Bibliography


Seven Classics


Book Reviews


Background

Selective Book List

Among the books cited in the comprehensive Bibliography for Metahistory are 36 recommended titles that belong to the three special categories: Orientation, Themes, Classics. These books are intended to present a helpful dose of basic reading, but no such list can be either final or authoritative. Readers of Metahistory.org are invited to comment on the suggested books and offer their own recommendations. Reader's contributions will be featured, below, after the list of books reviewed.

Thanks, and good reading.

JL

How strange the twists of our history. Here Socrates (looking oddly like Christ in a Fool's cap) is instructed in writing by Plato. But the caption says (correctly) that Socrates refused to write, so Plato put his maste's words into written dialogue. History is written - more aptly, the history that tyrannizes and torments us - and so metahistory engages the written word, but also goes beyond it. Metahistory.org is a dialogue with the Socratic intent to learn as we explore language. Although Socrates did not write down his ideas, he was most certainly literate, able to read. Perhaps he would have been interested in some of the books listed here.

General Orientation. There are 14 books recommended for a general overview of metahistorical issues and questions.

Pagan Christs by J. M. Robertson
Beyond Theology by Alan Watts
The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light by William Irwin Thompson.
Memories and Visions of Paradise by Richard Heinberg.
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell.
The Myth of the Goddess by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford.
From Atlantis to the Sphinx by Colin Wilson.
The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler.
Arktos by Jocelyn Godwin.
The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh.
Angels and Aliens by Keith Thompson.
Supernature by Lyall Watson.
Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine by James Lovelock.

 

Thematic Reading. These are 15 books suggested as basic reading in relation
to the five informing Themes of metahistory, three for each Theme:

Sacred Nature

Blackfoot Physics by F. David Peat.
Inanna by Diana Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer.
Voices of the First Day by Robert Lawlor.

Eternal Conflict

Cosmos, Chaos and World Order by Norman Cohn
The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness by Erich Fromm


Origins

Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock.
The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe by Marija Gimbutas
The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara Walker

Moral Design

I Ching, Translated by Richard Wilhelm
Voices of Our Ancestors by DhyaniYwahoo
Homo Ludens by Johann Huizinga

Technology

Coming to Our Senses by Maurice Berman
Technopoly by Neil Postman
In the Absence of the Sacred by Jerry Mander

The Seven Classics. These are books recommended for an understanding of the background of metahistory and history writing in general. They give in-depth perspective on the origins of historical writing, as well as insight into altered ways of looking at how history is told, how it can be spun, and how narratives can be evaluated.Commentaries on these books are incorporated into the essay, Background to Metahistory.

The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer
Myths to Live By by Joseph Campbell
Hamlet's Mill by Gorgio de Santillanna and Herta von Dechend
When God Was A Woman by Merlin Stone
Black Athena by Martin Bernal
Cities of Dreams by Stan Gooch

NOTE: Although the books of Hayden White are responsible for putting the word "metahistory" into current discourse, White's work is purely academic and rather forbiddingly loaded with freeze-dried categories and self-referential jargon. As I have said elsewhere in the site, metahistory is not an academic chess game, it is a path of liberation from belief-driven behavior. There is little or nothing in White that can contribute to the practice of metahistory as developed in this site.

Finally, there are Reviews on current books of metahistorical bearing. This list is subject to periodic additions. At present (June 2004) it includes the following:

The Biology of Transcendence by Joseph Chilton Pearce.
A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen.
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.
The Gospel of Mary of Magdala by Karen King.

Reader Recommendations.

We at Metahistory.org are always open to books recommended by readers. The selective reading list is by no means canonical, and the seven classics here cited could easily be replaced by seven others. Yet the above choices are not arbitrary, either. They are made on the basis of specific criteria: mainly, usefulness and originality, and they are occasionally idiocentric. We realize that our readers have their own criteria and idiocentricities, which can be valuable to us. We invite you to recommend and comment briefly on books that are important to you relative to the issues of metahistory.

Send your recommendations and comments to JL at: Metahistory@earthlink.net