Kamakura Daibutsu of Kōtoku-in temple in Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, photographed by H. Grobe in Wikipedia article “Japanese Zen” – licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

(15) ZEN AND JAPANESE CULTURE

Zen and Japanese Culture was for Daisetz Suzuki, a lifelong student and teacher of Zen whose works popularized it in the West, his magnum opus – ” a classic that has influenced generations of readers and played a major role in shaping conceptions of Zen’s influence on Japanese traditional arts”. In it, he connects Zen to art, haiku, tea ceremonies and the Japanese love of nature – and above all to the philosophy of the samurai and swordsmanship. It is this last that particularly appeals to me, as I’ve always found swords to have a metaphorical resonance to life and how one lives it.

“Life is one long battle; we have to fight at every step…that if we succeed, it is at the point of the sword, and that we die with the weapon in our hand”

Or in my own words, I hold two swords – one in my hand and one in my heart.

RATING: 4 STARS****
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(14) TAO TE CHING

If only there had been some law requiring any foundational religious text be written by its founder like a university exam – within a prescribed time limit of an hour, or two at most.

Surely that would eliminate much of the source of religious conflict, which at heart often seems to be wars of literary interpretation. My book is better than your book. All those long rambling religious texts – really, less is more. Of course, that would also eliminate most, if not almost all religious books – there goes the Bible for one .

But it would leave the Tao Te Ching, jotted down by its founder Laozi or Lao Tzu as a literal afterthought or postscript, at the request of a city sentry to record his wisdom for the good of the kingdom before being permitted to pass – and literally ride off into the sunset on a water buffalo because he was that awesome.

Of course, that is probably pure legend in every respect, including the historicity of Laozi himself, but who cares when it’s that cool? And it’s apt enough for the source of Taoism, with its emphases on living in balance, naturalness, spontaneity, simplicity and detachment from desire – particularly living in the moment and wu wei, or the art of doing nothing effectively.

RATING: 4 STARS****
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(12) JONATHAN KIRSCH – A HISTORY OF THE END OF THE WORLD

Jonathan Kirsch is the author of some of my favorite studies of the Bible. Not of the whole Bible, mind you – for one thing, he tends towards a Jewish focus on the Old Testament (with one notable exception), and for another, he has a particular focus on points of interest there as well.

The Harlot by the Side of the Road was his first such book and its subtitle says it all – Forbidden Tales of the Bible. As does the usual expression of shock he quotes in his introduction – do you mean THAT’S in the Bible?!

“The stories you are about to read are some of the most violent and sexually explicit in all of Western literature. They are tales of human passion in all of its infinite variety: adultery, seduction, incest, rape, mutilation, assassination, torture, sacrifice, and murder”

We’re talking Lot and his daughters in Genesis, then echoed by the Levite and his concubine in Judges, only worse. Much like Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son Isaac in Genesis is echoed, only worse, as Jephthah actually sacrificing his daughter in Judges. Which pretty much sums up those two bloody books of the Bible, which would do Quentin Tarantino or Game of Thrones proud.

Indeed, most of the book is from either Genesis or Judges. There is a couple of exceptions, including the one where God tries to kill Moses, until Moses’ quick-thinking wife Zipporah does a spontaneous circumcision of their infant son and smears Moses’ forehead with the bloody foreskin. Which is just odd, akin to of those weird variants of vampire that can be held at bay by some bizarre obsessive-compulsive ritual.

Which perhaps brings us to his book on Moses, although I just don’t find Moses as intriguing a character as the subject of his similar book on King David. After all, Exodus and its related books might easily have been summed up with the subtitle Are We There Yet?

I do like how he compares God and Moses to a constantly bickering old married couple. I mean, I’m only paraphrasing slightly with this exchange:

GOD: “I have had it with these Israelites! I’ll kill all of them and start over with you and your descendants!”
MOSES: “And what would the Egyptians say? That you saved the Israelites from slavery only to kill them in the desert?”
GOD: “Hmmm. Okay – I’ll just kill some of them.”

I’ve always imagined one Israelite turning to another as the God in a box starts yelling again from the Ark of the Covenant – “I preferred the calf”.

As I said, I prefer King David to Moses, because despite the former’s many flaws – and David could be a monumental ass at times – he’s just such a charming rogue, so much so that even God was charmed by him as God’s golden boy. Or at least, he charmed the original author of the Bible – I particularly like the theory Kirsch references that the nucleus of the Bible started as a court biography of David, to which preceding events were added almost as a legendary Hebrew Dreamtime.

However, my absolute favorite Kirsch book remains his study of the Book of Apocalypse or Revelations, not coincidentally my absolute favorite book of the Bible, in A History of the End of the World (and that one notable exception to his focus on the Old Testament I noted at the outset).

Again, the subtitle of the book sums it up – How the Most Controversial Book in the Bible Changed the Course of Civilization. Or for that matter, the scholarly quip he quotes in his introduction – “Revelations either finds a man mad, or leaves him so”.

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Harper Collins, 50th anniversary edition

(11) HUSTON SMITH – THE WORLD’S RELIGIONS

The classic work on the subject of its title, by leading scholar of religious studies Huston Smith – himself almost the literal embodiment of that title, raised in China as a child of a Christian missionary family and student of philosophy in the United States.

By necessity, it uses a broad-brush approach to the eight world religions it examines in their respective chapters – Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity and what it calls primal or tribal religions. It prompts to mind German philosopher Karl Jasper’s characterization of an Axial Age as the crucible of modern world religions, Jasper ended his Axial Age prior to Christianity or Islam – but it is striking that no major world religion has yet emerged since either.

As per its subtitle “Our Wisdom Traditions”, it seeks to put each religion’s best foot forward and look past caricatures or stereotypes – perhaps most memorably expressed by Smith when it comes to Islam as a common perception of a religion of sword and harem.

My personal favorite chapter, and unfortunately also its shortest, was that on the primal or tribal religions, which despite its brevity, impressed upon me the most the merits of the primal or tribal worldview – including the lost strengths and versatility of an oral culture as opposed to a literate one, despite the obvious advantages of literacy to our society.

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Reaktion Books 2021

(10) PAUL ROBICHAUD – PAN: THE GREAT GOD’S MODERN RETURN

Io Pan! Io Pan Pan!

Pan, the original horny god with the groin of a goat or as Bill Hicks styled him, randy Pan the Goat Boy. God of nature, mountains, shepherds and sexuality – also the source of our word panic, for the divine mad fear he could inspire in people, including as savior of Athens, the invading Persian army at Marathon.

As a Capricorn goat boy myself, I’ve long been a Pan fan. And so too is Paul Robichaud, a devotee of Pan. Well perhaps not the Capricorn part, but he has written a whole book as a paean to Pan.

Ironically, the only classical Greek god reported as dead – in a historical legend by Plutarch, with a sailor during the reign of Tiberius reporting a divine proclamation from an island that “the great god Pan is dead” – but reports of his death, to paraphrase Mark Twain, were greatly exaggerated. Pan was the one god that endured more than all the others, even to the extent of embodying in horned and hooved form all classical paganism as a whole in modern romanticism and neo-paganism. Perhaps aptly enough, given the pun on Pan – as the word for “all” in Greek also being Pan.

Robichaud comes from a background as an English professor – it shows in his fluent prose style, but also a focus on literature as he explores how Pan has been imagined in mythology, art, literature, music, spirituality, and popular culture through the centuries. The chapter titles best demonstrate this odyssey of Pan from mythic Pan – through medieval and early modern Pan, Pan’s romantic rebirth, Pan in the twentieth century (and his Edwardian height of popularity) and Pan’s occult power – to contemporary Pan.

All the usual suspects are here as cultural or literary devotees of Pan, but most notably those from Edwardian children’s literature of all places – prompting Bill Hick’s joke about his Goat Boy being available for children’s parties (“Mommy, I want Goat Boy to come play at our house”). Kenneth Grahame’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Peter Pan’s namesake, as well as much of his persona – with the Lost Boys as his satyrs.

Sadly, no C.S. Lewis’ Narnia, despite its deliciously Dionysian portrayal, maenads and all. Pan did often pal around with Dionysus after all, but generally not so much the other gods – not to mention all those fauns in Narnia. Wait a minute…Mr Tumnus is Pan! Spread the word.

Of course, there are bound to be omissions – Bill Hicks’ Goat Boy for one, Rhys Darby’s fleeting Pan-like figure in Flight of The Conchords’ Prince of Parties song for another. There’s just too much Pan – or is that too many Pans? – out there.

Also sadly, Rochibaud does suggest one of my favorite historical legends of how Christianity embodied Pan as its devil – as being just that, a legend dating back only to the nineteenth century (following the hypothesis of Ronald Hutton to that effect).

I still prefer the legend. In one of my story ideas, a somewhat lost and forlorn Satan muses to the protagonist (with whom he has occasional chats) of his origin from Pan (as one of his multiple-choice origin stories). The protagonist calls him out on his conflicting origin stories, to which Satan replies “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am legion, I contain multitudes”. But then he becomes sadly wistful “I would give anything just to dance in the moonlight again, when I was not evil but only wild and free”.

RATING: 4 STARS****
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(9) BETTANY HUGHES – HELEN OF TROY / APHRODITE & VENUS

A thematic duo of books for my top two favorite female figures from mythology – Aphrodite Venus and Helen of Troy (which I understand to be adapted from or for TV series written and presented by Hughes).

And for those who think it a cheat to include two books within the one entry, I’d rank her Helen of Troy over her Aphrodite & Venus (despite ranking Aphrodite over Helen for my top female figure from mythology). Firstly because it was, well, first of the two (including in my reading order of them) and secondly because it seemed to me the more developed in depth. Don’t get me wrong – her Aphrodite book is an interesting presentation of the goddess in her many aspects, written in Hughes’ characteristic engaging style, but I just would have preferred it to be a little longer to consider its subject a little deeper.

“As soon as men began to write, they made Helen of Troy their subject; for nearly three thousand years she has been both the embodiment of absolute female beauty and a reminder of the terrible power that beauty can wield”. And that’s literally as soon as men began to write, as she was enshrined within the Iliad, Homer’s epic poem that is the foundation of Western literary culture.

The subtitle of the book sums up her aspects in myth and history – goddess, princess, whore. I was aware of her divine mythic aspect from other sources – including one referenced in this book that saw Helen as a semi-divine figure in a blissful life, ironically with Achilles, but aptly enough coupling the world’s most beautiful women with its greatest warrior. And of course her divine origin as a daughter of Zeus in the form of a swan with Leda, with Helen hatched from an egg.

However, I was intrigued by Helen of Sparta, “the focus of a cult which conflated Helen the heroine with a pre-Greek fertility goddess”. For that matter, I often tend to overlook that Helen was from Sparta (SPARTA!) – and Hughes is evocative in fleshing her out as a Spartan princess or Mycenaean aristocrat, as well as fleshing out Paris as delegate from Troy as Hittite satellite, doing the Bronze Age equivalent of sliding into her dms.

It reminded me of other reading – that while we moderns tend to query a casus belli as retrieving a stolen wife, substituting other theories for the Trojan War, when one looks at ancient or tribal war, that wars fought over women or a woman may not be so strange after all.

And that of course brings me to that other aspect of Helen – “the home-wrecker of the Iliad” and “bitch-whore of Greek tragedy”. It’s an aspect that evokes the original sin of Eve on a geopolitical scale, “held responsible for both the Trojan War and enduring enmity between East and West”. There’s even an apple in Helen’s myth!

As for Aphrodite & Venus, it’s summed up by its subtitle – history of a goddess. And what a goddess! It starts – aptly enough – with her mythic birth (or one of its versions at least), reminding us of something that Botticelli’s famous birth of Venus often charms us to forget, that Aphrodite wasn’t just born from the bubbles of sea foam, but the bloody foam formed by or around the severed genitals of a deposed divine ruler.

It evokes images of the Anatolian goddess Cybele imported into Greece and Rome, some of whose frenzied male devotees were reputed to have castrated themselves at the height of her ecstatic festivals – which I suspect at least of few them regretted in the distinctly, ah, un-ecstatic light of the next day.

I don’t know of any association or connection between Aphrodite and Cybele – the Greeks associated Cybele with mother goddess Rhea – but Aphrodite was certainly associated with ancient near Eastern goddesses of love and war like Ishtar, aptly enough for Aphrodite’s’ blood-foamed birth. Hughes explores this association, seemingly conflated with her origin in Cyprus, as demonstrative of a divine figure far more complex in all her aspects than the mere classical pinup or party girl to which she is often reduced.

One such aspect is as goddess of the Roman Empire itself – evoked in Hughes’ chapter Venus and Empire – as Romans traced their empire to legendary Trojan founder, Aeneas. Aeneas – leader of exiles from the Trojan War, heir to the Trojan royal lineage of Priam, Paris and Hector, and above all, son of Aphrodite. The Romans also looked more favorably on her consorting with the god of war, as while the Greek god of war represented the brutish violence of war (with Athena representing the art of war), the Romans saw their counterpart Mars as representing more martial virtue and honor.

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Wiley-Blackwell, 1st edition

(8) WALTER BURKERT – GREEK RELIGION

If Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths are my Old Testament of classical mythology, Burkert’s Greek Religion is my New Testament. Alternatively, the three are my holy trinity of classical mythology (which I suppose would make Nietzsche the Father, Graves the Son and Burkert the Holy Spirit of classical mythology).

No, seriously. For me, Nietzsche and Graves are poles at the other end of a thematic spectrum from Burkert – which I suppose would make all three the points of a thematic triangle. Whatever.

The line from Nietzsche to Burkert is perhaps more obvious – both came from a long tradition of German classicists or classical philologists, indeed its most prominent figures in the English-speaking world (or at least authors of its most prominent books), but in some ways diametrically opposed from each other.

Nietzsche essentially extrapolated a recurring dichotomy of the Apollonian and the Dionysian from classical mythology, above all in its literary manifestation in Greek tragedy, hence his title The Birth of Tragedy. He wrote as an eccentric poet-philosopher, or as he himself described it, a ‘rhapsodizer’ (prompting thoughts of Nietzsche as rhap-artist), not unlike his own prophetic ‘madman’ and apostle of the death of God before his time – “I have come too early…my time is not yet”.

Graves strikes me as similar to Nietzsche – probably someone somewhere has studied or written of the influence of Nietzsche on Graves, if any, but I don’t know anything about that subject – writing as a fellow rhapsodizer or poet, but as an apostle of the Goddess rather than of the death of God, extrapolating his monomyth of the Goddess or prehistoric matriarchal religion from classical mythology.

Of course, the historical accuracy of either has been almost universally contested or considered to be idiosyncratic – “of value only as a guide to the author’s personal mythology”. But who cares? They’re fun! And it’s hard to argue with poetry.

Burkert’s The Greek Religion on the other hand, originally published in his native German in 1977 and translated into English in 1985, has been widely accepted as a standard work in the field. And unlike Nietzsche or Graves, Burkert pretty much extrapolates nothing, robustly sticking to the facts of his literary or archaeological sources.

Burkert presents classical polytheism as inherently chaotic in nature, but at the heart of classical religion was sacrificial ritual – “The term gods…remains fluid, whereas sacrifice is a fact”.

His section headings say it all about his comprehensive survey of Greek religion – Prehistory and the Minoan-Mycenaean Age; Ritual and Sanctuary; The Gods (the Olympian dirty dozen and the balance of the pantheon); The Dead, Heroes and Chthonic Gods; Polis and Polytheism; Mysteries and Asceticism; and Philosophical Religion.

“He describes the various rituals of sacrifice and libation and explains Greek beliefs about purification. He investigates the inspiration behind the great temples at Olympia, Delphi, Delos, and the Acropolis―discussing the priesthood, sanctuary, and oracles. Considerable attention is given to the individual gods, the position of the heroes, and beliefs about the afterlife. The different festivals are used to illuminate the place of religion in the society of the city-state. The mystery cults, at Eleusis and among the followers of Bacchus and Orpheus, are also set in that context. The book concludes with an assessment of the great classical philosophers’ attitudes to religion”.

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Art by Simon Bisley for “Slaine: The Horned God” written by Pat Mills for the 2000 AD comic as one of my favorite adaptations of Graves’ Goddess in popular culture, even more so than it was of Frazer – since it essentially adapted Graves, who in turn adapted Frazer

(7) ROBERT GRAVES – THE WHITE GODDESS & THE GREEK MYTHS

Graves saw Frazer’s sacred king and raised it with a queen, his titular White Goddess. For Graves, the monomyth was his theme, or rather the great mythic and poetic Theme:

“The Theme, briefly, is the antique story, which falls into thirteen chapters and an epilogue, of the birth, life, death and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year; the central chapters concern the God’s losing battle with the God of the Waning Year for love of the capricious and all-powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride and layer-out. The poet identifies himself with the God of the Waxing Year and his Muse with the Goddess; the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird.”

However, The White Goddess is not as accessible in its prose as Frazer’s The Golden Bough and is essentially a compilation of poetic musings, which has its shining moments but can often become turgid or bogged down in Graves’ esoteric discussion of the Irish tree alphabet or the poems of Taliesin. And like The Golden Bough, it’s best read as poetry than for factual or historical accuracy.

And he was an apostle of the White Goddess again in his study of Greek mythology. However, it remains my favorite single volume study of Greek mythology.

Essentially it comes in two parts.

The first part is a conventional compendium of Greek mythology – literary retellings of the various myths from their sources – and it is this part that is the basis for the book as my favorite single volume study of Greek mythology, albeit somewhat dense in its prose style.

The second part – his interpretative notes or commentary – is where things get more wild, albeit all in good poetic fun. This is where Graves ‘decodes’ or reconstructs Greek mythology to his monomyth of the Goddess or prehistoric matriarchal religion – “Graves interpreted Bronze Age Greece as changing from a matriarchal society…to a patriarchal one under continual pressure from victorious Greek-speaking tribes. In the second stage local kings came to each settlement as foreign princes, reigned by marrying the hereditary queen, who represented the Triple Goddess, and were ritually slain by the next king after a limited period, originally six months. Kings managed to evade the sacrifice for longer and longer periods, often by sacrificing substitutes, and eventually converted the queen, priestess of the Goddess, into a subservient and chaste wife, and in the final stage had legitimate sons to reign after them”.

So there you go. Of course, the historical accuracy of Graves’ interpretation or commentary has been almost universally contested or considered to be idiosyncratic – “the interpretive notes are of value only as a guide to the author’s personal mythology”. His characteristic rejoinder was to plead poetic privilege, essentially rebuking his critics or classical scholars “You’re not poets!”. And it’s hard to argue with poetry.

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Art by Simon Bisley for “Slaine: The Horned God” written by Pat Mills for the 2000 AD comic as one of my favorite adaptations of Frazer’s sacrificial sacred king in popular culture. Well, that and The Wicker Man (which also features in Slaine)

(6) SIR JAMES GEORGE FRAZER – THE GOLDEN BOUGH

“Who are these coming to the sacrifice?” –
John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

Behold the monomyth of the sacrificial sacred king.

That is – the monomyth of a recurring or universal mythic archetype, as used by Joseph Campbell for his archetypal hero’s journey. But it doesn’t get much more monomythic that one of the original monomyths – Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough.

The Golden Bough proposed the monomyth or recurring mythic archetype of sacrificial sacred kings – or their surrogates once the kings wised up to it – as incarnations of gods or solar deities whose death and resurrection in turn represented fertility. And believe me, Frazer saw these sacred kings or fertility cults everywhere – including Jesus and Christianity, controversially at the time – such that he filled several volumes up with them, although more people (including me) tend to read his abridged single volume.

Now I think that Frazer was always entertaining and occasionally illuminating in The Golden Bough – his discussion of the principles of sympathetic magic, a term coined by himself, seems particularly definitive – but in terms of factual or historical accuracy…not so much as he’s much more mixed at best in this respect. As the old adage goes, when all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail – and when all you have is a theory of sacred kings, then by god or goddess, everything begins to look like a sacred king, even if you have to hammer everything into shape for it. After all, we all have to make sacrifices…

While Frazer is or was mostly dismissed as a footnote in academic study, The Golden Bough has been highly influential in literary culture, because whether or not it is true, his mythic archetype of the doomed hero or sacrificial sacred king has the elements of a ripping yarn.

Just for starters, there’s his influence on T. S. Eliot, who openly acknowledged the influence of Frazer on The Waste Land, although with the characteristic pessimism of that poem, proposed the cycle might be broken, leaving only violence and death without rebirth – and in which the dying god is just another buried corpse, perhaps even prompting to mind a Nietzschean murder victim or contemporary zombie apocalypse, rising writhing from their own resurrection – “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, has it begun to sprout?”

Or there’s his influence on Campbell’s own monomyth. Or on Sigmund Freud, lending itself to the segue of his influence on Camille Paglia, who described her primary influence as a fusion of Frazer and Freud (although doubling the inaccuracy of the former with that of the latter).

RATING: 4 STARS****
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