Synopsis and Review - Of the Feral Children: A Mayan Farce

Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, vol. I (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2005), pp. 60-71., 2005

A comparison between references in the Greek Magical Papyri to lettered, semi-lettered, and unlettered amulets of stone, metal, and papyrus with the actual realia of such amulets from the archaeological record, with special attention paid to the categories of diseases addressed, especially fever, along with the malevolent spirits thought to engender such maladies.

The Goddess and the Underworld in Modernism: Proust, Mann, and Yourcenar The descent to the underworld is the single most important myth for Modernist authors. Nearly all of the major writers from 1895-1945 use the myth as a central allusion in major works. The myth gives the works that " shape and significance " which T.S. Eliot saw to be the consequence of the " mythical method " (" Ulysses "). Furthermore, the composition of these works tends to coincide with a crisis in the writers' lives, analogous to the descent to the underworld. This breakdown in the inner sphere is reflected outwardly by the cultural catastrophe of World War I, and by certain other developments in the arts and sciences of the times. Hence, the myth gives that shape and significance to the works and lives of the Modernists, which I delineate in this book, through a series of close readings of major texts which explicitly allude to the nekyia. 1 The Modernist underworld can be seen as an ancestral crypt, an inferno, a temenos (i.e., a sacred site of initiatory transformation), or as a cornucopia of the archetypal forms of the mind, which give shape and significance to life and art-a granary, where the seed forms of the imaginal are stored. It is this latter mode—the underworld as granary, that this paper focuses on. The Modernists used a diverse and flexible vocabulary for the notion of those fundamental forms of the mind to be disclosed at the climax of the nekyia. 2 Most fundamental to my formulation of the problem is James Hillman's provocative affiliation of Hades, lord of the underworld, with the Platonic term eidos, referring the Doctrine of Forms: the descent to the underworld catalyzes the revelation of those perfect forms which serve as the basis for all creative endeavors, whether it be cosmogenesis (the creation of the world), poiesis (the creation of a text), or hermeneusis (the generative process of reading itself).

Abstract: The appearance of apocalyptic symbols is common in NT narratives, including a Gospel such as that of Matthew. Yet the identification and interpretation of such symbols is frequently allusive, indeterminate, and even contradictory in scholarly discussion. The purpose of this article is to offer some methodological controls for interpreting such texts. Drawing on seminal work done on apocalypses as a genre and their constituent features, this article posits that the employment of symbols is a defining element of apocalypses that provides an important point of entry for the identification and interpretation of apocalyptic symbols in the Gospel of Matthew. Such symbols can be interpreted in a manner similar to that employed for formal apocalypses, in which interpreters seek to determine the referent of the symbol employed. Yet the distinction in genre between an apocalypse and a bios warrants careful attention to the function of the apocalyptic symbol in the Gospel narrative. This method is demonstrated on a text frequently described as “apocalyptic” (Matt 27:51–54).

Since the late 1980s, a new variety of English-language political fiction has developedthe green novel. Organized around tropes of crisis and decay, the new green novel gives generic form to the pervasive sense of urgency attached to environmental problems in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It is easily distinguished from neighboring forms, such as the fiction of urban crisis, by its treatment of Romantic and dystopian elements. These predecessor styles appear in transposed form in the new green novel, and the genre coheres around a stable set of motifs that update central ideas from the predecessors. In its most common version, the green novel expresses a critique of liberal individualist approaches to planetary problems, but in a few key works this critical tendency deepens into a more collective and affirmative mapping project.

"“[T]houghtful, wide-ranging, and eloquently written . . . .The argument cannot be reduced to any single simplistic thesis, and this is one of its major strengths. It acknowledges and affirms complexity, and yet it presents this complexity in a compellingly clear manner. In short, Pettman is a fine critic, both in terms of breadth of reference and understanding, and in terms of subtlety and thought . . . a superb piece of work.” - Steven Shaviro "Absolutely remarkable." - Jean Baudrillard"