Book Reviews

SERPENT IN THE SKY: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt, by John Anthony West; Julian Press/Crown (Random House); paperbound.

THE TRAVELER'S KEY TO ANCIENT EGYPT by John Anthony West; Alfred A. Knopf; illustrated paperbound.

Egyptology as a science is less than one hundred years old; as an innate yearning for the spiritual life it is timeless. West's approach to the Egypt experience either as a study or a journey is to relinquish the “cerebral approach” for the sake of the vital experience that its art and architecture conveys.

Serpent in the Sky is in its second edition, the new paperback format reflecting a resurgence of interest in ancient cultures from both scholarly and esoteric viewpoints. Serpent offers both, in addition to a trove of illustrative material that ranges from temple and tomb reliefs to mathematical theorems which articulate the sacred geometry.

West has produced a significant work in that for the first time in the English language, the prodigious work of French orientalist R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz is presented in a thorough, engaging overview. As originator of the Symbolist approach to understanding ancient civilizations, de Lubicz's work was, in the middle of this century, derided, or ignored by orthodox Egyptology. Currently, the basic premises of Symbolist thought can be found in a number of new Egypt works, and it appears that esoteric Egypt is finding its way into mainstream thinking.

The fundamental theme of Symbolist thinking concerning Egypt is that the underlying cause of its architectural, artistic, engineering, and medical achievements is the existence of a Sacred Science This body of knowledge was, according to de Lubicz, far more sophisticated and in concert with universal principles than our own physical sciences. West articulates the disciplines which compose this ancient wisdom, from Pythagorean concepts to esoteric symbolism in temple art.

The Traveler's Key to Ancient Egypt is the result of West's numerous research journeys to Egypt in the last twenty years and the development of his special guided tour events. The latter bypass standard, popular monuments for truly special sites that offer genuine spiritual ambiance. This “Guide to the Sacred Places of Ancient Egypt” offers far more than the common tourist itinerary. It is truly a pilgrim's compendium to the sacred journey through temple, tomb, and pyramid.

The Traveler's Key provides a comprehensive overview of cur rent Egypt “theories.” With the pyramids, for instance, West impartially discusses the probability of slave labor along with pyramid power claims, UFO origins, and undiscovered chambers of initiation. With his characteristic dry humor and thorough grasp of the facts, Egypt becomes easy.

Egyptian art, architecture, and the historical background of the monuments' period is discussed in opening chapters to each site. This prepares the traveler for the esoteric experience, and establishes an appreciation for the subtleties of each place. At Ombos, for instance, one may envision the temple crocodiles adorned with earrings splashing about while descending down the sacred well. At the same time, one is reminded of the ascent of the spiritual entry into the sacred marsh of time, embodied in the temple's lotus form capitals that fill the sky as the traveler attains ground level.

-ROSEMARY CLARK

Winter 1991

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THE EARTH MOTHER: Legends, Ritual Arts, and Goddesses of India

by Pupul Jayakar
Harper and Row, 1990; paper.

Pupul Jayakar is one of India's most highly respected citizens for the outstanding contributions she has made to Indian life and culture . For many years a close associate of the late Indira Gandhi, she has continued to be an adviser on heritage and cultural resources to the prime minister of India. She is also the president of the Krishnamurti Foundation of India.

Author of many books on Indian culture, she here takes us on a journey to the realm of the goddess as revealed in India's rural and tribal art. For anyone at all familiar with India, the book will awaken memories of entering villages where huge statues stand guard to protect the people and where the creative energy of the Earth Mother, the primordial goddess, is still potent.

She writes: “Two vast anonymous rivers of the creative flow in parallel streams over the landmass of India .” The first is the well-known “male-oriented artisan tradition” which traces its origin to Viswakarma, the first creator. The other, less well known, “is based on the recognition of woman as the original creator.” This heritage “traces its origin to Adi Sakti, the first woman, who spins the threads of creation.”

In India, time is cyclic, and ritual recreates the past, bringing its power into the present and ensuring the future . Pupul Jayakar 's description of the reenactment of the legend of the goddess in south India stirs the imagination:

On a dark moonless night in the light of flickering oil lamps, an image of Bhagavati Kali is drawn on the earth with colored powder. In her is the power and glory, the abundance of the earth, its savage ferocity, its tranquility. In one hand she holds a flame. To the thunder of chanting and drumbeats, the magician-priest dances the destruction of the goddess. With his feet he wipes away her limbs, her breasts, her belly, her face, her eyes, till only the fire held in one hand remains. For fire is eternal and primeval female energy has no end. When the form of the goddess finally disappears in the dust from which she has emerged, in the distant darkness, an oil lamp is lit. The fire from the hand of the goddess leaps across space, to light the oil lamp held by a human hand, and then her victory over the demon is reenacted. Drums reach a crescendo; creation, destruction, the cycle of birth and death are transformed in the hands of the village painter…; in that instant the eternal dance begins.

Mrs. Jayakar draws us deep into the roots of Indian culture and village life. The book is profusely illustrated. It is well documented and referenced, and scholarly, but never pedantic and academic. A delight to read, The Earth Mother reveals the contemporaneity of the ancient goddess legends, reminding us all that within each of us the past is still alive and powerful, even though we may have forgotten our own heritage.

- JOY MILLS

Winter 1991

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GRACE AND GRIT: Spirituality and Healing in the Life and Death of Treya Killam Wilber

by Ken Wilber
Shambhala Publications, Boston, 1991 ; cloth.

This is an extraordinary book- a mixture of love story, medical drama, spiritual quest, and philosophical/psychological contemplation.

The love story is that of Ken and Treya Killam Wilber, who fell in “love at first touch” in August 1983. At their first meeting, they barely exchanged five words, yet both went home with the feeling that they had been looking for each other for lifetimes. Within two weeks they decided to marry.

The wedding was November 26, 1983, and they planned a honeymoon trip to Hawaii to start two weeks later. But within a few days they learned that Treya had breast cancer, and were plunged into the medical drama.

Grace and Grit alternates between Ken Wilber's narrative, Treya's journal entries, and Ken's philosophical/psychological commentaries on the great wisdom traditions. There are explanations of meditation, the relationship of psychotherapy to spirituality, and the nature of health and healing.

At the outset Wilber advises readers on the structure of the book, inviting them to skip the philosophical and technical sections if all they are interested in is following Treya's story. But these more intellectual “thought” sections in their own way enliven the whole, showing how import ant the “life of the mind” is to the unfolding medical drama. The reader who chooses to skip these sections in order to stay with the drama of the story will be missing much, and may wish to return to the philosophical sections later to think more deeply about the life and death issues that confront us all.

Treya's openness to a multitude of approaches to healing is a major aspect of this book. These include traditional medicine with its chemotherapy, alternative medicine with its massive doses of enzymes and other methods “not approved by the AMA,” and various spiritual and “new age” techniques including meditation, visualization, affirmations, psychic healing, and more.

Counterbalancing what many readers might regard as a great credulity about Treya's pursuit of healing through this plethora of techniques, Wilber describes his own skepticism about much non-traditional healing. In one particularly interesting passage, he describes watching Chris Habib, a psychic healer, at work on Treya:

. . . I didn't doubt that something genuine was going on- she was definitely moving energy- but I believed hardly a word of what she said. I had never heard so many tall tales in my life. She was spinning them out with an ease that would shame the Brothers Grimm. But that was exactly her charm, that was what I found so endearing about her. Like Treya, I found her enormously likable. You just wanted to hang out with her, gel caught up in her magical stories. That, I came to see, was exactly a crucial part of what she was doing. 

Wilber concluded that it is “this charm that is so missing in white man's medicine.” And the net effect of the session with Chris Habib was that both Ken and Treya “felt vitalized, alert, happy. And the constant stream of outrageous tales made both Treya and I hold everything more lightly.. ..”

Also, the book includes an excellent critique of so-called new age ideas, the most pernicious being the not ion that mind alone causes disease, and that we can literally create our own reality. These are what Wilber labels “level two beliefs,” characterizing an infantile and magical worldview including grandiosity, omnipotence, and narcissism. His is not a blanket condemnation of the New Age, though Wilber believes, along with William Irwin Thompson, that about 20 percent of new agers are transpersonal (genuinely mystical), while about 80 percent are prepersonal magical and narcissistic).

The Wilbers' book is no “miracle cure” story; it tells of a real life and death, for Treya does die in the end. After all, she had forty lung tumors, four brain tumors, and liver metastases. Still, she carried on a five-year battle with cancer, and died in a state of what Ken calls “enlightened awareness.” The story is a moving one, and the final pages brought tears to my eyes.

The Wilbers have given a gift to all those who suffer from cancer and those who are support persons to those with cancer. Ultimately this is a story of an unfoldment of “passionate equanimity,” a Buddhist perspective on being (in Treya's words) “fully passionate about all aspects of life, about one's relationship with spirit, to care to the depths of one's being but with no trace of clinging or holding… It feels full, rounded, complete, and challenging.”

– WILLIAM METZGER

Winter 1991

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REIMAGINATION OF THE WORLD; A Critique of the New Age, Science, and Popular Culture

by David Spangler and William Irwin Thompson
Bear and Company, Santa Fe. Late September 1991; paperback.

"A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions. Rather, it is a mailer of having the courage f or an attack on one's convictions. "- Nietzsche

Nietzsche liked writing that was done with one's “blood”: self-critical writing. The use of blood as a metaphor which synthesizes the earth, air, water, and fire of life into the complexity of one's experience in history seems appropriate in a descript ion of the reflections of these two writers who have had their hearts beat in the midst of the media's “New Age.”

Bly has used “sewerage” to rhyme with “new age,” a judgment that is perhaps less kind than Ken Wilber's portrayal of the new age as an expression of baby-boomer narcissism. And other critiques of new age writing have suggested that its intellectual and spiritual roots are no thicker than a tarot deck – the mere difference between getting stoned and getting crystalled.

Spangler and Thompson, however, locate their roots prior to their work with Findhorn and Lindisfarne. Spangler was a student of science, for example, and Thompson cites a mystical experience he had while reading Whitehead's Science and the Modern World as a teenager.

These two thinkers, then, are far from any stereotype of the typical “new-ager” as an undisciplined, irresponsible, and mindless wanderer who seeks direction and escape from thought and reality through form s of divination. They are two knowledgeable thinkers who know philosophy, science, religion, and art. And their reflections and critiques of the movement they are associated with carry with them the scent of enough blood and courage to satisfy Nietzsche who, like them, was willing to challenge the paradigms of academia and popular culture.

The chapters of the book are based on seminars delivered in Washington at the Chinook Learning Center in 1988 and 1989 and possess a vitality that gives one a sense of being there as a witness in the way one witnesses Socrates in Plato's dialogues. These men speak of their lives, their spiritual and intellectual development, their former hopes scaled down or restructured by their experience over the last twenty years. And while they find plenty of things to dismiss in the so-called new age movement, they both understand to their depths what that movement was opposing in our society.

So while Thompson may decry the “sloppy syncretism” and “vulgarization” of the movement and Spangler may characterize it as “a kind of metaphysical Disneyland ,” they both see the movement as a thrust to express qualities of the “soul of the planet itself.” Spangler sees his fellow workers promoting “the capacity to empower co-creativity and to manifest connectedness, intricacy, complexity, and synergy.”

Spangler and Thompson look back into history and look straight into the emerging future and find value in this movement after they criticize it and themselves. And in being so vibrantly honest, they offer insights into how science may provide a new sense of spirituality based on quantum mechanics and how the idea of “holarchy” may supersede “hierarchy” in esoteric thinking.

I think this book is worth reading for academics who have dismissed the new age with little knowledge of it, since Spangler and Thompson relate new age ideas to the history of thought quite gracefully with all the caution of scientists. And think this book is important for anyone familiar with the new age movement who wants to reflect on her/his own experience. And this book will be a great joy for any critical spirits who like writing to be done with one's blood.

-ANTON LYSY

Autumn 1991

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