When We Met The Neighbours
Quote:Does it not fascinate you that there was a first sorcerer, a first shaman, a first act of magic?
There is considerable, understandable interest in how our art tumbled down from Egypt and Greece. Both civilisations irrevocably changed the shape of western magic.
But taking a macro view, an overemphasis on these two regions is rather like coming into the cinema for the last five minutes of Return of The King.
Shouldn’t we be curious about what happened in the rest of the trilogy?
Homo erectus kicked around for almost two million years, our fully-modern brains are 200,000 years old. And yet in the archaeological record there is a time before burial and a time after it.
Somewhere along our journey we acquired a spirit world.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
(2018-05-24, 06:59 PM)Chris Wrote: Actually, I'd be interested in any thoughts on Gordon White's work. A while ago I got a copy of Star.Ships on Kindle, and at first liked it very much. But as I got further into it, I began to wonder whether the evidence that he cited had really been evaluated critically. And I'm afraid I eventually gave up, because it seemed to me that the evidence as it was presented was difficult to judge - and in fact some of it seemed rather unreliable.
Still, if anyone feels the work really has merit - judged according to a scientific approach to these things - I'd be interested to hear their views.
I like him for the ideas, for the Blue Sky thinking, as it were. I also find his writing entertaining.
Does it add up as well as he makes it out? - like you I have my doubts, reinforced by some of the conspiracy theories he goes all in for that I am very skeptical of.
That said, I feel like his magical work seems workable as a system of practice and one can draw some spiritual insights from his thinking.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
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