Some months ago I was talking to a specialist bookseller. She was quite unusual in that she seemed to have read nearly all of the books she was selling. The conversation turned to Mysticism and Peter Kingsley. It would be easy to describe him as a scholar of ancient Greek works, but this would be to miss the depth and spiritual knowing which he brings to his work.
His books begin by exploring the writings of Parmenides who is credited as being the father of logic and the foundation on which Plato claims to have built. These are the roots of our modern world. In this extraordinary work Peter Kingsley re-translates Parmenides showing how and where he has been misunderstood in the past. He successfully re-claims this great work from the logicians and replaces it where it belongs as a major work of mystic wisdom.
Parmenides' world was one of using dreams and divination to heal and to govern. It was a world where wisdom was master and where the ‘real’ was something larger than the concrete world we measure today. So what has this to do with the Yijing and divination? The Yijing is itself a wisdom divinatory system, so what need of more wisdom? Parmenides poem is a report of a conversation he had with the Goddess. She explains much about the nature of the world and our lives within it. All the way through I found myself nodding and ah-ing. It forms an outer layer of a universal understanding in which the Yijing fits very comfortably. What’s more it is of the ancient root of western culture which had gathered knowledge from Mongolia, Nepal, Tibet, India and Persia before eventually being murdered by the Platonist logical world view. It survived by slipping across to Alexandria to be preserved by the Hermetic orders in Egypt.
Peter Kingsley writes exceptionally well. He manages to evidence his work whilst preserving the imaginal nature of the piece. Reading it is a curious experience. One moment he takes the reader through the evidence of how he came to this view or that and the next he lifts us into an imaginal realm where the ideas can be felt and appreciated. At times his sharp wit had me roaring with laughter.
The first book, “In the Dark Places of Wisdom” lays out some of the ideas arguments and background. To some degree I found it a little repetitive and frustrating though it does lay a good foundation to his second book, “Reality”, which is extraordinary. He sums up what he is doing in his work here.
This work is an uplifting journey of soul discovery.