Activity

For those Gizars (myself included) who will this Holiday Season bee renewing habits of voracious mastication (read carefully and get your mind out of the gutter) leading, of course, to the committing of two of The Seven Deadly Sins (those would be gluttony and sloth) and who in between such wanton and intentional exercise thereof might also have time and opportunity to immerse themselves in some Holiday Automathicastion (again, read carefully and get your mind out of the gutter) I offer the following possibilities as companions for such activities … ENJOY!
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1) Newman, William R. and Anthony Grafton (Eds.) – Secrets of Nature: Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: MIT Press – 2001 (HB), 2006 (PB). Interesting collection of papers particularly of interest to Gizars see Chapter 5: Astronomia inferior: Legacies of Johannes Trithemius and John Dee, and also Chapter 6: The Rosicrucian Hoax in France (1623-24).

2) Carington, Whately (W. Whately Smith) – The Death of Materialism, London: Allen and Unwin, 1933 and also his The Foundations of Spiritualism, London: Kegan Paul, and so on, 1920. (both of these available GRATIS on archive.org)

3) Battaglia, Debora (Ed.) – E. T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005. – especially Chapter 2: Ufology as Anthropology: Race, Extraterrestrials, and the Occult.

4) Seidenberg, Roderick – Post-historic Man: An Inquiry, Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.
A counter (of sorts) to Toynbee who, if one reads the end of Toynbee’s Habit and Change, good argument could be made that Toynbee is at base a Globalist (as an aside Richard Dolan has on more than occasion heaped great praise on Toynbee as a “model” historian — just saying’). Someone asked Dr. Farrell in a vid-chat some while back why there were no more “grand historians” this read (Siedenberg’s) may provide an answer (or two).

5) De Giustino, David – Conquest of Mind: Phrenology and Victorian Social Thought, London / New Jersey: Croom Helm/Rowan and Littlefield,. 1975. A nice volume on the history of the science of mind. Could one construe modern MRI and fNIR studies as a kind of modern phrenology? SPOILER ALERT! [I think good argument could be made that it in some sense it is.] If one has interest in such a question see Kosslyn, S. M. – If Neuroimaging Is The Answer, What Is The Question? in Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 1999 Jul 29; 354 (1387): 1283–1294, doi: 10.1098/rstb.1999.0479. Kosslyn’s book Wet Mind is also an interesting read.