- Paperback: 236 pages
- Publisher: Spring Publications,U.S.; New edition edition (21 Mar 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0882145568
- ISBN-13: 978-0882145563
- Product Dimensions: 22.8 x 16.2 x 1.7 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 4,237,620 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
| ||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Synopsis
Michael Ortiz Hill looks closely into one hundred end-of-world dreams and uncovers the myths ruling our fears and hopes. In his foreword to this new edition, Ortiz Hill calls September 11, 2001 "the blade of initiation, dividing who we were from who we are called to be ...I invite the reader to the wilderness, to the beginning of the apocalyptic rite of passage ...I offer this book with a single caveat: Beware the seduction of the image, mine and others, for the myth of apocalypse seeks to enthral us into an epic fiction with very real consequences.."
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A profound analysis of collective psychic apocalypse,
By
This review is from: Dreaming the End of the World: Apocalypse as a Rite of Passage (Paperback)
Echoing James Hillman's open-minded approach to psychology, heavily influenced by Jung but wholly open to Freud, and peppered with personal twists, Hill considers the image of the nuclear bomb, and the mythical patterns that its creators and their society - our society - seem to have found themselves enmeshed in as the actual nuts-and-bolts-and-plutonium bomb arose from the wider, deeper dream of the Bomb.
Hill's thesis is both stark and sophisticated. The central contention is that the Bomb has constellated, brought to a head, the core mythical conflict of Western civilisation. Looking behind and before St. John's Revelations, with its final conflict between Beast and Messiah, to Babylon's "primordial dragon" Tiamat and her death under the blade of the "municipal god" Marduk, Hill finds here a root expression of the conquest of nature, the progressive split between civilisation and wilderness. The Beast - dark, chthonic, ravenous, destructive and polluting - is defeated and held in abeyance by the Messiah - from the sky, illuminating, sharp, wielding technology. Sensing some alchemical telos in our history, a cosmically apt collision of warring principles, Hill sees in the Bomb's image - the detonation, the mushroom cloud and the aftermath - an uncanny fusion of the Messiah and the Beast. The Beast and the Messiah have merged in a "terrible koan" that has begun to unravel the fabric of Western culture. Such a summary does little justice to Hill's thesis, which relies on patiently traversing a tightrope between literalism and runaway fantasies. As with Norman Brown and James Hillman, both enemies of the tendency to literalise and draw simple parallels between psychic and social realities, both scholars careful not to fly away into reality-denial, Hill's arguments are put forward as much in their form as their content. Gracefully dancing around the pitfalls of seeing with a metaphorical eye, he manages to convey a position that is keenly aware of the bomb's reality in the world, and passionate about defusing its proliferation, yet at the same time deeply committed to the ways of the dream - shifting, ambivalent, multiplicitous, imaginal and charged with numinous potential.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews) 15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Deep, insightful, fresh, satisfying,
By Daren Scot Wilson (darenw@pipeline.com) - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Dreaming the End of the World: Apocalypse as a Rite of Passage (Paperback)
Starts by describing the nuclear bombs of WWII, from an experiential viewpoint. There are quotes from physicists I haven't seen elsewhere. They were changed, and they knew the world had changed. After this dramatic introduction, the author describes, with dreams fragments as examples, several stages of apocalypse, tying together the personal-scale experiences and the archetypical end of the world symbolized by the Bomb. This is no trivial book where the author just threw some related ideas together; Michael Ortiz Hill has skillfully related ideas that, to me, seem to be from different worlds. One very minor gripe is the lack of an index, but there is a topical dream image glossary, very fun to browse, and I'm not sure this book would benefit much from a regular index. Like movies, some of which are entertaining but you forget as soon as you walk out of the theater, and others make you think about life for some time afterward, books can be fleeting or lasting. Dreaming the End of the World was one of the most satisfying, enlightening, food-for-thought books I've ever read, and it's good for a second -- or third -- reading.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Eloquent and important,
By Steven Taylor "Gyrus" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Dreaming the End of the World: Apocalypse as a Rite of Passage (Paperback)
This is a quite brilliant book, pulling together dreams of nuclear holocaust using sensitive, shrewd psychological observation. Hill finds patterns, but schematizes them in a way that respects rather than over-interprets the material. If you've not already discovered through personal experience, this book should demonstrate the profound significance of apocalyptic dreams, where boundaries between personal and cultural psychology become more and more fluid. If you've experience this kind of dream already, reading this book is an even more potent demonstration of the liminal nature of dreams. I found the common themes and motifs that Hill draws out of his informants' dreams to reflect with uncanny precision the threads running through my own nuclear / apocalypse dreams. Especially fascinating and important is the segue from the dream of nuclear holocaust to the dream of ecological devastation; again, something that my own dreams testify to. I always suspected I wasn't alone; this book made me sure. Hill's book makes an excellent contribution to the idea that there is some form dream world, more mercurial than this world, but a clear overlapping of our dream landscapes.
|
|
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Health, Family & Lifestyle > Psychology & Psychiatry > Specific Topics > Sleep & Dreams
- Books > Mind, Body & Spirit > Self Help
- Books > Mind, Body & Spirit > Thought & Practice > New Age
- Books > Religion & Spirituality > New Age > Dreams
- Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Psychology Textbooks
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
