outlandishly speculative, possibly specious, yet very interesting books

I'm particularly interested in stuff that might be considered pseudo-science or pseudo-history but which takes the available science/history quite seriously as a foundation upon which to build a hypothesis/theory which is essentially unsupported by available evidence but which does solve some persistent mysteries (if it were true). I haven't read it myself, but I think Terence Mckenna's work might fall along these lines? Or the theory of "panspermia" supported by the likes of Francis Crick?

Two major examples are Freud's "Moses and Monotheism" (perhaps a great deal of later Freud fits this genre) and Julian Jayne's "The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind."

I'm looking for things that are less intentionally weird or outlandish but that just become so due to the perhaps charming idiosyncrasies and obsessions of the author. It's key to me that the author thinks they are doing serious history, science, etc. whether or not they achieve it. Nor is it conspiracy theory, which strikes me as something quite different to this genre, though perhaps it is related in some way.

You could try looking for a copy of The Aquatic Ape, Morgan, Elaine (1982). It's outlandishly speculative, probably specious, but less so than, say, Lemurians living under Mt. Shasta.

I guess books about the future don't count?

Robert Graves' The White Goddess ticks a lot of these boxes

from the bits I've read of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History I feel like he might fit this template, he seems to me to have tried to apply a proto-Structuralist approach to world history, which reminds me maybe Vico is kind of like this too but older and possibly more mystically inclined

Gavin Menzies - 1421, The Year China Discovered America

capital by piketty

Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (nb I am in no position to judge the outlandishishness or otherwise of Bernal's claims, but it's certainly true that a lot of his writing has been contested by other classicists).

Early 20th century arch/anth/history crossover does tend to look like this - I mean it's not a terrible description of The Golden Bough. But for that real idiosyncrasy, agree on The White Goddess.

Nutball nationalist world history (Eden was in Surrey, Pilate was from Glamorgan) might also get close eg The British Edda, by Laurence Waddell or the entire British Israel tradition or the works of Comyns Beaumont (maybe a bit closer to Grahame Hancock or Von Daniken or w/e, who aren't quite a fit, because I don't think you're looking for hacks)

I think there's a lot of stuff that looks like this in the Enlightenment and earlier – Vico, Kircher, Newton as chronologer – but I'd argue they mostly seem idiosyncratic just because the structures of evidence are different, eg the Bible is broadly factual because textual criticism hasn't really really kicked in yet.

Colin Wilson looks a hack, but his books have this sincere, convinced, I-have-a-theory-and-have-done-the-research quality that could fit.

There must be some emergence of consciousness stuff like this around at the moment.

Darwin among the Machines by George Dyson felt a little like this, as did Timothy Taylor's Buried Soul. But they're both too modest and hedged - no LISTEN! THIS EXPLAINS EVERYTHING! impetus behind them.

lol darragh

Golden bough otm!?

haven't read it yet but gary tomlinson's a million years of music: the emergence of human modernity may fit the bill

cyrus reed "koresh" teed's theory of the concave earth (correct imo, but many scoff)

https://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9781235991769-us-300.jpg

http://www.missteribabylonestar.com/wpimages/wpff6575c8_06.png

Lol mark that looks a bit like that book I gave you :)

this stuff is my jam as you know

RD Laing: The Divided Self

Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being by Paul Feyerabend

maybe everything by Feyerabend? that's the only one I've read

Didn't the Nazis believe in some form of concave earth? Where man is living on the interior surface of a world surrounded by rock. Not sure where I read that cos it was about 35 years ago.
Might be in The Morning Of The Magicians by Louis Pauwels et al which would probably fit here too.

Didn't the Nazis believe in some form of concave earth? Where man is living on the interior surface of a world surrounded by rock. Not sure where I read that cos it was about 35 years ago.
Might be in The Morning Of The Magicians by Louis Pauwels et al which would probably fit here too.

Yes, it's in there. Fifth ice age and all that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sIRjxQIYOj4

a true believer here

On Meades Jerry Building he talks about a top German Nazi-era scientist (who later ended up working for NASA) who complained that his research on radar was being curtailed because Himmler wanted to prove the world was concave or something.

is this relevant? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4457530/Mini-Ice-Age-wiped-cvilisation-13-000-years-ago.html

I really like that Julien Jaynes book fwiw

maybe some of the "matriarchy" theories fit here? Daly, etc.

Medieval Atlases?

Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson maybe fits the bill.

everything otm

two others

Wilhelm Reich -- Cosmic Superimposition: Man's Orgonotic Roots in Nature (1951)

Colin Wilson -- The Outsider (1956)

McKenna def counts - esp Food of the Gods

"The Cosmic Serpent: DNA & the Origins of Knowledge" by Jeremy Narby

https://blavatskytheosophy.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/secret-doctrine-blavatsky-theosophy.jpg

Blavatsky's "The Secret Doctrine" (1888) is an essential work in this field

Crowley etc

But feel anything occult is low-hanging fruit perhaps

I was thinking of the Urantia book earlier. Really need to take a closer look at the copy I've had sitting on my stereo for the last few years.

Crowley was more Jungian in approach imo. his books are like poems or collages rather than literal histories or prophecies. they are meant to be read esoterically. outlandish, perhaps, but not very speculative.

Alfred Korzybski

Immanuel Velikovsky might be cool, though i have only run into him as the subject of scathing critique in Carl Sagan's "Broca's Brain". from what i remember he argued that over the course of history the Earth has come into close contact with Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, and Mars, that these are documented in religious text around the world, and that the orbits of those planets were once very different from what they are now.

Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici

Margaret Murray - The God of the Witches

I guess Charles Fort doesn't really belong here -- he was more interested in exposing the closed-mindedness of the scientific establishment than in developing an overarching theory about the universe (and I think his followers took his research more seriously than he did)

The Malleus Maleficarum (Latin for “The Hammer of Witches”, or “Hexenhammer” in German) is one of the most famous medieval treatises on witches. It was written in 1486 by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, and was first published in Germany in 1487. Its main purpose was to challenge all arguments against the existence of witchcraft and to instruct magistrates on how to identify, interrogate and convict witches.

Some modern scholars believe that Jacob Sprenger contributed little if anything to the work besides his name, but the evidence to support this is weak. Both men were members of the Dominican Order and Inquisitors for the Catholic Church. They submitted the Malleus Maleficarum to the University of Cologne’s Faculty of Theology on May 9, 1487, seeking its endorsement.

While general consensus is that The Catholic Church banned the book in 1490 by placing it on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (“List of Prohibited Books”), the first Index was, in fact, produced in 1559 under the direction of Pope Paul IV.

http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org/

This book is really crazy. I have only started reading. It was a more or-less official guide to witch hunts, and covers all topics, bringing up questions and arguments and deconstructing them through a convoluted theological legalease. The first thing they do is prove (by setting up arguments and debunking them) that anyone who doesn't believe in witches is in fact a heretic. They even admit that the Bible in several parts forbids this very thing, and there is a lot of irony in this, the Inquisitors themselves enforcing a heretical reading of Christianity. The worldview was that witches were real, that people sacrificed people to Satan/demons in exchange for magic, and there was a worldwide - globalist if you will - plot to destroy civilization. It is a disturbing look at society in the height of Patriarchal oppression, the co-operation of church and state to torture and kill women and girls, blame or kill rape victims, murder the homeless and mentally ill, and violently enforce traditional gender roles. The key demons involved in the domestic witch are Succubi and Incubi, which are mostly known for forcing themselves on sleeping women in the night. All witches - conspirators in Satan - were seen as fully cooperating with him, whether aware of it or not, whether given consent or not. They wonder if a demon can really generate a human child, and go into the concept of the humunculus, which was a sort the first lab-grown human. One theory was that ejaculate could be transported and placed inside of the womb of another person or even an animal. Again, this is still the era of Galenic medicine, based on "gazing at piss". Most of the "night visit" infants were deemed "monsters" and given the undignified end befitting an era of mass infanticide perhaps alongside the mother. The common account of the Devil's Mass fits in with a husband's drunken jealous fever dreams of his wife getting up in the night, adorning herself with oil, and leaving the bedside to go sleep with someone he doesn't know. Or to go to an orgy in the woods! I imagine that happened quite a bit back then, with no clubs, what else are you going to do for kicks in the 15th century.

Margaret Murray - The God of the Witches

This sounds cool, from reading the wikipedia entry. Though she seems to be saying there actually was a witch cult. What is it like? She is apparently really well up on Egyptology. I might have to get this book, it sounds cool.

How could scripture ban believing in witches? Saul consults a witch to talk to Samuel!

wow. lots of great stuff mentioned. Alfred Korzybski is a great call.

I really like that Julien Jaynes book fwiw

i think it's borderline profound! the freud i mentioned is certainly profound as well, but maybe not for what freud takes to be its central argument.

Have a look at the Book of Marvels and Travels by John Mandeville, first published in 1499. Also notable as the inventor of double finger guns, according to his Wikipedia page.

There's a book that traces Mandeville's supposed travels and points out that descriptions correlate. I read it a few years back.
Concludes that Mandeville which has been viewed as a hoax for centuries might be largely true. Think it also points out that Marco Polo may just be fabricated based on what somebody who'd never travelled heard from people who did.

Ibn Battuta is interesting too though largely true. A 14th century Arab describing his vast travels which I think there are records of and were several times as far as either of the Europeans.

Mandeville book is The Riddle and the Knight by Giles Milton.

That is apparently there is original valid material in there. Plus some distorted stuff fabulated from existing travel writing.
It's been 5 years since I read it but I think he speculates on other things being incorporated by scribes after the fact.

Years and years since I read Margaret Murray's The Witch-Cult in Western Europe: mainly what I remember is an extensive analysis of the trial of Joan of Arc, aiming to prove that she -- and her sponsor Gilles de Rais (or Retz) were indeed witches, not in the broomstick sense but in the sense that they were deeply involved in a secret cult which got up to all sorts. (Vaguely remember a passage explaining that the Devil they encountered was one of them dressed up, and sporting a giant cold phallus.)

Gilles de Rais (or Retz) turned out v bad egg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_de_Rais#Child_killer

the Devil they encountered was one of them dressed up, and sporting a giant cold phallus

I hate when that happens.

How could scripture ban believing in witches? Saul consults a witch to talk to Samuel!

I'm not saying it does, but the writers of the book put forth counter arguments like Leviticus saying "Do not turn to mediums or necromancers" and the warnings against divination and sorcery in Deuteronomy. The Inquisition recognized God as the ultimate authority, and thus finds itself arguing that ultimately He is letting all of this happen, the demons can only use their powers through his grace. Yet somehow what the witch is doing is going against God. Even though He is ultimately cool with whatever the demon and witch are doing together, causing it to rain or, flying to a Black Sabbath on a mist emitting from their mouths, or whatever. It is a very confusing and insane argument but filled in with dozens of micro-stories, a newspaper police blotter of the 15th century. The church employed many scribes and was able to send out essentially reporters to gather information on folk stories from all over the continent, as well as accounts from local and regional trials. The local authorities, town courts, sheriffs, medieval version of police, etc. were already killing people for being sorcerers for centuries before this, so a lot of the "Malleus Maleficarum" is sort of finding a standard of processes and case studies that can be adopted by towns and villages all over Europe.

mainly what I remember is an extensive analysis of the trial of Joan of Arc, aiming to prove that she -- and her sponsor Gilles de Rais (or Retz) were indeed witches, not in the broomstick sense but in the sense that they were deeply involved in a secret cult which got up to all sorts

This would be interesting. What is the cult, what is the canonical text or root religion? Canonical demonology and occult traces back to the Kabbalah and the more mystical/cryptogram wings of the Hebrew traditions. There really doesn't appear to be anything about killing people for Satan, or indeed pledging yourself to him, even in the grimoires purporting to have the secret knowledge of Solomon or post-Fall Adam. Is this a thing in her cult, sacrificing people?

Gilles de Rais sounds like a nutcase, no matter what century there are sick people. There is also the misleading nature of information gathered through Enhanced Interrogation. People accused of sorcery were often blamed for the crimes of others, and their confessions extracted in painful, inhuman ways. Sorcerers were known to hide talismans under the skin, or have "dangerous" tattoos that would need to be removed during inspection. The Inquisitor also had the option to subject the accused to Trial By Red Hot Iron, where they were to hold a red hot iron in both hands while walking the amount of paces appropriate to their crime. Before the witch hunts began to be supported by the Catholic Church they would simply throw the guilty to wild animals, a practice that was replaced with burning at the stake because it was mostly women they were killing (this is an observation by the church of common legal practices of the day). There was an official no-sex-with-the-accused policy among the Inquisitors, so the public could rest assured that no abuse occured.

A Razor for a Goat by Eliot Rose is an entertaining anti-Murray screed written in the 50s... he is maybe a little too fired up about it, but he is good with the acerbic wit.

like i say, all i can really remember is the huge cold phalloi, it's probably 35 years

My fave in this genre is Georges Bataille's "The Accursed Share"

first thing that came to mind was an old "thinking allowed" vhs tape i have seen in the late 90s with this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake . "Sheldrake's morphic resonance hypothesis posits that "memory is inherent in nature" and that "natural systems, such as termite colonies, or pigeons, or orchid plants, or insulin molecules, inherit a collective memory from all previous things of their kind"" . was skeptic of it all while searching for interesting nuggets but i remember writing his name down to check out later... years after google was invented i did and it turns out the scientific community is not very impressed with his concept.

Has anyone read The History of Britain Revealed (UK title) or The Secret History of the English Language (US title) by M.J. Harper?

The author asserts that English has been spoken in the British Isles for thousands of years, long before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, whose language has little to do with English. It's a book bound to infuriate real linguists, whom the author shows obnoxious disrespect to at every turn. When he expands the scope of his argument to talk about Latin and then non-language topics such as evolution you will want to destroy the book by fire, but the arguments in the early chapters have an entertaining ring of possible validity to them.

would the book 1491 fit in here? some of it is definitely speculative/based on circumstantial evidence.

― HONOR THE FYRE (sleeve), Thursday, May 4, 2017 6:53 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I haven't read this one, just 1493 but the author doesn't strike me as a crackpot. He does float a few environmental theories (not his own) that I hadn't heard before--for instance that the rapid depletion of the Native American population led to a decrease in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (because no one was burning brush in the forests) which contributed to the Tiny Ice Age.

1491 is speculative in places, but never outlandishly so and I would not apply "specious" to it as an apt descriptor. The author, Mann, is always careful to note where he deviates from generally accepted theory into more controversial and disputed territory.

Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science maybe?

History of Shit by Dominique Laport probably applies: "It uses an idiosyncratic method of historical genealogy derived from, among others, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Georges Bataille, and Michel Foucault, to show how the development of sanitation techniques in Western Europe affected the formation of modern notions of individuality. Laporte examines this influence through the historical processes of urbanization, the apotheosis of nationalism, practices of capitalist exchange, and linguistic reform."

^love that book so much. it was recommended to me on ILX last year. it's a really short book w a ton of ideas.

Halfway through it and I think The Phenomenology of Spirit fits pretty well.

One of those books which is comforting to know I'll never have to read.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - allegedly "the best-selling philosophy book of all time", its philosophy - later more explicitly laid out in the sequel Lila: An Inquiry into Morals - is almost entirely ignored by the philosophical establishment (zero references in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). I'm not particularly interested in its grand thesis but the smaller scale parables on subjective vs objective and romantic vs scientific viewpoints were very thought provoking to my younger self and as a memoir it's quite fascinating, and has one of the most breathtakingly perspective-shifting moments I've ever encountered in a book.

i love this kind of thing. lots of continental philosophy fits imo, d&g and i think derrida.

this one is fun for ridiculous made-up words

Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History

https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/styles/large_book_cover/http/mitp-content-server.mit.edu%3A18180/books/covers/cover/%3Fcollid%3Dbooks_covers_0%26isbn%3D9781913029562%26type%3D.jpg?itok=rvVvA9OG

would The Art of Memory fit here? i think quite probably

that looks .. very interesting.

this thread is fantastic, glad it's been revived as i missed it the first time around.

I just had to order The Art of Memory! Looks great.

Don't want to start any arguments but very tempted to add "The Dawn of Everything" to this genre.

totally

started reading another classic in this genre: Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents"

Rene Girard's stuff is right in the wheelhouse as well.

Girard a great case too in that it's all very self-consciously a kind of "this is the key to everything" esotericism.

adding some more:

Eric Voegelin's "Order and History" series
Karl Jasper's "Origin and Goal of History" (where the Axial Age thesis comes up)
Richard O. Prum's "The Evolution of Beauty" is largely straight-laced but if you're inclined you can extrapolate to some wild stuff.

and, not an example itself so much as *about* this kind of thought: Erik Davis' "High Weirdness"

(not a great read overall as he seems about halfway committed to academic theorizing while also wanting to protect his object of study from it...)

excited to look through this whole thread and check some of these out. it reminds me that i need to get to "bicameral mind" sooner rather than later. this kind of thing, when it's filled in with incredibly erudite detail and analysis, along with brilliant style, is totally my jam.

maybe too obvious to post but carl jung and william reich are in this category, right?

i probably draw the line at people who were cultists irl, like carlos castanada. jung kind of borderline afaict.

the line as far as what i'm excited to read vs not excited to read.

"bicameral mind" is legitimately one of my favorite books.

jung and reich are the bullseye, yes.

pretty much anything jacques vallee

not to get too technical with the boundaries of the genre but i think what i'm trying to get at comes down to a distinction between "revealed" knowledge (a la mysticism or religious thought) vs a so-called empiricism. to be properly in this genre you can't resort to "god told me so" or appeals to any kind of innate intuition-ism or subjective experience...you have to at least attempt to lay out "evidence" according to some (very) loose standard of modern empirical thought.

however, what makes this stuff interesting is precisely how it can trouble that distinction.

a lot of mid-century "systems" oriented thinking (Gregory Bateson, for instance) is on the edge of this.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is specious from front to back. Or back to front. It's specious thinking all the way down. As for 'outlandish', it's about as outlandish as a bowl of soured milk.

One could mention Atlas Shrugged as ticking two of the three boxes; it's speculative and outlandish, but it is only 'interesting' as a window into how stupid the people are who accept it as gospel.

I read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" a very long time ago. I remember that lots of philosophizing took place but I can remember very little of the substance of it. As I recall, there was an effort to raise the status of manual labor/craftsmanship as an existential activity.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is specious from front to back. Or back to front. It's specious thinking all the way down. As for 'outlandish', it's about as outlandish as a bowl of soured milk.

I'm not entirely sure why it should be singled out for this treatment over many other more famous works on metaphysics. And soured milk could be considered outlandish if served for breakfast.

I don't think Jim Carter actually ever wrote a book, but Margaret Wertheim wrote a book about him and his ideas that might be relevant here...

!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fringe_science

Wertheim's book looks cool, thank you!

regarding Jaynes, Merlin Donald's really interesting books are definitely influenced by JJ, and Donald in turn plays an interesting role in Robert Bellah's "Religion in Human Evolution."

In another thread, I called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance the worst serious book I ever finished reading. For me the giveaway is, among all his high-flown philosophizing, Pirsig judges his son as severely mentally ill because he repeatedly complains about having an upset stomach, and bullies him throughout the journey nonetheless.

Burroughs never wrote an entire book that fits this thread title, but all of his earlier novels take detours into quasi-documentary pseudo-science, sometimes in the fiction and sometimes as authorial commentary.

xp

Yeah, this thread has inspired me to take it off the shelf and add to the "read next" pile....

Can’t believe I haven’t mentioned “Crowds and Power” yet!! One of the absolute best in this mode.

David Hockney - Secret Knowledge

If I had the time I'd read way more of this kind of stuff as I like the sense of possibilities and that feeling of being on the edge of something monumental - however specious.

One book that comes to mind is What is Architecture? by Paul Shepheard, which is one of my favourite books. It's short and elliptical but his thesis is broadly 'everything built by man' and includes chapters on Kitty Hawk, the secret spaces of St Paul's and the Uffington White Horse, so it seems much longer in my imagination. I might re-read it right now.

I haven't read any of the books, but I do enjoy some of the Jesus mythicist stuff on Youtube, especially the debate between Bart Ehrman and Robert Price. This is the view that Jesus never existed and is a totally mythical figure. The arguments are kind of interesting, but it's more fun for the odd fixations and bitter resentment among mythicists about how they aren't taken seriously by the scholarly establishment.

the mythicists are easily more than half right. afaics a largish subset of the scholarly establishment would seriously agree with the thesis that the figure of Jesus accumulated a lot of mythic accretions. I guess the mythicists just want to 'win' what amounts to a futile argument and the scholarly people won't play by those rules.

pretty much anything jacques vallee

Yes, but please avoid the new one (Trinity) co-written with Paola Harris. Unsure why he even signed onto it.

and, not an example itself so much as *about* this kind of thought: Erik Davis' "High Weirdness"

(not a great read overall as he seems about halfway committed to academic theorizing while also wanting to protect his object of study from it...)

Davis initially wrote High Weirdness as his PhD dissertation and it kinda shows? I haven't read it since, but do highly recommend The Visionary State and his 33 1/3 book on Zeppelin IV.

yeah i don't know what the deal is with that trinity book, kind of embarrassed for him frankly xp

some pop science books on loop quantum gravity might qualify. carlo rovelli's the order of time is the one I read.

i don't think robert burton's the anatomy of melancholy would quite fit the precis since i don't think it was ever intended to be a singular theory or something to be taken seriously.

Wait, Crowds and Power??

you disagree that it belongs in this thread?

certainly on the serious and rather profound and maybe not all that specious end of the spectrum for this stuff…but it’s exactly the kind of imaginative analysis that I’m interested in.

I guess some of D.H. Lawrence's philosophical books would qualify. I read his Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious many years ago and remember it as being interesting though highly speculative.

For example:

"We do not pretend to use technical language. But surely our meaning is plain even to correct scientists, when we assert that in all mammals the center of primal, constructive consciousness and activity lies in the middle front of the abdomen, beneath the navel, in the great nerve center called the solar plexus. How do we know? We feel it, as we feel hunger or love or hate. Once we know what we are, science can proceed to analyze our knowledge, demonstrate its truth or its untruth."