The time falling bodies take to light: Mythology, sexuality, and the origins of culture

Description

The grandest and most fundamental questions humans raise have to do with our nature and the nature of our world. The most elusive of these, seemingly intractable to rational scientific inquiry and to philosophic speculation alike, probe those qualities of mind and body which distinguish us from other creatures—our consciousness and our sexuality. In his classic National Book Award nominee At the Edge of History, William Irwin Thompson introduced a new approach to dealing with these problems when he surveyed contemporary American culture and its movement into the future. Now he has turned his attention to the other edge of history to illuminate the core issues of human and cultural development. Here, in a work of imaginatively vast depth and clarity, Thompson rejects the familiar fragmented version of history of traditional academics to open to us a new world of understanding. His imagination ranges over and makes connections between disciplines and phenomena as diverse as anthropology, archaeology, physics, biology, various schools of psychology, mysticism, western religion and eastern theosophy, gnosticism, yoga, prehistoric and Renaissance painting and sculpture, current film. It is ultimately in myth, the place beyond the edges of “history,” “science” and “art,” that he locates the intertwined origins and essential unity of human consciousness, sexuality, and culture. The scope of Thompson’s knowledge is sweeping, and he writes with a literary flair critics have found “incredibly beautiful and apt in expression.” Here he has produced ‘a major work, a voyage of the mind and spirit that never loses us. Thompson’s is a radical, visionary synthesis that ultimately gives us a new understanding of ourselves, the past, and the possible future of civilization and culture. About the Author: William Irwin Thompson, a cultural historian, has taught at MIT, York University in Toronto, and Syracuse University. He is the founding director of the Lindisfarne Association, a contemplative educational community devoted to the study and realization of anew planetary culture. He is also the author of numerous articles and of five books: The Imagination of an Insurrection; At the Edge of History; Passages About Earth; Evil and World Order; and Darkness and Scattered Light. When not traveling and lecturing, he lives in Colorado. Cover Contents I The Myth Before History Prologue: The Time Light Bodies Took to Fall II The Transformations of Prehistory 1. Hominization 2. Symbolization 3. Agriculturalization III Western Civilization and The Displacement of The Feminine 4. Civilization and Alienation in Ancient Sumer 5. Civilization and Initiation in Ancient Egypt IV The Myth Beyond History Epilogue: The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light Notes Index