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Memories & visions of paradise : exploring the universal myth of a lost golden age / Richard Heinberg; 1990
Richard Heinberg
Available at Barr Smith Library Main collection (291.24 H468m )
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Customer Reviews
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Memories and Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age
byRichard Heinberg
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5.0 out of 5 starsEvery human culture has a myth of the "fall"
ByA customeron October 8, 1997
Format: Paperback
Did you really think Adam and Eve were unique or unprecedented? Every human culture has a myth of the "fall" from an original golden-age of peace and prosperity to death and disease, including eskimos, aborigines and Native Americans. The author examines "fall" myths from a variety of angles, presenting all the major theories as to what they might mean. "Memories and Visions of Paradise" presents a much clearer overview of the "saddest story ever told" than any previous book on the topic. A commendable effort, well worth picking up for anyone interested in myth or religion.
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4.0 out of 5 starsThe Shadowy Realms of Past and Future
ByDidaskalexVINE VOICEon October 20, 2006
Format: Paperback
"The fruit of that forbidden tree ... brought death into the world, and all our woe ... till one greater Man restore us." John Milton
Paradise Lost:
This above line from Paradise Lost, an epic by John Milton, gives an excellent summary of Genesis 3, which adds enhancing imagery, though a few unnecessary elements are included.
Many legends have paradise myths which even refer to a specific place, a lost Utopia land, a sunken island or a great isolated oasis as the lost paradise of humankind. Of which the author mentioned the lost Shambhala, as a mystical hidden kingdom protected behind snowy peaks, located somewhere to the north, as pictured in the Tibetan legend. Tibetan sages and Western discoverers have looked everywhere for Shambhala - from the Gobi Desert to the North Pole. Geoffrey Ashe alleges that the fantasy of a lost paradise began in northern Asia some 25,000 years ago, within a goddess-worshipping cult. The book is impressive, well researched, on a wide range subjects from Ancient Mediterranean mythology to Indo-European philology.
The paradise myths:
The account of Satan's (Lucifer's) rebellion and fall from heaven with all his followers takes up a major portion of the plot of Paradise Lost. The Biblical sources of this occurrence are brief, but early church writings had fleshed out these lines by the time Milton began composing his epic. The Great Traditions of which the paradise myth is a part tells us that there has been a succession of world ages. Our era is not the only one in which people have grasped at Promethean powers. Civilizations have come and gone; like the others, ours too will pass away. But the greater story continues.
Utopian Paradise?
If we are to imagine any paradise, at all, we should locate it in the future, not the past, argues the author. Other people object that, even if the paradise myth makes us feel good, it is pure wishful thinking; there is no evidence that such a condition ever actually existed. The assumption at the heart of this view is that paradise must refer to a perfect, unblemished state. Given that definition, I would agree. It is indeed preposterous to suppose that there was a time when there was no suffering of any kind, when whatever one wished for immediately became reality. The historical paradise, if it existed, was almost certainly not perfect in this absolute sense. There have been times when human society will strive more for material simplicity and spiritual depth than for wealth and power.
Visions of Paradise:
Heinberg, explores the realms of myth and prophecy, analyzing paradise tradition parallels, in the line of Eliade and Campbell's exploration of the mythical dreams, linking them to a state of recollection of infancy, or an accidental meditation through a near-death-experience. This lost homeland of a far forgotten civilization, a blissfull dream before the emergence of civilization. Each of these consciousness centered interpretations proposed by the author himself may seem to have some applicable validity. At lectures and in discussions, Heinberg mentions, he still often encounters the idea that it's psychologically, and philosophically wrongheaded to look back to an imaginary time in the past when life was somehow better. If we are to imagine any paradise, at all, we should locate it in the future, not the past. However he proposes that this thinking methodology is linked to modernism. The industrial civilization, disapproval of the paradise myth was essential to the purposes of which substituted for the universal, ancient belief in a lost Golden Age the idea continual progress from a primitive origins. Among traditional peoples, the paradise myth appears to implant a feeling of security and stability; it is perhaps the cultural equivalent of the memory of loving parents and a happy childhood. The human evolution from barbarism may well serve the purposes of a material civilization that continually destroys social bonds in order to rebuild a society that serves the interests of a capitalist elite.
A state of consciousness:
Heinberg combined religious mythology fables, applied literary criticism, with tools of both anthropology and archaeology, but arrived in the end at a New Age concept of Paradise.
Ten years ago, recalls Richard Heinberg, "I was hard at work on what would be my first book, Memories and Visions of Paradise. ... In the book, I explored how the paradise myth may refer to a state of consciousness ..., a recollection of infancy, a forgotten civilization, a time prior to devastating world cataclysms, a lost homeland, or the era before the emergence of civilization itself. It was published in 1989, and since then I have periodically looked back on it to see how my thinking has changed and how much I've learned."
An Expert's review:
"..., but Heinberg makes his arguments fairly and does not attempt to draw conclusions far afield from his data. Even if his arguments do not convince, they make one think. He posits that "the memory of Paradise represents an innate and universal longing for a state of being that is natural and utterly fulfilling, ..." Lucy Patrick, Florida State Univ.
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5.0 out of 5 starsguess what, paradise was real. No, really !!!!
ByMoises Pittounikoson April 6, 2012
Format: Paperback
If the 19th century was an attempt to understand the world, and in the process killing a few million people, then the 21st will be an attempt to understand the brain and crack into a real realization that the the world is conditioned by the brain and so utopia is a state of mind, rather that a place 'out there'. This is what those Indian Rishis and Yogis and Buddhists have been saying all along!
So the real home is called the `outer void' or `God' and we have lost touch with who we really are because we are tightly encased in an ego bubble and the bubble is a prison of some sort, shielding humanity off from the truth. How do we know this and is there an escape? Yes there is proof and yes there is an escape. I will first like to take a historical detour and argue that we haven't always been so tightly encased in our ego bubble. Thousands of years ago, humanity had access to the Godhead, but the cord was broken and the Gods disappeared, vanished, until only myths and nostalgias and scraps of religion remained to fill the emptiness. Since then we have been trying to reconnect the cord to the outer reaches, to find God.
Ancient India is an interesting example of a tradition of reaching other states of consciousness. The popular words `Nirvana' `Moksha' `Turya' and many more Sanskrit words are descriptions of higher states of awareness. It seems that the yogis of India have been trying to reconnect to God for thousands of years. Our ancestors, thousands of years ago, were better connected to the higher consciousness than we miserable moderns are today. Humanity fell from the higher state; to crash land into the bog of consciousness we have today. The higher mind, for some reason, deteriorated into the monkey mind, with its emotional baggage and clicks and quarks and all that; but the myth of a higher human survived. In Memories & Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age, Richard Heinberg shows that all cultures have a myth about a fall from paradise. But Heinberg is no Bible basher (we must now insert `Koran basher' to this worn out cliche), as he is only reporting the empirical evidence that indeed paradise did exist. But what was paradise? We are told that Paradise was a place of milk and honey etc, but that would be a boring paradise indeed. There is plenty milk and honey in my local supermarket and I'm still bored! I have a suggestion, and it involves a fun scientific experiment.
So what do we mean by The Fall. How about a fall from a high consciousness state to a lower consciousness state? So just to recap, according to this hypothesis, The Garden of Eden was real, but it wasn't a place, like Disney Land; rather, Eden was a consciousness projected outwards from a hemispherical balance brain and therefore The Fall myth is neurological degeneration, but turned into an allegorical story. So the story about getting kicked out of the garden of Eden, and the subsequent road to Hell, a story incidentally, that is an echoed in myths throughout the world; myths that tell of how it felt to lose fully functioning consciousness, is a true story, but only half remembered. This is how Hell came about then. Well that's not a good statement because our world is always cognized by our brain and so the state of one's brain is the world. The sad man, remember, always sees the world differently from the happy man, and so an impressively happy person is always in a mental paradise, all of the time. So the Fall was what heroin addicts call `a come down'. The opposite of a come down would be paradise and if only we pessimists can stop moan about how bad things are, we can also be in a mental paradise. Here is that scientific experiment I mentioned above, that I wouldn't recommend trying, but it is a funny example.
To test the paradise inside your head idea, rather than paradise being a physical place, out there in the world, give your friend a euphoric inducing drug, say, ecstasy for example, and you notice your friends' happy go lucky behaviour and his annoying blissful outlook on existence. He is in a state of bliss, all of the time. It doesn't matter about his environment because the brain interprets the environment and paradise goggles have been attached to your friends' retina, and so he will call the world we hate, a paradise. This is why the Garden of Eden was a state of mind. Your blissful friend can still hold a conversation and he can still drive a car, but the world he inhabits is a veritable play-pen of joy. There is a strong possibility that your friend will get knocked over by a bus mind; but he probably wouldn't even mind. Thus civilisation is a guard against getting knocked over by a bus. Now give some ecstasy to a troop of baboons, in the traffic free rainforest, and they too will call their environment, Eden; or whatever baboons call paradise.
So this is why, instead of a holiday resort, paradise was a mental paradise, and now we can better understand why, throughout history, humanity has been so nostalgic for paradise. This `nostalgia for paradise', as Mircea Eliade calls it, was not a nostalgia for a theme park at the dawn of history, that would be silly, rather, the nostalgia is a yearning for a higher consciousness that only a select few of our species are now capable of accessing. So the Fall from Paradise was not a bunch of primates getting kicked out Disneyland by an angry Father. There probably was a fall from paradise, but it was not the fall of the Bible, with a topless Adam and a naked Eve frolicking with apples; oh no, that's a myth for the children. The real Fall was the fall from a higher awareness; the breakage of the connection to the God consciousness.
This is why Indian ideas are all about `waking up' and why Sanskrit was the `polished language', designed by sages to recapture the lost consciousness in language (didn't work). The list of Sanskrit words for these higher states is long and, sparingly, I not flail the reader with. The Sanskrit language therefore was a fossil from a deteriorating mind. The ancients didn't go down without a fight though.
Well, as the story goes, they noticed the deterioration, the Indian Yogis, and they devised ingenious technologies to return to the higher mind; to halt the mental decline. Whereas today we have computers and implants; millennia ago they had consciousness technologies that are now lost to us. The art of yoga, for example, may well be a fossil of those ancient practices. The true origin of yoga is lost in the overgrowth of time and may never be ascertained, however, many believe that the original branches of meditation and yoga were techniques to capture the disintegrating consciousness, which, by the time of Christ, was a distant memory. We can argue that various yoga, meditation and other shamanic techniques are psychological fossils that were developed as medicines to fix the damage, or, to put it differently, they acted as techniques to return to a long lost brain state. But I digress.
This is what yoga is all about, that is, re-connecting to the source and so the implication is that in every human being there slumber faculties to which he or she can attain the higher yoga awareness; the realisation that God resides not in the clouds; but behind your eyelids; this is the doctrine of Tat Tvam Asi, or, I AM THAT. In plain English, this means that the girl selling crack down the road has forgotten that she is God Almighty, looking out onto the world. This sounds good to me and, dare I say it, it should sound good to you too. Why, didn't you know that the God behind your eyelids makes you yourself God Almighty? Yes, you, and all you need to do is switch those faculties on, and off you go!
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5.0 out of 5 starsA Unique and Insightful Voice
ByS Graveson September 12, 2014
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
This is a fantastic book and very well written. There is literally no other book like it, in this particular realm. It has been indispensable for my research. I would call it "the hero with a thousand faces" for garden paradise myths - it's that good. Hats off to Mr. Heinberg for his wonderful contribution to our collective consciousness...
CommentWas this review helpful to you?
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4.0 out of 5 starsUnique, entertaining and interesting.
ByP. Mulloyon January 4, 2015
Format: Hardcover
Many civilizations have had images of a lost paradise. Heinberg draws on history, anthropology and religion with inspiration from Immanuel Velikovsky and help from Jung and Joseph Campbell to pump meaning into the idea of a lost golden age.
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5.0 out of 5 starsPhenomenal work!!!
ByDr. Gushtunkinflupon July 2, 2014
Format: Paperback
Brilliantly written and incredible food for thought. Heinberg is an amazing writer.
It goes very well with Tony Wrights book, Return to the Brain of Eden, which documents how fruit biochemistry may have been a key part in this "golden age", and humanities subsequent decline in consciousness once we left this forest symbiosis.
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KIRKUS REVIEW
A study of paradise myths from around the globe, badly marred by a lack of critical perspective. There's no doubt that Heinberg has done his homework: as an ""everything you've always wanted to know"" handbook on paradise, this excels. After declaring that paradise ""may be the most popular and intensely meaningful idea ever to have gripped the human imagination,"" Heinberg demonstrates its universality, from the Hebrew Eden and Greek Golden Age to the Australian aboriginal Dreamtime. Most paradise myths feature common motifs, which Heinberg examines in detail--sacred rivers, a magic tree, a cosmic mountain, humans with miraculous powers, and, of course, a Fall. Still chugging along, he pokes at prophecies of paradise at the end of time, paradise in literature, and a thumbnail history of utopias, from More's original to Stephen Gaskin's The Farm. So far, so useful. Heinberg's own Fall comes when he attempts to interpret his material. At times he happily restates the theories of others, with little attempt to sift wheat from chaff. At other times he proffers his own view, an uncertain compromise between paradise as wispy memory of a historical Golden Age and paradise as a state of mind. Heinberg does a great job of collecting and organizing hundreds of paradise tales, but his questionable analysis garners this a permanent asterisk.
----
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Memories and Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age
byRichard Heinberg
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5.0 out of 5 starsEvery human culture has a myth of the "fall"
ByA customeron October 8, 1997
Format: Paperback
Did you really think Adam and Eve were unique or unprecedented? Every human culture has a myth of the "fall" from an original golden-age of peace and prosperity to death and disease, including eskimos, aborigines and Native Americans. The author examines "fall" myths from a variety of angles, presenting all the major theories as to what they might mean. "Memories and Visions of Paradise" presents a much clearer overview of the "saddest story ever told" than any previous book on the topic. A commendable effort, well worth picking up for anyone interested in myth or religion.
----
4.0 out of 5 starsThe Shadowy Realms of Past and Future
ByDidaskalexVINE VOICEon October 20, 2006
Format: Paperback
"The fruit of that forbidden tree ... brought death into the world, and all our woe ... till one greater Man restore us." John Milton
Paradise Lost:
This above line from Paradise Lost, an epic by John Milton, gives an excellent summary of Genesis 3, which adds enhancing imagery, though a few unnecessary elements are included.
Many legends have paradise myths which even refer to a specific place, a lost Utopia land, a sunken island or a great isolated oasis as the lost paradise of humankind. Of which the author mentioned the lost Shambhala, as a mystical hidden kingdom protected behind snowy peaks, located somewhere to the north, as pictured in the Tibetan legend. Tibetan sages and Western discoverers have looked everywhere for Shambhala - from the Gobi Desert to the North Pole. Geoffrey Ashe alleges that the fantasy of a lost paradise began in northern Asia some 25,000 years ago, within a goddess-worshipping cult. The book is impressive, well researched, on a wide range subjects from Ancient Mediterranean mythology to Indo-European philology.
The paradise myths:
The account of Satan's (Lucifer's) rebellion and fall from heaven with all his followers takes up a major portion of the plot of Paradise Lost. The Biblical sources of this occurrence are brief, but early church writings had fleshed out these lines by the time Milton began composing his epic. The Great Traditions of which the paradise myth is a part tells us that there has been a succession of world ages. Our era is not the only one in which people have grasped at Promethean powers. Civilizations have come and gone; like the others, ours too will pass away. But the greater story continues.
Utopian Paradise?
If we are to imagine any paradise, at all, we should locate it in the future, not the past, argues the author. Other people object that, even if the paradise myth makes us feel good, it is pure wishful thinking; there is no evidence that such a condition ever actually existed. The assumption at the heart of this view is that paradise must refer to a perfect, unblemished state. Given that definition, I would agree. It is indeed preposterous to suppose that there was a time when there was no suffering of any kind, when whatever one wished for immediately became reality. The historical paradise, if it existed, was almost certainly not perfect in this absolute sense. There have been times when human society will strive more for material simplicity and spiritual depth than for wealth and power.
Visions of Paradise:
Heinberg, explores the realms of myth and prophecy, analyzing paradise tradition parallels, in the line of Eliade and Campbell's exploration of the mythical dreams, linking them to a state of recollection of infancy, or an accidental meditation through a near-death-experience. This lost homeland of a far forgotten civilization, a blissfull dream before the emergence of civilization. Each of these consciousness centered interpretations proposed by the author himself may seem to have some applicable validity. At lectures and in discussions, Heinberg mentions, he still often encounters the idea that it's psychologically, and philosophically wrongheaded to look back to an imaginary time in the past when life was somehow better. If we are to imagine any paradise, at all, we should locate it in the future, not the past. However he proposes that this thinking methodology is linked to modernism. The industrial civilization, disapproval of the paradise myth was essential to the purposes of which substituted for the universal, ancient belief in a lost Golden Age the idea continual progress from a primitive origins. Among traditional peoples, the paradise myth appears to implant a feeling of security and stability; it is perhaps the cultural equivalent of the memory of loving parents and a happy childhood. The human evolution from barbarism may well serve the purposes of a material civilization that continually destroys social bonds in order to rebuild a society that serves the interests of a capitalist elite.
A state of consciousness:
Heinberg combined religious mythology fables, applied literary criticism, with tools of both anthropology and archaeology, but arrived in the end at a New Age concept of Paradise.
Ten years ago, recalls Richard Heinberg, "I was hard at work on what would be my first book, Memories and Visions of Paradise. ... In the book, I explored how the paradise myth may refer to a state of consciousness ..., a recollection of infancy, a forgotten civilization, a time prior to devastating world cataclysms, a lost homeland, or the era before the emergence of civilization itself. It was published in 1989, and since then I have periodically looked back on it to see how my thinking has changed and how much I've learned."
An Expert's review:
"..., but Heinberg makes his arguments fairly and does not attempt to draw conclusions far afield from his data. Even if his arguments do not convince, they make one think. He posits that "the memory of Paradise represents an innate and universal longing for a state of being that is natural and utterly fulfilling, ..." Lucy Patrick, Florida State Univ.
----
5.0 out of 5 starsguess what, paradise was real. No, really !!!!
ByMoises Pittounikoson April 6, 2012
Format: Paperback
If the 19th century was an attempt to understand the world, and in the process killing a few million people, then the 21st will be an attempt to understand the brain and crack into a real realization that the the world is conditioned by the brain and so utopia is a state of mind, rather that a place 'out there'. This is what those Indian Rishis and Yogis and Buddhists have been saying all along!
So the real home is called the `outer void' or `God' and we have lost touch with who we really are because we are tightly encased in an ego bubble and the bubble is a prison of some sort, shielding humanity off from the truth. How do we know this and is there an escape? Yes there is proof and yes there is an escape. I will first like to take a historical detour and argue that we haven't always been so tightly encased in our ego bubble. Thousands of years ago, humanity had access to the Godhead, but the cord was broken and the Gods disappeared, vanished, until only myths and nostalgias and scraps of religion remained to fill the emptiness. Since then we have been trying to reconnect the cord to the outer reaches, to find God.
Ancient India is an interesting example of a tradition of reaching other states of consciousness. The popular words `Nirvana' `Moksha' `Turya' and many more Sanskrit words are descriptions of higher states of awareness. It seems that the yogis of India have been trying to reconnect to God for thousands of years. Our ancestors, thousands of years ago, were better connected to the higher consciousness than we miserable moderns are today. Humanity fell from the higher state; to crash land into the bog of consciousness we have today. The higher mind, for some reason, deteriorated into the monkey mind, with its emotional baggage and clicks and quarks and all that; but the myth of a higher human survived. In Memories & Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age, Richard Heinberg shows that all cultures have a myth about a fall from paradise. But Heinberg is no Bible basher (we must now insert `Koran basher' to this worn out cliche), as he is only reporting the empirical evidence that indeed paradise did exist. But what was paradise? We are told that Paradise was a place of milk and honey etc, but that would be a boring paradise indeed. There is plenty milk and honey in my local supermarket and I'm still bored! I have a suggestion, and it involves a fun scientific experiment.
So what do we mean by The Fall. How about a fall from a high consciousness state to a lower consciousness state? So just to recap, according to this hypothesis, The Garden of Eden was real, but it wasn't a place, like Disney Land; rather, Eden was a consciousness projected outwards from a hemispherical balance brain and therefore The Fall myth is neurological degeneration, but turned into an allegorical story. So the story about getting kicked out of the garden of Eden, and the subsequent road to Hell, a story incidentally, that is an echoed in myths throughout the world; myths that tell of how it felt to lose fully functioning consciousness, is a true story, but only half remembered. This is how Hell came about then. Well that's not a good statement because our world is always cognized by our brain and so the state of one's brain is the world. The sad man, remember, always sees the world differently from the happy man, and so an impressively happy person is always in a mental paradise, all of the time. So the Fall was what heroin addicts call `a come down'. The opposite of a come down would be paradise and if only we pessimists can stop moan about how bad things are, we can also be in a mental paradise. Here is that scientific experiment I mentioned above, that I wouldn't recommend trying, but it is a funny example.
To test the paradise inside your head idea, rather than paradise being a physical place, out there in the world, give your friend a euphoric inducing drug, say, ecstasy for example, and you notice your friends' happy go lucky behaviour and his annoying blissful outlook on existence. He is in a state of bliss, all of the time. It doesn't matter about his environment because the brain interprets the environment and paradise goggles have been attached to your friends' retina, and so he will call the world we hate, a paradise. This is why the Garden of Eden was a state of mind. Your blissful friend can still hold a conversation and he can still drive a car, but the world he inhabits is a veritable play-pen of joy. There is a strong possibility that your friend will get knocked over by a bus mind; but he probably wouldn't even mind. Thus civilisation is a guard against getting knocked over by a bus. Now give some ecstasy to a troop of baboons, in the traffic free rainforest, and they too will call their environment, Eden; or whatever baboons call paradise.
So this is why, instead of a holiday resort, paradise was a mental paradise, and now we can better understand why, throughout history, humanity has been so nostalgic for paradise. This `nostalgia for paradise', as Mircea Eliade calls it, was not a nostalgia for a theme park at the dawn of history, that would be silly, rather, the nostalgia is a yearning for a higher consciousness that only a select few of our species are now capable of accessing. So the Fall from Paradise was not a bunch of primates getting kicked out Disneyland by an angry Father. There probably was a fall from paradise, but it was not the fall of the Bible, with a topless Adam and a naked Eve frolicking with apples; oh no, that's a myth for the children. The real Fall was the fall from a higher awareness; the breakage of the connection to the God consciousness.
This is why Indian ideas are all about `waking up' and why Sanskrit was the `polished language', designed by sages to recapture the lost consciousness in language (didn't work). The list of Sanskrit words for these higher states is long and, sparingly, I not flail the reader with. The Sanskrit language therefore was a fossil from a deteriorating mind. The ancients didn't go down without a fight though.
Well, as the story goes, they noticed the deterioration, the Indian Yogis, and they devised ingenious technologies to return to the higher mind; to halt the mental decline. Whereas today we have computers and implants; millennia ago they had consciousness technologies that are now lost to us. The art of yoga, for example, may well be a fossil of those ancient practices. The true origin of yoga is lost in the overgrowth of time and may never be ascertained, however, many believe that the original branches of meditation and yoga were techniques to capture the disintegrating consciousness, which, by the time of Christ, was a distant memory. We can argue that various yoga, meditation and other shamanic techniques are psychological fossils that were developed as medicines to fix the damage, or, to put it differently, they acted as techniques to return to a long lost brain state. But I digress.
This is what yoga is all about, that is, re-connecting to the source and so the implication is that in every human being there slumber faculties to which he or she can attain the higher yoga awareness; the realisation that God resides not in the clouds; but behind your eyelids; this is the doctrine of Tat Tvam Asi, or, I AM THAT. In plain English, this means that the girl selling crack down the road has forgotten that she is God Almighty, looking out onto the world. This sounds good to me and, dare I say it, it should sound good to you too. Why, didn't you know that the God behind your eyelids makes you yourself God Almighty? Yes, you, and all you need to do is switch those faculties on, and off you go!
---
5.0 out of 5 starsA Unique and Insightful Voice
ByS Graveson September 12, 2014
Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
This is a fantastic book and very well written. There is literally no other book like it, in this particular realm. It has been indispensable for my research. I would call it "the hero with a thousand faces" for garden paradise myths - it's that good. Hats off to Mr. Heinberg for his wonderful contribution to our collective consciousness...
CommentWas this review helpful to you?
---
4.0 out of 5 starsUnique, entertaining and interesting.
ByP. Mulloyon January 4, 2015
Format: Hardcover
Many civilizations have had images of a lost paradise. Heinberg draws on history, anthropology and religion with inspiration from Immanuel Velikovsky and help from Jung and Joseph Campbell to pump meaning into the idea of a lost golden age.
---
5.0 out of 5 starsPhenomenal work!!!
ByDr. Gushtunkinflupon July 2, 2014
Format: Paperback
Brilliantly written and incredible food for thought. Heinberg is an amazing writer.
It goes very well with Tony Wrights book, Return to the Brain of Eden, which documents how fruit biochemistry may have been a key part in this "golden age", and humanities subsequent decline in consciousness once we left this forest symbiosis.
----
KIRKUS REVIEW
A study of paradise myths from around the globe, badly marred by a lack of critical perspective. There's no doubt that Heinberg has done his homework: as an ""everything you've always wanted to know"" handbook on paradise, this excels. After declaring that paradise ""may be the most popular and intensely meaningful idea ever to have gripped the human imagination,"" Heinberg demonstrates its universality, from the Hebrew Eden and Greek Golden Age to the Australian aboriginal Dreamtime. Most paradise myths feature common motifs, which Heinberg examines in detail--sacred rivers, a magic tree, a cosmic mountain, humans with miraculous powers, and, of course, a Fall. Still chugging along, he pokes at prophecies of paradise at the end of time, paradise in literature, and a thumbnail history of utopias, from More's original to Stephen Gaskin's The Farm. So far, so useful. Heinberg's own Fall comes when he attempts to interpret his material. At times he happily restates the theories of others, with little attempt to sift wheat from chaff. At other times he proffers his own view, an uncertain compromise between paradise as wispy memory of a historical Golden Age and paradise as a state of mind. Heinberg does a great job of collecting and organizing hundreds of paradise tales, but his questionable analysis garners this a permanent asterisk.
----
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