Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science [Paperback]

William Irwin Thompson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 1990

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Critical supporter of New Age thinking, Thompson ( At the Edge of History ; Pacific Shift ) envisions "a planetary culture in which myth is understood to be isomorphic, but not identical, to science." Weighted down by portentousness and self-sustaining rhetoric, these five loosely related essays, in part, defend the Gaia hypothesis, which posits planet Earth as a single living organism. Thompson offers insightful commentary on the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy, the "illusory conservatism of Ronald Reagan," the gropings of New Age visionaries; the essays also interweave a self-indulgent tribute to four friends who influenced the author's thought: neurophysiologist Francesco Varela, mathematician Ralph Abraham, and co-inventors of the Gaia hypothesis, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. Thompson links "the plagues of AIDS and pollution" as he discusses responses of living systems to "the emerging planetary bioplasm."
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Thompson, author of other works on mythology, here sees myths as fundamental insights into the patterns of nature. Using especially the myth of Gaia the Earth Goddess, he speculates on the future in areas where recent advances in science have tended to require a whole new way of grasping reality. "The Gaia hypothesis proposes that the Earth has been so shaped by life that it makes no sense to look upon the planet as a rock that circles the sun . . . ; rather, we should think of the Earth as a self-regulating entity." The mind must find its own way of adapting to this ongoing Planetization, and mythology can be a valuable part of the reach for emergent meaning in a changing reality. A fascinating but difficult work that is probably beyond the average reader. Recommended for larger collections and areas with reader interest in mythology and New Age philosophy.
- C. Robert Nixon, M.L.S., W. Lafayette, Ind.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 198 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (October 15, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312048084
• ISBN-13: 978-0312048082
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #906,402 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Thompson was born in Chicago in 1938, but moved to Southern California in 1945, where he grew up to graduate from Los Angeles High School in 1957 and Pomona College in 1962. He received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study at Cornell in 1962 and a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship to do his doctoral research in Dublin in 1964. He received his doctorate from Cornell in 1966 and published his first book, The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916 in 1967. In 1972, his second book At the Edge of History was a finalist for the National Book Award. In 1986 he won the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award for his novel, Islands Out of Time.

Thompson has taught at Cornell, MIT, and York University in Toronto. His interdisciplinary interests are indicated in that he studied anthropology, philosophy, and literature at Pomona, and literature and cultural history at Cornell. He has served as visiting professor of religion at Syracuse University (1973), visiting professor of Celtic Studies at St. Michael's College, the University of Toronto (1984), visiting professor of political science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (1985), Rockefeller Scholar at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco (1992-1995), and Lindisfarne Scholar-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York in the autumn of each year from 1992 to 1996. In 1995 he designed an evolution of consciousness curriculum for the Ross School in East Hampton, New York and serves as a Founding Mentor, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ross_School). Thompson founded the Lindisfarne Association in 1972 and served as its Director until 1997. He has now retired from Lindisfarne and teaching and lives in Maine and devotes himself to writing essays and poetry; he often contributes to the Wild River Review. (http://www.wildriverreview.com/) and the Seven Pillars Review.(http://www.sevenpillarshouse.org/).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Where Jungians Fear to Tread, October 2, 2007

By 

John David Ebert (United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science (Paperback)

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.

SEE MY LECTURE ON THOMPSON ON YOU TUBE

--John David Ebert, author of "The New Media Invasion."

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars uneven, July 16, 2008

By 

Ted Byrd - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science (Paperback)

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.

4.0 out of 5 stars W.I.T. does it again!, December 31, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Imaginary Landscape: Making Worlds of Myth and Science (Paperback)

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.