint of a comparative study of symbolic forms whether
Christ or the Buddha ever actually lived and performed the miracles
associated with their teachings." (29) This view is consistent
with his general tendency to downplay the historical aspects of mythic
and symbolic narratives in the effort to decipher their universal import
as psychic patterns.
While it is true that neither Christ nor Buddha need ever to have lived
as historical persons, someone had to live through the experiences
that produced the mythological narratives attached to those figures.
The "Divine Christ" is a mythological identity attached to
one, or more than one, flesh-and-blood Jesus who actually lived in
Palestine during the Jewish uprising against Rome, and the historical
Buddha was an Indian prince of the 5th Century BCE. In his passion
for the power of myth, Campbell may overlook the fact that real
human experience is at the source of all genuine mythology, although
it may not be the experience of the characters alleged to have played
out the mythic stories.
I would caution readers of Campbell to reflect on this nuance. It is
subtle but also immense.
To my knowledge the lectures in Myths to Live By are without
equal as a clear, gripping introduction to the great themes they treat. "The
Mythology of Love" does the work of volumes of other studies. "Mythologies
of War and Peace" carries tremendous insight on religious ideologies
that support and legitimate violence. To read this book by Campbell,
and this alone, is equivalent to taking a year’s college course
in comparative mythology.
Hamlet’s Mill by
Gorgio de Santillanna and Herta von Dechend: 1969
From the lucid and accessible discourse of Joseph Campbell we now turn
to one of the most dense, digressive and downright exasperating books
written in the 20th century. Perhaps the best that one could say about Hamlet’s
Mill is to compare it to a junkyard, a pawnshop, or a museum packed
with incredible treasures in almost total disarray. (The same could
be said of certain of C. G. Jung’s works, such as Mysterium
Conjunctionis, his magnum opus on alchemy. I think that Jung would
not have objected to his work being compared to a huge dung heap in
which jewels were hidden.) The flotsam and jetsam of the Ages floats
through the pages of this massive treatise, coyly subtitled "An
Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and its Transmission
through Myth." Some essay!
The subtitle is intentional, of course. It indicates the reticence
of two scholars from MIT to delve into highly esoteric material, the
kind of stuff that is ordinarily off limits to professors and pundits
of the orthodox mind-set. The subject of their inquiry is stellar mythology:
that is, myths from around the world that relate to particular aspects
of celestial mechanics, especially a long-term cycle of polar rotation
called "precession of the equinoxes." This cycle takes around
26,000 years and may be considered to break down into "World Ages" designated
by the animals of the Zodiac: hence, the Aries Age, the Piscean Age,
the Aquarian Age, etc. Amlodhi’s Mill, a mythological image from
Nordic literature, represents the axial astronomical mechanism that
determines this cycle. As the mill turns, the polar axis of the earth
shifts relative to the celestial sphere, and the Ages are ground from
the grist of human experience. This mythic image is probably the source
of the old saying, "The mills of the gods grind slow, but they
grind exceeding fine."
Speculations on cosmic order run rampant in Hamlet’s Mill,
but after all is said and done, the authors present and explore two
leading propositions:
- Universal legends of continents sinking into the ocean refer to constellations
shifted over the horizon of time by precession (a long-term phenomenon,
not by any means easy to conceive or visualize);
- Many myths from around the world use numbers (72, 4320, 108) that
encode the precise timing of astronomical events and cosmic ages related
to celestial mechanics.
The notion that myths encode astronomy is certainly an eye-opener,
but the authors of Hamlet’s Mill are perhaps a little overwhelmed
by their own discovery. In places they tend to imply that all myths
reduce to nothing but coded astronomy. Or, to say the same thing in
another way, they suggest that transmitting astronomical knowledge
was originally the sole and supreme purpose of myth. Having given some
30 years to the study of comparative mythology, with a special focus
on star-related myth, I cannot endorse this view. Elsewhere in this
site (VIEWS: Myth in Metahistory, Part One: The
Panorama of the Past), I have suggested eight possible "plot-factors" that
may be detected in the materia mythica, astronomical events
being but one of them. The cases where myths do preserve ancient knowledge
of astronomy are always striking, because we of the modern mind-set
tend to assume that only in recent times have scientists come to understand
what is happening in the celestial world. Santillana and von Dechend
are highly effective in dispelling this illusion.
Reading Hamlet’s Mill can be as deeply inspiring as a long
vigil under the glittering constellations of the night sky. It can
also be like dunking your head in a bucket of snails stewed in molasses.
The lasting power of this book lies in the repercussions it has generated,
as much as in its actual content. In the 40-odd years since it appeared,
heirs to the chaotic insinuations of Hamlet’s Mill have
been too numerous to name. Thanks to these two daring authors, the
question of the knowledge of precession among the ancients (i.e., before
Hipparchus, the Greek astronomer said to have discovered precession
around 150 BCE) has become the focal issue in a wide range of debates
on the status and purpose of the archaic sciences. Writers like Graham
Hancock (Suggested Reading in Themes: Origins)
rely on Santillana and von Dechend for the background of arguments
on the high sophistication of Egyptian star wisdom. Contemporary reworkings
of their thesis are too numerous too cite, although no one has yet
solved the riddle of the meaning of the Zodiacal Ages.
Turgid and incoherent as it may be in places, Hamlet’s Mill is
a metahistorical thrill ride not to be missed.
When God Was a Woman by
Merlin Stone: 1976
The feminist contribution to Metahistory is so huge and so crucial
to the revisioning of our story, that it is painful to have to select
one work for classic status. However, Merlin Stone’s book is so
outstanding in style and argument, and so seminal to the field it defines,
that it makes the decision tolerable.
Stone was fortunate to be writing at a time of momentous discoveries
that have deeply affected the feminist rewriting of history. The work
of archeologist James Mellaart at Catal Huyuk in Turkey became known
to the world in 1967, and in 1975 he published The Neolithic Era
of the Near East, opening up a whole new perspective on prehistory.
Until Mellaart did his meticulous reconstruction of the Goddess-oriented
societies of Anatolia, our vision of the "origin of civilization" in
the Middle East was dominated by the patriarchal glories of Sumer,
Babylon and Egypt. The assumption that civilization was a man’s
game was shattered by what Mellaart unearthed at Catal Huyuk.
As noted, Frazer wrote about the empowering role of the Goddess in
the institution of sacred kingship, but prior to Mellaart archeologists
were prone to modest and reticent acknowledgements of the role of women
in building civilization. For instance, Jacquetta Hawkes and Leonard
Wooley (Prehistory and the Beginning of Civilization, 1963)
write with evident temerity: "It is generally accepted that owing
to her ancient role as the gatherer of vegetable foods, woman was responsible
for the invention and development of agriculture." (cited in Eisler,
p. 215, n. 24)
Some five years after Mellaart, Marija Gimbutas produced her first
monograph, The Early Civilization of Europe, revealing the high
level of culture achieved by the non-patriarchal, Goddess-based societies
of the Balkans, and in 1982 she broke through with The Gods and
Goddesses of Old Europe (suggested reading: Origins).
Merlin Stone’s work is complementary to the great accomplishment
of Gimbutas, which it preceded. Whereas Gimbutas concentrated on "Old
Europe" (centered on the Balkans, and excluding Southern Italy
and the Aegean), Stone revealed the vast legacy of the Goddess in the
ancient Middle East. She defined the standard for "Goddess reclamation" later
to be popularized in best-selling studies such as Riane Eisler’s The
Chalice and the Blade (review in Essential Reading).
Originally published under the title The Paradise Papers, Stone’s
masterpiece is remarkable for its even tone and rich content. She is
never polemic, yet she is at least as convincing as the most vociferous
of feminist historians. She is careful in her arguments, yet conveys
the sense of excitement, even astonishment, at the discoveries she
shares:
As I read, I recalled that somewhere along
the pathway of my life I have been told — and accepted the
idea — that the sun, great and powerful, was naturally worshipped
as male, while the moon, hazy, delicate symbol of sentiment and
love, had always been revered as female. Much to my surprize
I discovered accounts of Sun Goddesses in the lands of Canaan,
Anatolia, Arabia and Australia, while Sun Goddesses among the
Eskimos, the Japanese and the Khasis of India were accompanied
by subordinate brothers who were symbolized by the moon.
This is page 2, and the revelations unfold
luxuriantly from there. Stone is an art historian and sculptor. When
God Was a Woman contains 20-odd plates of remarkable and
beautiful images of the Goddesss. One of them (plate 8) had an
electrifying effect upon me: Egyptian Goddess Hathor (Canaanite
Ashtoreth), stone plaque, c. 1250 BCE, British Museum.
During my second or third read of When God
Was a Woman I was engaged in writing a book on the Dendera
Zodiac*, the unparalleled masterpiece of ancient sacred astronomy.
This precious artifact is the sole intact working model of
the Zodiac that survives from antiquity. It was discovered
around 1795 in the ceiling of a small chapel in the temple
of Dendera in Upper Egypt (thirty miles north of Luxor), a
site dedicated to the Star Goddess, Hathor, the Egyptian Eve.
Traditionally, Dendera is said to be the birthplace of Isis.
When God Was A Woman is saturated with sexual
lore. Better than any other feminist historian, Stone
shows that the institution of sacred kingship, upon
which all known high civilizations of the past were
founded, could not have existed if the king had not
been empowered by a priestess who represented the Goddess.
In this respect her book provides a resonating coda
to Frazer’s symphonic variations. The original
ritual of empowerment was a hieros gamos, a
sacramental rite of sexual intercourse between king
and priestess. Stone’s elucidation of "sacred
sexuality" stands behind later, more well-known
books such as Sacred Pleasure (1996) by Riane
Eisler, and it resonates beautifully with the luscious
restoration of Sumerian erotic myth by Diane Wolkstein
and Samuel Noah Kramer (Inanna: Queen of Heaven
and Earth, 1984, cited under Sacred
Nature).
Black Athena by Martin
Bernal: 1986
This two-volume masterpiece argues the startling notion that Athena,
who represents Greece, the fountainhead of the Western cultural heritage,
was an Egyptian goddess, a masculinized version of Isis-Hathor, and
she was black. Hence the deep tap-root of White-Western-European-Androcratic-Christian
culture is African. The subtitle of Black Athena is "The
Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization."
Martin Bernal, formerly of King’s College, Cambridge, is a professor
of history at Cornell University. Predictably, his thesis incited enormous
controversy, which continues to this day. Several books devoted exclusively
to the cross-arguments generated around Black Athena have been
published, and Bernal’s ideas continue to be passionately debated.
These volumes (two of a projected four-volume opus) are personal favorites
of mine, rare metahistorical treats.
Bernal writes with ease and openness, so it is never tiring to read
him even though he plows through enormous masses of research. His thrust
is simple and direct: he refutes the "Aryan Model," a script
that explains that Greek civilization originated with Indo-European
(Aryan) invaders who conquered the indigenous peoples of Hellas. Bernal
develops, in contrast, the "Ancient Model" of pre-Hellenic
history, the story told among the ancient Greeks who — let’s
face it — were much closer to their own origins than we are, millennia
later. He shows that everything we conventionally attribute to the
white-male, Aryan, Indo-European complex is a gloss, a "cover
story" that conceals the true derivation of Greek classical culture
from Afroasiatic sources. The title says it all: Athena is black. In
one swift poetic juxtaposition, Bernal achieves a metahistorical shift
of great import. The way we visualize Athena determines the way we
envision the cultural and spiritual heritage of ancient Greece, and
all that later derives from it.
The sweep of Bernal’s vision is suggested by one passage taken
from the Introduction:
This belief [i.e., that Egyptian wisdom
nurtured the Classical world] continued through the Renaissance.
The revival of Greek studies in the 15th Century created a love
of Greek literature and language and an identification with the
Greeks, but no one [of that time] questioned the fact that the
Greeks had been the pupils of the Egyptians, in whom there was
an equal, if not more passionate, interest. The Greeks were admired
for having preserved and transmitted a small part of this ancient
wisdom: to some extent the experimental techniques of Paracelsus
and Newton were developed to retrieve this lost Egyptian tradition
of Hermetic knowledge. A few Hermetic texts had been available
in
Latin translation
throughout the Dark and Middle Ages; many more were found in
1460 and were brought to the court of Cosimo di Medici in Florence,
where they were translated by his leading scholar, Marsilio Ficino.
These and the ideas contained in them became central to the neo-Platonist
movement started by Ficino, which was itself at the heart of
Renaissance Humanism. (Vol.I, p. 24)
In linking the distant Afroasiatic roots of
Greek culture to Renaissance humanism, Bernal touches a theme
revisited time and time again in the metahistory discourse: the
origins and fate of humanism. While it is true, and most important
to remember, that Hermetic wisdom was retrieved and relaunched
in Renaissance Humanism, the reformulation was faulty and humanism
did not serve its stated intention of providing moral and spiritual
criteria for guiding the human species. We live with the failure
of humanism, a failure that metahistory seeks to explain and
correct. Bernal’s study gives enormous depth to this great
and urgent challenge.
Cities of Dreams by
Stan Gooch, 1989
Born in 1932 in London, Stan Gooch studied modern languages and psychology
before devoting himself to independent research on some of the more
baffling questions of human experience, including parapsychology, genetics,
neuroanatomy, and prehistory. Of his fourteen published books, Cities
of Dreams is the ninth in his intensive exploration of a single
theme: what determines human intelligence.
Subtitled "The Rich Legacy of Neanderthal Man Which Shaped Our
Civilization," Cities of Dreams takes an unusual view of
human experience before the end of the last Ice Age. Gooch begins by
proposing that our ancestors in prehistory (roughly, 100,00 - 20,000
BP, Before
Present) may not have been ignorant "cavemen" huddling in
dank caverns. Instead, he builds up the picture of a loose network
of European cave-dwelling peoples who traveled widely, exchanged goods
and communicated with each other, and enoyed a high level of cultural
and spiritual attainment: "Neanderthal civilization." Gooch
carefully explains how the "civilization" of our prehistoric
ancestors ought not to be imagined along the lines of the past high
cultures (Egypt, Sumeria, China, etc). He argues that the Neanderthals
had a culture unique to themselves, and he describes what it was like.
A polymath, versed in disciplines such as archeology, genetics and
parapsychology, Gooch presents a rich and detailed portrait of Neanderthal
life. He emphasizes the subjective dimension of Neanderthal culture,
rather than such external feats as city-building, irrigation and agriculture.
In fact, he suggests that the distinctive mark of Neanderthal mentality
may have been its lack of concern for permanent structures or technological
advantage over nature. The "primitive" mind-set of this lunar-oriented
cave people was deeply esthetic and ritualistic, far more mystical
than practical.
Rather like an isolated dolmen on the horizon, Gooch’s study of
Neanderthal life stands alone and apart from all other speculative
research on prehistory. Due to its radical nature his work has not
been sufficiently assessed and integrated by authors and experts working
in the same field. The three-part essay on prehistory by Ian Baldwin,
featured in the FORUM, is corrective in this respect. It contains many
references to Cities of Dreams, especially in the second installment.
Compared to the other "Classics" cited here, Gooch’s
masterpiece poses unique demands upon metahistorical inquiry. This
is because the material it treats lies at a level of chronological
time that must be accessed by active work of the imagination. And this
process must rely on judgement seasoned by large doses of erudition,
such as Gooch himself exemplifies. Although he cites a vast array of
mythological, folkloric, historical, etymological, anthropological
and archaeological evidence, Gooch cannot develop his hypothesis without
a large degree of invention, or imaginative reconstruction. This is
both the handicap and the hallmark of his book.
Of course, all writers who deal with the distant past must use imagination
to invent it, but according to scholarly protocols, one pretends not
to so do. Among scholars the act of invention is hidden, or denied,
so that it looks as if the prehistorian is simply developing a plausible
scenario from solid evidence. With Gooch, it is impossible to ignore
the act of creative invention, and he does not try to hide it; but
neither does he fantasize and speculate in a reckless, irresponsible
manner. As I reckon it, the failure of his book to meet established
academic standards is due to his not concealing the inventive
nature of his thesis.
The narrational challenge to metahistory exemplified by Gooch is central
to its function: to reformulate the story of our species in poetic-visionary
terms. I alluded to this issue in the essay Tree
and Well, linked to the logo for this site. For the greater part
of the life of the human family, the task of telling the story that
guides the species was encharged to shamans (both men and women) who
preserved it in epic oral tales, long narratives full of poetic language
and visionary content. These tales were, I would argue, vehicles of true
memories of human experience over long periods of time, for myth
in its essential form is a memory of events that once transpired, a
record of actual developments in the cosmos, our earthly habitat, and
in the psychic and somatic life of the species. With Herodotus and
the advent of written history, the "recall" process was radically
altered. As "facts" and a literal, linear style of recounting
them came to the fore, the poetic-visionary memory of the species receded
into the background.
Cities of Dreams is both a model and an inspiration
for the revival of poetic-visionary recall that might
be cultivated in metahistorical discourse from now
on.
Where the Wasteland Ends by
Theodore Roszak: 1989 (written 1971-2).
After a long trek into the distant reaches of prehistory, the last "classic" in
this list returns us to the present and opens a visionary window on
the future.
Theodore Roszak is a cultural historian known among other things for
coining the word "counter-culture." In his book, The Making
of a Counter-Culture, published in 1969, Roszak both critiqued
and championed the quest of American youth to find alternatives to
conventional beliefs and behaviors. Over the last thirty years he has
been relentlessly consistent in his critique of the failings of both
religion and science to provide guidance for humanity. A notable slayer
of sacred cows, Roszak offers positive and inspirational ideas to counterbalance
his intense and unrelenting critique of our cultural and spiritual
norms. His is perhaps the most vibrant and articulate radical voice
in current debate over the fundamental values of Western culture.
The central thrust of Where the Wasteland Ends is clear from
its opening pages. Roszak argues that the failure of religion and the
overvaluation of technology have led us to the brink of self-annihilation.
Because we have not paid attention to what our humanity demands of
us, we have succumbed to a vast range of alienating influences. "Our
culture has struck a Faustian bargain for power over man and nature,
and it will not easily resign its wager. It still looks to its machines,
its science, its big economic systems for security, prosperity, salvation" (xvii).
In exposing the ills of society, Roszak does not leave us without a
remedy. From the first moment of his argument, he proposes that we
can make the necessary course-correction for the species by reclaiming
and re-evolving what we have lost. The "Old Gnosis" is his
term for the magical and sacramental vision of nature that was normative
for the species before we shifted into our current slide, some thousands
of years old, that now threatens to remove us from nature altogether.
All along the way, Roszak does a lot of attacking. The main target
of his lucid rage is "the technological imperative," the
belief-system that insists that all progress due to technology is good
and will benefit humankind. In Roszak’s view the confidence invested
in technological advance is the insanity of Narcissus: we behold an
idealized image of ourselves in the artificial world we are creating,
but the reflection is illusory, and dangerous, because it blinds us
to who we really are.
In the last section of Where the Wasteland Ends, Roszak sets
out his view of "how the Romantic artists rediscovered the meaning
of transcendent symbols and thereby returned western culture to the
Old Gnosis, and what part the rhapsodic intellect must play in our
journey to the visionary commenwealth" (274). Among the Romantics
cited the first and foremost is English poet and artist, William Blake,
who championed imagination as humankind’s divine faculty. The
second culture hero he evokes is Goethe, whom Roszak celebrates for
his little-known scientific work, the best option to the "single
vision" of Newton and Descartes. His chapters on Goethe’s
view of natural morphology, his quest for the "primal phenomenon" in
the plant world, and his colloidal theory of light, are brilliant expositions
that clearly establish Goethe as an outstanding exemplar of the species’ genius.
Over the years I have wondered if I might be the Siamese twin of Theodore
Roszak, separated from him at birth by a meddling pediatrist. We are
both notable for our high regard for the Romantics, although I take
a more cautious view of their great legacy. My strongest personal affinity
with Roszak is perhaps the conviction we share that dissent must
be a potent catalyst to any significant reform in the modern way of
life. The "feel-good factor" is wonderful when it works,
but it can also be a soporific. To those who would object that there
is too strong a dose of negativity in Roszak’s critique, I would
reply that to see deeply into the current malaise and millennial illusion
of humanity is a courageous and empowering act. (In this sense, Roszak’s
work belongs to the "despair work" proposed by Buddhist activist,
Joanna Macy in World As Self, World as Lover.) To engage our
full potential for correction, we need to grasp the fullness of our
deviation from the truth of our species. In the work and play of our
self-redemption,
half-measures will avail nothing.
Those who are unfamiliar with the legacy of Romanticism have a lot
to learn from Where the Wasteland Ends. Roszak’s final
appeal is to the power and beauty of the "mythopoetic" endowment
of the human species. This also is the ultimate calling to which Metahistory
leads, the sacred mission it seeks to inspire.
JLL: Jan 2003
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