'Why do we take drugs? I haven't the faintest idea, but Gary Winship has a damned good go at telling me the answer. Some might say this is a largely academic book, but as an ex-psychiatric nurse and a Jo Public for the last twenty-five years, I'd say there's something in here for everyone. We've all taken drugs at some point in our lives (except, perhaps, my grandma) so one way to find out why is by reading this fascinating book.'- Jo Brand, comic, author, and actress
Before you get to Homo sapiens, you must first deal with Homo roboticus. Inside all of us is the strangest thing, a biological robot. You notice it during sleepwalking and hypnosis, but in fact it's there all the time. Most people have had the experience of driving from A to B and then realizing they have no memory of actually having done the driving. It just seemed to happen, almost by itself. The robot in fact did the driving. It's the human autopilot and it handles most things. Most people are conscious very little of the time. They are usually in autopilot mode. Thousands of years ago, the autopilot human was all that existed. How we got from the robotic human mode to human consciousness is one of the greatest tales the cosmos has to tell. How did biological robots turn into human beings with free will? And why has no other animal on earth managed the same trick? Come inside and discover the answer to this greatest of all mysteries.
This magisterial reflection on the history and destiny of the West compares Greco-Roman civilization and the Judeo-Christian tradition in order to understand what both unites and divides them. Mediation, understood as a collective, symbolic experience, gives society unity and meaning, putting human beings in contact with a universal object known as the world or reality. But unity has a price: the very force that enables peaceful coexistence also makes us prone to conflict. As a result, in order to find a common point of convergence—of at-one-ment—someone must be sacrificed. Sacrifice, then, is the historical pillar of mediation. It was endorsed in a cosmic-religious sense in antiquity and rejected for ethical reasons in modernity, where the Judeo-Christian tradition plays an intermediate role in condemning sacrificial violence as such, while accepting sacrifice as a voluntary act offered to save other human beings. Today, as we face the collapse of all shared mediations, this intermediating solution offers a way out of our moral and cultural plight.
Women and Dionysus links repression of the Dionysian spirit in Western culture with the rise of the patriarchy over the course of two millennia. It effectively draws aconnection between Dionysus and women throughout history, with examples from cultures both past and present, and the author’s own experiences. Maggy Anthony explores Dionysus’ role as god of the vine, creativity and passion, and his impact on art and literature. The book examines the Dionysian influence on creative older women, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Martha Graham and Marguerite Duras; examines Dionysus in mythology, history and religion; and considers connections to mysticism and the Renaissance. Anthony goes on to explore how women’s expressions of creativity through healing, wine-drinking and dancing were condemned in history, and how modern African and Latin American rites contrast with Western traditions. Finally, the book looks at ‘outbreaks’ of modern Dionysian spirit - from Haight-Ashbury to the Burning Man festival - and speculates on its future. This unique study will be essential reading for academics and scholars of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, and for analytical and depth psychologists, particularly those with an interest in female individuation, creativity, and spirituality.
This book argues that The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche's first book, does not mark a rupture with his prior philosophical undertakings but is, in fact, continuous with them and with his later writings as well. It shows that many of the book's elements are reminiscent of Nietzsche's earlier revisions of philology and anticipate the later writings.
Studied for many years by scholars with Christianising assumptions, Greek religion has often been said to be quite unlike Christianity: a matter of particular actions (orthopraxy), rather than particular beliefs (orthodoxies). This volume dares to think that, both in and through religious practices and in and through religious thought and literature, the ancient Greeks engaged in a sustained conversation about the nature of the gods and how to represent and worship them. It excavates the attitudes towards the gods implicit in cult practice and analyses the beliefs about the gods embedded in such diverse texts and contexts as comedy, tragedy, rhetoric, philosophy, ancient Greek blood sacrifice, myth and other forms of storytelling. The result is a richer picture of the supernatural in ancient Greece, and a whole series of fresh questions about how views of and relations to the gods changed over time.
"Walter Pater, best known as the author of The Renaissance (1873) and as Oscar Wildes tutor and friend, was a leading figure in European aestheticism and British fin-de-siecle culture. Despite this, he has received only limited critical attention, and has tended to be read conservatively. Drawing on Paters unpublished manuscripts, Giles Whiteley challenges this view of Pater as a closeted don who spend the remainder of his life regretting the excesses of his Renaissance. Focusing on Paters reading of the German idealist philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel, Whiteley argues that Paters response to both the philosophical and the ideological legacies of idealism was significantly more advanced than has been hitherto thought. Presenting a persuasive new reading of the genre of the imaginary portrait Paters most elusive form of writing the book paints a picture of Walter Pater as a truly revolutionary thinker. Pater, like Nietzsche during the same period, breaks with the dialectic as a method. Anticipating the radical critiques of ideology of post- Hegelians such as Derrida and Deleuze, Pater becomes a radical and transgressive thinker in his own right."
Dionysus after Nietzsche examines the way that The Birth of Tragedy (1872) by Friedrich Nietzsche irrevocably influenced twentieth-century literature and thought. Adam Lecznar argues that Nietzsche's Dionysus became a symbol of the irrational forces of culture that cannot be contained, and explores the presence of Nietzsche's Greeks in the diverse writings of Jane Harrison, D. H. Lawrence, Martin Heidegger, Richard Schechner and Wole Soyinka (amongst others). From Jane Harrison's controversial ideas about Greek religion in an anthropological modernity, to Wole Soyinka's reimagining of a postcolonial genre of tragedy, each of the writers under discussion used the Nietzschean vision of Greece to develop subversive discourses of temporality, identity, history and classicism. In this way, they all took up Nietzsche's call to disrupt pre-existing discourses of classical meaning and create new modes of thinking about the Classics that speak to the immediate concerns of the present.
