Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In a demythologized world, William Thompson finds that the power of myth is ironically being restored at the leading edge of science. This book surveys the present, from Post-Modern theory to a science encompassing Chaos theory and the Gaia hypothesis, and finds in it the threads out of which a future conceptual landscape might be woven.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Thompson, author of other works on mythology, here sees myths as fundamental insights into the patterns of nature. Using especially the myth of Gaia the Earth Goddess, he speculates on the future in areas where recent advances in science have tended to require a whole new way of grasping reality. ``The Gaia hypothesis proposes that the Earth has been so shaped by life that it makes no sense to look upon the planet as a rock that circles the sun . . . ; rather, we should think of the Earth as a self-regulating entity.'' The mind must find its own way of adapting to this ongoing Planetization, and mythology can be a valuable part of the reach for emergent meaning in a changing reality. A fascinating but difficult work that is probably beyond the average reader. Recommended for larger collections and areas with reader interest in mythology and New Age philosophy.-- C. Robert Nixon, M.L.S., W. Lafayette, Ind. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Critical supporter of New Age thinking, Thompson ( At the Edge of History ; Pacific Shift ) envisions ``a planetary culture in which myth is understood to be isomorphic, but not identical, to science.'' Weighted down by portentousness and self-sustaining rhetoric, these five loosely related essays, in part, defend the Gaia hypothesis, which posits planet Earth as a single living organism. Thompson offers insightful commentary on the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy, the ``illusory conservatism of Ronald Reagan,'' the gropings of New Age visionaries; the essays also interweave a self-indulgent tribute to four friends who influenced the author's thought: neurophysiologist Francesco Varela, mathematician Ralph Abraham, and co-inventors of the Gaia hypothesis, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. Thompson links ``the plagues of AIDS and pollution'' as he discusses responses of living systems to ``the emerging planetary bioplasm.'' (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Kirkus Book Review

At once a celebration of the thinking of five friends and an invective against establishment thinking as practiced at M.I.T., Harvard, etc. Along the way, Thompson also offers an intellectual autobiography tracing his journey from Sixties rebellion through Seventies self-searching to Eighties union with new breed ""planetary-thinking"" scientists. The friends are chaos mathematician Ralph Abraham; James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, founders of the Gaia theory; neurophysiologist Francesco Varela, and the author, a humanities professor now living in Switzerland. The metaphysics/epistemology of their new school of thought celebrates mind as ""the organization of the living,"" not located in a discrete ego but ""immanent in the pathways that couple the organism to its environment."" Much unconscious thought, metaphor, and myth, Thompson (Pacific Shift, 1986, etc., and a novel, Islands Out of Time, 1985) believes, reflect this planetary connectedness over time and space. As the humanities scholar. Thompson has quite interesting things to say in analyzing the Rapunzel tale, for example, seeing it in terms of ""the one becoming the two"" (Rapunzel gives birth to twins) and the taming of the sexuality of an earlier age into a stable form of civilization headed by a king. Later, Thompson further develops a scheme of history through five epochs from hunter-gatherer to the hoped-for planetization. The analysis is highly provocative and somewhat Hegelian. Thompson sees each successive epoch as an antithesis to a previous synthesis (or an evil transformed to a good, etc.). For the rest, though, too much spleen is directed against the opposition, tarred with the familiar reductionist brush; there are too many dizzying neologisms, too much cheering for the new team, and so many North-South-East-West connections that one loses the cosmological trees in a Gaian forest. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.