1.28.2008
Slow Time and Secret Societies
A couple of interesting book-related articles to check out this morning, the first comes from the San Francisco Gate, who interviews Pagan author Waverly Fitzgerald concerning her new book "Slow Time: Recovering the Natural Rhythm of Life".
"Spiritual teacher and author Waverly Fitzgerald believes we'd all benefit by changing our ideas and relationships with time. In her new book, "Slow Time," Fitzgerald, who has written for Beliefnet and Sage Woman magazine, provides exercises and ideas intended to inspire people to align themselves with nature's natural rhythms - night and day, the monthly lunar cycle and the yearly solar round - rather than living their lives to the frenzied beat of industrial time."
For Fitzgerald, connecting religiously with the changing seasons is one way to "slow" your conception of time from the "frenetic" pace of our industrialized world.
"Most of the major religions have a seasonal liturgy, even though it may be sort of buried. If you look at Christianity, with the Easter cycle and the Christmas birth, there is this lovely use of the seasons to tell a story, and the same is true in the Jewish religion. And, of course, the pagan religion really works with this notion of the seasons and the cycle. So there is a very deep connection between this notion of cyclical time and spirituality. And there is a message of hope that things will come around again, that we may feel despair but spring will come again. It is a pretty profound metaphor that is embedded in our lives."
Meanwhile, over at Salon.com, Laura Miller rips apart Mark Booth's uneven examination of the history of the world through the eyes of esoteric secret societies.
"...you might conclude that "The Secret History of the World" is a truckload of drivel, and you would be right. It is a mess of a book, disjointed and rambling, rife with puzzling non sequiturs that are obviously meant to be suggestive or evocative but that more often read like the symptoms of an advanced case of Attention Deficit Disorder ... Booth is forever intimating that he's about to explain something important to the reader and then abruptly dropping the subject. He has all the smoke and cymbals of the Great and Terrible Oz, but can rarely muster even the fake disembodied head as a crescendo ... Furthermore, much of the "information" Booth chooses to supply is either incorrect or, frankly, untrue. Some of these errors seem to be the result of simple ignorance."
So if you are looking for the inside scoop on the importance of secret societies, and what they believed, "The Secret History of the World: As Laid Down by the Secret Societies" may not be the book for you. You might be better off with a work like "Hidden Wisdom", by former Gnosis editors Richard Smoley and Jay Kinney, if you want to understand what contributions esoteric secret societies have made to our culture.
Labels: books, Freemasonry, gnosticism, Mark Booth, Paganism, Salon.com, secret societies, Waverly Fitzgerald
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