Book Reviews

The Mystery of Doggerland: Atlantis in the North Sea

Graham Phillips
Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2023. 198 pp., paper, $20.

Lost continents have long featured in lore, but until recently they were derided as mere legends.

That picture is rapidly changing, as archaeologists are unearthing discoveries that point to civilizations that sank underwater in comparatively recent times. Although the last Ice Age is generally deemed to have ended in the tenth millennium BC, large—and inhabited—territories were submerged only thousands of years later.

Graham Phillips explores one of these submerged civilizations in The Mystery of Doggerland. The name is taken from the Dogger Bank, a submerged sea bank in the North Sea. Doggerland was an enormous territory in that sea, to the east of Britain, and at one time connected the island to the mainland European continent.

Phillips chooses to focus on another, smaller island, called North Doggerland, northeast of the coast of Scotland. He prefers to call it Fairland, not only because the name is more evocative but because the last part of it to remain aboveground is Fair Isle, a 2.5 x 3‒mile territory between the Orkney and Shetland islands with sixty inhabitants.

 The great megaliths and stone circles scattered around the British Isles have long been a source of wonder, but until recently it was believed that the oldest ones were in the south (such as Stonehenge and Avebury). It turns out that the opposite is the case: the oldest circles and standing stones are in the Orkneys, off the north coast of Scotland, and the custom of erecting them slowly spread south.

Despite their age, Phillips says that the circles and megaliths of the Orkneys were themselves mere outposts of the civilization of Fairland, and the islands may have been settled in part by refugees of that country as it began to be submerged. One megalithic complex that is now twelve feet below the surface off the Bay of Firth, began sinking in 4000 BC, according to Phillips.

Consequently, “during the fourth millennium BC, a completely new, far more advanced culture than anything that came before suddenly came from the Orkney Islands . . . the characteristic megalithic monuments began to be erected, and the technical innovations of pottery, weaving, and farming suddenly appeared. The Orcadians began building stone houses—the first anywhere in Europe.” These were all the legacy of Fairland.

Myth did not forget the lost country, which, says Phillips, was known in ancient sources as “Tu-lay,” “Tyle,” “Thule,” and “Thoule”; “Tule” was another variant. In the fourth century, the Greek explorer Pytheas followed such legends of this mysterious and bounteous land, but all he found is what we see today—the small, sparsely populated islands of the Orkneys.

Although Phillips does not mention this fact, there is another tradition about Tule, known from the works of the French esotericist René Guénon, who posited a primordial circumpolar tradition that he connected with the Greek legend of Hyperborea. The Greeks regarded Hyperborea as a real but inaccessible country in the far north, but Guénon contended that it no longer existed. (Still another picture of Hyperborea is the one known from H.P. Blavatsky, but it is quite different from both the Greek and Guénonian views.)

All genuine esoteric traditions, said Guénon, were descended from that of Hyperborea. Furthermore, this spiritual center became “occluded” so that our present connections with this primordial tradition can only be weak and tenuous. We might, if we liked, connect this occlusion with the submergence of Fairland.

One may wonder about how all of this came about in such a dismal climate, but Phillips makes the startling claim that “until around 1200 BCE the British climate was warmer than it is today, more like what we would now find in southern France or northern California.”

This book examines myths of other lost continents, such as Atlantis, first discussed in Plato’s Timaeus and Critias. According to Phillips, evidence suggests that a landslide off the coast of southern Greenland around 6500 BC caused a giant tsunami, “hammering the coasts of southwest Europe and northwest Africa with a wave about 30 feet high.” Hence, he concludes, “an island, perhaps sustaining an early city . . . did exist exactly where Plato and his contemporaries had in mind. And it appears that it was completely inundated by a gigantic wave in a single day as Plato describes.” But he is much more skeptical about the legends of Mu in the Pacific and Lemuria in the Indian Ocean.

Phillips takes his investigation into a number of other directions, for example, about traditions of medicinal uses of herbs. Traces of noxious herbs are found in the box tombs of the ancient Orcadian elite, which he says can only have been for medicinal purposes. These plants could only be harvested at certain specific times and seasons, he argues, because the amount of poison they secreted varied at different times: “The organism has evolved to deter some creatures and attract others when it is ready to be pollinated.” Hence “many of the substances utilized in the making of remedial potions need to be extracted at a very specific time,” even “on very particular days.”

Phillips’ suggestions cast a different light on the much-derided old traditions requiring harvesting of plants and herbs at specific days and times and at specific phases of the moon. Here as in other situations, superstitions may contain relics of a very precise ancient knowledge.

Phillips’ book has an unsettling relevance. Sinking islands are no longer risible myths but realities that many parts of the world have to face. The Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, for example, is expected to be completely submerged by the end of this century. Coastal regions of the United States are by no means exempt. Twelve thousand years from now, skeptics will probably sneer at legends of a magnificent but sunken city known as New York.

Richard Smoley

For more on lost continents, see Richard Smoley’s YouTube lecture “Atlantis Then and Now.”

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What I Don’t know about Death: Reflections on Buddhism and Mortality

C.W. Huntington Jr.
Somerville, Mass.: Wisdom Publications, 2021; 167 pp., paper, $16.95.

Death would seem to be the greatest human mystery, although it appears to be only a bit more mysterious than life. C.W. (Sandy) Huntington Jr. acknowledges that in the first sentence of his book: “I know next to nothing about death.”

 Written during the six months Huntington had left of his life after being diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer in January 2020, this book is his final gift to those of us who are left pondering the meaning of life and its end, death. “Science can tell us a great deal about dying and death from an objective point of view but nothing at all about what it means to directly face one’s own imminent demise,” he writes.

Huntington grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, and attended Michigan State University. He earned his PhD in Asian languages and cultures at the University of Michigan. Living in India from 1976 to 1979, Huntington studied with the teachers Ambika Datta Upadhyaya and Ram Shanar Tripathi. He traveled to India many times in his life, taking students in his Buddhist studies program (first at the University of Michigan and Denison College, and then to Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York), to experience that country.

The life of the Buddha and the nature of the spiritual path are the subjects of the beginning chapter of Huntington’s work, in which he notes that the spiritual path is often rooted in discontent, as was the Buddha’s. When the questions loom large in our minds, the search for answers begins. Most of us seek to know why. How can we attain happiness? The search is often a struggle to find the meaning in what confronts us in life, and “how ultimately futile our struggle for control” is.

Some people are critical of Buddhism’s seeming obsession with death and dying, which, as Huntington observes, sees “spiritual work as preparation for death . . . obvious in the case of the Tibetan Book of the Dead,” in which “the message is communicated . . . throughout Buddhist teachings, where meditations on death are commonplace.” But there likely is no more profound teacher of suffering and the way out of suffering than being given a terminal diagnosis of a “dis-ease,” as Huntington terms it in the chapter of that title. Wanting life to be other than it is brings on suffering “whenever our experience runs counter to our desires. What I don’t get what I want, or when I get what I don’t want, I become restless, worried, fearful.”

That reminds me of the phrase in a song by Sheryl Crow: “It’s not having what you want; it’s wanting what you’ve got.” That’s true even if what you’ve got is a terminal diagnosis. This quality—wanting nothing more than what you are given—is called desirelessness in Buddhist philosophy, as Huntington notes as one of the lessons of living and dying. It’s the only way out of suffering.

Huntington explores waking up and what it means as we move through life seeking enlightenment, which more often than not eludes us. His chapter on “A Pathless Land” also discusses waking up. We try too hard to attain enlightenment, which is our greatest impediment: “The harder I twist and pull, the tighter the knot gets. At some point my only choice is to give up trying to not try.” Does waking up (enlightenment) come gradually, through our own efforts, or in a sudden insight? He quotes J. Krishnamurti, who said that “‘truth is a pathless land’ . . . some problems will not yield to rational analysis, so there are skills that cannot be learned by mastering a formula.”

While most of Huntington’s insightful book is focused on the basics of the Buddhist philosophy of living, including nonattachment, equanimity, and desirelessness, ultimately one must learn to let go. “Letting Go” is his final chapter, both literally and figuratively. “I am dying, and what I don’t know about death has become a metaphor for what I don’t know about life. As I’m compelled to give myself over to this darkness of unknowing, I’m finding a new and deepened understanding about what it means to come to terms with what I’ve been given—with what Buddhism calls the ‘suchness’ (tathata) of things.”

Learning nonattachment and the practice of letting go is a lifelong effort, but one that finally gives us the peace and courage required to die. As my late partner, Brent, said to me in one of his last lessons to me: “Dying is easy; it’s living that’s hard. Dying is so easy.”

Huntington died on July 19, 2020, at 1:45 p.m., says his epilogue. “It was an entirely quiet passing. He simply let go.”

Clare Goldsberry’s latest book, The Illusion of Life and Death: Mind, Consciousness, and Eternal Being, was reviewed in Quest, spring 2022.

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The Religious Revolution: The Birth of Modern Spirituality, 1848‒98

Dominic Green
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022; 452 pp., hardcover, $35.

With the advent of the age of science, many wondered what might replace Christianity in the Western religious tradition. Few realized that a new spirituality was dawning on the horizon. Dominic Green, a historian, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and an author who has taught writing, history, and politics at Brandeis University and Boston College, takes us on this journey in his latest book, The Religious Revolution: The Birth of Modern Spirituality, 1848‒98.

With the death of the Christian God proclaimed by Friedrich Nietzsche (whom Green cites extensively), many wondered, would a new god arise? If so, what would that god look like? And who would present that god to the Western world? During the fifty-year period that Green examines, there were many participants in this religious revolution.

Green’s book begins with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose beliefs shifted from those of a Christian theologian to something more akin to an Indian spiritual mindset, as set forth during his famous Harvard commencement address, which was influenced by the Bhagavad Gita. That small event may have marked the beginning of this religious revolution.

At the same time, political influence on Christian religious beliefs came not only from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels but from Charles Darwin, who posited the evolutionary development of species, including humans, putting science into the forefront of the revolution.

Green includes Claude de Rouvroy, the count of Saint-Simon, who “launched the ‘Scientific Religion” in 1803 by calling for a curia called the “Elect of Humanity” that would ensure “peaceful resolution of disagreements” as well as managing the spread of humanity throughout the world. Like some scientists today, Saint-Simon “warned that the Earth was over-heating, that the temperate zones would shortly resemble the deserts of Africa and Asia, and that Man would end up where he had begun, playing in the sand.”

The English economist Thomas Malthus was concerned about another problem: overpopulation. In his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus was convinced that as populations grew, their numbers would outstrip the food supply. “Malthusian competition became the spring in the mechanism of Darwin’s universe,” Green notes.

Green has much to say about the role of Theosophy and its founders, H.P. Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott, in the religious revolution that brought East to the West. He writes extensively about the early history of Theosophy—the good, the bad, and the ugly—crediting HPB with bringing Buddhist philosophy West. Green is a bit critical of the “license” she took with science of her day, contending that her “scientist followers kept her up-to-date on their fields, and she remained a bold plagiarist. The Secret Doctrine mingles digressions into comparative mythology with speculations on the Ice Age,” wrote Green. (However, should Green care to study recent geological research on the Ice Ages, he would discover that her “speculations” have been borne out regarding Greenland’s former tropical climate.) 

“Science and skepticism had weakened the Christian theology, imperiling the soul and its after life,” Green writes. “Blavatsky returned it to them . . . the Western perception of life and death was changing, the New Age theology emerging Blavatsky was a catalyst.” W.T. Stead wrote in 1894 in his Spiritualist journal, Borderland, that the “range of popular thought” had widened, and this “great achievement” would ever be associated with Blavatsky, who “bridged the chasm between the materialism of the West and the occultism and metaphysics of the East.”

Addressing the contributions of Judaism to the religious revolution and the role that Zionism played in global politics and religion, Green writes, “The Jews needed to answer the ‘Jewish Question’ before their enemies did. The answer was a revolutionary leap forward into the past: the recovery of the lost Jerusalem, the return to Zion.” Theodor Herzl, “son of German-speaking Jews who migrated from Budapest to Vienna,” was a central figure in this religious revolution. The struggles of the Jews in Europe during that period are mirrored in today’s Middle Eastern strife, a seemingly never-ending trial that is both religious and political. 

Green’s tour de force of the religious revolution, which was in fact a spiritual evolution, includes many more players in that drama, ranging from Richard Wagner to Swami Vivekananda, Arthur, Comte de Gobineau to Mohandas Gandhi and others, each playing their roles in the religious revolution.

Their influence continues today. According to Green, recent surveys show that “one in three Americans believes in reincarnation” and nearly “one in five describes themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious’”—which, for him, means that “the Religious Revolution is not over.”

Clare Goldsberry

Clare Goldsberry’s latest book, The Illusion of Life and Death, was reviewed in Quest, spring 2022.

                                                           

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Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe: An Investigation

Ronald Hutton
New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2022. 245 pp., hardcover, $25.  

Discerning the relationship between paganism and Christianity over a thousand-year period in any geographical context is both complex and contentious. Examining presuppositions, clarifying categories, gathering evidence, mastering relevant critical literature, and crafting an effective argument—perchance with eloquence—require persistence, courage, and something akin to a sense of vocation. This is especially so when members of the intended audience feel they have a stake in the conclusions. The difficulty is further heightened when the tasks are undertaken, as many early modern writers had to put it, “in time of pestilence”— in this case, the academically inhospitable time of COVID-19.

All these factors conspired against the British historian Ronald Hutton in his seemingly simple project of tracing the origin and development of a handful of godlike female figures in medieval and modern European culture. Remarkable in the cohort of pandemic-age publications, Queens of the Wild speaks far beyond the circumstances of its composition and release. It addresses deep and perennial questions at the core of Western self-understanding.

Hutton is no stranger to scholarly controversy or the study of royals, both natural and supernatural. Long associated with the University of Bristol in the U.K., he has contributed significantly to research on the British Civil War, the Restoration, and the Stuart monarchs. Since the 1990s, he has gained recognition as an authority in a second specialty, much broader than but still including the seventeenth century: the academic study of ancient Britain and the full sweep of Western paganism from prehistory to the present day. This agenda, enhanced by his familiarity with cognate fields of archaeology and folklore studies, has brought Hutton increased exposure and even celebrity as a media personality, landing him guest appearances on BBC specials, such as Sacred Wonders of Britain and other platforms, such as Ancient Aliens. It has also revealed fault lines within the community of his contemporary pagan readers.

Hutton’s empathetic yet critical approach, dedicated to following evidence wherever it leads while advocating for appreciation of pagan paths in contemporary society, has sparked considerable self-examination and sometimes division among practitioners, especially reigning leaders of pagan networks. Queens of the Wild continues this pattern of old-school objectivity, interrogation of historiographical orthodoxies, and celebration of pagan wisdom.

Between the book’s first chapter, longer than any other in the volume, and the chapter-length epilogue, four chapters explore the history and meaning of intriguing superhuman female beings selected from the folklore and literature of European peoples, figures that blur the boundaries between pagan and Christian.

These are the sovereigns signaled by the book’s provocative title: Mother Earth, known by many names, including the Great Goddess; the Fairy Queen, associated with mysterious realms populated by elves and sprites; the Lady of the Night, variously identified as Diana, Herodias, and Holda, famous for her nocturnal voyages and benevolence with food and drink; and the Cailleach, the giant Old Woman or Hag of Gaelic legend, linked to fierce landscapes only slightly more forbidding than herself. According to Hutton, all four are transgressive, all exercise agency rarely exhibited in patriarchal systems, and all are products of medieval or modern milieus. In other words, the pagan goddesses in Christian Europe (at least this chosen quartet) turn out to be not so pagan after all—and not so Christian either.

Many readers, convinced by luminaries from Jacquetta Hawkes and Marija Gimbutas to Robert Graves and Carl Jung, will be especially surprised to learn that the myth of a single Great Goddess permeating global cultures before an Axial Age assertion of patriarchy owes its existence principally to medieval humanists, Victorian rural enthusiasts, and twentieth-century distorters of archeological data.  

Hutton’s unsensational prose and genteel style help even the truest of believers give his revisionism a fair hearing. The case for what critics might call debunking is laid out in the first chapter, where Hutton argues against “pagan survival,” the claim of an integral pagan tradition enduring through the Middles Ages, but documents the possibility of “pagan survivals,” elements of pre-Christian traditions persevering through channels such as popular service magic and any number of folk customs.

The epilogue, on Britain’s not-so-feminine Green Man, with fascinating asides on the curious foliate heads and unabashed sheela-na-gigs of medieval cathedral art, reiterates Hutton’s conclusion about the irrepressible creativity of the Western imagination, which fits only awkwardly into abstract categories of pagan or Christian. The structure of the book itself identifies this theme as his central idea: just over half of the text focuses on female archetypes. Mistitled, Queens of the Wild is a lucid invitation to explore the free interaction of pagan and Christian in the untamed Western mind.

Peter A. Huff, an academic administrator and professor of religious studies, is the author or editor of seven books. His article “The Current State of Unbelief” appeared in Quest, spring 2022.                            

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