The Avatar Film & the Trees’ ReBirthDay

Arthur Waskow
January 14, 2010

Several milestones in my life came this past week as I continue climbing into and beyond my post-car-crash ordeal of the last four months. One came Sunday afternoon, when Phyllis and I saw our first movie-movie (in a movie house, not DVD) since August.

The film was Avatar. It is an obvious metaphor for the European-USA destruction of Native America and Africa; for the corporate destruction of the Amazon forest and its tribal human eco-partners; for the US destruction of much of Iraq and parts of Afghanistan.

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Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

Dr. Andrew Weil
November 11, 2009

It is a rare human act that is utterly reprehensible. Some glimmer of grace, some hope for redemption shines through nearly all of our efforts. And then, Jonathan Safran Foer reminds us in his new book, Eating Animals there is factory farming of living creatures.

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The Red Book by Carl Jung

Janet Piedilato
November 11, 2009

On Wednesday October 7, 2009 the long awaited publication of The Red Book by W. W. Norton was celebrated by a series of events in NYC that commenced with the opening of an exhibit displaying the original C.G Jung masterpiece.

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Islamic Sufism Unbound: Politics and Piety in Twenty-First Century Pakistan

Peter Lamborn Wilson
July 9, 2009

In general I wish that contemporary scholars of Sufism (or anything else, really) could now all agree to drop the obligatory Big Theory part of their books and theses, the apparently almost ritual genuflections to various Theory heroes of the 1970s, many of them now safely dead. In the last century Theory was fresh and exciting and seemed to promise great things, but by now some of it has become all-too-canonical in Academia, and has begun to seem a bit stale – although not as stale as, say, Logical Positivism, of course.

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Mother of the Believers

Tamam Kahn
June 9, 2009

At last—I can suggest a page-turner to the reader who wants to catch the sense of early seventh century Arabia and experience the colorful, brilliant, contradictory woman who was Aisha. Perhaps Pasha goes a bit overboard in describing her as a beautiful white-skinned redhead based on the nickname “Little Reddish One” given by her husband, Muhammad, but that’s poetic license.

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Being With Dying

Sohrob Nabatian
June 8, 2009

Though most would agree with Benjamin Franklin’s maxim that “In this world nothing is certain except death and taxes,” mainstream culture has little to offer on how to prepare for the former. Without a shared, collective story about the ultimate human transition, the dying and their caregivers are left to orient themselves as they enter bewildering worlds of medical protocol, emotional upheaval and rapidly shifting existential landscapes.

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Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician and Martyr

Peter Lamborn Wilson
May 1, 2009

I always wanted to get the straight scoop on Hypatia the beautiful Late Pagan Neoplatonist woman philosopher, and once tried to read the old novel about her by Charles Kingsley (author of The Water Babies), but simply couldn’t slog past page 20. Anyway I now know that it’s full of mistakes, thanks to this slender but crisp and seemingly definitive monograph by M.A.B. Deakin.

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Alamut: A Novel

Peter Lamborn Wilson
April 3, 2009

Vladimir Bartol’s Alamut certainly has curiosity value: a novel about Hasan-I Sabbah and the Assasins written in 1938 in Slovenian. An international best-seller now translated into English, the book is advertised as the “inspiration for several video games” and as an eerie prediction of today’s Islamic terrorism (“the training manual” for “al-Qaeda’s martyrs”). Luckily none of this need deter anyone from reading the book as an enjoyable historical romance swashbuckler, with plenty of exotic orientalismo and fast action.

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Why Birds Sing: A Journey Into The Mystery of Bird Song

Peter Lamborn Wilson
March 31, 2009

Breathes there a human with soul so dead as never to have wondered why birds sing? Little did one know, however, that dozens, perhaps hundreds of scientists are poking around the edges of this question with their scalpels (literally) asking how birds sing, or where, when and to whom – but almost never why, which to them smacks of the pathetic fallacy, or of metaphysics.

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Watching the “Watchmen”: A Report from the Movies

Satya and Mirza Inayat Khan
March 13, 2009

A central theme that appears graffitied in the background of several scenes of director Zack Snyder’s new movie “Watchmen” is Socrates’ question from the Republic: “Who watches the watchmen?” As humanity struggles with looming nuclear disaster, the movie follows a set of characters who are equipped with superhuman strength, intellect, and/or the ability to rearrange matter. The heroes of “Watchmen” live with no authority strong enough—or relevant enough—to oversee them. Whether they help or harm the people around them depends on their individual and collective moral compasses, which are distorted by the violence that permeates their lives as well as their own pathos.

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The Compleat Gentleman: A Modern Man’s Guide to Chivalry

Pir Zia Inayat-Khan
February 28, 2009

When asked to explain the mission of Seven Pillars, I generally begin by outlining the four core areas. As I invoke the words Cosmology, Revelation, and Mysticism, I am typically greeted with beaming approval. Then comes Chivalry. Now my listener has a furrowed brow. Peering through that brow I can almost read the thoughts it encloses: Chivalry is sexist, elitist, and violent. Chivalry is dead.

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The Leopard’s Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Çatalhöyük

Peter Lamborn Wilson
January 28, 2009

Those of us who were once blown away by the brilliant James Mellaart and his discovery (in the 1960s) of the fantastic Neolithic town of Çatalhöyük in Turkey will want to know the latest news from that amazing site, which is still being slowly excavated. Some of Mellart’s ideas remain valid but others are being challenged. For instance his identification of some structures as “shrines” now looks shaky, since all the buildings appear actually to be houses, with evidence of domestic use. The implication is that some houses, those with more art and burials, were clan headquarters, so to speak – and that the people of Çatalhöyük were unusually deeply involved in “House” ritual and magic, all of them, not just a few “priests” or “shamans.”

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Food for the Gods: New Light on the Ancient Incense Trade

Peter Lamborn Wilson
January 28, 2009

If you’re very very interested in the history of incense and have $70 to spend on your obsession, you’ll want this book, a collection of essays on the subject emphasizing the “Roman” period of the incense trade (circa 1^st century BC to 2^nd century AD). The gist is this: frankincense and myrrh come only from Arabia Felix, cannot be cultivated elsewhere (except Somalia), have been harvested by the same people in the same way for 5000 years, and marketed internationally since at least the Bronze Age. But the golden era of the trade began with the Hellenistic Greek sailors who discovered the monsoon winds of the Red Sea, so that they were able to sail direct from Egypt to India. A triangular trade arose, in which the West spent its gold on Eastern treasures (SW India was a depot for the Asian and Chinese trade in spices, silk, etc.), with incense going both ways, to be consumed in vast quantities in the temples of all religions (except early Christianity, which poopoo’d incense as “pagan” till about the 4th century, despite the Three Magis’ gifts to baby Jesus).

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Dante’s Pluralism and the Islamic Philosophy of Religion

Pir Zia Inayat-Khan
January 28, 2009

Dante’s relationship with Islam and Islamic thought is something of a conundrum. On the one hand, Dante notoriously assigned Muhammad (peace be upon him) a miserable fate in the eighth circle of Hell. On the other hand, the entire structure of The Divine Comedy bears an unmistakable resemblance to Muhammad’s fabled mi’raj or ascension, as Miguel Asin Palacios demonstrated nearly a century ago.

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