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3.08 AVERAGE
3.08 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
mysterious
medium-paced
challenging
informative
slow-paced
This author seems to make claims with very little evidence to back it up. Found myself furrowing my brow more often than not.
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
A book that makes you think about the things you thought you knew.
More like a philosophy book than anything, it tackles alternate ways of looking at the world that hard Christians or scientists would not appreciate. For an open-minded person, it's a fascinating delve into perspectives that make sense of the world in a different way - and they do make sense.
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
It may just be me, but I have always been excited by the prospect of finding books that reveal secret mystic knowledge. My impressionable, fantasy-riddled childhood has me daydreaming about stealing tomes out of Hogwarts’ Restricted Section, or delving into the scrolls maintained under Minas Tirith like Gandalf researching Bilbo’s ring. Who wouldn’t be tantalized by initiation into a mystery school?
The Secret History of the World may have the trappings of such conspiratorial enlightenment, but in reality, the mishmash of world religion and pessimism regarding human capabilities through the ages makes the revelations contained within that much more disappointing.
I struggle deciding whether to bemoan the history or the secrets in this book first. In one fell swoop, I can say that the secrets rely on an ignorance of historical blasphemy while the history only contributes to the author’s worship of figures of yore. Starting from the beginning, Booth hews towards Christian interpretations, adding a smattering of unwitting cosmological pedagogy, then sprinkling in world religions to the taste of nineteenth century pseudo-mystics.
There are three main narratives in Booth’s recounting of our world. Each thread has moments of mystic intrigue, “insights” that can pique one’s interest. However, taking each as a whole, then all together, the author’s general outlook (and by proxy, Rudolf Steiner and Aleister Crowley’s views on humanity) left a sour taste in my mouth.
First and foremost: all religions are real. Much of the first half (and further) of Secret History of the World involves retellings of world religion mythology. Booth twists this into some kind of self-confirming grand narrative. All gods are part of some battle of good and bad. Monotheistic gods were just different aspects of pagan gods, Egyptian relics determined historic turning points. When all of it is real and true, what value is any of it?
The second and third threads detail the dual descent and enlightenment of humanity. According to this record, humans used to have wondrous powers over and understandings of nature. At the same time, they needed divine intervention to conceive of things like love, lies, or individuality. So much of the book is about mystery schools trying to achieve this heightened perception of the universe while not truly trusting the average person to be capable of holding that knowledge.
You can’t just try to convince me that humans literally had no concept of deception before the Trojan War. Based on what I can surmise, the establishment of the Ten Commandments could be concomitant with this war, but really, neither have written records until around the eighth century BCE. So, they vaguely overlap in myth. How can no humans know of lies, but both make rules and songs about it (thousands of miles apart mind you)? It’s just silly. Have I forgotten to mention that love-at-first-sight didn’t exist until Dante…the 1300’s! Yea sure Booth.
Booth skips between religions like school children playing hop-scotch. Each one confirms each other’s underlying truth. His version of history requires Great Beings to guide events, out in the open and hidden. To where these Men guide humanity is no more specified than “enlightenment” or “protection from evil”.
Sure, there are tidbits of fun esoterica. Pythagoras speaking with a river, enlightenment era mystics seeing the future and performing weird feats. Yes, this stuff is entertaining. Yet the lack of proper citations and conspiratorial tone belie the facade of supportive instruction for its true nature as an exercise in self-glorified profit-seeking. An unidentified portion of the information in this book comes from an alleged initiate (unnamed) of some secretive mystery school.
This is such a shame. Somewhere towards the beginning of the book, Booth gives a great explanation differentiating why questions from how questions. Such insight may lead you to believe the author has great optimism about people’s abilities to learn, going to such lengths to distinguish their reasoning for this book from a scientific study of cosmology or evolution. All proceeding chapters disappoint on that standard. When Booth isn’t misrepresenting history or maligning scientists (even in the face of admitting that mysticism and science pursue mutually exclusive knowledge), he demeans the “common man” of history. They neither could conceive of other individuals’ personhood before Jesus nor can they now be trusted with super-secret, magic sex techniques.
Contemporaneous reviewers for this book point out the perhaps coincidental release date (shortly after the esoterica craze caused by The Da Vinci Code). With all of the less savory aspects of this book, I cannot help but perceive it as some money-grab—albeit one the author could convince themselves also served those seeking supernatural education.
Since childhood, I have pictured magic and its applications as liberating people, granting them power outside of themselves. Much of the media imagining these things unfortunately frame it in genealogical, racial, or monarchical terms. I have been hoping for something more aligned with the folk freedom of witches.
This book only perpetuates Christianity's worst inclinations towards authority and power without granting its readers any semblance of instruction. If you don’t want to praise Napoleon Bonaparte nor worry about Obama’s anti-Christ nature, you may want to find a different book.
The author spent most of this book too busy rambling about a whole lot of nothing to explain the people, places and things he mentioned that were actually really interesting. The entire book was filled with, "As we will see..." about topics he never went back to and "As we have seen..." about things he never took the time to explain in the first place. It was frustrating. At first I thought maybe he's just the type of author who assumes the reader already knows all about Kepler's three laws and the golden ratio and Manichaeism and Gnosticism and doesn't need or want a more thorough explanation. Then, near the end of the book, he makes the briefest mention of Louis XVI's execution when a man jumped on the scaffolding who yelled, "Jacques de Moloy, you are avenged!" I'm sorry, what? Are you referring to Jacques de Molay, the Grandmaster of the Templar's who was tortured and executed? A 400 page book about secret societies by an author who doesn't seem to know much about them. I was also surprised that for all his talk of giants and proto-humans he didn't seem to know about about the giants Magellan supposedly encountered that he named Patagonia for. His lack of in depth knowledge left me disappointed over and over again. His views on the evolution of civilization and human thought and feeling are also embarrassingly Eurocentric. I still gave the book 3 stars because I enjoyed and despite its shortcomings, it was a fun and interesting read.
challenging
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
This book was very unique. Booth seems to have done his research and reported the facts as they are seen by adherents to the world's secret societies. Some of the pieces do fit together into a logical and cohesive history, if you suspend your disbelief.
My greatest question is whether or not the secret societies themselves believe these tales or is Booth just representing allegory as fact?
If you can open your mind to possibilities that would usually be called impossible or you are seeking the answers to great cosmic questions and have been disappointed thus far. You may enjoy this book.
My greatest question is whether or not the secret societies themselves believe these tales or is Booth just representing allegory as fact?
If you can open your mind to possibilities that would usually be called impossible or you are seeking the answers to great cosmic questions and have been disappointed thus far. You may enjoy this book.
I'm fairly unfamiliar with esoteric philosophies, so picked this up to try to understand that tradition and way of looking at the world.
I'm not religious or particularly spiritual, I don't belong to a religious community or have a faith practice, but I am really interested in learning more about religion and beliefs and the cultures that grow up in/around different religious communities. If you're like me, this book is strongest as a kind of broad overview of esoteric thought, from the earliest origins of human religion through the major Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and some eastern (Buddhist, Taoist, etc) traditions. This is written by a European man, British/English I believe. It is heavily, heavily biased toward a western, Euro-centric point of view. This is particularly apparent in those sections of the book that cover esoteric thought in the Americas, and the sections on Freemasons and their proposed role in forming the U.S. government and the design/layout of Washington D.C. (with no real reference or moral accounting for the slave labor that was critical to that effort, and how the use of slaves might reflect on the overall philosophy these men were said to believe).
In general, the closer this "history" gets to current-day, the weaker it becomes. It should also be said that the author is not himself unbiased. While he says he is not a member of an esoteric, "secret society," by the end, it's clear that he's a believer. The very end of the book is spent highlighting a current day mystic/"prophet" from Ireland (I think), and for me, the book took a quick hard right turn at that point, toward the psychic Sylvia Brown, "I talk to angels" territory, which I just can't invest anything in. I'm not saying these things are illegitimate, but for me they are uncritical, unaccountable, and therefore unbelievable.
All of that said, the early to mid-late sections of this book are really enlightening and provide a reading of the development of religious/spiritual philosophy that is very different from how most of us are taught in school or the spiritual communities we might be brought up in. It is also an interesting critique of the paradigm of materialist thinking that most of us have (whether consciously or unconsciously).
I'm not religious or particularly spiritual, I don't belong to a religious community or have a faith practice, but I am really interested in learning more about religion and beliefs and the cultures that grow up in/around different religious communities. If you're like me, this book is strongest as a kind of broad overview of esoteric thought, from the earliest origins of human religion through the major Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and some eastern (Buddhist, Taoist, etc) traditions. This is written by a European man, British/English I believe. It is heavily, heavily biased toward a western, Euro-centric point of view. This is particularly apparent in those sections of the book that cover esoteric thought in the Americas, and the sections on Freemasons and their proposed role in forming the U.S. government and the design/layout of Washington D.C. (with no real reference or moral accounting for the slave labor that was critical to that effort, and how the use of slaves might reflect on the overall philosophy these men were said to believe).
In general, the closer this "history" gets to current-day, the weaker it becomes. It should also be said that the author is not himself unbiased. While he says he is not a member of an esoteric, "secret society," by the end, it's clear that he's a believer. The very end of the book is spent highlighting a current day mystic/"prophet" from Ireland (I think), and for me, the book took a quick hard right turn at that point, toward the psychic Sylvia Brown, "I talk to angels" territory, which I just can't invest anything in. I'm not saying these things are illegitimate, but for me they are uncritical, unaccountable, and therefore unbelievable.
All of that said, the early to mid-late sections of this book are really enlightening and provide a reading of the development of religious/spiritual philosophy that is very different from how most of us are taught in school or the spiritual communities we might be brought up in. It is also an interesting critique of the paradigm of materialist thinking that most of us have (whether consciously or unconsciously).
slow-paced