The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture [Paperback]

William Irwin Thompson (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0312160623 | ISBN-13: 978-0312160623 | Publication Date: April 15, 1996

In this book, William Irwin Thompson explores the nature of myth. Acknowledging the persuasive power of myth to create and inform culture, he weaves the human ability to create life with and communicate through symbols with myths based on male and female forms of power.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is an abundant, powerful book. Much of its power flows from Thompson's increasing ability to read images, a complicated process. Scholars and thinkers over the last 70 years have slowly rediscovered the stages of this lost ability; and in this book William Irwin Thompson climbs one more step." --Robert Bly

Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin (April 15, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312160623
• ISBN-13: 978-0312160623
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #422,678 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

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Above average "new age" stuff, November 15, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture (Paperback)

Thompson takes us on a rollercoaster ride through the origins of culture, sex, agriculture and patriarchy.He does not solely rely on left brain abstract thinking, but has got the right side of the brain working too.In other words, he is into mythopoeic thinking, which gets down to deeper levels of existence.If for nothing else, this book is worth it for the sentence "Myth is the history of the soul."There is much wisdom in this sentence.Thompson has more insightful things to say about myth than many other writers on the subject.If he has a fault, it is a too wide sweep over his subject matter.Nevertheless, he has many challenging ideas to confront us with.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars re-imagining our past, November 3, 2001

By 

David Lannom "markdave" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture (Paperback)

Thompson is so dazzling a writer that, even when you don't agree with some of his conclusions, you are nevertheless thrilled to be taken along for this intellectual joyride through prehistory and myth; half the fun is the argument that this book will most assuredly start. New Age mystic or not, Thompson will forever change the way you perceive your world in challenging many things you have previously taken for granted: patriarchy, sexuality, gender and identity, and religion. Literate, passionate, and eccentric--this is one of my favorite books.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tough but worth it, November 26, 2007

By 

Cecil Bothwell "Author of "Whale Falls: A... (Asheville, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Time Falling Bodies Take To Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture (Paperback)

The immediate effect of reading William Irwin Thompson is at least twofold: first one lapses into stunned silence, and then one wants to dance -- embracing the wonder of the mythic universe we inhabit. In this work the author is concerned with edges -- the origin of consciousness, the beginning of language, the source of symbol and the reason why sexual reproduction supplanted simple cell division. Such edges are necessarily the limits of our intellectual understanding, beyond them we can only see through myth. Thompson's scholarship is broad and deep and infused with keen insight. He ably demonstrates that science may be clever at dissecting what is, but fails when it attempts to demonstrate how things came to be. Though the scientist frames explanations in different language than the mystic, at the margins science lapses into pipe dreams. Take the case of explaining why humans developed large brains. A scientific explanation usually runs thus: as changing climate shrank the forests, some hominids moved into the savannah where standing upright was advantageous, which freed the hands to carry things, which freed the mouth from carrying things, which begat hand tools and language, which required more brain power, and the combination of bigger brain and language conferred evolutionary advantage. Great, but then how do you explain baboons? They made the same moves and survived just fine. So the science which seems to offer an explanation, only begs the question by describing a possible scenario. Tackling pedagogy from another angle, Thompson reasons that the long-held belief that men invented language as an organizing method for hunting and weapon making is similarly misguided. Women with babies were far more likely to engage in the invention, play and repetition necessary to formation of language. Developmentally, children are in the best position to learn to communicate before they are saddled with adult responsibilities. And women, as gatherers, were more likely to develop a taxonomy, creating the body of knowledge which identified plants by their utility or toxicity. Specific identity is much less important to a hunter than to a gatherer, and wolves manage to organize hunts quite handily without complex conversation. The author's exploration of sexuality as an organizing principle is equally divergent, and he looks to Jane Goodall's study of chimpanzees for clues about the shift we made away from the matter-of-fact mating observed in other apes to the high urgency of sexual relations in humans. He notes in passing that moralists have often labelled our sexual attractions as an animal instinct, an idea that is exactly wrong. Non-procreative sex is almost exclusively a human trait, and Thompson explores its link to the rise of culture as well as the mythological roots of pornography, homosexuality, bestiality, and sado-masochism. Thompson's point is that ancient myths, preserved from times closer to the edges are likely to be more informative about origins than modern myths cooked up to suit the needs of science. At the edges, all modes of thinking take a flying leap, and the maps provided by the old stories, suffused with poetry and rich symbols, are disgarded at our peril. A science cut off from ancient wisdom can easily lose sight of the reason we needed knowledge in the first place, and full of itself can lead us toward catastrophe. In this reader's opinion, a dose of myth would go a long way toward dispelling belief in genetic engineering, as one example. Cleverness and wisdom do not necessarily arrive in tandem. Like William Irwin Thompson's COMING INTO BEING, Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness (St. Martin's Press, 1996), this book is demanding. It takes a while for some of the ideas to make sense, to be fitted into the rest of what one knows -- or thinks one knows. If I owned a copy of FALLING BODIES, it would reside in the handful I would grab as I escaped a fire. It is that good.