William Irwin Thompson

From the Easter Rebellion reading program, despite it not being really about the Eastern Rebellion. Instead, it’s about the poetic and literary inspiration behind the Eastern Rebellion, attempting to explain how a bunch of poets and political theorists found themselves defending the Dublin Post Office against the British Army. Quite good although quaintly dated (published 1967). The quaint part is scattered through the text, where Thompson, from the vantage point of 1967, explains how the show more Irish struggle and the deaths of the Easter rebels somehow prefigures the eventual triumph of the State. OTOH, the biographies of the participants really do resonate dimly today; young men, underemployed for their education and sexually repressed by their religious beliefs engage in an almost deliberately incompetent suicidal act; he also makes the observation that revolutions take place not when repression is worse, but just when things are starting to get better, and is generally not led by the lowest strata of society but (in his words) “the bottom of the top and the top of the bottom”. Thus Thompson really was a prophet although he didn’t realize what he was prophesying.


Thompson starts with a background to the events, going back about 50 years or so, and explaining how various national, literary, language and agricultural reform movements coalesced into a military rebellion. His short explanation of how the House of Lords lost its veto power over Home Rule and the subsequent conservative backlash (“playing the Orange card”) cleared up a lot of things for me.


Thompson then segues into capsule biographies of the major participants at the Post Office. Their poetry is uninspired (well, it’s better than anything I could possibly write, though). It’s William Butler Yeats, who didn’t have any part in the rising, who has the creepiest stanzas:


All that I have done and said

Now that I am old and ill

Turns into a question till

I lie awake night after night

And never get the answers right
Did that play of mine send out

Certain men the English shot?


Yeats is thinking of his play Cathleen Ni Houlihan and wondering whether it did inspire people to go out and die for Ireland. Perhaps; art sometimes does have that power. Pearse, in particular, was famous for bloodthirsty speeches – Thompson cites one in particular with the chilling lines:

“We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people; but bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing, and the nation that regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood.”


Four years later Lieutenant-Colonel Ferguson-Smith gave the following advice to the Royal Irish Constabulary (the Black and Tans):


“You may make mistakes occasionally and innocent persons may be shot, but that cannot be helped, and you are bound to get the right parties sometime.”


Padraic Pearse was executed by firing squad for his part in the Easter Rising on May 3, 1916; Ferguson-Smith was assassinated in his club in 1920, shortly after making the statement above.


Like all the histories of the Easter Rising I’ve read, Thomson gives the rebels all the print; there’s no mention of the British soldiers killed, or of the fact that more Dublin civilians were killed than rebels and British combined. He does suggest that the firing-squad execution of the rising leaders was a mistake on the part of the British; it turned them from fanatics who had devastated Dublin in what was essentially a terrorist act to martyrs for the cause of Irish independence. Thompson suggests the correct strategy on the part of the British would have been a formal trial; the defendants would have looked ridiculous and ridicule is crushing to revolutionaries. The executions allowed Michael Collins, released later in 1916, lead what was essentially the world’s first terrorist campaign (and, so far, the only successful one) which culminated in Irish independence (Collins, of course, was later killed himself. There was a lot of that going around in Ireland).


Interesting; inspires me to go out and read more of Yeats, Synge, O’Casey and the other Irish writers of the time. show less

In The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, William Irwin Thompson denounces sociobiological explanations of the development of human culture, and espouses an alternative based to no small degree in yogic mysticism and mythological allegories of sexual and celestial processes. Ultimately, his sweeping account of anthropogenesis resolves into a meta-historical picture provocatively similar to the "aeons" of Isis, Osiris, and Horus proposed by Aleister Crowley, complete with allusions to the show more precession of the equinoxes. Like Crowley, he sees the 20th century as the possible inception of a new dark age, as well as an opening to new spiritual potentials best understood in terms of human sexuality.

Thompson is especially critical of the 20th-century development of Western educational institutions, which he indicts with succumbing to "the politics of social scientists. In the new society we have created through mass education, we have tried to force the humanists in the universities to become social scientists, and in the extreme patterns of narrow specialization we grant PhDs in the social sciences to some people who have read almost exclusively articles in specialized journals and predigested textbooks prepared especially for the enormous classes favored by the bureaucracies of the edubusiness. Equipped with worthless degrees, these social scientists then become the expert consultants to government and the educators of the new generation" (52). Written by an academic who had held positions at MIT and other universities, Thompson's jeremiad was accurate and should have left a mark, but we are now another generation further along on the same trajectory.

Thompson's chapters on "The Transformations of Prehistory" are a lucid and provocative exploration of a posited matrifocal culture of the neolithic era. His chief archaeological referents for this purpose are the Lascaux caves and Çatal Hüyük. Reconsidering this material today demands--and benefits from--comparison of recently-discovered Indonesian cave art. But more recent and thorough work on Çatal Hüyük casts doubt on the goddess-worship explanations offered by the original excavator Mellart and cited by Thompson.

The chapters on "Western Civilization and the Displacement of the Feminine" provide analyses of actual myths, Sumerian and Egyptian. For the former, the focus is Gilgamesh, for the latter it is Isis and Osiris. Both are taken as illustrative of a transition from the religion of the mother to that of the father. In the Egyptian discussion especially, Thompson concerns himself with the matter of esoteric initiation, and he deploys some jargon of decidedly Theosophical provenance (e.g. the "causal plane" distinguished from the "astral") without ever citing the sources of his own initiated knowledge.

The short final chapter on "The Myth Beyond History" supplies Thompson's analysis of Christianity and its planned obsolescence, along with an attempt at contemporary prophecy. I read this book when it was 33 years old, and I think it's quite deserving of being lifted on a pole or standard, "that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live." show less

Some useful ideas here: "myth is the history of the soul;" all versions of a myth are useful to its explication and not mutually exclusive even if they appear to be (which comes from Levi-Strauss); the importance of narrative to human understanding; the importance of women in social evolution, the questioning of linear (reductive) notions of progress, things of that kind. The idea that social innovation in much of hominid and human history was fundamentally conservative - i.e., a way to show more preserve norms at risk of being lost under changing external conditions - that struck me as a novel insight. The take down of Wilson's sociobiology is a nice addition to anti-reductionist interpretations of reality. The degree to which scientists and thinkers like Freud "invoke what they must explain" in order to justify their origin theories - also good. But then the troublesome fact that Thompson accepts as given, true and universal things like the existence of an "astral plane," or the "prophecies" of spirit mediums, or an "Atlantean" elite world culture; the troublesome idea that he is, like so many western scholars, cherrypicking from other cultures just what he needs to support a universal culture theory that is mostly based on Western (Near Eastern) symbolism - these aspects made me less than enthusiastic. I was no closer to understanding what the "evolution of consciousness" could possibly be after reading him than before. It still seems altogether too diaphanous a concept. There is the old atheist dictum: if horses had gods, they would look like horses... Well, if silicon-ingesting three-gendered beings on a planet with no moons and no plants had consciousness and spirituality, would they really find themselves communing with a lunar cornucopian Great Mother figure? How universal exactly is this metaphysical region into which the enlightened soul is said to tap?

Still a worthwhile read, and as useful an explanation of some aspects of pre-history as anything else out there that purports to explain us to ourselves. show less

Through bardic oration, Thompson creates lectures of a quality that cannot be surpassed. Serving moreso as artifacts of artwork sans script one can admire a tapestry of riffing on concepts that truly does become musical both in performance and content (as in the later fascination he tethers to with the Pythagorean monochord) through an aperture of telescoping through entire civilization with a prescience only reserved for the deeply introspective and the obsessively hyper-read. Through an show more unconscious lineage of Spengler and Gebser (the latter of which he becomes consciously fascinated with only decades later) he marks a beginning of a polymathic interest in, what I've formalized and concretized as, the project or map of metahistory.

This text stems and follows from those lectures, those mp3's that act as rites of initiation, and variations upon the themes touched in them. Through a keen sensibility in myth, anthropology and philosophy - he creates a truly Batesonian ecology of mind, through taking every variation upon a myth into a tree directory of that myth's Source as an application of Levi-Strauss's structuralism (Freud's Oedipus and Sophocles' Oedipus can be seen as part of the same myth), a focal lens study of the Paleolithic and Neolithic that is only highlighted amongst its contrast to the study of the cybernetic Gaian planetary culture we create today giving us a "commodious vicus of recirculation," an understanding of metareligion that maps the scientific basis for myth and the mythic roots of science.

Though, one cannot see it as highly as Spengler or Gebser, since Thompson does not reach the grandiose depths that they partake in their complete surveyals of entire civilizations and archaeological listings of every domain of study in them - this more works as an introductory dive towards the project of metahistory.

The gnostic realization of this metahistory - that it is our demise, the nightmare in which we are trying to awake, the fall of unity into multiplicity, the One into Two - and each metamyth we pulse and emanate out of our minds of civilization, those nodes that make networks, the knowing that makes Indra's Net work, is a recapitulation of that fractal Fall. show less