Of Cannibals, Inquisitors, Mainstream Militants & Escape Artists:

A Passport for Extra-Canonical Voyages
 

by Guido Mina di Sospiro (January 2018)

The Library of Thorvald Boeck, Harriet Backer, 1902

 

 

ereading recently St. Augustine’s Confessions, written over sixteen hundred years ago, I was struck by one aspect that had previously eluded me: the authors he makes reference to are, for the most part, still known to us today. Whether consciously or not, he was already contributing to building the western canon. The Aristotelian-Euclidean-Cartesian-Newtonian-Darwinian/Spencerian canon by which the western world operates to this day has been in the making for millennia. Along the way, there were death blows to the possibility of at least one other canon, for example the Platonic Academy, which was first destroyed by the Roman dictator Sulla in 86 BCE, and then, having been revived centuries later, was closed once and for all by Justinian I in 529 AD. The Church had/has its Canon Law and was, for centuries, a strict enforcer of it, with anything beyond it being perceived as heresy and being vigorously stamped out.

 

While the western world in the 21st century is free from alacritous canon-enforcing enterprises such as the Holy Inquisition, it nevertheless operates by a canon which remains very much the mentioned Aristotelian-Euclidean-Cartesian-Newtonian-Darwinian/Spencerian one, inculcated into us all from kindergarten to the grave, echoed not only by schools of all levels, but by governments, the media, official institutions and nonofficial entities and, last but not least, by the entertainment industry.

 

Judging from the history of mankind, the simple reality is that people both need and like dogmas. Concepts that to an uninvolved and level-headed mind seem grotesque, evil and everything in between, at a certain time and in a certain place looked just right. Customs that appear barbaric today were the norm once, and vice versa. The Holy Inquisition is the obvious target, as is the Nazis’ Final Solution. But what of Stalin’s Great Purge? The Khmer Rouge Killing Fields? Ethnic cleansing in the Balkans?

 

And then there are many less obvious examples.

 

One should think of dogmas or, in their combined puissance, of the canon as an inescapable force not dissimilar from gravity. Can it, in fact, be escaped at all?

 

Some readers of my books have sent me e-mails asking for suggestions about what they might read in order to break out of the western canon. I’ve been thinking about that request for some time and, while a complete list of books would be impossible and at any rate well beyond the scope of this piece, I suspect that a small list, to begin with, could be of help to those curious minds that are contrarian by nature, or disillusioned with the current western canon and the all-pervasive propaganda that reinforces it. So, there follows my (drum roll): eye-opening, assumption-challenging, horizon-broadening list.

 

The I Ching, not only mankind’s first (known) book, but a very thorough dissertation on accidentality in juxtaposition to western man’s obsession, i.e., causality, that self-evident and asinine nexus between cause and effect on which western philosophy nevertheless built entire systems. Moreover, consulting the I Ching as a divinatory tool can be as infuriating as it can be enlightening.

Skipping thousands of years, Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living. Lin Yutang was a philosopher of life, translator of Chinese classics into English, novelist and an inventor. He is the one who finally solved the riddle and, in 1946, succeeded in producing the unthinkable: a workable Chinese typewriter! Amid his writings he left many epigrams, lustrous exercises in witty prose as well as in non-linear thinking. You would think that the Dude, from the film The Big Lebowski, has metabolized his teachings, for example: “It is amazing how few people are conscious of the importance of the art of lying in bed.” “It is characteristic of play that one plays without reason and there must be no reason for it.” “A good traveller is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from.”

 

—that has caused not a little trouble down the centuries.

 

Of the trinity of essential, prescient works that describe the decadence of the West—Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, René Guenon’s The Crisis of the Modern World, and Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World—I would pick the latter, with Hermann Hesse’s warning that it is a “really dangerous” book. And so it is. It’s difficult not to be swept away by this radical rethinking of history. Only later does one begin to realize that it is, after all, a phenomenally well-built . . . fantasy. But its Wagnerian scope and intrinsic power make it one of the most disruptive books ever written, particularly because it’s so well constructed and so profoundly erudite. I would recommend it, but with the caveat: to be read cum grano salis by a mature, Apollonian reader, not a by an impressionable, Dionysian youth.

 

Very valuable is Aldous Huxley’s anthology The Perennial Philosophy: An Interpretation of the Great Mystics, East and West, an excursus across space and time in search of the same matrix.

 

Weren’t St. Francis of Assisi and St. Anthony of Padua a bit peculiar—and extreme? Where did Cervantes draw inspiration for many of the adventures in his Don Quixote? Idries Shah’s The Sufis explains how much the West owes to Sufism and its teachings, and introduces the fundamental practice of non-linear thinking.

 

For a touch of India from a western perspective, and limiting it to a single book, I would pick Paul Brunton’s A Search in Secret India. His sensible approach, unwillingness to be credulous, and nevertheless slow transition from being a non-believer to becoming open to wonder, is a wonder in itself.

 

Julius Evola wrote various books that would deserve mention. But having to choose, in addition to Revolt, I would signal The Hermetic Tradition, praised even by C.G. Jung, whom Evola disliked for obvious reasons, chiefly the former’s insistence on the “lowly” unconscious.

 

Which brings us to Carl Gustav Jung, who is not an author, but a voyage. He touched upon just about everything, and his most gifted disciple, Marie-Louise von Franz, was just as insightful, as well as possessed, unlike her teacher, of the art of concision. The reader who wants to depart from what (s)he has been taught since the crib could start with Jung’s exceptional Answer to Job. And for a touch of early ufology, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies.

 

Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods was written, as a successful breakthrough, with the technique of fiction, rather than nonfiction, and is as a result an engaging read. Some of its claims are . . . odd (Atlantis in Antarctica!), others, for example the actual occurrence of the Great Flood, have been since confirmed by various other open-minded scholars.

 

I like just about anything either written or published by David Hatcher Childress, the real-life Indiana Jones. The back-covers of his books are full of bombastic tidbits, but in fact his writing is well-researched and careful, and he tends to present unusual facts and findings while consistently trying to strike a balance between enthusiasm and plausibility. Another enthusiastic and prolific compiler was the late Colin Wilson who, however, did not seem to be as careful. Moreover, David Hatcher Childress has traveled/travels everywhere to research and to substantiate his theories, while Colin Wilson was an armchair traveler who relied exclusively on what others had written.

 

Forbidden Archaeology by Michael Cremo and Richard Thompson is useful in revealing in a very methodical and indeed scientific way to what extent mainstream science has gone in suppressing the evidence pointing to the reality that humans have inhabited this planet for much longer than we are told. In Chapter 1.11, for example, there is a very lucid explanation of the “Phenomenon of Suppression”: the different stages by which an anomalous finding is either ignored, explained away, ridiculed, dismissed, or suppressed. Quite an enterprise from an activity—science—that originally set out to explain the unexplained or seemingly unexplainable. While the ponderous tome of 914 pages doesn’t make for the liveliest reading, it is nevertheless an impressive contribution.

 

More on the wacky side, and far more entertaining, is Terence McKenna’s True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise. For those who will never try “heroic doses” of psilocybin mushrooms deep in the Colombian jungle, this is a wild, vicarious ride, an amalgam of science, literature, myth and exotica from an adventurer whose genuine inquisitiveness in things psychedelic goes hand in hand with mythomania—what an exuberant explosion of literary and philosophical high kitsch! If not persuaded, there follows the endorsement from The New York Times: “The polysyllabic sentences he lards with intellectual references are an attempt to lend credibility to the otherwise debunked subject of drugs.” Yes, a hatchet job from the The New York Times could not make for a more valuable endorsement.

 

Fortean Times.

 

My friend and co-author of two novels, Joscelyn Godwin, has written, translated, and edited many books that could be on this list. One of them, Artkos: The Polar Myth, explores a different origin of mankind in conjunction with various other occult myths. I should remind the reader that while I do not necessarily adhere to any of the beliefs expounded in these books, I am interested in learning about alternate versions of the same reality, which some (at times lunatic) fringes were, or are, convinced of. The level of scholarship is very high, as in all of Joscelyn’s works.

 

Finally, and possibly shockingly, I would include a few installments from George MacDonald Fraser’s outrageously entertaining Flashman saga—take your pick. That’s because his masterful portrayal of Flashman is too close to what man’s nature really is once stripped of all its phony, superimposed veneer of civility. In fact, should man be “re-wilded” (and all it takes is a catastrophe, natural, nuclear or otherwise), Flashman’s outrageous trespasses would, in comparison, seem benign.
 

 

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Guido Mina di Sospiro was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, into an ancient Italian family. He was raised in Milan, Italy and was educated at the University of Pavia as well as the USC School of Cinema-Television, now known as USC School of Cinematic Arts. He has been living in the United States since the 1980s, currently near Washington, D.C.  He is the author of several books including, The Story of Yew, The Forbidden Book, and The Metaphysics of Ping Pong.

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