readings, one book at its own scale — a prehistory
that argues the spirits came first, a mythic phylogeny its own author
calls provisional, and the correction the blog owes the book it has
already been quotingSixth of the readings, and the first to read a book
the corpus is already using. The deep inheritance took Michael
Witzel’s deep-mythology split through Gordon White and flagged its dates
as model-dependent reconstructions; a
cosmos of persons drew on White’s later Ani.Mystic for the personhood of a
living cosmos. Both did the right thing: they held White as a
source about the material, never as the frame. This reading has
to do that and one thing more — take the book whole, at its own scale,
and say what it argues when nobody is quoting it for a thesis. Which
turns out to matter, because the book’s own claim is not the one the
corpus took from it. What follows is the thesis in the book’s words, the
four kinds of claim it is built from, the correction the blog owes, and
the register in which its author writes: a practitioner for whom the
spirits are not metaphor — held at that distance, and not
adopted.
Status. This post reads one source. The quotations are verbatim from the digital text, checked character for character against the file and cited in the notes by chapter and section, because that file is a single collapsed run of text and carries no page markers at all. The file’s typographic quotes and dashes are rendered here as straight ASCII quotes and em dashes, and the stray spaces its italics markup leaves before punctuation are closed. The reading of the quotations is an inference, offered as one. The book’s cosmology is not endorsed — nothing here claims that spirits are real, and nothing claims they are not; §5 and §6 are about why both of those verdicts are refused. No living author is diagnosed, the ownership question in §7 is described as a structure and not adjudicated, and nothing here validates, disqualifies or restricts anyone’s practice. As everywhere: describe structures, diagnose no one.
Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits is by Gordon White, and its front matter states its publishing position in one sentence:
“Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits was published by Scarlet Imprint in 2016 under the Bibliothèque Rouge banner.”1
That banner line is in the file, as is the digital edition’s own identifier — “eISBN 978-0-9931200-8-4” — and the colophon’s account of the physical editions: the standard hardback and paperback “printed and bound by Gomer Press”, the fine edition “bound by Ludlow Bookbinders”.1 The extract does not carry a printed-edition ISBN, and this post therefore does not quote one.
Its structure is a Prologue, ten chapters and a Conclusion, and the contents listing is itself an argument: One Funeral at a Time; The Cathedral Predates the City; Et in Laurasia Ego; Island of Dragons; Star Lore; How a World Ends; Expulsion from Eden; The Mirror of Heaven; The Tree of Many Branches; Children of the Mother of Heaven, ending at Canopy of Stars.1 The listing opens with a Preface, for which the file contains no text — it runs straight from the contents to the Prologue, and that absence is reported rather than filled.
Two things about the shape of the book matter before anything else. The first is that the chapter titles are the thesis in miniature: a temple before a city, a global mythology before the civilisations that inherited it, a Flood before the Book that remembers it, Egypt and Sumeria as late variants of something older. The second is that this is a practitioner’s book about a prehistory, not a prehistory with a practitioner’s appendix: the argument is addressed throughout to “A specialist readership such as this one”, and the last line of the Conclusion is an invitation to a rite.23
And the reason the blog owes it a reading rather than a quotation is exactly that the blog has quoted it. The deep inheritance is built on the Witzel layer of this book — the Gondwanan/Laurasian split, the 65,000 and 40,000 year figures, the warning that the split’s homeland “requires the use of data points that Dr Witzel studiously avoids”. Every one of those is here, and §4 and §5 read them as this book presents them, which is not how the corpus has them.
The clearest self-statement of the book’s argument is not in the Prologue but buried at the head of a section in chapter III called Digging in the Wrong Place:
“This book tells the story of at least one advanced culture that existed prior to the end of the Ice Age, and the survival of some of its cultural practices and spirits down into the practice of western magic in the twenty first century, albeit in dramatically different outerwear.”4
It names the book’s unit and its claim, and neither is a frame: the unit is spirits and practices, the claim is survival, and the destination is the western magical tradition. The author knows what that makes the book:
“So it is an ‘alternate history’ book, which puts it in, shall we say, mixed company?”4
The priority claim arrives as the opening sentence of chapter II, as bluntly as it can be put:
“Before we knew how to farm, before we lived in villages, before we even knew how to make pots, we built a star temple on a hill.”5
That is the title’s claim doing its work, and it is restated in the register of agency rather than architecture, the thing built and the thing that civilised:
“It may well have been the coming together for spiritual reasons that birthed settled cultures, rather than the other way around.”5
“We may literally state that mankind had civilising gods (for better or for worse!).”5
Chapter IV restates it as a claim about the gods themselves — the book’s nearest thing to its own title in a single sentence:
“It is quite clear that the gods of both Egypt and Sumeria are present at Göbekli Tepe, albeit in atavistic form.”6
And the Conclusion describes the gods of the historical period as late editions of something older: “these are much, much younger variants of older spirits and storylines that, by definition, cannot literally be true, just as the reboot of a film is not the original film.”7 Chapter V puts a date on the same claim in the first person, of a set of Australian asterism traditions: “Quite a number of these asterisms represent, to my mind, Gondwana-era spirits that have survived into the modern day, making them tens of thousands of years older than western esotericists commonly assume.”8
So the priority claim is not inferred here from a title. It is made at the level of temples, of gods, of spirits, and of the technique that reaches them; and its scope is stated once, in chapter I, in a sentence worth having before anything in this section is weighed:
“Indeed, the overall quest of this book is to fulfil the Sepik Revelation. To show that stories and non-physical technology do indeed move between cultures and down through time. Perhaps a lot of time. To accomplish this while giving the widest possible berth to the skeletons hidden in diffusionism’s closet requires more data and less interpretation. Hard data.”9
The book’s own term for what it is chasing is “non-physical technology”, which is not a modern person’s way of describing magic but a practitioner’s way of describing technique that transfers — and the sentence says what discipline the transfer-claim is submitted to.
This is the section the corpus most needs, because the corpus has quoted this book for one kind of claim and the book makes four.
The first kind is archaeological, and it is the book’s floor. Göbekli Tepe, its layers and its dating; Rapa Nui’s statuary; Nabta Playa’s alignments; the Saqqara complex and the Pyramid Texts; a 70,000-year-old ritual site in Botswana with offerings to a giant python, which the book notes as “something of a smoking gun for the Gondwana hypothesis”.10 These are checkable, and the book treats them as the ground the rest stands on. It is candid about the field it is borrowing from, too, quoting Göbekli Tepe’s excavator on “Holy Land Syndrome” — “the propensity for archaeologists to head out into the field with a spade in one hand and a Bible in the other”.11
The second is genetic and linguistic — the peopling of the earth, the Austronesian expansions, the Nusantao network, the distribution of languages and haplogroups — and the book uses it as a check on itself, in the sentence most useful to this blog:
“One of the great gifts of the Laurasian model is that it provides a countercheck of linguistic, genetic and archaeological evidence to some of the bolder claims of alternate history.”4
The third is mythological-comparative, and it is Witzel’s: the reconstruction of myth families by the same comparative logic that reconstructs a lost language from its descendants. §4 takes it up.
The fourth is the author’s own inference, and the book is unusually explicit about the seam. Its most important instance stands in the chapter III section called The Spirit Interpretation, where the simultaneous appearance of art and spiritual concepts around 40,000 years ago is given a possible trigger in psilocybin mushrooms:
“Given that we are talking about fungi and cultures with perishable artefacts at a time depth of 40,000 years, it is not clear what archaeological evidence we would ever expect to prove or disprove this hypothesis, although there are numerous depictions of mushrooms or humans with mushroom hands, etc. in later cave art, and indeed at Göbekli Tepe.”2
Two paragraphs earlier the book says where the materialist account runs out:
“A specialist readership such as this one requires an additional interpretation, if not explanation.”2
“interpretation, if not explanation” is the most honest four words in the book, and they are why this reading does not treat Star.Ships as one undifferentiated thesis. The book marks the seam between what the evidence shows and what the author takes it to mean, and it marks it more than once — including in a line a hostile reader would enjoy and the book writes itself: “Just how far one wishes to follow this line of reasoning is entirely personal.”12
The book also applies a test to claims, including some of its own, and the test has a name that occurs six times in the text: the obligation of proof. It is applied to the standard academic position — that simultaneous inventions in separate regions were independent, which the book answers from Oppenheimer with “Theoretically, both points of view have an obligation of proof.”6 It is applied to alternative history, at the head of the anti-noise list the book prints precisely “so you can see how wheat is separated from chaff”4 — Noah’s Ark, Plato’s Atlantis, the Garden of Eden’s location, the Nephilim, Moses, and out-of-place artefacts. And it is applied, hard, against the book’s own side of that argument:
“Suggestions that the Old Kingdom had access to machine tools, electric lighting, microwave energy or any of the other examples of high technology you are likely to see on cable television, as with any other claim in this book, have an obligation of proof. And there is none.”13
Note what that concedes: the book puts a pile of its own neighbours’ claims on the floor for lack of proof. A blog that has spent five posts on unfalsifiable slots and on checks that cannot benefit from the answer has here a source using the same instrument in its own words — and using the word:
“It is really more of a thought experiment than an actual theory owing to its complete unfalsifiability, but it is instructive nonetheless.”12
That is the book’s verdict on Julian Jaynes’s theory that the whole human race heard voices until 1250 BCE — a theory it nonetheless mines for a scale, asking whether “we” are at 6% spirit contact where Jaynes’s ancestors were at 100%.12 Unfalsifiable and instructive, in the same sentence. The test in this book is real, and it is applied unevenly — a finding about the book, not a verdict on it. §7 returns to it.
Now to the material the deep inheritance took, read here as the book presents it. Witzel’s book arrives in chapter III with an adjective that matters:
“The results are hugely significant and, crucially, provisional.”14
“New data are guaranteed to appear that will move his proposed timelines, or suggest earlier connections between cultural groups, or place mankind in a specific part of the world at a previously-unknown date.”14
The scheme chapter III sets out has three parts, not two, and the third is the one the corpus does not carry. The method, in the book’s words:
“Witzel categorises the planet’s mythologies into two macro-groups; examples of both still exist today; and one underlying group — mankind’s earliest mythology — which is reconstructed from an examination of the overlaps between the two existent groups in much the same way as ancient languages are reconstructed.”10
The three, as the book prints them:
“GONDWANA MYTHOLOGY: 65,000 years old. This is the cosmology our ancestors took with them when they left Africa.”10
“LAURASIAN MYTHOLOGY: 40,000 years old. Sometime around this date, somewhere in Asia or Eurasia, mankind developed what Witzel calls ‘our first novel.’”10
“PAN-GAEAN MYTHOLOGY: Between 150,000 and 65,000 years old. This is Witzel’s reconstruction of mankind’s first mythology, emerging some time in Africa after the appearance of modern humans.”10
The book is explicit that the third has no data of its own: “Obviously there are no extant examples of these beliefs or languages. However the methodology is sound and the insights are useful in the potential repositioning of western[…].”10 So the deep-time claim can be said exactly. It is a phylogeny — a family tree inferred from surviving motifs, exactly as linguistics infers an unattested proto-language — and it comes in three grades of attestation: two families with living descendants, and a root reconstructed from their overlap. The whole thing rests on comparative inference from surviving material, not on anything dug up. The author says which parts are inference: Pan-Gaea is “Witzel’s tentative reconstruction”; the Laurasian homeland is unknown: “Pinpointing the best case for precisely where in Asia requires the use of data points that Dr Witzel studiously avoids”.1015
One more thing about the dates, because the corpus got this right and the book deserves the credit: White does not present them as excavated. He presents them as a clock read off a tree, and says plainly that the readings will move. Where the book does lean on an excavated date it says so in the same register — the Botswana python site is “the oldest archaeological evidence of ritual ever found on earth”, dated 70,000 years, and it is brought in as support for a reconstruction, not as the reconstruction’s basis.10
And here is where the corpus’s summary and the book part company, and it is not a quibble. The corpus’s §4 read the chronology as a sequence — “the telos was added later. The forest of stories comes first; the novel — beginning, middle, end — comes after, in Eurasia, and then spreads.” The book forbids exactly that reading, in the section on Gondwana mythology:
“What is important to remember is that Witzel’s categorisation is not an evolutionary one. Gondwana stories are older than Laurasian ones but they still continue to this day in worldviews found in Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and parts of Papua New Guinea, among other places. Cultures do not graduate from one collection of stories to another like cabin classes on an airplane.”16
An older layer in a tree is not an earlier stage of anything, and the book says so in the plainest image it has. It then gives its own defining difference between the families, which is not telos or no telos at all; §5 takes that up as the correction.
Four parts, and the first is the one that changes an argument.
First, the corpus turned a model into a finding, and a three-part scheme into two. The deep inheritance states the finding as a phylogeny and then, in its §2, sorts the world’s mythologies “into two deep families with a shared root”. That is a fair summary of the two living families — but the book names the root as a third category with its own name, its own date range (150,000–65,000 years) and its own status, which is reconstruction with no extant examples. The blog has been carrying the tree while walking past the branch the author labels tentative. This is an extension in the literal sense: the missing category is the one that would have made the corpus’s own caution — these are reconstructions — more visible rather than less.
Second, and this is the correction with content: “the telos was added later” is the reading the book forbids. The deep inheritance wrote one sequence sentence here — the forest first, the novel after — and wrote that the “telos was added later”. Its structural claim does not rest on that chronology (that post says so itself: “this post does not lean on the chronology… Its claim is about the structure”), but the sequence-sentence is the reading the book forbids. The book’s sentence about the categorisation not being evolutionary is aimed at precisely that construction, and its own account of what distinguishes the families is a difference in magical emphasis:
“From a magical perspective, the defining difference between Laurasia and Gondwana is that the former has a strong emphasis on the power of the word as opposed to the latter’s stress on physical objects such as fetishes.”16
Not a stage of development, and not an endpoint. A blog whose own rule is that frames are inherited, not invented should find that comfortable rather than inconvenient: an inherited layer is not a phase anybody graduates out of, which is what the corpus has been saying about frames all along, and the book says it about stories in one image about aeroplane cabin classes.
Third, the book’s position on the Younger Dryas is not the one the corpus attributed to it. The deep inheritance says the book “mounts an argument about the Younger Dryas and the flood stories”, and cites the rebuttal it “lists in his own bibliography”. The book reports the hypothesis as the frontrunner — “Currently, the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, out of Harvard, is the frontrunning explanation for the snap cooling that preceded the end of the last Ice Age.”17 — and then reports the evidence against single-event causation and drops the single-event explanation in the same section, which is the opposite of mounting an argument for it:
“More recently, however, David Meltzer of Southern Methodist University has re-examined the data from 29 American sites used to support the Impact Hypothesis and the date ranges stretch a lot further on either side of the supposed meteor event […]. Once again, the facts remain and the interpretation needs revising.”17
The Southern Methodist University entry the corpus quotes is in this book’s bibliography because the book uses its finding, not as an opponent’s rebuttal listed as a concession. And the corpus’s quotation of that entry is truncated mid-sentence without an ellipsis — the title continues past “cold snap at the end of the Ice Age” to “Clovis changes or mass animal extinction.”18 Two small things; both are the failure mode this series exists to catch, and both are corrected above. What the book does argue is the mythic side: that flood stories are non-randomly distributed, densest where the most land was lost at the end of the Ice Age and thinnest where the least was, a claim about distribution rather than about a comet.19
Fourth, the corpus flattened a contested argument into a convergence, and the flattening was not necessary. The deep inheritance framed Witzel-through-White as the series’ “fourth convergence”, and to reach that it used the two-family split as the unit. The book’s own use of the split is weaker and better: it is “our best interpretive framework for exploring these correlations”, and the same chapter carries a seven-item list of the model’s shortcomings — an underemphasis on star lore, a refusal to use evidence outside the academic canon, a dismissal of flood myths as “incidental”, the absence of any spirit model — after which the author writes:
“For all of these shortcomings I forgive him entirely. Firstly, because the theory is delivered with rigour and humility.”20
A blog that is honest about how it uses a source can use that list, and a blog that says “the fourth convergence” cannot. So the correction, stated once and plainly:
The blog took a model its author calls “provisional”, and a scheme of three categories used as an interpretive framework, and carried it as a convergence between two families. The book’s own claim is narrower and stranger: that some of its practices and spirits survived from a pre-Ice-Age culture into the western magical tradition, that the myth families are a tool for seeing that, that the families are not stages, and that the tool has seven named shortcomings.
None of that makes the corpus’s argument wrong. It makes its attribution wrong, which is correction enough, and it moves the blog’s use of this book from lever to source — which is the whole purpose of this series.
Star.Ships is written by a practitioner, and the practitioner is not concealed. The register is audible from the Prologue, where history and practice share one sentence and one discipline:
“In the early years of the twenty first century, the empowered, informed shaman is presented with the opportunity to rescue these fading stories from the spirit world and restore them to the tribe. As with all journeys to the spirit world, dangers abound for the unprepared. Discretion, parsimony and evidence-based reasoning, now that they exist in the wider culture, belong here as much as they do in the hard sciences. These are the fetishes we must carry to extract truthful stories from the spirits.”21
The spirits are parties to the inquiry; the evidence discipline is a fetish carried into their territory. That is a practitioner’s sentence about method, and no one else writes it. The register returns at the book’s scale in chapter III — Witzel’s results “also say something profound about the origins of magic and the spirits”14 — and it is fully on the page in the Conclusion, where the phenomena are described in the first person of someone who works with them:
“We appear to be dealing with — and have been dealing with for a very long time — a range of phenomena with at least one subset interested in ‘teaching’ us or otherwise transmitting knowledge in an oblique fashion. This knowledge appears designed to impress us with its slight superiority and ‘inspire’ us in specific directions.”12
“Any magician worth her salt has experienced the phenomenon of receiving more information than required from the spirit world. It is interesting, yes. But ultimately pointless.”22
And it is on the page with an altar in it. The being the book is discussing is described as “the being we have come to know as Astaroth, currently enshrined on my humble little altar in west London”, on the argument that it “was once summoned by the banks of a long-dead, roaring glacial river to bring victory in battle over neighbouring Ice Age tribes” — and the sentence that follows is three words of tone: “Approach with newfound caution and humility.”7
The seam between the registers is one of the book’s most interesting features, because it is not blurred. The book asks its questions as questions — “How would you describe a hologram to a Neanderthal shaman?”12 — and offers its own answer as a claim with a shape, not as a datum: “Nuit is how you explain a hologram to a Neanderthal.”23 When it puts something forward on the strength of experience it says so: “I put it to you that someone either saw or was shown that coastline.”22 When it is speculating, it says that too. And when it wants the reader to do something, the instruction is the book’s last line:
“Go, burn a little incense, out under the Stars. Welcome to the neighbourhood.”3
The boundary this post holds is the analogue of the other readings’ rule. Nothing here claims that the spirits are real, and nothing here claims they are metaphor, error or projection — the second verdict is as metaphysical as the first, and a reading that issued either would be adopting a cosmology by the back door. What can be said exactly is what the text does: it moves between two claim-types and marks the move, and the mark is not decorative. Its archaeological and genetic claims are offered to readers who can check them; its comparative-mythological claims are offered as a model with named shortcomings; its interpretive and practical claims are offered as the author’s, in a register that says this is the trade I am in. That is a structure, and it can be described without deciding whether any of it is true.
It also produces the sharpest tension in the book, and it should be named rather than smoothed. A practitioner’s claim — I have received more than I asked for from the spirit world — is not checkable by the instrument the same book uses on everyone else. The book knows what unfalsifiability is, calls it out against Jaynes, and then builds its model of contact on exactly that class of report.
First: the book’s own central witness states the limit of the evidence. Göbekli Tepe is the keystone of chapter II, and chapter II handles it the way a good archaeologist would rather than the way a thesis would. The site’s excavator is quoted not for what the site proves but for what it cannot:
“Dr Schmidt will be the first to tell you that the earliest evidence of usage is not evidence of first usage.”5
“We face an immovable temporal barrier beyond which it is largely impossible to see with the spectacles of archaeology. Fortunately, there are other spectacles in the dedicated folklorist’s toolkit which we shall come to in subsequent chapters.”5
That second sentence is the book’s whole method in two clauses, and it is also its most honest admission: the archaeology stops, and other instruments take over. Every claim after that sentence is made with instruments whose resolution is lower, and the book says so at the moment it changes tools. The matching caution, later, is against building worlds out of fragments: “you are a farmer who discovers a Roman coin in a field in Somerset and declares that the empire began right here by your apple trees.”6
Second: the dating is a reconstruction, and the corpus’s caution is right. This is the crux, so it is stated once more plainly: the families are inferred from surviving motifs, the root has no surviving examples, the timelines are “guaranteed” to move, and the author of the underlying study is described as avoiding the very data points that would locate the origin. A method that reconstructs a tree from surviving motifs can be right about the relationships and wrong about the clock, and the two errors are independent. The deep inheritance already said this, and §5 only adds that the book says it too, and says it more precisely.
Third: the book argues against consensus in its own direction on at least one site, so it cannot be borrowed for authority. Chapter V’s Rapa Nui material is a sustained case against the collapse narrative, drawing on geological work by Robert Schoch and on Benny Peiser’s 2005 observation “that ‘there is no compelling archaeological evidence for any of the key claims of societal dissolution and breakdown before the 18th century.’”8 A book that is itself a revisionist at site level is not a stable authority for a blog’s structural claim. What is stable is the shape of the evidence the book distinguishes — which is what §3 and §4 used.
Fourth: the book issues its own warrant, and prints the objection first. The Conclusion has a section called Who Owns These Stories?, and it is the same structural question undreaming wetiko found in an afterword, in a different configuration — here the objection is raised by the author against himself, in the register of the accusation:
“How outrageous of me to get so far into a book of this nature without checking my privilege. To speak of New Guineans without having brown skin, to speak of biology without having a diploma and just simply to speak about more than one thing.”3
His answer is not a defence of appropriation in general — “comparison is not the same thing as universalism”3 — but a claim about what a magician does:
“Magicians are not simply opportunistic comparativists, magicians are thieves.”3
“If one is not retelling them, they belong to the world. If one is retelling them, they belong to the culture in which one finds them. But your microscope and your telescope always belong to you.”3
This post does not adjudicate any of that, for the same reason the Wetiko reading did not adjudicate Grossinger’s: the question is about a practice and about people, and a reading that resolved it would be issuing a verdict from outside on evidence it does not have. What can be reported is the structure, which is genuinely different from the last instance the blog examined: there the warrant arrived from a sympathetic outsider, printed inside a book that also printed the doubt; here it is issued by the author in the first person, against his own objection, inside a book whose licence to compare is its subject matter. Whether that is sufficient is not this post’s question. That it is shaped differently from the certified frame’s closed warrant is a finding, and a reading that called the two the same would be flattening evidence to fit a pattern.
And one more, which belongs in the body because the blog’s own instrument has a handle here. The owned cosmos and the cosmos that refuses both end at the same requirement — a check that does not benefit from the answer. This book is an evidence chain with one interpreter at the end of it: the archaeology, genetics and comparative inference arrive through the same author who then tells the reader what they mean for western magic, and there is no second party whose reading of the same material would count. That is not a fault of the book; it is what a single-authored synthesis is. It is, however, why the blog can use this book and cannot rest on it.
The series reports the presence or absence of a safeguard, a metered pace and a clinical referral as search results, scoped to the file. This book’s results are unambiguous, and each is a different kind of absence.
“Safeguard” occurs exactly once, and it is not a safeguard of the reader. It is in a chapter VII inventory, the section “Summing Up”, of what a stellar kingship promised: “Kingship descending from the stars and the ritual requirement of the king to return to them to secure his own immortality and safeguard the life of the tribe/city.”24 The word belongs to the cosmology being described, not to the reader being addressed.
There is no metered pace, because there is no practice to meter. The book is a prehistory and not a manual. The corpus’s meter question — how fast, how often, under whose eye — has no answer here because it has no question: there are 0 hits for “meditat”, 0 for “mentor”, 0 for “ethic”, and the single occurrence of “unprepared” is the Prologue’s “dangers abound for the unprepared”, which is a warning about journeys to the spirit world in general and not a schedule.24 There is exactly one caution addressed to a practitioner, and it is a matter of tone rather than of pace: of the five occurrences of “caution”, the practice-facing one is the chapter X instruction quoted at §6 — “Approach with newfound caution and humility.”7 It names no pace, no dose, no supervisor and no stopping rule. What the book substitutes is the thing quoted in §6: discretion, parsimony and evidence-based reasoning, carried as fetishes by the investigator. That is an epistemic discipline, and it is the nearest analogue this book has to the safeguards the series has been tracking — which is worth saying precisely, because it is a different instrument aimed at a different actor. It disciplines the researcher, not the practitioner.
There is no clinical referral at all. A case-insensitive search of the file returns 0 hits for “therapy”, “therapist”, “psychiatry”, “psychiatric”, “hospital”, “psychosis”, “psychotic”, “mental health”, “crisis”, “hotline”, “seek help”, “professional help” and “self-harm”. Three more terms do occur, and none is a referral: “counsel” once (“legal counsel from a Muslim jurist”), “suicid” three times (a “suicidal” labour detail, a “career suicide” figure of speech, Cleopatra “committing suicide”), and “emergency” once (“emergency services rely entirely on modern communication”). The other near-misses are elsewhere too: “doctor” appears once, of a cited researcher; “physician” once, as a fellowship title (“Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh”); “breakdown” once, about societies (“no compelling archaeological evidence for any of the key claims of societal dissolution and breakdown before the 18th century”); and “clinical” three times: once on published clinical research, once on the clinical study of psychoactive substances as evidence, and once about “actual clinical conditions”.24
Read as a structure rather than a gap, that is a different result from the last two readings. Undreaming Wetiko named psychiatry as an adversary; this book names it not at all. It cites clinical studies when they are useful and refers no reader to a clinician, and it does not have to, because it is not instructing anyone to do anything. A book that issues no practice has no duty to fence one, and that is the honest reading of the absence: not silence about medicine, and not a deliberate withholding, but a subject matter that never arrives at the question. A search shows only what it indexes, so the claim is scoped to this text.
A reading holds one source whole and asks what a blog that has quoted sources for years now has to change. What this one changes is smaller than a mechanism and larger than a citation.
The correction is an attribution correction, and it has three parts. The blog carried a three-category reconstruction as two families; it carried a model its author labels provisional as a finding, calling it a convergence; it read a chronology as a sequence — the telos was added later — in the one book that forbids that reading in a sentence about aeroplane cabin classes; and it attributed to this book an argument for a comet the book reports the evidence against. None of those touch the corpus’s structural claim that frames are inherited rather than chosen. All of them touch what the blog may say this book says.
The extension is that the book’s own test is the blog’s test. Star.Ships runs an obligation of proof across six instances and faults a rival theory for its unfalsifiability, applies both to claims on its own side of the argument, and — where it cannot apply them — says so in the plainest clause it has: “interpretation, if not explanation”. The corpus has spent five readings looking for exactly this in its sources and has repeatedly found it absent. Here it is present, in a book about spirits, on the same pages as the spirits. That is the strongest thing in this reading.
And the gap is the one the corpus keeps finding. A single-authored synthesis has one interpreter at the end of its evidence chain, and this book’s practitioner dimension — its claim that some spirits are old, that some have survived, that the technique reaches them — is offered where no instrument in the book can check it, including the book’s own. The corpus’s requirement, at every scale, is a check that does not benefit from the answer. This book supplies an instrument and not a second party. The blog can quote it with the boundaries §3 to §7 have drawn, and cannot cite it as corroboration — which is the guardrail the corpus already had, now with a reason attached from inside the book.
Which leaves the reading’s own bottom line, and it is the one this book hands over in its final section, about a book that compares the world’s stories and knows what it is doing: your microscope and your telescope always belong to you. The corpus has been saying a version of that about frames at every scale. It now has it from a practitioner who arrived at it about comparison, and drew the one conclusion this blog draws: look with your own instrument, and say whose it is.
Marking: a reading. Documented — every passage in quotation marks, taken from the digital text of Gordon White’s Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits (Scarlet Imprint, 2016, Bibliothèque Rouge banner; the extract carries the eISBN 978-0-9931200-8-4 and no printed-edition ISBN), checked character for character against that file and cited in the notes by chapter and section, because the file carries no page numbers. Absences reported as search results: no clinical referral at all, no metered pace, a single practitioner-facing caution that names no pace or supervision (“Approach with newfound caution and humility.”), and a single occurrence of “safeguard” in a sense belonging to the cosmology described (itemised at 24); the contents listing carries a Preface for which the file has no text (noted at 1). Inferred, as this post’s: §3’s sorting of the book’s claims into four kinds and its finding that the same book that faults Jaynes’s theory for its “complete unfalsifiability” also states an unfalsifiable hypothesis of its own; §4’s reading of the three-part scheme as three grades of attestation; §5’s three-part correction, resting on the book’s own sentence that the categorisation is “not an evolutionary one” and on its own account of the Younger Dryas evidence; §6’s finding that the book marks the seam between its evidence claims and its interpretive ones, including the phrase “interpretation, if not explanation”; §7’s four counterweights, of which the last two — the book’s own revisionism at site level, and its first-person warrant in “Who Owns These Stories?” — are recorded as structures and not judged; and the closing claim that the corpus may use this book and may not rest on it. The cosmology is not endorsed — nothing here claims the spirits are real and nothing claims they are not, and §6 is about why both verdicts are refused; the book’s practitioner claims are reported, not adopted. No living author is diagnosed, the ownership question is not adjudicated, and nothing here validates, disqualifies or restricts anyone’s practice.
Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits, Scarlet Imprint, 2016, published under the Bibliothèque Rouge banner. Front matter (banner line, “eISBN 978-0-9931200-8-4”, the CPI Antony Rowe digital-edition credit and the contents listing: a Preface, Prologue “The Mission at the End of the World”, chapters I–X, and the Conclusion “Canopy of Stars”); the illustrations list; the Colophon (“published in the United Kingdom by Scarlet Imprint, Bucknell, SY 7 0 AH. Copyright © Gordon White, 2016.”; the standard hardback and paperback editions “printed and bound by Gomer Press”, the fine edition “bound by Ludlow Bookbinders”). Read directly from the digital text (740,754 characters, no page markers and no line breaks — a single collapsed run of text); every quotation in this post was checked character for character against that file, with its typographic quotes rendered as straight ASCII quotes, its dashes as em dashes, its whitespace normalised, and the stray spaces its italics markup leaves before punctuation closed; elisions marked […] are this post’s. The file carries no page numbers, so quotations are cited by chapter and section title, as they appear in the book’s own headings. The contents listing carries a Preface for which the file contains no text; that absence is reported at §1 and nothing is inferred from it. The extract does not carry the printed-edition ISBN, and this post quotes none.↩︎
Star.Ships, chapter III, section “The Spirit Interpretation”: “This could almost belong as another shortcoming in the thesis were it not a near universal and entirely expected blind spot found across the modern academic spectrum.”; “A specialist readership such as this one requires an additional interpretation, if not explanation.” (§1 quotes that sentence with a bracketed capital — “[A] specialist readership…” — as the file prints it.); “Given that we are talking about fungi and cultures with perishable artefacts at a time depth of 40,000 years, it is not clear what archaeological evidence we would ever expect to prove or disprove this hypothesis, although there are numerous depictions of mushrooms or humans with mushroom hands, etc. in later cave art, and indeed at Göbekli Tepe.”; “it may be that we are seeing here the evidence for an encounter with a new class of spirits or consciousness effects, triggered by the colonists’ encounters with the psilocybin molecule, resulting in similar spiritual and artistic responses within different cultures.”; “While Laurasia may be the ‘containing narrative’ for Western magic, many of its spirits are at least Gondwanan and potentially Pan-Gaean.”; “You can even make the case — and I do — that ‘true’ Western magic, devoid of its much, much later onboarding of Neoplatonism, is a practical application of a Pan-Gaean world-view”; and “The witch is a very old woman and she has been on a long, long walk.”↩︎
Star.Ships, Conclusion, section “Who Owns These Stories?”: “How outrageous of me to get so far into a book of this nature without checking my privilege. To speak of New Guineans without having brown skin, to speak of biology without having a diploma and just simply to speak about more than one thing. Surely the world has seen enough universalisms issuing from London to last the rest of the Kali Yuga? Well, comparison is not the same thing as universalism.”; “Magicians are not simply opportunistic comparativists, magicians are thieves.”; “If one is not retelling them, they belong to the world. If one is retelling them, they belong to the culture in which one finds them. But your microscope and your telescope always belong to you.”; and the book’s last line, “Go, burn a little incense, out under the Stars. Welcome to the neighbourhood.” Reported at §7 as a structure and not adjudicated in either direction; no finding is made about the author.↩︎
Star.Ships, chapter III, section “Digging in the Wrong Place”: “This book tells the story of at least one advanced culture that existed prior to the end of the Ice Age, and the survival of some of its cultural practices and spirits down into the practice of western magic in the twenty first century, albeit in dramatically different outerwear. So it is an ‘alternate history’ book, which puts it in, shall we say, mixed company?”; “One of the great gifts of the Laurasian model is that it provides a countercheck of linguistic, genetic and archaeological evidence to some of the bolder claims of alternate history.”; “It is worth highlighting some of these claims so you can see how wheat is separated from chaff.”; and the numbered “alternate history” list of which §3 cites item 1, “Noah is a recent example of a much older flood myth, inherited by Near Eastern cultures.”; item 4, “The Nephilim and the Book of Enoch”; and item 7, “OOPARTs. Out Of Place Artefacts”.↩︎
Star.Ships, chapter II, “The Cathedral Predates the City” (the chapter opening and the section “Locating Göbekli Tepe in Time and Space”): “Before we knew how to farm, before we lived in villages, before we even knew how to make pots, we built a star temple on a hill.”; “It may well have been the coming together for spiritual reasons that birthed settled cultures, rather than the other way around.”; “We may literally state that mankind had civilising gods (for better or for worse!).”; “Göbekli Tepe is at least twelve thousand years old. That is seven thousand years older than the Giza complex. The Great Pyramid is closer in time to us than it is to the creation of Göbekli Tepe.”; “Dr Schmidt will be the first to tell you that the earliest evidence of usage is not evidence of first usage.”; and “We face an immovable temporal barrier beyond which it is largely impossible to see with the spectacles of archaeology. Fortunately, there are other spectacles in the dedicated folklorist’s toolkit which we shall come to in subsequent chapters.”↩︎
Star.Ships, chapter IV, “Island of Dragons” (chapter opening): “The further back in time we travel, the fewer the archaeological data points and the greater the desire to connect what little of them remain into parent-child relationships. It is quite clear that the gods of both Egypt and Sumeria are present at Göbekli Tepe, albeit in atavistic form. However, it does not necessarily follow that those tribes who buried the last enclosure immediately wandered south and founded two of the three great civilisations of antiquity.”; “Mistaking resonance for direct connection has trapped many a magician in the garden maze of Choronzon’s summer palace.”; “The Laurasian model described in the previous chapter is our best interpretive framework for exploring these correlations.”; “When dealing specifically with physical evidence, it is essential to recognise just how rare these data points are and to realise that they hint at a much larger world of which we only have a fragment, then seek to build out a new, evidence-based world from this knowledge. Otherwise, you are a farmer who discovers a Roman coin in a field in Somerset and declares that the empire began right here by your apple trees.”; and the passage quoted at §3, in which Oppenheimer’s Eden in the East is quoted: “When breakthroughs like cereal farming, pottery and bronze making occur at the same time in widely separate regions, the usual explanation is that these discoveries were independent. This may seem a weak argument but for academics it is much safer to say this, rather than risk ridicule by having to prove how the inventions were transmitted over great distances. Theoretically, both points of view have an obligation of proof.”↩︎
Star.Ships, chapter X, “Children of the Mother of Heaven”, section “Little Green Men”: “The hypothesis that mankind’s civilising gods or spirits were, too use a cheekily disparaging term, ‘little green men,’ relies on taking literally a personally preferred ancient mythology, typically the Sumerian one. However, as we have seen, these are much, much younger variants of older spirits and storylines that, by definition, cannot literally be true, just as the reboot of a film is not the original film.”; and “such an argument — like anything else — has the ever present obligation of proof.” The passage’s “too use” is printed thus in the digital text. From the same chapter’s later section, “An Incomplete List of Children”: “the being we have come to know as Astaroth, currently enshrined on my humble little altar in west London”; and, closing the sentence, “Approach with newfound caution and humility.” Cited at §6 and §8 as the book’s one practitioner-facing caution; no finding is made here about the author’s practice.↩︎
Star.Ships, chapter V, “Star Lore”, section “Gondwana Star Lore”: “Quite a number of these asterisms represent, to my mind, Gondwana-era spirits that have survived into the modern day, making them tens of thousands of years older than western esotericists commonly assume.”; and, from the sections on Rapa Nui, “For a stone object to be repurposed it is, by definition, older than the structures it is incorporated into.” and the Peiser quotation, “there is no compelling archaeological evidence for any of the key claims of societal dissolution and breakdown before the 18th century.” §7 cites this as the book’s own revisionism at site level.↩︎
Star.Ships, chapter I, “One Funeral at a Time”, section “Stories Written in Blood and Stone”: “Indeed, the overall quest of this book is to fulfil the Sepik Revelation. To show that stories and non-physical technology do indeed move between cultures and down through time. Perhaps a lot of time. To accomplish this while giving the widest possible berth to the skeletons hidden in diffusionism’s closet requires more data and less interpretation. Hard data.” Quoted at §2 as the book’s own statement of scope.↩︎
Star.Ships, chapter III, section “Gondwana, Laurasia and Pan-Gaea”, and the sections “Gondwana Mythology”, “Laurasian Mythology” and “Pan-Gaean Mythology”: “Witzel categorises the planet’s mythologies into two macro-groups; examples of both still exist today; and one underlying group — mankind’s earliest mythology — which is reconstructed from an examination of the overlaps between the two existent groups in much the same way as ancient languages are reconstructed.”; “GONDWANA MYTHOLOGY: 65,000 years old. This is the cosmology our ancestors took with them when they left Africa.”; “Gondwana mythologies display little interest in the creation or destruction of the universe; indeed, probably the defining characteristic of a Gondwana mythology is that the creation/destruction story is absent and the universe has always existed and will always exist.”; “LAURASIAN MYTHOLOGY: 40,000 years old. Sometime around this date, somewhere in Asia or Eurasia, mankind developed what Witzel calls ‘our first novel.’”; “PAN-GAEAN MYTHOLOGY: Between 150,000 and 65,000 years old. This is Witzel’s reconstruction of mankind’s first mythology, emerging some time in Africa after the appearance of modern humans.”; “a distant High God who may or may not have created the world but is uninvolved with it, a Trickster who teaches/creates mankind, a spirit world viewed as a well of souls”; “This is a noble and ambitious exercise in examining non-random distribution.”; “Witzel’s tentative reconstruction of what mankind’s first cosmology may have been. Obviously there are no extant examples of these beliefs or languages. However the methodology is sound and the insights are useful in the potential repositioning of western[…].”; and, in the Gondwana Mythology section, “Complex religion must have existed and been brought to Australia by 50,000 BCE at the very latest.”; “The independent creation of Australian and African motifs can be excluded on the basis of the huge overlap between the two groups.”; “the oldest archaeological evidence of ritual ever found on earth was discovered in Botswana by University of Oslo researchers. Offerings of arrow tips and similar objects, dedicated to a giant python whose body movements shaped the land have been found at a time depth of 70,000 years ago. This strikes me as something of a smoking gun for the Gondwana hypothesis.” The section headings’ colons carry a space before them in the digital text (a markup artifact); they are closed here.↩︎
Star.Ships, chapter I, “One Funeral at a Time”. On method in the discipline: “Discoverer of Göbekli Tepe and its chief excavator, Dr Klaus Schmidt, famously warned against what he called ‘Holy Land Syndrome’”; “the propensity for archaeologists to head out into the field with a spade in one hand and a Bible in the other”; “Holy Land Syndrome precludes the finding of something you didn’t already expect to find.”; and, on the discipline’s own history, “These are dangerous roads, then. Dangerous as the people who travel them professionally.” Cited at §3 and §8 as the book’s account of the field, not as a finding about any archaeologist.↩︎
Star.Ships, Conclusion, “Canopy of Stars” (opening): “How would you describe a hologram to a Neanderthal shaman?”; “I believe Dr Witzel is probably correct in his findings that the Trickster sits at the very bottom of our global tree of gods.”; “Dr Witzel’s research suggests it is the Trickster, at a time depth of more than 70,000 years, who is our first culture hero and civilising god, and that providing us with answers may have violated some sort of cosmic taboo.”; “We appear to be dealing with — and have been dealing with for a very long time — a range of phenomena with at least one subset interested in ‘teaching’ us or otherwise transmitting knowledge in an oblique fashion. This knowledge appears designed to impress us with its slight superiority and ‘inspire’ us in specific directions.”; “Perhaps we have fallen away from this state of awareness? Perhaps ‘they’ have fallen away from us? Just how far one wishes to follow this line of reasoning is entirely personal.”; and, on Jaynes, “It is really more of a thought experiment than an actual theory owing to its complete unfalsifiability, but it is instructive nonetheless.” and “if we consider Jaynes’s theory to be ‘100% spirit contact’ and the contemporary western world to be around ‘6% spirit contact,’ there is simply no way to know quite how literally these consciousness effects were experienced, or where the people of the Palaeolithic fell on the ‘spirit scale.’”↩︎
Star.Ships, chapter VIII, “The Mirror of Heaven”, section “Giza” (subsection “High Technology”): “Suggestions that the Old Kingdom had access to machine tools, electric lighting, microwave energy or any of the other examples of high technology you are likely to see on cable television, as with any other claim in this book, have an obligation of proof. And there is none.” Also, from chapter VII, the “Summing Up” list including “Kingship descending from the stars and the ritual requirement of the king to return to them to secure his own immortality and safeguard the life of the tribe/city”, cited at §8.↩︎
Star.Ships, chapter III, “Et in Laurasia Ego” (chapter opening and the section “The Return of the Hollywood Epic”): “The last 140 years of the Western occult revival owe a great deal to the academic field of mythology and the antiquarian field of folklore.”; “The results are hugely significant and, crucially, provisional.”; “New data are guaranteed to appear that will move his proposed timelines, or suggest earlier connections between cultural groups, or place mankind in a specific part of the world at a previously-unknown date.”; and “They also say something profound about the origins of magic and the spirits.” The word “provisional” is set off as an italicised word in the digital text, which is why the file prints a space before its full stop; that space is closed here.↩︎
Star.Ships, chapter III, section “Laurasian Mythology”: “The implication of mythic similarity points to a common pool of motifs that must have existed at a sufficient time depth to appear across such disparate corners of the world. Given that both Amerindian and Eurasian mythologies share the same Laurasian shape, this puts its appearance somewhere between 40,000 BCE and 20,000 BCE, ‘somewhere in Asia.’ Pinpointing the best case for precisely where in Asia requires the use of data points that Dr Witzel studiously avoids, which we will come to in later chapters.”; and, from the same section’s discussion of the Golden Age mytheme, “If Dr Witzel’s timelines are even slightly accurate, then Laurasian cultures had a story of a worldwide flood, typically interpreted as divine punishment for man’s hubris, for tens of thousands of years before experiencing a worldwide flood at the end of the last Ice Age.” Quoted at §4 to show that the book marks its own conditional.↩︎
Star.Ships, chapter III, section “Gondwana Mythology”: “What is important to remember is that Witzel’s categorisation is not an evolutionary one. Gondwana stories are older than Laurasian ones but they still continue to this day in worldviews found in Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and parts of Papua New Guinea, among other places. Cultures do not graduate from one collection of stories to another like cabin classes on an airplane.”; “From a magical perspective, the defining difference between Laurasia and Gondwana is that the former has a strong emphasis on the power of the word as opposed to the latter’s stress on physical objects such as fetishes.” “All of human existence” follows in the same passage. This is the passage §5’s second correction rests on.↩︎
Star.Ships, chapter VI, section “Fire in the Sky”: “Currently, the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, out of Harvard, is the frontrunning explanation for the snap cooling that preceded the end of the last Ice Age.”; “More recently, however, David Meltzer of Southern Methodist University has re-examined the data from 29 American sites used to support the Impact Hypothesis and the date ranges stretch a lot further on either side of the supposed meteor event. This makes it unlikely that the abrupt climate change was caused by a single event — always the preferred explanation of the academic. Once again, the facts remain and the interpretation needs revising.”; and “It is possible that the absence of definitive evidence is itself a form of evidence.” Cited at §5 against the deep inheritance’s account of this book’s position; this post makes no finding about the impact hypothesis itself.↩︎
Star.Ships, Bibliography, the entry “SMU
Research”: “Comet theory false; doesn’t explain cold snap at the end of
the Ice Age, Clovis changes or mass animal extinction.” with the URL
http://blog.smu.edu/research/2014/05/12/dating-of-supposed-extraterrestrial-impact-indicators-unreliable-fails-to-prove-comet-sparked-climate-change-at-the-end-of-the-ice-age-or-killed-clovis-people/,
“Last accessed Sep 5, 2015.” The entry is quoted at §5 in full because
the deep inheritance quotes it
truncated to “cold snap at the end of the Ice Age” without an
ellipsis.↩︎
Star.Ships, chapter VI, “How a World Ends”, section “The Flood”: “More than any other tableau, the Flood requires the most rigorous distributional analysis.”; “the presence of non-randomly distributed flood stories — and who or what managed to survive them — offers us the opportunity for some careful calibration.”; “It is the continent that suffered the least amount of land loss at the end of the Ice Age and has probably the lowest number of indigenous flood myths relative to the number of local cultures.”; “It seems very likely that many of the beliefs found here are Palaeolithic survivals.”; and “You are bound to be disappointed if you take this as your map and go looking for first century Christians in North Wales, but this is what seekers after Noah’s Ark are doing.”↩︎
Star.Ships, chapter III, section “Shortcomings in the Thesis”: “Being the first to say something is very often more trouble than it is worth. To Dr Witzel’s credit, he admits his thesis will certainly be subject to modification and elaboration as more information comes to light. For the purposes of our research there are some notable shortcomings.”; the seven numbered items, of which §5 cites “An underemphasis on star lore and navigation which are found in abundance in the Gondwana mythologies of Australia.” and “Staying firmly within the canon of what are acceptable data in mainstream academia.”; and “For all of these shortcomings I forgive him entirely. Firstly, because the theory is delivered with rigour and humility. Secondly, the broad strokes appear not only correct but hugely, hugely useful to the further investigations of the origins of western magic.”↩︎
Star.Ships, Prologue, “The Mission at the End of the World”: “Stories that fall outside this network first become untrue, and then they fade completely from reality.”; “In the early years of the twenty first century, the empowered, informed shaman is presented with the opportunity to rescue these fading stories from the spirit world and restore them to the tribe.”; “As with all journeys to the spirit world, dangers abound for the unprepared.”; “Discretion, parsimony and evidence-based reasoning, now that they exist in the wider culture, belong here as much as they do in the hard sciences. These are the fetishes we must carry to extract truthful stories from the spirits.”; and, in the section “Further River Spirits”, “This book was not written on the banks of the Sepik, though she does feature in its tale.”, “the story is always the same because river spirits are always the same”, “Civilisation is the tobacco of river spirits.”, and “We are always in danger of drawing our own eye, for we depict our own vision of the world when we think we are depicting the world; often when we think we are studying an other we are really studying ourselves through the narrative of the other.”↩︎
Star.Ships, Conclusion, section “Complexity of Received Information”: “Any magician worth her salt has experienced the phenomenon of receiving more information than required from the spirit world. It is interesting, yes. But ultimately pointless.”; and “You don’t think the best ancient navigators were clairvoyant? I put it to you that someone either saw or was shown that coastline.”↩︎
Star.Ships, Conclusion, section “The Nuit Formula”: “When you speak of her you are speaking of the entire range of cosmic and spirit phenomena. Nuit is how you explain a hologram to a Neanderthal.” Quoted at §6 as the book’s own answer to its own question, offered as a formula rather than a datum.↩︎
Reported as a search result, and scoped to this file. Case-insensitive counts of the digital text: “safeguard” 1 (the chapter VII, section “Summing Up”, sentence quoted at §8); “unprepared” 1 (the Prologue sentence quoted at §6); “doctor” 1 (“the good doctor brings up an excellent point”); “physician” 1 (“Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh”); “breakdown” 1 (Peiser’s “societal dissolution and breakdown before the 18th century”); “clinical” 3 (clinical research credibility; clinical studies of DMT and psilocybin; and “often actual clinical conditions”; the second and third are in chapter X’s model of consciousness effects, the first is chapter I); “medic” 9 (including “overmedication” in chapter I’s list of modern ills), all in the senses of a medieval school of medicine, the New England Journal of Medicine, medicinal knowledge, an ‘overmedication’ list and a programme title; “caution” 5, of which one faces a practitioner — the chapter X “Approach with newfound caution and humility.” — and the rest concern interpreting archaeological or textual evidence; and 0 for “therapy”, “therapist”, “psychiatry”, “psychiatric”, “hospital”, “psychosis”, “psychotic”, “mental health”, “crisis”, “hotline”, “seek help”, “professional help”, “self-harm”, “meditat”, “mentor” and “ethic” (the three terms that do occur — “counsel” 1, “suicid” 3, “emergency” 1 — are itemised above). “Mad” as a word returns 0; “madness” returns 2, one of them “most Atlantologists into madness and ridicule”. A search shows only what it indexes, so the claim is scoped to this text.↩︎