Where Jungians Fear to Tread

books:


	• Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science William Irwin Thompson Palgrave Macmillan, 1990 - 198 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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uneven

The high point of this book was indeed ,as another reviewer noted, the exegesis of the fairy-tale "Rapunzel", which uncovers several layers of meaning. There is also an interesting interpretation of some of Rudolf Steiner's seemingly far-fetched writings in which his ideas are made to seem more plausible in terms of a planetary consciousness. The rest of the book seems very uneven and rambling, perhaps trying to cover too much material for such a relatively short book. There are interesting bits distributed throughout, but his scheme of the evolution of consciousness seems a bit superficial. Having been written in the 1980's many of the references seem already dated. Certainly not a waste of time, but I wouldn't put it at the top of my list.

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W.I.T. does it again!

Forget Joseph Campbell and his academic-minded ilk -- and take a journey on the wild side with W.I.T. There are very few others writing in the English language like W.I.T. who have all the necessary academic credentials (in his case teaching at MIT, etc.), plus all of the requisite real world credentials that come from creating Lindisfarne Assoc. from scratch. What this book does for the reader is creating a context and provide a place within which we can understand the truly mythic character of the human story, and thereby grasp the underlying evolutionary significance of our own moment in meta-history. Give this book the tie it deserves, because it can be a dense thicket. But passing through the thicket, even with the occasional thorn, is well owrth the price paid by an interested reader seeking larger truths about culture, language, history, and cosmos.

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Where Jungians Fear to Tread

Somebody once wrote to Carl Jung asking of his opinion of Rudolf Steiner, and Jung replied, "I have not the slightest use for him." That attitude synopsizes everything that has gone wrong with the field of mythological sudies ever since Jung captured the muse of myth and abducted her to his underground cavern, where she has been ever since. It also explains why this book, one of Thompson's best, has been generally neglected for so long, since it has absolutely no affiliation to the Jungian universe whatsoever.

This book contains one of the great essays on mythology, namely Thompson's riff on the Grimm's fairy tale of Rapunzel, in which he analyzes the tale from a multilayered point of view. Thompson points out how the plant upon which the story is based, Campanula rapunculans, which is a self-fertilizing plant with curled up tendrils that unfold during this process in a way that is suggestive of the unfolding of Rapunzel's hair (and this is an image, by the way, which first turns up in the Persian Shah-namah in the story of Rudabeh and Zal), Thompson points out that this is a plant with a flower that is five-leaved, and that such five-leaved flowers are known as 'flowers of Venus' because they imitate the fivefold pentagram shape which the peregrinations of the planet Venus makes up in the sky. Thus, there is a hidden astronomical allegory in the story superimposed over the botanical one: the prince is Mars, and his union with Rapunzel is an image of a conjunction of Venus & Mars in the heavens, with their children, the twins, as Gemini. This is one of the great chapters in the history of mythological hermeneutics and is worth the price of the book alone.

The rest of the book is an exploration of the interface between myth and science, particularly the science of complex dynamical systems. The book also serves in this respect as a nice introduction to the work of scientists Lynn Margulis, Ralph Abraham, James Lovelock and Francisco Varela (and in this respect, it is the genuine article; leave Fritjof Capra's amateurish "Web of Life" aside). It is one of the best books ever written about the interface between myth and science, and it opens a door into this dimension which, so far as I know, has never been either competently or adequately followed up by any other myth scholar.

If you think Joseph Campbell and his hoard of drooling Jungian cronies are the last word on myth studies, then think again, because Thompson proves, with this book, that there are more things between heaven and earth than are dreamt of inside the skull of Carl Jung.

--John David Ebert, author of Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society

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In a demythologized world, William Thompson finds that the power of myth is ironically being restored at the leading edge of science. This book surveys the present, from Post-Modern theory to a science encompassing Chaos theory and the Gaia hypothesis, and finds in it the threads out of which a future conceptual landscape might be woven.