Book Review:

Peter Kingsley: In the Dark Places of Wisdom, Point Reyes, Calif., 1999/sixth printing
2017.
ISBN: 9781890350017

Christopher Hartney
Studies in Religion
University of Sydney

What is to be done when the scholarly author of a book is also a believer and writes
in a style that seeks to convert the reader in two different senses of that word?
Firstly, to convert the academic reader to the argument expressed, and secondly to
convert the reader more generally to the belief system expressed in the book – in
this case a wider mystical approach to life. Whilst doing this, Kingsley also suggests
that the current point-of-view of the scholar may be nothing more than a dogmatic
and faith-tinged position anyway – so how should we read all this? These questions
should be at the forefront of any reader’s response to In the Dark Places of Wisdom.

Kingsley is a lauded academic and also a self-admitted mystic and this book is
framed as a journey into a new take on reality. It has a fable-like beginning that
slowly takes us closer and closer to a complete understanding of Parmenides and
his epic poem (handed down to us only in a series of fragments) On Nature. The
opening lines of Kingsley’s assessment declares that his book will step outside of the
scholarly pursuit in order to undermine the long-manufactured certainties of
academic discourse on this fascinating primary text.

[This book is] not what it seems, just as the things around us are not what
they seem. If you read on you’ll see it’s all about deception – about the total
deception of the world we live in and about what lies behind (p.3).

Thus when one compares Kingsley’s journey with the long explanation of the age-
old scholarly debate on the monism and metaphysics of Parmenides in an overview
text such as can be found in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, we see that
Kingsley’s main response to this is to begin to invalidate the whole tradition. He
does so based on the claim that this tradition moves Parmenides out of his essential
religious and healing context. In which case, should In the Dark Places… be read as
the text of a mystical insider, or as an arch-critic to the entire canon of Western
philosophy? As an academic, I shifted my understanding of the text to that of an
“insider’s discourse” and kept reading with a sense of sceptical bemusement at the
simple but engaging stylistics of the work until the book started shifting again to a
far more scholarly and “outsider” perspective as it linked Parmenides’ text with
recent archaeological evidence discovered around the ancient Southern Italian
settlement of Velia.

As the chapters pass, Kingsley slowly demonstrates how we can link Velia as a site
of healing to Apollo in an Anatolian and Pythagorean tradition that parallels the
incubatory dream-healing centres of Asclepius. In the book it became increasingly
enjoyable to watch as the narration switched between a voice seeking to carefully
(and academically) critique prevailing scholarly views on the Pythagorean tradition
in the Classical age, whilst seeking simultaneously to convince the reader that
something has gone wrong with our world and the way to heal it was through these
katabastic dream-and-heal journeys. Kingsley unites evidence from recently
discovered statues, inscriptions and vase evidence to bring Parmenides’ fragments
to life as a powerful religious (rather than philosophical) tradition. In this author’s
mouth Parmenides ceases to become merely a pre-Socratic thinker and transforms
into the underworld-descending prophet and healer who established Velia’s
prominence as a centre of health and mystical investigation.

Thus Kingsley stresses, against a range of more philosophically strict thinkers who
take the poem as a metaphor, that the journey to the otherworld was a journey the
poet/seer literally did take - and did so for the pursuit of wisdom in its broadest
sense. He sought a wisdom that could heal, and a practice that could incubate and
inspire. Kingsley discusses the title of “pholarchos” which is attached to the lineage
of healers in Velia - a word that can be literally rendered as “lord of the lair” – or
cave – and identifies a technician trained to watch over a particular entranceway to
the realms of Persephone. But this journey does not simply seek to fill in a gap in
modern scholarship, rather in several evocative passages Kingsley tries to remind
us that these gaps were caused by wilful intent and have resulted in our world
being equally riddled with existential lacunae:

…when Plato and his followers took over these ideas from the Pythagoreans
they cleverly amputated the ambiguities: focused only on the true and the
good and the beautiful, and cut out the need for the descent. We no longer
even notice what happened…. Then there were the early Christians who
talked about the ‘depths’ of the divine. Most of them were soon silenced.
And there were Jewish mystics who spoke of ‘descending’ to the divine;
they were silenced too. It’s far simpler to keep the divine somewhere up
above, at a safe distance. The trouble is that when the divine is removed
from the depths we lose our depth, start viewing the depths with fear and
end up struggling, running from ourselves, trying to lift ourselves up by our
bootstraps into the beyond…. It’s impossible to reach the light at the cost of
rejecting darkness. The darkness haunts us; we’re chased by our own
depths…. (p.69-70).

In a passage like this we see the author’s attempts at academic investigation bleed
back into a strong mystical positioning that suggests that thought and practice
before the rise of the Athenian thinkers gave us a chance at a real and satisfying
understanding of life – but that presently this is lost to us by immersing this
tradition only in relation to Plato. Kingsley laments that when Plato claims the
inheritance of these mystical traditions, they start to die. Ironically, because of
Plato’s particular brand of propaganda, Parmenides himself, the poet and taker of
these otherworldly journeys gets reworked into the Western philosophical tradition
as the father of Western metaphysics and ontology. Throughout the text, Kingsley
denies that this primary thinker in the Western tradition is only and merely a
thinker.

This is fascinating, but there are other ways to do what Kingsley seeks to do here
and with far more academic certainty. Hermann Schmitz in his extensive rewriting
of the basics of Western philosophy (System de Philosophie 1964-1980) sought to
eradicate what he called the Innerweltdogma of Western thought - particularly after
Plato positioned “experience” not as a corporeal and emotional engagement with
the world but as a mental and textual puzzle. Like Kingsley, Schmitz celebrates the
clarity and completeness of the pre-Socratic reaction to life. But unlike Kingsley,
Schmitz does not seek recourse to the mystical in order to achieve this.

My problem is, however, reading Kingsley can be a lot more delightful than
Schmitz and it is one of the reasons I am a reviewing a book in 2018 that first came
out in 1999 (although reprinted many times) – this book provokes not only from a
believer’s viewpoint, but at a scholarly level as well. In the end there are two
significant contestations that Kingsley’s mystical odyssey suggest I keep
considering. The first is the basic positioning of all academic voices. When we read
a scholarly theologian such as Paul Tillich, it is assumed that such a writer speaks
from a position of faith and although his arguments may be tightly logical, the place
he starts from will be strongly influenced by his faith position. So, to what extent
then, is a writer like Tillich subverting his fuller intent as a Christian author by
writing like a scholar rather than as a believer? In comparison, Kingsley writes as a
believer, but he is so dedicated to piecing together a tradition occluded by
prevailing academic assumptions that Parmenides should only be read as a
philosopher (as we understand that tradition in this century). Kinglsey is able to
render a range of mostly-ignored evidence into a solid and well-justified working
explanation of the Pythagorean lineage of healers, prophets, lawgivers, and poets.
In doing this he can then enthusiastically link this tradition to the role that
Parmenides (as healer and not philosopher) and his poem take within this tradition
(and for the scholar there is an extensive list of footnotes hidden at the back of his
book to demonstrate his academic position).

The second thing to reconsider in light of this book is the faith position that
perhaps a modern scholar may start from. For although a scholar may produce
thoroughly academic work, work that seeks to be tightly logical and reasonable in
its analysis, is it the case that we also start from a position that is taken on faith?
For this final and most compelling point Kingsley seeks to highlight how
Pythagoreans were also political operatives, renowned lawgivers, and wise men
seeking to heal not only individuals but whole societies as rulers and advisors. Thus
Parmenides and his immediate successor Zeno were also agents that stood up to the
expanding Athenian Imperial hegemony that was spreading across the Greek-
speaking world (…for his sins, Zeno was killed while arming independent states
against the encroaching Imperial Athens). So when we take an Innerweltdogma-
based, non-mystical, non-corporeal, and post-Platonic view of Parmenides - do we
start this act of scholarship as an act of fact, imperial propaganda or faith? Are we
operating within an academy that has for too long considered Plato’s legacy as the
natural place to begin. Because of this we only read Parmenides through the inner
world of our long conditioned minds - our Innerweltdogma? And is this dogma not
ultimately rational but drawn from a lineage begun from a corpus of very successful
Athenian (and thus imperial) moves to dominate both the thinking and political
worlds of their time? It is this last point that appeals to the conspiracy theorist
within me. But not for too long… I enjoyed reading In The Dark Places… it
challenged me to reconsider how I approach the Western tradition and how that
tradition might be vastly more “shamanic” and “religious” than I first conceived it.
Nevertheless, Kingsley’s book is also a blatant work of mysticism. It suggests that
scholars get misled by this Athenian imperialist propaganda – even today. But by
doing this the book can too quickly become its own work of competing propaganda
and it is at this point that a very careful sifting of Kingsley’s academic aims, and his
Pythagorean aims need to be distinguished.