Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

Very fascinating and readable. Since I am rather lacking in funds, I have decided to stop buying books for a while, but after reading most of this in the library, I decided that it was a worthy exception.

If you want to understand myth and its importance to the evolution of the human experience, drink from the deep thought of this classic book.

The topic was most interesting in the early 80's when Joseph Campbel's popularity was cresting and there was a renewed interest in Grave's "white godess". Yet, as another reviewer points out, selective citations marr an otherwise fascinating prose.
Makes for some very stimulating (albeit imbalanced) reading.

Some interesting ideas about mythology, and some fine writing, are ruined by sloppy scholarship, wishful thinking, and general nonsense. The author either can't understand, or misrepresents, basic scientific thinking as well as Julian Jaynes, Noam Chomsky, Richard Leakey, and Charles Darwin. Thompson is obviously sharp enough to understand his primary sources -- and I'm afraid that he selectively quotes things out of context as well as setting up straw man fallacies. Meanwhile Thompson treats Edgar Cayce's past-life experience claims seriously. This book was highly reccomended and I was annoyed to find that it was new age hooey. For works on the psychology, sociology and history of myths stick to Cambell and Frazier