Peter Kingsley
I decided to start with the presocratics and vanished right into the rabbit hole. To get into the topic I decided (a few months ago) to do something I had wanted to do for a long time: read all the books by Peter Kingsley.
Some background first. Born in 1953 he was trained as a classicist and got his PhD from
the University of London. From 1990 on he published a very impressive
series of articles in scholarly journals, followed by his 1995 monograph
Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition. In the following years, Kingsley's annoyance with academia became increasingly evident, and his next book In the Dark Places of Wisdom (1999), on Parmenides, was published (like all his later books) not by an academic press but by the Golden Sufi Center. It was followed in 2003 by his large volume Reality and finally by a small book titled A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tibet and the Destiny of the Western World published in 2010. By the second half of the 1990s Kingsley was clearly moving out of academia. He moved to an island off the coast of Canada and set himself up as a popular speaker on spiritual topics. His website doesn't look very active anymore, and I wonder what he is doing today.
His 1995 book made a big impression on me when I first read it, and did so again when I re-read it a few months ago. He is a deep scholar and a virtuoso philologist with very profound knowledge of Greek antiquity and its wider contexts. His interpretation of Empedocles as a iatromantis figure (a "healer/seer") deeply involved in the context of "chthonic" mysteries seems wholly convincing to me. Over the last weeks I also read the complete series of his early academic articles, and was impressed even more deeply. About Kingsley's scholarly credentials there cannot be any doubt. Nor can there be any ambiguity about the extremely polemical thrust of his work, which basically argues that traditional classical scholarship misinterpreted everything it touched because of its ideological denial of anything that could possibly compromise an idealized picture of Greek rationality.
When I met Kingsley in the years just before and after 2000, his thorough disgust with the world of academia was impossible to miss. But it would seem that he never gave up scholarly work, even after moving to popular audiences. Dark Places is written in a style reminiscent of a self-help book, but if you actually read it, you find that it contains an extremely thorough argument about Parmenides, backed up by a large bibliographical apparatus at the end of the volume. The same goes for Reality, in two parts devoted to Parmenides and Empedocles respectively. On many pages, Kingsley's utter contempt for almost all his colleagues and their failure to see the Truth makes the reading embarrassing and painful; but if you can bring yourself to look beyond these displays of superiority and condescension, you discover an extremely sensitive argument grounded in deep learning and inspired by a genuine and even passionate love for his favorite thinkers. And again, the notes at the end are extremely impressive: Kingsley knows his stuff, and he knows that he knows it. His final book takes these approaches to their ultimate limit: arguing for an early transmission of "shamanic" traditions from Mongolia to Greece, the main text can be read in an hour, but the 84 pages of notes in small print are enough to keep anyone occupied for months and probably years.
I also did a thorough check of how Kingsley has been reviewed in academic journals. To the credit of the scholars whose attitudes he despises so much, all his books have received a fair share of attention, and all the reviews I have read show considerable respect for his expertise and appreciation of his perspectives and interpretations. Not a single reviewer I have read allows him/herself to be provoked by Kingsley hostility against academics: they may express surprise and disapprove of his tone, but basically keep their eye on the ball.
The prologue to my book will begin with a paraphrase of Parmenides' "Proem", describing how the "man who knows" enters the underworld to meet the Goddess (Persephone, according to Kingsley). Thus our very first discussion of strict logic about the nature of Being ("Reality") comes not from the brains of a philosopher but is revealed to him by a Goddess who basically tells him to shut up and listen: "I will do the talking." I am currently reading various other interpretations of Parmenides, Empedocles, and their relation to Pythagoreanism (Walter Burkert's classic Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism is currently on my desk, next to books by e.g. Charles H. Kahn on Pythagoreanism and Plato, Michael Attyah Flower about the Seer in Ancient Greece, Fritz Graf and Sarah Iles Johnston on Orphism and Divination, some chapters from Thomas McEvilley's The Shape of Ancient Thought, and so on), but as far as the presocratics go, I find myself quite convinced by the general direction of Kingsley's interpretations.
So: any thought on Kingsley, Parmenides, ancient Pythagoreanism and Greek mysteries? Comments and suggestions are welcome.
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| Peter Kingsley |
His 1995 book made a big impression on me when I first read it, and did so again when I re-read it a few months ago. He is a deep scholar and a virtuoso philologist with very profound knowledge of Greek antiquity and its wider contexts. His interpretation of Empedocles as a iatromantis figure (a "healer/seer") deeply involved in the context of "chthonic" mysteries seems wholly convincing to me. Over the last weeks I also read the complete series of his early academic articles, and was impressed even more deeply. About Kingsley's scholarly credentials there cannot be any doubt. Nor can there be any ambiguity about the extremely polemical thrust of his work, which basically argues that traditional classical scholarship misinterpreted everything it touched because of its ideological denial of anything that could possibly compromise an idealized picture of Greek rationality.
When I met Kingsley in the years just before and after 2000, his thorough disgust with the world of academia was impossible to miss. But it would seem that he never gave up scholarly work, even after moving to popular audiences. Dark Places is written in a style reminiscent of a self-help book, but if you actually read it, you find that it contains an extremely thorough argument about Parmenides, backed up by a large bibliographical apparatus at the end of the volume. The same goes for Reality, in two parts devoted to Parmenides and Empedocles respectively. On many pages, Kingsley's utter contempt for almost all his colleagues and their failure to see the Truth makes the reading embarrassing and painful; but if you can bring yourself to look beyond these displays of superiority and condescension, you discover an extremely sensitive argument grounded in deep learning and inspired by a genuine and even passionate love for his favorite thinkers. And again, the notes at the end are extremely impressive: Kingsley knows his stuff, and he knows that he knows it. His final book takes these approaches to their ultimate limit: arguing for an early transmission of "shamanic" traditions from Mongolia to Greece, the main text can be read in an hour, but the 84 pages of notes in small print are enough to keep anyone occupied for months and probably years.
I also did a thorough check of how Kingsley has been reviewed in academic journals. To the credit of the scholars whose attitudes he despises so much, all his books have received a fair share of attention, and all the reviews I have read show considerable respect for his expertise and appreciation of his perspectives and interpretations. Not a single reviewer I have read allows him/herself to be provoked by Kingsley hostility against academics: they may express surprise and disapprove of his tone, but basically keep their eye on the ball.
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| Walter Burkert |
So: any thought on Kingsley, Parmenides, ancient Pythagoreanism and Greek mysteries? Comments and suggestions are welcome.
Hello Dr Hanegraaff,
ReplyDeleteI have just signed in to follow your Blog "Creative Reading" and that led me to this very interesting new project of yours. In relation to Peter Kingsley, you will by now be aware that he has just published a new two volume book entitled, "Catafalque" (2018) with the descriptive subtitle, "Carl Jung and the End of Humanity". I have just read it and would appreciate hearing your remarks about this work also.
To begin with I found that "Catafalque" continued the dense style of his earlier work "Reality", and that in order to best get a handle on his argument one needed to be well versed in the pre-Socratic esoteric worldview. As my reading unfolded however, I began to see that his link between Jung and prophecy was indeed very convincing (especially in the light of the publication of the Red Book), and the distance he sees between Jung and the Jungians (Jung several times remarked, "Thank God I am not a Jungian." This also echoed the sentiments of his Swiss compatriot theologian Karl Barth, who often declared, "I am not a Barthian.") is on the level of the distance between the original teachings of Jesus and the Christian Church. I found this very convincing also, given that Jesus was committed to the notion of a "secret teaching of the Kingdom" and often remarked that it was strictly for "those who have ears to hear". Essentially, like all in the mystical tradition, Jung privileged the heart over the head, the unconscious over the rational, despite the fact that he "hid" his secret teachings behind the cloak of scientific analytical psychology.
Volume 2 is full of copious notes and a bibliography and will takes years of unpacking, so for that I am most grateful to Peter. I really came away from my reading that this work of Peter's is of key importance to the Western esoteric tradition, although I imagine that the academic world will look on it a little more sceptically.
Anyway, I appreciate that the topic of your current project on Western Culture and Counter-culture would find Kingsley's idea that Jung has signalled the end of Western culture to be very relevant indeed. I imagine you will probably address it at some point in your forthcoming book.
Best wishes, and thanks for your outstanding contribution to the field.
Pax, John.
Hello Dr. Haanegraaf. I came here to express something that irks me about Kingsley. I say this having not read A Story Waiting to Pierce You.
ReplyDeleteIn that paper published in the journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, Pythagoras and Turba Philisophorum, Kingsley makes the case that perhaps Pythagoras studied in Egypt. But in Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic he seems to neglect Egypt entirely. There is something here rather odd. He is willing to furnish a Babylonian origin to the cosmos of Phililaos. But he writes of the treatment of Fire in the Egyptian underworld that it is "significant but limited." Even this is buried in his footnotes.
This idea in the Egyptian Underworld is not limited. The Lake of Fire is central to the images of the Book of the Dead. The Book of the Dead, more than Enuma Elish or Gilgamesh or other Babylonian books expresses a cosmological world similar to this equation of Tartarus and the Central Fire.
I am saying this because tradition ascribes this Pythagorean doctrine to Egypt. Kingsley seems willing to entertain the idea that the Neoplatonists we're recovering rather than distorting Plato; then he is willing to say that Central Asian shamans are influencing Zoroastrianism magi to seed Western Culture with magical ideas. Yet he is not willing to investigate something that is ascribed to Egypt by Western Tradition and seems to demonstrate the same tendencies towards bias in the Aristotelians he puts down.
All this to say I am becoming convinced there is a specifically Heliopolitan influence at the bottom of this web that cannot be written off as Orphic; Egyptian Geometry may have resembled Pythagorean Geometry much more than we wish to acknowledge because for some reason everyone wants to contrast the Rhind Papyrus with Euclid. This is the most interesting neglect in Kingsley's work for me.