William Irwin Thompson

Fascinating classic that attempts to shed light on our matriarchal/Goddess ancestors, within the rigors of academic standards. It was not easy reading, and I admit I only skimmed it, in part because I got it through an inter-library loan with a ridiculously short due date.

I can see why he was panned by some of the early Goddess revival women (who he evidently had overlooked in his earlier edition). Still, it presents a compelling body of research that, alas, shows how entrenched academia still is about HIS-story.… (más)

Through bardic oration, Thompson creates lectures of a quality that cannot be surpassed. Serving moreso as artifacts of artwork sans script one can admire a tapestry of riffing on concepts that truly does become musical both in performance and content (as in the later fascination he tethers to with the Pythagorean monochord) through an aperture of telescoping through entire civilization with a prescience only reserved for the deeply introspective and the obsessively hyper-read. Through an unconscious lineage of Spengler and Gebser (the latter of which he becomes consciously fascinated with only decades later) he marks a beginning of a polymathic interest in, what I've formalized and concretized as, the project or map of metahistory.

This text stems and follows from those lectures, those mp3's that act as rites of initiation, and variations upon the themes touched in them. Through a keen sensibility in myth, anthropology and philosophy - he creates a truly Batesonian ecology of mind, through taking every variation upon a myth into a tree directory of that myth's Source as an application of Levi-Strauss's structuralism (Freud's Oedipus and Sophocles' Oedipus can be seen as part of the same myth), a focal lens study of the Paleolithic and Neolithic that is only highlighted amongst its contrast to the study of the cybernetic Gaian planetary culture we create today giving us a "commodious vicus of recirculation," an understanding of metareligion that maps the scientific basis for myth and the mythic roots of science.

Though, one cannot see it as highly as Spengler or Gebser, since Thompson does not reach the grandiose depths that they partake in their complete surveyals of entire civilizations and archaeological listings of every domain of study in them - this more works as an introductory dive towards the project of metahistory.

The gnostic realization of this metahistory - that it is our demise, the nightmare in which we are trying to awake, the fall of unity into multiplicity, the One into Two - and each metamyth we pulse and emanate out of our minds of civilization, those nodes that make networks, the knowing that makes Indra's Net work, is a recapitulation of that fractal Fall.… (más)