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54 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Poorly researched, poorly constructed, just poor all around, March 29, 2008
I picked this book up on a whim. As a student of esoteric philosophy, I have to say that books such as this don't pop up often and suddenly there it was at the front of my local chain bookstore. I started plowing through it, curious to see something like this in the mainstream, but my eagerness quickly vanished, and for several reasons.
Booth admits that he is not an initiate of any of the societies he writes about because then he would be sworn to secrecy. So is the assumption that he learned all these heavily-guarded ancient secrets from years of self-study? How would he know any of these ideas are accurate? Are these actual beliefs of secret societies and mystery schools (and if so, which ones), or Booth's own beliefs based on his personal research? He doesn't specify.
There are no footnotes. None. Nada. Any college student would be turned out on their ear if they ever tried handing in a thesis looking like this. Booth makes a lot of fantastical claims and doesn't even try to show where he got the information to back up his ideas - and they're pretty wild ideas. I won't even call them theories, as so far it looks like the only person who's (publicly) spouting them is Booth, and an idea isn't a theory until it's gotten sufficient consideration and acceptance by one's academic peers. At one point, Booth hints that the Great Sphinx at Giza is over ten millennia old. Really? You and who else? Most scholars pinpoint its construction to the second or third millenium BCE. Add to this numerous spelling mistakes, starting from the introduction.
Little errors don't bug me in and of themselves. But little errors in large amounts immediately make me question all the information I'm getting. If you can't even write a cohesive sentence without spelling errors and you tell me a basic historical fact is incorrect (and don't bother to cite a source), why in the world should I be inclined to believe anything you say? In order to sell an idea, a writer has to gain the trust of his audience and make himself seem smart and believable. At this, Booth fails.
The writing is atrocious. Booth can not organize a coherent thought. Ideas are plastered on the page at random, sometimes in short, choppy paragraphs, and veer off on tangents that are barely connected by a thread. At one point, Booth states that humanity started as plant-like humanoid creatures with soft, waxy bodies before we solidified into bone and flesh, who reproduced asexually and who sported lamps from their foreheads to connect psychically to other worlds. This is quite an assertion, given the ample body of research supporting the theory that we share a common ape-like ancestor with today's apes. Booth himself states this and asks, so why would anyone believe such a fantastic story as one I've described above?
It sounds like the perfect setup. I waited for Booth to explain himself. Indeed, why SHOULD I believe something so farfetched?
But Booth doesn't explain himself. That is literally the final sentence of one chapter, and the next continues on to another topic. That's it?
I'm not sure who is the intended audience. If you're a student of occultism, you may see some familiar ideas. Others may strike you as downright bizarre, and unfortunately the lack of sources forbids you the ability to dig deeper and figure out where these ideas are from or if Booth just pulled them out of some orifice. If you're a scientist, a theologian or a historian, you're going to have a difficult time swallowing any of it. If you're interested in the history of secret societies, don't bother, as this is purely the history of the world as they allegedly see it, not a history of the Templars or Rosicrucians or Illuminati themselves. If you're a conspiracy theorist, you may like this.
If you're genuinely interested in the teachings of these societies and schools, you'd have better results going straight to the source and checking out the works of initiates such as Israel Regardie, Dion Fortune, Alice Bailey, Aleister Crowley, Eliphas Levi, C. G. Jung, Joseph Campbell, Gareth Knight, Hermes Trismegistus and yes, Rudolf Steiner.
If Booth could write better, organize his thoughts better, be able to cite, I may have taken this book a little more seriously. As it is, I got about halfway through and then donated it to my local library. Wish I'd gotten it there instead of paying for it.
Note: The author is listed as Mark Booth on American copies of this book but Jonathan Black in the UK. I don't understand the disconnect, but I've given up on figuring out this man's logic.
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26 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
The Secret History of the World: Utter Tripe -- and unlike Booth I'll even back up my claim with proof!, July 25, 2008
What a frustrating and ultimately useless book. I enjoy exposes on forgotten areas of history, on complex conspiracies, and particularly on ancient religion and mythology. So this book promised much, a "Secret Teaching Of All Ages" for a new millennium. Ultimately though it delivered little, spitting out addle-headed supposition after supposition - each presented as fact - with nothing to back any of them up. As others have said, it's most tempting to read the book as a parody, but of what? Or whom? Because author Booth seems dead earnest throughout.
Booth starts off fairly strong, with a plea for the reader to try to see the world in a different light, as the ancients might have seen it. This is a worthy request, and one well worth attempting. Also, his recounting of some of the more forgotten historiographers (ie Berossos) is interesting. This however is because Booth excels at exploiting the murkier areas of history. The less that's known about a city, a person, a structure, whatever, the more free Booth is to expound at length on its "secret" history - with of course nothing to back up his claim. Hence, the Sphinx was created as a monument to when the four dimensions came into being. Hence, Herodotus was an initiate who knew the true history of mankind (that we are descended from plantlike beings, according to Booth). Hence, it's all crap and it's all easily disproven.
What's most frustrating is that Booth wants it both ways. Early on he suggests that Jesus did not exist (at least as Christians imagine him), and that literal-minded Christians should stop reading if they're easily offended. Now this I could get behind; I myself don't even believe in Jeebus, as Homer J. Simpson once said. But later on Booth wants to have it the other way: Jesus DID exist, and he was just as perfect as depicted in the gospels; not due to his facile son-of-Yahweh origins, but because he was the latest harbinger of the true god, the latest in a line of succession of gods who have come to earth to set things straight. The Jesus stuff gets even more muddled. For example, to contrast Jesus's "new" way of thinking (which earlier in the book Booth claims was actually pieced together from Socrates and Pythagoras; again, having it both ways) with the soon-to-be-replaced "old" way of thinking in the ancient world, Booth compares some sayings of Jesus with some sayings of Emperor Marcus Aurelius. With Jesus providing positive messages, Aurelius caught up in "depression." But the simple fact Booth fails to mention: Marcus Aurelius lived about 150 years AFTER the time in which Jesus is supposed to have lived!
Things get downright stupid as the "Secret History" moves into the Middle Ages. Because here Booth claims that "true love" did not exist until Medieval times! That's right, the era in which eviscerations were public entertainment, priests sold forgiveness to the highest bidder, and sex was the work of the devil, was the era which saw the first appearance of true love. Any reader of the classics will know this is bull. And Booth does attempt to skirt over it; he gives ancient poet Sappho as an example, stating that even though her well-known poems SEEM to be about true love, they're really more concerned with physical love. No, true love was brand-new to the human experience sometime around the 1100s CE. That anyone could present something so idiotic is baffling. Again, maybe it all really IS a parody.
I'll give you one example of how Booth so often misleads his reader. Around page 94 of the hardback (which I don't have in front of me at the moment) there's a neat little illustration of an ancient statue: a wavy-haired being with a vacant expression and crab pincers jutting from his forehead. Booth identifies this illustration as being of "The Green Man," a favorite subject of fringe scholars. If you check the image credits at the back of the book, this illustration is one of the many which are identified as being from "the author's collection." Meaning, no attestation to where Booth took it from. This is a clever little trick Booth plays throughout the book, covering up where his images are from, so he can claim they represent whatever he intends. So, this "Green Man" illustration. I happen to know that it's taken from James Morgan Pryse's 1910 treatise "The Restored New Testament;" Pryse himself took the illustration from "Specimens of Antient Sculpture," published in London in 1802 by the Dilettanti Society. Now, Pryse claimed the illustration was of "The Mystic Dionysos," with those pincers representing the constellation of Cancer, the dewlap ears representing the Ram, and etc. It's apparent Pryse based his claim off of the illustration, and that he never saw the actual statue, because do you know what this statue - which Booth claims was the Green Man and Pryse claimed was the Mystic Dionysos - is actually of? The sea god Triton. It's a shattered bust which was part of a group commissioned for Emperor Commodus's apotheosis around 191 CE. Maybe you've seen that famous bust of Commodus, where he's a pumped-up Hercules look-alike with a lion's head draped over his own. This statue of Triton stood beside it, and it features none of the things the fantasy-prone original artist depicted in "Specimens of Antient Sculpture," no pincers on its forehead, no dewlap ears. It's anyone's guess why that illustrator decided to add these spurious attributes (it's possible he just got creative when depicting the statue's wavy hair), but otherwise his illustration looks exactly like Triton; search online for "Triton right Musei Capitolini MC1121.jpg," compare that image with the illustration in your copy of "The Secret History," and you'll see they're one and the same. And you'll also see, right before your eyes, how Booth has mislead you into believing something that's not true.
So if Booth is misleading you about something so trivial, why trust him with something more grand...something like, say, the "secret history" of the world?
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65 of 86 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Errant Nonsense, Cover to Cover, January 29, 2008
I'm someone whose pulse quickens every time I find a new conspiracy theory title on the shelves of an airport bookstore. Four hours to Omaha, and nothing to do but wallow in conspiracy theory and stale airplane pretzels -- what could be better, really?
Twenty minutes into a two hour flight, as it became apparent that this book was not the "uber-conspiracy-theory" its publisher promised, but rather the spotty oddball knitwork of someone who hadn't read well in the literature, or paid much attention in the philosophy or theology classes the blurb claims he took, I closed the book and went to sleep. I'd managed to make it through the chapter of awful theology, and the chapter of disclaimers suggesting that anything other than a revelatory reading experience on my part was somehow a failure on the part of my intuition or imagination, and a couple of chapters involving the...hmmmm...evolution of consciousness from mineral to vegetable. I'd skipped ahead to find familiar ground -- Flood, Doctor Dee, my much-beloved Templars.
Junk, through and through.
Booth claims to have studied esoteric traditions for decades, yet his knowledge is superficial and often just inaccurate, and he'd rather talk about his own personal belief system anyway, conjuring with famous names whose words -- to a naive reader -- might appear to lend weight to Booth's whacked-out theories.
(I did read the part that explained (a) that Booth himself had been initiated into capital-T The capital-S Secret capital-K Knowledge and (b) TSK is never given to the uninitiated except in a way that confuses as much as it enlightens....caveat lector, I guess.)
There is a lot of bad conspiracy theory out and about right now -- the more chaotic the times, the more we're drawn to narratives that promise to show us the order underneath the chaos.
But this is the worst I've read, yet -- worse that the sequel to *Holy Blood, Holy Grail,* worse than the stuff churned out recently by the Graham Hancock Factory.
If you're a doubter, this is a *great* book for you, since it shows the "esoteric knowledge" tradition at its worst: sloppy, anti-intellectual, wantonly ahistorical and ascientific, idiosyncratic, superficial, erratic. You can damn the entire discipline with choice excerpts from this one. Dig in.
If you're interested in the esoteric or conspiracy theories, if you like to entertain ideas you to which you have no intention of committing, if you get pleasure from reading this sort of literature -- skip this book entirely.
It's just badly-research, badly-written humbug.
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