Peter Kingsley

Peter Kingsley (born 1953) is a British-born classical scholar and mystical writer, resident in North America since 1995, whose work argues that Western philosophy, logic and science began not with the first rational inquiries into nature but with a lineage of Greek healer-prophets in southern Italy and Sicily — Pythagoras, Parmenides, Zeno, Empedocles — who practised incubation, descended in trance to the underworld, received their teaching from a goddess and brought it back as “words of power” meant to transform their hearers. His first book, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic (1995), made that case in the language of philology and was received by classicists as a major, if contested, contribution. The books that followed — In the Dark Places of Wisdom (1999), Reality (2003), A Story Waiting to Pierce You (2010), Catafalque (2018) and A Book of Life (2021) — make the same case in another voice, that of a man who says he writes not as a scholar but as an heir of the tradition he describes, and who reads the Presocratic fragments as living instruction: an initiatory logic in which “whatever you think exists”, a cosmos held together by “deception”, a practice of stillness by which one “dies before dying”, and a prophetic history in which the sacred origin of the West has been forgotten, its last modern witness was C. G. Jung, and the civilisation that grew from the gift is now ending. Kingsley’s importance for the study of Western esotericism lies in both halves of this work: in the scholarship that traced a continuous esoteric transmission from the Greek West through Hermetic and alchemical Egypt into Sufism, and in the unusual spectacle of a trained historian who came to claim the tradition as his own.¹

Life#

London, Lancaster, and Cambridge (1953–1977)#

Kingsley was born in 1953 in England. No published source gives the day, the month or the town; the middle name “Michael” appears in an older version of the Wikipedia article and nowhere else, and his parents are unnamed in everything he has written. He has said of his childhood only that he asked questions his parents could not answer — “It didn’t correspond to what I was seeing with my own eyes” — and that a neighbour, a mathematics teacher, told him: “I don’t know the answers myself, but I just want you to trust your questions.” He is said to have attended Highgate School in north London until 1971. He took an honours degree at the University of Lancaster in 1975, living, by his own account, in “a little caravan on a cliff overlooking the sea in northern England”, and a Master of Letters at King’s College, Cambridge, in 1977.²

The vocation, as he tells it, came early and came from within. “My work on the Presocratics began when I was still a teenager, although I would prefer to say that this is the time when they started working in earnest on me.” While his friends “were immersing themselves in Buddhism and other Eastern religions”, an “inner voice that deeply impressed me with its constant clarity and logic instructed me to stay focused on the West”. Two experiences from these years recur in his interviews. At about twenty, forced by illness into solitude with the fragments of Empedocles and a journal, he prayed, “Please God, show me what Empedocles really means”, and understood “within seconds” that “Love does not free the soul — and Strife is not evil … Strife is the power that frees the soul from the snares of Love”, the inversion of the received reading that governs the second half of Reality thirty years later. At Cambridge, sitting on the lawn of his college beside King’s Chapel, he experienced what he describes as the sudden presence of “an incredibly glorious divine, feminine being”, the genius loci of the place, and came to understand Parmenides, he says, “through the whole body — and most immediately through the belly”. These are his testimony, not verifiable events; they are recorded here because his later books present themselves as their consequence.³

London and the Warburg Institute: The Scholar (1977–1995)#

Kingsley took his doctorate in Classics at the University of London under Martin Litchfield West, the leading textual scholar of Greek poetry of his generation, whose memoir for the British Academy lists Kingsley among his research students; the college was presumably Bedford College, where West taught from 1974, and the thesis grew into the Oxford book of 1995, whose preface thanks West “for always being there ready to help at every stage in the writing of this book”. Kingsley later recalled that West gave “his wholehearted and unconditional approval” to his emendation of the text of Parmenides in a letter of 27 March 1988. He was a Fellow of the Warburg Institute in London and a Harold Hyam Wingate Scholar; his two articles in the Institute’s Journal, on the name Poimandres (1993) and on Pythagoras and the Turba philosophorum (1994), belong to these years, as do the articles on the dating of Zoroaster (1990), on Ezekiel and Babylon (1992), on Empedocles’ four elements and his sun (1994), on the Magi (1995) and on Empedocles’ two poems (1996) that established him as a philologist of the Presocratics and of the Greek East. In 1993 he published, for the Islamic Texts Society, a translation of Claude Addas’s biography of Ibn ʿArabī, Quest for the Red Sulphur. His acknowledgements from this period name Walter Burkert, Mary Boyce, Geoffrey Lloyd, David Sedley, Charles Burnett, Stephanie Dalley, Michel Chodkiewicz, Stella Corbin, the widow of Henry Corbin, and Sara Sviri, the scholar of early Sufism who had been a disciple of the Naqshbandi teacher Irina Tweedie; the last three names mark the Islamic and Sufi thread that runs through all his later work. Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition appeared from the Clarendon Press in September 1995.⁴

Kingsley’s own account of these years is unsparing. “I went through a phase of becoming a scholar in the acceptable sense, writing a book that was published by Oxford University Press … it was actually a whole exercise in cunning. I was simply putting on a garment that didn’t belong to me.” And: “In origin I am not a scholar, although I can play the scholarly game as well as anybody else. I am a mystic.” Academic friends, he says, warned him that identification with his subjects “leads to insanity”; he replied that he did not accept “the academic norm of so-called ‘objective’ writing”. Burkert, with whom he says he was friends “for many years”, urged him to “take a stand against those who were causing so much damage with their tediously hyperrational approach”.⁵

Canada and the Mystical Books (1995–2002)#

In 1995 Kingsley left England for Canada with his wife, Maria Kingsley, who has since worked beside him and describes her own concern as “the presence of the divine feminine at the roots of our Western world”. They lived on an island off the coast of British Columbia, unnamed in his writings, and there he wrote In the Dark Places of Wisdom (1999), the first chapter of which, he says, “was dictated to me in a dream”. He was by 2001 honorary professor of humanities at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, an appointment whose date of conferral is not recorded in any source I have found; the statement in the French and Spanish Wikipedias that he held it “from 1995” merely echoes the year of his emigration. On 8 September 2001, “alone at home … on the island where my wife and I were living off the west coast of Canada”, he had the experience he later described in the essay “Raven’s Appearance”: a raven circling the house and conveying, he says, a warning of “terrible death and destruction”, three days before the attacks of 11 September. He has told the story in print and, in a different form, in A Book of Life.⁶

The United States: New Mexico, Georgia, and North Carolina (2002–2017)#

The Kingsleys moved to the United States in 2002 and settled first in Albuquerque, where by 2003 he was also honorary professor of philosophy at the University of New Mexico. Reality was published in 2003 by the Golden Sufi Center of Inverness, California, the publishing arm of Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee’s Naqshbandi Sufi lineage descending from Irina Tweedie, which had also published Dark Places; the interview he gave that year at Inverness, in a house belonging to the publisher, is the source of the widespread but mistaken statement that he lived there. In New Mexico he and his wife befriended Joseph Rael, “Beautiful Painted Arrow”, the Picuris Pueblo elder who would write the foreword to A Story Waiting to Pierce You and whom Kingsley calls “an extraordinary human being, an elder”. From 2003 to about 2015 he lectured and led retreats across North America and in Switzerland — at Esalen, at the Abode of the Message in New Lebanon, New York, the centre of Pir Zia Inayat-Khan’s Inayati Sufi order, at the Omega Institute, at the Golden Sufi Center’s conferences, before the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies and at the University of Texas — and the recordings of these talks, with titles such as “Philosophy as a Sacred Tradition”, “Primordial Meditation”, “The Path that is No Path: From the Ancient Greeks to the World of the Sufis” and “The Golden Chain”, are sold from his website. A documentary, Finding Our Ancient Wisdom (2008), was filmed at one such gathering with Huston Smith, Pir Zia Inayat-Khan, Gregory Shaw and Cynthia Bourgeault. About 2006–2007 the Kingsleys moved to northern Georgia, where the Peter Kingsley Foundation was incorporated, “fostering the study and practice of ancient religious traditions”, and where he was for a time a research associate at Emory University; by 2010 they were living near Asheville, North Carolina. In the spring of 2009, following what he calls “an inner instruction”, he convened a gathering of Native American elders near Asheville that September; the elders, he says, “wept” over the loss of “our original instructions”. A Story Waiting to Pierce You appeared in November 2010, and in 2012 he began the book that became A Book of Life.⁷

The question of Kingsley’s own Sufi affiliation should be stated with care. His books of 1999–2010 were published by a Sufi organisation; he thanks a disciple of Tweedie in his scholarly work; he has lectured repeatedly in Naqshbandi and Inayati settings and been endorsed by Pir Zia Inayat-Khan; he treats the early Sufis as the heirs of Parmenides and Empedocles and Ibn ʿArabī as their kin; and A Book of Life is said by its readers to link its author’s path to “Sufi mysticism”. But I have found no statement by Kingsley naming a Sufi teacher or an initiation, and the entry does not assert one.⁸

Catafalque Press and the Late Books (2018–2026)#

In 2018 Kingsley founded his own imprint, Catafalque Press, in London, to publish the two-volume Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity (November 2018), which had grown, he says, out of a single chapter on prophetic tradition written for A Book of Life and had been “confirmed, down to the most intricate of details” by unpublished texts of Jung’s that he was shown. In February 2018 he discussed the Red Book with the Jungian analyst Murray Stein in Zurich. The same year the Dutch historian of religion Jan Bremmer published, in the Geneva journal Asdiwal, an attack on A Story Waiting to Pierce You entitled “Method and Madness in the Study of Greek Shamanism: The Case of Peter Kingsley”; Kingsley’s reply, “Shamans among the Greeks”, appeared in the same journal in 2024. Catafalque Press reissued Reality in a “new and updated” edition in 2020, published A Book of Life on 1 September 2021 and the one-volume paperback of Catafalque that November, and issued a second, revised edition of A Story Waiting to Pierce You in May 2025; Spanish translations of Reality (2021) and Catafalque (2025) appeared from Atalanta, and a German Ein Buch des Lebens [A Book of Life] from Novalis in 2025. A new book, The Watching Words, “about the reality that lies behind religion and beyond philosophy”, is announced for publication on 9 September 2026. The Kingsleys’ address remains Asheville; the Foundation’s current status is uncertain.⁹

Thought#

The System in Outline#

Kingsley’s teaching has been remarkably constant from 1995 to 2026, and it can be set out in a few steps.

Western philosophy did not begin with rational speculation about nature. It began with a small line of men in the Greek colonies of southern Italy and Sicily in the sixth and fifth centuries BC — Pythagoras, Parmenides of Velia, his adopted son Zeno, Empedocles of Acragas, and Empedocles’ pupil Gorgias — who were priests of Apollo and of Persephone, healers, prophets, lawgivers and magicians, and who practised a technique the Greeks called incubation: lying motionless in a dark place, without food, for hours or days, until a third state of consciousness, “neither sleep nor waking”, opened and one could “die before dying”, travel to the underworld and return with a message. Parmenides’ poem is the record of such a journey, made downward to a nameless goddess who is Persephone; its “logic” is not argument but an initiatory instruction in one unmoving reality that includes everything one can think or perceive, and its second half, in which the goddess “deceives” her hearer with a cosmology, describes the same reality seen from inside its “bonds”. The faculty that steers between the two, and that the goddess and Aphrodite share, is mētis [cunning intelligence], the Greek word for cunning, trickery and intense alertness. Empedocles teaches the same thing in another key: the four “roots” are gods and everything is divine; Love is the power that binds souls into mortal bodies and Strife the power that sets them free; each of us is an exiled daimon, “an unconscious immortal”; and the disciple is made a god by perceiving with all his senses at once, in the present, while pressing the teacher’s words “down beneath the diaphragm” like seeds.

Plato and Aristotle “murdered the father”: they turned a divine logic into human reasoning and cut out the descent, and the philosophy the West knows is their compromise. The living teaching went underground and eastward — into the Hermetica and the alchemy of Egypt, and from there into Islamic Sufism, where Empedocles and Pythagoras were remembered as sheikhs — while the West kept the gift and threw away the instructions. In the modern West its last witness was Jung, a prophet whose followers “domesticated” him; Henry Corbin, the interpreter of Persian Sufism, recognised what Jung was. The Western world that grew from the original seed has now ended, though it does not know it, and the only honest response is to mourn it — to build it a catafalque — while preparing, in silence and stillness, for whatever may be seeded next.

Three things should be said about this system before its parts are examined. First, its author holds that it is not his: it is the teaching of the tradition, which he claims to have received and to report as “messenger”. Second, its two registers, the historical and the initiatory, are meant to be one, so that a philological argument about a Greek particle and a claim about the reader’s consciousness can occur in the same sentence. Third, the historical claims range from ones that mainstream scholarship has accepted (the Egyptian etymology of Poimandres; the seriousness of Empedocles’ claim to magical power; the inscriptions at Velia), through ones that remain contested (the incubatory reading of Parmenides), to ones that leading specialists reject (a Mongol Abaris). The sections that follow keep these distinctions in view.¹⁰

Parmenides: The Journey, the Goddess, and the Healers of Velia#

Parmenides’ poem, of which the proem and about a hundred and fifty further lines survive, describes a journey in a chariot drawn by mares, escorted by the Daughters of the Sun, through the gates of the paths of Night and Day, to a goddess who welcomes the traveller and instructs him in “the unshaken heart of well-rounded truth” and in “the opinions of mortals”. Since antiquity the journey has been read as an allegory of the mind’s ascent from darkness into light. Kingsley reads it the other way. “Parmenides never describes himself as travelling out of darkness into the light. When you follow what he says you see he was going in exactly the opposite direction.” The Daughters of the Sun come out of the Mansions of Night, and Hesiod tells us where those are: “in the depths of the depths, at the edges of existence, where earth and heaven have their roots: they’re in Tartarus”. So “Parmenides’ journey is down to the underworld, into the regions of Hades and Tartarus from where no one usually returns … He was travelling in the direction of his own death, consciously and willingly; and the only way to describe that is in the language of myth.” The goddess’s greeting, that “no hard fate” has sent him, means that one would expect to arrive where he has arrived only by dying; “the man who knows”, the poem’s phrase for the traveller, is the standard term for an initiate; Justice, who keeps the gates, “shares the same house as the gods of the underworld”. The goddess herself is nameless because in southern Italy she needed no name: “the Greeks called her Persephone”.¹¹

The traveller is called kouros [young man], “young man”, and Kingsley makes the word carry the weight of an office. “A kouros was the man of any age who still saw life as a challenge … The kouros stands at the borderline between the world of the human and the world of the divine”; Apollo “was the divine kouros and the god of the kouros”, and the kouros “was needed for prophecy, for receiving oracles, for the magical process of lying down in a special place at night to obtain messages from the gods through dreams”. Every figure Parmenides meets is female: “the universe he describes is a feminine one; and if this man’s poem represents the starting point for western logic, then something very strange has happened for logic to end up the way it has”.¹²

The evidence that gives this reading its documentary anchor was found at Velia, the ancient Elea, in three campaigns of excavation between 1958 and 1962. Three inscribed statue-bases record men called Oulis — “Oulis son of Euxinus, citizen of Velia, healer, Phōlarchos, in the 379th year”; “Oulis son of Aristōn, healer, Phōlarchos, in the 280th year”; “Oulis son of Hieronymus, healer, Phōlarchos, in the 446th year”. A fourth fragment reads “Ouliadēs, Iatromantis, Apollo”, and a fifth, found in 1962, “Parmeneidēs son of Pyres, Ouliadēs, Physikos”. Kingsley’s reading of these stones is the core of In the Dark Places of Wisdom. “Oulis” names a man dedicated to Apollo Oulios, “the destroyer who heals, the healer who destroys”, a title at home in Anatolia, in Caria and at Miletus, the region from which Velia’s Phocaean founders had sailed, and otherwise unknown in the western Mediterranean except in the region of Marseilles, the other great Phocaean colony. Phōlarchos means “lord of the lair”: “a phōleos [lair] is a lair where animals hide … a place where animals go into retreat; where they lie motionless, absolutely still, hardly breathing”, and the healers were therefore “in charge of a lair, a place of suspended animation … It was all tied up in a clumsy-sounding word: incubation”. Iatromantis is, in Kingsley’s words, “a healer who’s a prophet, a healer who heals through prophecy”; Ouliadēs, “son of Oulios”, is a priestly title; physikos, usually rendered “natural philosopher”, “became a normal term for describing magicians and alchemists”. And the absence of a date on Parmenides’ own inscription is decisive: “Parmeneides himself represents the year zero; all the numbers on the other inscriptions … were being counted from him”. He is the hērōs ktistēs, the founding hero of a line of healer-priests of Apollo that lasted, on the stones’ own reckoning, five hundred years — in the words of Reality, “the ancient confirmation of exactly those features already implicit in his own account of a journey to another world”.¹³

Incubation, Stillness, and the Healer-Prophet#

Incubation is the practice at the centre of the system, and Kingsley defines it with unusual plainness. “It involved isolating yourself in a dark place, lying down in complete stillness, staying motionless for hours or days. First the body would go silent, then eventually the mind. And this stillness is what gave access to another world … a third type of consciousness quite different from either waking or sleeping … They called it incubation.” Strabo’s account of the Charonium at Acharaca in Caria, where the sick were left “in utter stillness (hēsychia [stillness]) without any food for several days — just like animals in a lair (phōleos)”, supplies the vocabulary; the Istrian dedication to “Apollo Phōleutērios”, “Apollo who hides away in a lair”, the divine patron; and the sentence in Diogenes Laertius that Parmenides “was led to stillness (hēsychia)” by the Pythagorean Ameinias, “a poor man but a good one and a fine one”, whose hero-shrine Parmenides founded, the historical link: “What Ameinias taught Parmeneides wasn’t anything to do with thinking … It had to do with incubation.” The goal of the practice is the goal of the poem. “For Parmenides it’s through stillness that we come to stillness … Through the practice of stillness we come to experience a reality that exists beyond this world of the senses”; “reasoning is based on thought and stillness is the end of thought”; “all our thinking is nothing but the longing for this”.¹⁴

The master of this state is the iatromantis [healer-prophet]. “A Iatromantis was someone who was a master of this state of awareness … what we can live for a thousand years but never discover … consciousness itself. It’s what holds everything together and doesn’t change. Once you experience this consciousness you know what it is to be neither asleep nor awake, neither alive nor dead.” Such men — Epimenides the Cretan, who was taught in a cave; Pythagoras, who built an underground room; Aristeas, Abaris, Hermotimus — used breath control and incantation, were “taken by Apollo”, and were called “skywalker” (aithrobatēs), “a term used as far east as Tibet and Mongolia in just the same way”; the state they entered has Indian names, turīya and samādhi, and its onset is marked, in Greek accounts of incubation as in Indian accounts of kundalinī, by “a piping, whistling, hissing sound”, the syrinx, “the sound of silence, the sound behind the whole of creation. Above all, it was the sound always being made by the sun”. Apollo, on this account, is not the god of reason but the god of oracles that are riddles, of night, caves and the underworld, of “ecstasy, trance, cataleptic states”; his identification with the sun “was esoteric — a matter for initiates only”. The Greek healer-prophets and the shamans of Siberia and Central Asia “are part of one and the same phenomenon”. This last claim, the shamanic reading of the iatromantis, descends from Karl Meuli, E. R. Dodds and Walter Burkert and is the point on which Kingsley has been most sharply attacked.¹⁵

Two features of the practice recur in Kingsley’s own voice. One is the role of longing, thumos, the “energy of life itself” that carries the traveller “as far as longing can reach”: “the strength of his longing simply determines how far he can go”; “People who love the divine go around with holes in their hearts, and inside the hole is the universe”; depression is “the voice of ourselves calling to ourselves … the negativity isn’t in the depression — it’s in running from the depression”. The other is the meaning of the descent. “The underworld isn’t just a place of darkness and death … it’s the supreme place of paradox where all the opposites meet … The source of light is at home in the darkness”; “there’s no going up without going down, no heaven without going through hell”; and the Pythagoreans who lived near volcanoes knew the fire beneath the earth as “the fire of hell, but also the fire that all the light we know and see derives from”. “To die before you die, no longer to live on the surface of yourself: this is what Parmenides is pointing to.”¹⁶

Logic as Initiation: “Is,” Deception, and Mētis#

The central section of Parmenides’ poem, the goddess’s account of what is, is the founding text of Western ontology and logic. Kingsley’s reading of it in Reality is the most sustained and the most radical thing he has written. The two ways of the second fragment, “is” and “is not”, form “a classic example of a riddle”, and the poem “is, in itself, an initiation”; the way of “is not”, “from which no news returns”, is death, the left-hand fork of the underworld road described on the Orphic gold plates. The third fragment, usually translated “for the same thing is for thinking and for being”, is rendered “For what exists for thinking, and being, are one and the same”, and taken to mean, with complete literalness, “Whatever you think exists”: “the divine law: the very fact of thinking something is the assurance that it already is”. The Greek verb noein covers “direct, intuitive perception as well as perception through and with our senses … what nowadays we would refer to as consciousness or awareness”; so the goddess is not laying down a criterion for correct thought but pointing to what all thought occurs in. “By accepting every thought he is actually taking us beyond thought … The only possible way to understand is by standing back in the stillness that lies underneath thinking.” “Wherever it seems that you go, or come, everything happens in your consciousness. And that consciousness never moves, is always the same.” “Our thoughts are not ours … They are simply reality thinking itself”; even pain “is nothing but reality perceiving itself”.¹⁷

The famous “mortals” of the sixth fragment, “who know nothing”, wandering “two-headed”, are not Heraclitus or the Pythagoreans but “us”. Kingsley’s key is a single word: their “helplessness”, amēchania, means literally “without a ruse”, “the one word used to define, to perfection, the result of a total lack of mētis”. Mētis, in the analysis of Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant that Kingsley adopts, “was the Greek term for cunning, skillfulness, practical intelligence; and especially for trickery … a particular quality of intense awareness that always manages to stay focused on the whole”; it “has nothing to do with argument or careful reasoning, because there is not even the time to think”; it “is the encircler; the completer of the circle”. The “two-headed” are travellers at the fork in the road where ghosts and cheats congregate — so that “we humans are already in the underworld. We are already dead”, and “everyone we see or know is a ghost”. The eighth fragment’s signs of what is — unborn, whole, unmoving, complete — are read as a magical act performed now: “the cosmic order is being established at the only possible moment it ever can be: right now”; the goddess’s “it has been decided” is a divine speech-act, the poem “a magic spell”. Its close, in which the goddess declares that “its name shall be everything”, is “the goddess, herself, in the act of naming reality”, handing every mortal name back to the one thing that is: “everything is divine”; “What you see all around you: that’s it”; “Go to the window and look outside. Look at the sky and the trees; and listen. All the intellectual and mystical journeys end here.” A textual emendation underwrites the whole: the line that seems to tell the hearer to “judge by reason” (krinai logōi), the charter of Western rationalism, is for Kingsley a Stoic corruption of logou, “the account”, so that the goddess is asking the hearer to “judge in favour of the highly contentious demonstration of the truth contained in these words as spoken by me”. Logic, in the poem’s original sense, is “a fine, fine thread connecting us with another world: a gift from the gods, a magical lure drawing us into oneness”. “Rationality is simply mysticism misunderstood.”¹⁸

The second half of the poem, the “opinions of mortals”, opens with the goddess announcing that she will now deceive. The modern reading takes this as the mark of a discredited cosmology; Kingsley takes it as the second act of the initiation. “The deception is about to begin”; the goddess is “the honest deceiver”; “we have to trust the goddess completely — and allow ourselves to be deceived”. The cosmos she describes is steered by Aphrodite, “the supreme goddess of deception and illusion”, who steers “through mētis”, and who in southern Italy was one with Persephone: “the two halves of Parmenides’ poem are the two faces of a dual goddess: life in death, death in life”. Deception and binding are one — “to bind was to deceive and to deceive was to bind”, and apatē, deception, “used to be the normal term for describing the effects of a magic charm” — so that “what can be described from outside as the binding of existence is experienced, from inside, as this: the wonderfully enchanting world you see and hear all around you”. “There is no deception apart from reality, and no reality apart from deception. The deception is what is real.” The ethic that follows is neither escape nor exposure: “the only protection against deception is to surrender to it”, and “the cunning and trickery of mētis are woven into the fabric of the universe. Everything around us is an elaborate trick; and we can either go on letting ourselves be deceived or learn to trick our way in and through and out”. Parmenides’ own contribution to science, the sphericity of the earth and its five zones, is “offered to the West with a warning tag attached to it: Use this, but don’t be tricked by it”.¹⁹

Empedocles: The Roots as Gods, Love and Strife, and the Exiled Daimon#

Empedocles of Acragas, the subject of Kingsley’s first book and of the second half of Reality, presented himself as a wandering healer, prophet and poet, promised his disciple Pausanias control over wind and rain and the power to bring the dead back from Hades, and told the citizens of Acragas that he walked among them “an immortal god, no longer mortal”. Kingsley takes these claims as the historical Empedocles made them. “He was a magician. Or to be more precise … he was a sorcerer … And just to make things worse, he said he was immortal. He explained that he had realized his divinity. He announced he was a god.” The philological foundation is the argument of Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic about the four “roots” of things, which Empedocles names as the gods Zeus, Hera, Aidoneus and Nestis. Against both ancient identifications (Zeus as fire), Kingsley argues from the usage of aithēr and aēr in the fifth century that Zeus is air (the bright upper air, the substance of the soul), Hera earth, Aidoneus — Hades, “the unseen” — fire, and Nestis, a Sicilian cult-title of Persephone, water. Fire’s home is not the sky but the underworld, the volcanic fire beneath Sicily; the “central fire” of the Pythagoreans was originally the fire at the centre of the earth; and the myth at the end of Plato’s Phaedo, with its subterranean rivers of water, mud and fire and its “true earth”, is a Pythagorean-Orphic eschatology of purification by underworld fire that Plato took over almost whole. Empedocles’ death by leaping into Etna, leaving a bronze sandal behind, is an initiatory myth of apotheosis through that fire. The 1999 publication of the Strasbourg papyrus, which showed the physical poem interrupted by “the cry of the soul”, confirmed for Kingsley that Empedocles’ “entire account of the universe was bound up with the fate of the soul … They were there to save the soul”, as the Gnostics later taught cosmology “for the sake of the soul”.²⁰

The cosmology is a cycle. “There is an endless cosmic cycle of uniting and separating … The uniting is the work of Love. The separation is done through Strife … four fundamental ‘roots’ of all existence — earth, water, fire and air … Nothing else exists.” Everything in it is divine: “Love is divine. Strife is divine. Each one of the four elements, or roots, is divine. So whatever you see or hear is divine. And whatever you see or hear with is divine.” The inversion Kingsley says he received at twenty governs the reading. Modern accounts obey “our real logic … we love love and hate hate”, and make Love the good principle and Strife the evil; for Empedocles the cycle “ends every cycle not with Love but exactly where it began — with the stage of total Strife”. Love’s rule is “a cosmic blood bath”, for “harmony” means “being bound together and joined fast”; sex is Love’s “last stand”. The soul, the daimōn, is the aither, Zeus’s element, exiled from the gods and “coated with earth and dressed up in robe after robe of flesh”; “Empedocles presents himself quite openly as a daimon, as someone who knows he is divine … we are all daimons who keep passing from life to death”; “every single human is an unconscious immortal … There are no special clubs”. The famous line in which Empedocles calls himself “an exile from the gods and a wanderer, placing my trust in mad Strife” is read with its verb’s proper sense: “he trusts in Strife because he is in exile”, and Strife is what will bring him home. “The power responsible for drawing the soul out of heaven is not Strife but Love. And the one power … that can finally get us home is not Love but Strife.” “Love traps the soul while Strife sets it free.” Strife’s work is the destruction of illusion, and therefore “the very act of becoming conscious is, itself, a process of destruction … of learning to die before we die”; the “madness” of Strife is both pathological and purifying, and “Madness is to know what it means not to have been born”. Beneath the polarity lies the same faculty as in Parmenides: “The real axis around which Empedocles’ teaching revolves is not the polarity of Love and Strife. They are just two flags flapping in the wind. It’s mētis.”²¹

Perceiving With Every Palm: The Senses, the Seeds, and the Making of a God#

The practice Empedocles taught, in Kingsley’s reconstruction, is the opposite of ascetic withdrawal from the senses. His opening address to Pausanias, in Kingsley’s translation, laments that “palms — so narrow and closed in — have been poured over people’s limbs”, that “mortal resourcefulness [mētis] can manage no more”, and instructs the disciple to “watch with every palm how each single thing becomes apparent”, perceiving “with the eyes … with the ears … with the tongue”, trusting none more than another. “His first instruction to Pausanias is not to perceive but to perceive that he is perceiving”; “this choiceless, all-embracing awareness can only happen in one particular moment: right now”; “for humans, mētis grows in relation to what is present”. “To go beyond this world of the senses all we have to do is use our senses to the full … the common factor linking each sense together, motionless, featureless, placeless and timeless, which is the consciousness we are.” This, Kingsley argues, is the original meaning of “common sense”, koinē aisthēsis, “what had once been an extraordinary meditation technique” until Aristotle assumed that everyone already possessed it. “It will make you a god — which is not too surprising considering how, regardless of our beliefs, we are gods already.”²²

The other half of the practice concerns the teacher’s words. Empedocles tells Pausanias, in the fragment preserved in a Mount Athos manuscript, that “if you press them down underneath your dense-packed diaphragm and oversee them with good will and with pure attention to the work, they will all … stay with you … For they grow”. The words are seeds; the disciple “has to press the words he hears down below the compact muscle of the diaphragm — deep inside his abdomen … bury them deep inside his own entrails like seeds”; the vocabulary of oversight and care is the vocabulary of Hesiodic farming and of the “beholding”, epopteia, of the mysteries, the stage at which “there is nothing left to learn”. “We are becoming the farmers of our immortality.” Another fragment asks the disciple to receive the pledges of the Muse “after splitting what I am saying in your entrails”, which Kingsley reads, with Clement of Alexandria, as grafting: the world perceived through the senses is grafted onto the tree of the teaching growing inside, so that “this world has simply been born in us … the whole world … is just buds on the tree that you are”. The roots of that tree, as of Empedocles’ cosmos, “lie in Tartarus … the power of sheer nothingness beyond this world of the senses” — “Here is where Parmenides came to meet the goddess.” The words themselves have a magical character: “They mean what they are; are what they mean.” And the relation that makes them work is the one Kingsley describes in the most demanding terms of any in his books: “You have to find the sacred spot where teacher meets disciple and the real learning begins … From then on, life without the teacher is impossible … There is no half-in, half-out, no voyeurism, and absolutely no bargaining”; “the only way to have access to it is through the guidance of a teacher who has left the human condition behind”.²³

The Line and Its Murder: Pythagoras, Zeno, Gorgias, and Plato#

The teaching passes along a line. Pythagoras, the first to use the word “philosophy”, brought to Italy “techniques of incubation, techniques for descending to the world of the dead” and “built a special underground room where he’d go and stay motionless”; his followers “were people who knew how to die before they died”, lived near volcanoes, taught through riddles (“the riddle contains its own solution”), were adopted into a “great family” whose teachers were “true fathers”, and knew their founder “as a son of Apollo or, quite simply, as Apollo himself”. Parmenides was led to stillness by the Pythagorean Ameinias and adopted Zeno as his son and successor, adoption being the Anatolian form of priestly succession; Zeno’s paradoxes “used logic in its truest sense … not to fortify or justify our commonsense view of reality but to undermine it, destroy it”, and his death under torture, smuggling arms to the Liparaean islands against Athens, “tested Parmenides’ teaching in fire like gold that’s pure and true”. “Parmenides was the teacher of Empedocles who was the teacher of Gorgias”, and Gorgias, the sophist who wrote that nothing exists, “took Parmenides’ teaching and totally destroyed it … by cancelling out Parmenides’ teaching with such rigorous thoroughness, he ended up staying perfectly true to it”; “when Gorgias destroyed the line he belonged to, he really destroyed nothing except for an illusion. And he destroyed it in such a conscious way that he made sure it would always be available to come back”. “There are visible lines and invisible ones.”²⁴

Plato’s part in the story is the “patricide” that the Sophist names. Plato’s dialogue Parmenides is “first-class historical make-believe” that belittles Zeno and makes Socrates the heir; “in the ancient world you never joked about patricide”, and “Plato had to commit patricide, get Parmenides out of the way. And the murder was so complete that now we don’t even know it ever happened, or what was killed”. The Pythagorean eschatology was taken over with “the ambiguities” amputated and “the need for the descent” cut out; the love of wisdom became “the love of talking and arguing about the love of wisdom”, “a pastime for people who love playing with toys”. “Parmenides’ teaching had been that logic is something divine, a gift from the gods. Plato took logic and put it in everyone’s hands … He had given people something wonderful to play with”, and Aristotle carried the “distortions, falsifications, obscurations … to perfection”. Kingsley quotes Dodds’s judgement that Plato “by a truly creative act transposed these ideas definitively from the plane of revelation to the plane of rational argument”, and reverses its valuation. Socrates, by contrast, is an ally, a man who “liked to describe himself as a magician, an enchanter”, whose elenchos was the divine warfare of the goddess and for whom “there is no more room … in our institutions … with the exception of our mental institutions”. Yet the murder had a purpose: “Plato and Aristotle, in particular, simply did their job: they made it possible for us to develop our intelligence in certain directions … But then the time comes to be moving on”; “Westerners had a great adventure ahead of them that required they forget all about stillness — for a while”; and now “the time for thinking and for reasoning is over … They have served their purpose.”²⁵

East and West: Persia, Egypt, the Hermetica, and the Sufis#

Kingsley’s scholarly articles, written before the mystical books, are the substructure of their history, and their common target is what he calls, inverting Festugière, “the Greek mirage”: “the illusion that the Greeks grew up in a self-enclosed world”. The Phocaeans who founded Velia were Anatolian traders on the Persian Royal Road, “the Vikings of antiquity”, and “the links with the East were there to begin with”; Xanthus of Lydia wrote about Zoroaster before Herodotus; the Academy’s dating of Zoroaster six thousand years before Plato was current in the early Academy, and Eudoxus and Theophrastus translated Babylonian astrological texts “virtually word-for-word” — so that “Greek philosophy was influenced by oriental — and specifically Iranian — ideas from the very beginning”. Empedocles’ self-proclaimed power to journey to the underworld and return “has closer parallels with Iranian Magi than with any other group”. The model of transmission Kingsley proposes is not diffusion but contact between adepts: it “seems to have occurred directly between the heart of one tradition and the heart of another: from centre to centre, core to core”, as when Ezekiel, consciously hostile to Babylon, reproduced the throne of lapis lazuli and the gleam of amber of a Babylonian esoteric text — “consciously his religion is one thing, unconsciously another”.²⁶

Then the movement reverses, and the Greek West flows back to the East. Pythagoras’ journey to Egypt is defended; the Orphic gold plates, “plainly Egyptian” in origin, travel on Phoenician stepping-stones; and the Hermetica are “the most obvious manifestation of Pythagoreanism returning to Egypt”. Kingsley’s most widely accepted single finding is that the name Poimandres, the revealer of the first Hermetic treatise, is not Greek (“shepherd of men”) but Egyptian, p-eime nte-re [the knowledge of Re], “the knowledge of Re”, an epithet of Thoth, so that the Greek Hermetica translate Egyptian theology and Iamblichus was right to say so against the charge of forgery. From Panopolis in Upper Egypt, the city of the alchemist Zosimus and of the Sufi Dhū ‘l-Nūn, and from the Arabic Book of the Gathering of ʿUthmān ibn Suwayd, an alchemical congress of Greek sages “presided over by Pythagoras himself” that became the Latin Turba philosophorum, Kingsley traces “the Pythagorean leaven” — the phrase is Suhrawardī’s — into Islam: the “Empedocles groups” of Arab alchemists, the Persian Sufis for whom Empedocles and Pythagoras were “among the greatest sheikhs who had ever lived”, Suhrawardī’s Empedocles who knew “how to apply either or both of his two principles at precisely the right time”, and Ibn ʿArabī, whose teaching Kingsley finds “fundamentally similar” to Parmenides’ and Empedocles’. The kouros survives as the Persian javānmard [spiritual young man] and the Arabic fatā [young man], the “young man” of Sufi chivalry; the Pole, the hidden axis of the Sufi hierarchy, is prefigured in the Arabic Plotinus’s Empedocles, “calling out to people … to reject this world”. And the whole chain is summed up in a sentence of Shahrazūrī on the West: there “the traces of the paths of the ancient sages disappeared … their directions were either wiped out, or corrupted and distorted”. Kingsley’s claim, in short, is that Sufism preserved what the West forgot, and that the two are one tradition whose ends can still touch.²⁷

Prophecy, Jung, and the End of the West#

From A Story Waiting to Pierce You onward a further element enters: a theory of how civilisations begin and end. “We have the strange idea in the West that civilizations just happen … But this is not how things are done at all. Civilizations never just happen. They are brought into existence quite consciously, with unbelievable compassion and determination, from another world. Then the job of people experienced in ecstasy is to prepare the soil for them; carefully sow and plant them; care for them; watch them grow.” “Each culture is just like a tree whose essence and whole potential are already contained in the seed. Nothing during the course of a civilization is ever discovered, or invented, or created, which was not already present inside that seed.” The seed of the West was sown by Pythagoras, but “such a great gesture of generating a new culture for a sacred purpose … can never be performed by a single person alone. Someone else was needed, somebody from outside”: Abaris the Hyperborean, whom Kingsley identifies as “the Avar”, a Mongol shaman-envoy who came from the far north-east bearing a golden arrow, recognised Pythagoras as Hyperborean Apollo and gave him the arrow, “activating and confirming him in his role”. Hence the book’s subtitle: the West was seeded from Central Asia, and its destiny is a return to “the place of origin”. “There is no escaping the barbarians, because they are the life behind what we think of as life.”²⁸

Catafalque applies the theory to the present. Jung, on Kingsley’s reading, belongs to the line of prophets “like Parmenides, Empedocles, Khidr, Mani, Joachim of Fiore”: a mystic and gnostic who knew it, whose Red Book records the “Spirit of the Depths” and whose guide Philemon is Simon Magus, who said “I know. I don’t need to believe. I know”, and who saw himself helping “God to be alive and free from the suffering man has put on him by loving his own reason more than God’s secret intentions”. His task was “to shock people into an awareness that all life comes from, and returns to, the sacred”, and his followers domesticated him: “many expert hands came together to smooth over and set straight what he had said; domesticate it; ‘auntify’ it”; “in Jung’s own name, officially and very efficiently, Jungians were managing to get rid of Jung”. “There is no Jung. His life wasn’t the story of Jung realizing himself. It was a story of the unconscious realizing itself through the passing appearance of a conscious Jung.” Henry Corbin, serving his own “inner sheikh” Suhrawardī, who traced his lineage to Pythagoras and Empedocles, alone “saw almost immediately who and what Jung really was”; their last conversation, in September 1955, was sohbet, the Sufi communion of “two individuated people”, monos pros monon. The prophet is defined as “one who at any moment in history speaks or writes or communicates faithfully, accurately, without interfering with the process, on behalf of the divine”, and “the only possible approach to the reality of the prophets will always be from the scorned side, the silenced side, the disgusting side of prophecy”. Jung’s last vision, locked away by Marie-Louise von Franz, showed the West “already quite still, poised at the point of stasis before the inevitable unwinding begins”: “the movement has stopped. The energy behind its momentum is over; spent”. “Quite literally, our western world has come to an end.” The book’s title, which came to Kingsley in a dream, names a bier for a coffin; its purpose is “to provide a catafalque for our western world”, and its counsel is not rescue but mourning: “without prophets willing to take us back to the primordial reality of what we are, we have no future left”, and “it’s only by shedding everything, including ourselves, that we sow the seeds of the future”. A Book of Life states the same in the first person and the imperative: “The rules are simple. Prepare in silence. Train in stillness. Strain as much as possible to become worthy of facing the impossible … It’s just a question of being empty enough to transmit the will of the gods.”²⁹

Sources, Affinities, and the Status of the Claims#

Kingsley’s apparatus shows what he builds on. In the historical books it is the German and French scholarship that first took Greek irrationality seriously: Erwin Rohde’s Psyche; Karl Meuli’s “Scythica” (1935), which proposed shamanic origins for Greek ecstatic religion; Dodds’s The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), on incubation, Apollo’s ecstasy and the “shamans” of the Greek north; Burkert’s 1969 article on Parmenides’ proem and the katabasis of Pythagoras, the single item he cites most, and Burkert’s Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism; Detienne and Vernant’s Les ruses de l’intelligence (1974), from which the whole apparatus of mētis is drawn; Günther Zuntz’s Persephone; Eliade’s Shamanism; Ioan Culianu; and, from the Islamic side, Corbin’s En Islam iranien [In Iranian Islam] and his editions of Suhrawardī, Chodkiewicz and Addas on Ibn ʿArabī, Sviri on early Sufism. In the mystical books the same names remain in the notes while the voice changes; the epigraphs of Reality — Isaiah, the oracle of Apollo at Clarus, Rūmī, the Chinese Buddhist Hanshan Deqing, the Tantric Saraha, Olympiodorus the alchemist, the Nag Hammadi Exegesis on the Soul, the Mahābhārata — announce a perennialism that Seyyed Hossein Nasr recognised as his own and that Arthur Versluis has classified as “immediatism”, the teaching of “an immediate, primordial illumination” attached here, unusually, to “the primordial wisdom of the West”. Jung enters late but decisively; Guénon and the Traditionalist school are not among the sources.³⁰

The claims, finally, have different standings. The identification of Empedocles’ roots with the gods and of Hades with fire has been accepted by some specialists and rejected by others; the Egyptian etymology of Poimandres has been widely accepted; the seriousness of Empedocles’ claim to magic is now common ground. The incubatory reading of Parmenides rests on the Velia inscriptions, which are real and late (Roman imperial in date), on the testimony about Ameinias, and on the poem’s own imagery; it has been endorsed by Laura Gemelli Marciano and Gregory Shaw and treated by others as “very difficult to assess as a truth claim”. The Mongol Abaris rests on an etymology and on comparative parallels that Jan Bremmer has called “non-evidence”. The claims about the reader’s consciousness and about the end of the West are not historical claims at all, and Kingsley does not present them as such: “This book is neither fact nor fiction. It’s about something stranger than both; and compared to that, what we call facts are just a fiction.” The entry keeps the three kinds apart; his books do not, and that is their method.³¹

Works#

Kingsley’s writings fall into two bodies that he insists are one: the scholarly articles and the Oxford monograph of 1990–1996, and the books of 1999–2021 written, as he puts it, “not for academics”. They are treated here in order of publication. Page references to In the Dark Places of Wisdom and Reality are to the first editions.³²

The Scholarly Articles (1990–1996)#

At a glance. Nine articles in the leading journals of classical and oriental studies, written before and around the Oxford book, together with a translation. “The Greek Origin of the Sixth-Century Dating of Zoroaster,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 53 (1990); “Ezekiel by the Grand Canal: Between Jewish and Babylonian Tradition,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1992); “Poimandres: The Etymology of the Name and the Origins of the Hermetica,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 56 (1993); “Empedocles in Armenian,” Revue des études arméniennes 24 (1993); “Empedocles and His Interpreters: The Four-Element Doxography,” Phronesis 39 (1994); “Empedocles’ Sun,” Classical Quarterly 44 (1994); “From Pythagoras to the Turba philosophorum: Egypt and Pythagorean Tradition,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 57 (1994); “Greeks, Shamans and Magi,” Studia Iranica 23 (1994); “The Christian Aristotle,” Le Muséon 107 (1994); “Meetings with Magi: Iranian Themes among the Greeks, from Xanthus of Lydia to Plato’s Academy,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1995); “Notes on Air: Four Questions of Meaning in Empedocles and Anaxagoras,” Classical Quarterly 45 (1995); “Artillery and Prophecy: Sicily in the Reign of Dionysius I,” Prometheus 21 (1995); “Empedocles’ Two Poems,” Hermes 124 (1996); and the translation of Claude Addas, Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn ʿArabī (1993).³³

Argument. The articles share a method — the close, sceptical reading of the doxographic and historiographical tradition against its own grain — and a thesis, that the Greek philosophical tradition was from its beginning in contact with the East and was misreported by the Greeks who systematised it. The 1990 article argues that the “sixth-century” date of Zoroaster, which places him 258 years before Alexander, is not Persian but a Greek fiction of the fourth century, invented when the Tarentine Pythagorean Aristoxenus made Zoroaster the teacher of Pythagoras at Babylon in order to give Pythagoreanism an oriental pedigree and to expose Plato’s Academy as plagiarist: “Oriental wisdom makes a fool of Socrates but it gives the seal of approval to Pythagoras.” The Ezekiel article shows that the prophet’s throne vision — the throne of lapis lazuli, the gleam of amber — reproduces a Babylonian esoteric cosmological text almost word for word, and draws from it the model of transmission “from centre to centre, core to core” that governs all Kingsley’s later history. The Poimandres article establishes the Egyptian etymology of the Hermetic revealer’s name and rehabilitates Iamblichus’s claim that the Hermetica were translated from Egyptian by men “not unacquainted with Greek philosophy”; its last page insists that Thoth, like Hermes, is a trickster and shape-shifter, so that “texts describing him must be understood with an equal degree of agility”. The two Empedocles articles of 1994 dismantle Diels’s reconstruction of the doxography on the four roots — “neither of the two interpretations … can possibly be correct” — and Theophrastus’s account of Empedocles’ sun, concluding that “whatever he says about [the Presocratics] must be treated with extreme caution”; the Turba article follows Pythagoreanism into Egypt and into the Arabic Book of the Gathering of ʿUthmān ibn Suwayd of Akhmim, at whose core “genuine teachings of the Presocratic philosophers are preserved”; “Meetings with Magi” defends the authenticity of Xanthus of Lydia’s account of Zoroaster and concludes that “Greek philosophy was influenced by oriental — and specifically Iranian — ideas from the very beginning”, ending with Plotinus’s journey towards Persia and Suhrawardī’s synthesis of Plato and Zoroaster. “Empedocles’ Two Poems” holds, against the fashion for a single poem, that the fragments come from two, On Nature and Purifications, and that the fall of the daimon belongs to the latter. “Greeks, Shamans and Magi” treats the iatromantis figures — Aristeas, Abaris, Epimenides, Pythagoras, Parmenides — as a shamanic phenomenon with Iranian and Central Asian links, the germ of A Story Waiting to Pierce You.³⁴

Relation to other works. The articles are cited on almost every page of the notes to Dark Places and Reality; the Poimandres and Turba findings recur in “Paths of the Ancient Sages” (1999, 2009) and in the last chapter of the Oxford book; the Zoroaster and Magi articles underlie the “Greek mirage” thesis; the Ezekiel article’s psychology of conscious hostility and unconscious reproduction, illustrated with Jung’s archetypes, anticipates Catafalque.

Takeaway. These are the papers of a philologist of the first rank, and they are the reason the later books could not be dismissed; the Poimandres etymology in particular has passed into the standard accounts of the Hermetica.

Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition (1995)#

At a glance. Oxford: Clarendon Press, September 1995; ix + 422 pages with two maps; paperback 1996–1997. No dedication or epigraph appears in the scanned copy consulted. Twenty-four chapters in three parts — I “Philosophy”: Back to the Roots; Aither; Aer; The Riddle; The Sun. II “Mystery”: An Introduction to Sicily; The Phaedo Myth: The Geography, The Sources, The Structure; Plato and Orpheus; The Mixing-Bowl; “Wise Men and Women”; Central Fire; A History of Errors. III “Magic”: The Magus; From Sicily to Egypt; The Hero; Death on Etna; Sandals of Bronze and Thighs of Gold; Pythagoreans and Neopythagoreans; “Not to Teach but to Heal”; Nestis; “Conceal My Words in Your Breast”; From Empedocles to the Sufis: “The Pythagorean Leaven” — with three appendices, Parmenides and Babylon, Nergal and Heracles, and Empedocles and the Ismāʿīlīs. The preface thanks, among others, Burkert, Boyce, Sedley, Sheppard, Burnett, Dalley, Sviri, Stella Corbin and “above all” Martin West, and notes that the cover reproduces Salvator Rosa’s Pythagoras Emerging from the Underworld. The introduction opens: “This book covers a wide area in space and time, but takes as its starting-point one man who lived well over two thousand years ago. That man was called Empedocles”, and closes: “The following story is itself only a fragment of a much larger one.” Translated into French (Les Belles Lettres, 2010), Italian, Spanish, Greek and Turkish.³⁵

Argument. Part I reopens the riddle of Empedocles’ sixth fragment, “Hear first the four roots of all things: dazzling Zeus, life-bearing Hera, Aidoneus and Nestis”. Antiquity offered two decodings, both making Zeus fire; Kingsley shows, from the usage of aithēr and aēr in Empedocles and his contemporaries, that Zeus is the bright upper air, Hera the earth, and Aidoneus — Hades, “the unseen” — fire, with Nestis water. The decisive move is the last: fire’s true home is not the heavens but the underworld, the volcanic fire beneath Sicily, so that Empedocles’ roots form a vertical sequence from sky through earth to the fire below and the waters of Persephone. The chapter called “The Riddle” argues that the fragment was meant to be a riddle, in the manner of oracles and initiations, and “The Sun” rebuilds Empedocles’ cosmogony, in which the fire that rose at the separation of the elements gathered into the sun while its residue became the stars. Part II turns to Plato. The myth at the end of the Phaedo, with its subterranean rivers of water, mud and fire, its “breathing” Tartarus, its spherical “true earth” and its “wise men and women”, is shown to transcribe the actual geography of Sicily and the Lipari islands and to derive almost whole from a Sicilian Pythagorean-Orphic eschatology in which the fire beneath the earth is “purifying, transforming, immortalizing”; the Pythagorean “central fire” was originally the fire at the centre of the earth, moved to the centre of the cosmos only later; and “A History of Errors” traces how Aristotle and his successors misconstrued the tradition — “the misunderstanding of a misunderstanding”. Part III takes Empedocles’ claims to magical power literally. He was a magos and iatromantis, a healer-prophet claiming divinity within a “Bacchic esotericism” linking Pythagoreans, Orphics and Dionysiac initiates; the legend of his death on Etna, leaving a bronze sandal, is an initiatory myth of apotheosis through the underworld fire, the bronze sandal being Hecate’s attribute as the golden thigh is Apollo’s; the Greek magical papyri from Egypt preserve Sicilian traditions; Pythagoras went about “not to teach but to heal”; and the instruction to Pausanias to conceal the teacher’s words in his breast shows the poem to be an esoteric transmission. The last chapter follows “the Pythagorean leaven” — Suhrawardī’s phrase — from Empedocles through Hermetic and Gnostic Egypt, Zosimus of Panopolis and the alchemists of Akhmim to Dhū ’l-Nūn, Sahl al-Tustarī and the Persian Sufis, for whom Empedocles and Pythagoras were “among the greatest sheikhs who had ever lived”, and to the Ismāʿīlī “Empedocles circles” of the appendix.³⁶

Major themes. The riddle as teaching; the fire below; the Sicilian origins of Plato’s eschatology; the philosopher as magician; transmission eastward.

Esoteric symbolism. The underworld fire as source of light and immortality; Etna’s crater as the mixing-bowl (kratēr) of Orphic and Pythagorean cosmology; the bronze sandal and the golden thigh; Nestis as Persephone; the “leaven” that passes from tradition to tradition.

Relation to other works. The book carries forward the articles of 1990–1996 and supplies the scholarly foundation for everything after it: the volcanic Persephone of Dark Places, the roots-as-gods and the Sufi chain of Reality, the alchemy of “Paths of the Ancient Sages”. Kingsley later called it “an exercise in cunning”; its readers have not.

Takeaway. Anthony Long’s judgement, printed as an endorsement, that “a truly original book, one that can transform a whole discipline, appears at the most once in a generation … Kingsley’s is such a book”, and John Bussanich’s, that it is “a great contribution to scholarship: invigorating, profoundly learned, polemical, original, and provocative”, stand beside Denis O’Brien’s, that the magic thesis “is flawed” and that the reader “will have to turn somewhere other than to Kingsley’s serried footnotes and elusive arguments”. All three are right about different parts of the book.³⁷

Shorter Writings (1997–2002)#

Between the Oxford book and Reality Kingsley published the pieces that mark his change of voice. “Knowing Beyond Knowing: The Heart of Hermetic Tradition,” Parabola 22:1 (1997), and “In the Dark Places of Wisdom,” Parabola 23:4 (1998), a preview of the book, introduced the language of initiation and of teaching through riddles to a general readership; “Paths of the Ancient Sages,” Lapis 10 (1999), later revised for the Rosicrucian Digest (2009), summarised the chain from Pythagoras to Suhrawardī; “Parmenides and the Origins of Western Thought,” Scientific and Medical Network Review (1999), and “Where East and West Are One,” Caduceus (2000), addressed the alternative-science and holistic-health readership. “An Introduction to the Hermetica: Approaching Ancient Esoteric Tradition,” in Roelof van den Broek and Cis van Heertum’s From Poimandres to Jacob Böhme (Amsterdam, 2000), published with a reprint of the Poimandres article, presents the Hermetica as initiatory texts recording divine knowledge received in incubation and transmitted from teacher to disciple. “Empedocles for the New Millennium,” Ancient Philosophy 22 (2002), 333–413, an eighty-page article occasioned by the Strasbourg papyrus, is the scholarly substructure of the second half of Reality: it argues that the papyrus confirms that Empedocles’ physics was taught “to save the soul”, treats his prophetic self-presentation and initiatory riddles, the opening address to Pausanias, Aphrodite’s deception and binding magic, the emendation “not at once, but reluctantly” in fragment 35, and the reading of fragment 110 as “words as seeds”. It is the last thing Kingsley wrote for a classical journal until 2024.³⁸

In the Dark Places of Wisdom (1999)#

At a glance. Inverness, California: The Golden Sufi Center, 1999; British edition, London, 2001; 255 pages, with references keyed by section (pp. 233–255), no notes in the text, no index; no dedication and no epigraph; a map of the Mediterranean from Marseilles to the Black Sea faces the contents. Five parts of short titled sections: One (This Book; Our Ancestors; Phocaea; Journey to the West; Fairy Story; What’s Missing; Killing the Father); Two (Getting Started; The Man in a Toga; Dying Before You Die; Masters of Dreams; Apollo; Goddess; Iatromantis; Ecstasy; The Sound of Piping); Three (Founding Hero; The Line; Walking Away; Ameinias; Like the Wind at Night); Four (Playing with Toys; The Lawgivers; A Matter of Practicalities); Five (Invisible Lightning). The cover carries the sentence: “This book is neither fact nor fiction … The documents, the discoveries, the people that it describes are all as real as we are. But the story it has to tell is far stranger than any fiction, because this is the story of ourselves.” Endorsed by Walter Burkert (“The philosophical and mystical roots of Western civilization start to appear in a completely new light”) and Jacob Needleman. Translated into German (Die Traumfahrt des Parmenides [Parmenides’ Dream Journey], 2001), Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch, Greek, Persian, Portuguese, Turkish and Chinese.³⁹

Argument. The book is a detective story whose clue is a set of inscriptions and whose crime is a murder. Part One states the wager. “If you’re lucky, at some point in your life you’ll come to a complete dead end”; “this life of the senses can never fulfil us … if we want to grow up, become true men and women, we have to face death before we die”; and against those who turn East — “we become cultural tramps and vagabonds” — Kingsley announces that “a spiritual tradition lies at the very roots of western civilization”, whose founders “laid the foundation for disciplines that were to make the West what it now is: chemistry, physics, astronomy, biology, rhetoric, logic. But they did all this with an understanding we no longer have”; the scholars who hold its fragments “hold the keys of knowledge but hide them”; and “the price is what it always has been: ourselves, our willingness to be transformed”. The Phocaeans, Anatolian sea-traders on the Persian Royal Road, besieged by the Persians about 540 BC, swear never to return, sail to Corsica, fight a naval battle, and are told by a stranger from Posidonia that Apollo’s oracle meant not to settle on Cyrnus but to found a cult for the hero Cyrnus; they found Velia. “The real origins of western philosophy … lie in Velia.” Then the missing man: “There’s one man who influenced the western world in a way no one else did. He lies buried under our thoughts … And the world he belonged to is buried there too: a feminine world of incredible beauty and depth and power and wisdom … His name was Parmenides. He was from Velia.” “Killing the Father” reads Plato’s Parmenides, Theaetetus and Sophist: “Plato had to commit patricide, get Parmenides out of the way. And the murder was so complete that now we don’t even know it ever happened, or what was killed.”⁴⁰

Part Two is the reading of the poem and the stones set out under Thought: the journey downward; the three Oulis bases found by Sestieri in 1958; “dying before you die”; the phōlarchos and the lair; Apollo as god of night, riddles and trance; the goddess as Persephone; the iatromantis; ecstasy, breath control and the “skywalkers”; and “The Sound of Piping”, which reads the poem’s insistent repetitions as incantation — “the repetition of the word for ‘carry’ is what carries”; “those poems are incantatory texts. Their writers were magicians and sorcerers” — and its one sound, the piping of the axle, as the syrinx, the hiss of the snake and of the sun, “the ultimate password: the sound of silence”. Part Three is “the line”: the block of 1962, “Parmeneides son of Pyres, Ouliadēs, Physikos”, found beside a statue of Asclepius; the undated founding hero from whom the healers counted their years; adoption as succession and Zeno as adopted son; the silence of scholars who “walked away” from the finds; Ameinias, the poor and good Pythagorean who led Parmenides to stillness; and the teaching by riddle: “the greatest teachers are often utter nobodies … Real teachers leave no traces. They’re like the wind at night rushing right through you and totally changing you but leaving everything unchanged.” Part Four turns to what the West made of the gift. The stereotyped Roman head found in 1968 and labelled Parmenides shows that “the love of wisdom had been replaced by philosophy … a pastime for people who love playing with toys”; Parmenides and Zeno came to Athens “as ambassadors from Velia, as negotiators of peace”, not as thinkers; Parmenides was a lawgiver — “Moses brought his laws down from Mount Sinai; Parmeneides brought his back from the depths of hell” — in the tradition of Epimenides and of Plato’s own priests “of Apollo and the Sun”; the Persian javānmard and the Arab alchemists carry the kouros and the “initiatory chain of succession” into Islam; and the sixth fragment’s “helplessness in their chests” describes “us”. Zeno died under torture resisting Athens: “he tested Parmenides’ teaching in fire like gold that’s pure and true … And of course, as we all know, Athens won the day.” Part Five, a single page, calls the inscriptions “little more than statistics now … stored away in dark warehouses”, speaks of “a conspiracy of silence”, and ends: “the story is far from finished, and this book that you’ve come to the end of is only the beginning: the first chapter.”⁴¹

Characters. Parmenides, the founding hero and healer-priest; Ameinias, the poor Pythagorean who taught him stillness; Zeno, the adopted son who died for the teaching; the three Oulis healers of the inscriptions; Pythagoras, nameless and “Apollo himself”; the stranger from Posidonia who reads the oracle; Epimenides the Cretan kouros; Apollo and Persephone; and Plato, the patricide. The reader is addressed throughout as the one whose forgetting the book is about.

Major themes. The dead end as beginning; the feminine universe of the poem; the healer-prophet; incantation and the sound of silence; the line of succession; Athens against the Greek West; scholarship as concealment.

Esoteric symbolism. The gates on the axis of the world where opposites meet; the sun’s home in darkness; the lair; the snake and the hiss; the kouros at the borderline; the founding hero’s “year zero”; the laws brought up from hell.

Relation to other works. The book is the popular statement of the Parmenides half of Reality, which expands it tenfold and adds Empedocles; its last sentence announces the sequel. Its readings of the Velia inscriptions had been sketched in “Greeks, Shamans and Magi” (1994) and in the Oxford book’s first appendix, “Parmenides and Babylon”.

Takeaway. The most accessible of Kingsley’s books, and the one that made his name outside classics; Gregory Shaw judged that it “argued convincingly that scholars have entirely misunderstood the ‘founder of Western philosophy’”, while a later academic reviewer found it “delightful” but “a blatant work of mysticism” that risks becoming “its own work of competing propaganda”. Both descriptions fit.⁴²

Reality (2003)#

At a glance. Inverness, California: The Golden Sufi Center, 2003; 591 pages, with notes keyed by section (pp. 561–591) and no index; second, “new and updated” edition, London: Catafalque Press, 2020. No dedication. Two parts: I, “The Final Journey” (chapters One to Five, on Parmenides, Zeno and Plato); II, “Sowers of Eternity” (chapters Six to Twelve, on Empedocles and Gorgias). Each chapter is divided into short numbered sections and opens with an epigraph — Isaiah (“I will make a road in the wilderness, rivers in the desert”); an oracle of Apollo from Clarus (“Once you have touched it there is no division; no tearing your heart away. For it knows no separation”); Rūmī (“Think of nothing except the creator of thought”); the Chinese Buddhist Hanshan Deqing on the doctrine of immutability; the Tantric poet Saraha (“with certainty must all things be viewed as if they were a magic spell”); Empedocles (“I know that truth is with the words I will be saying”); Olympiodorus the alchemist (“The helplessness is tremendous … There will be fighting and violence and war”); the Nag Hammadi Exegesis on the Soul (“It’s Aphrodite who deceived me”) with Homer; Shahrazūrī (“A disciple of Empedocles asked him: What is the noblest thing to know? He answered: What people neglect the most”); Robert Pirsig on “the bones of the Sophists”; Matthew’s parable of the sower; and the Mahābhārata (“The seed it grows from is the unseen. Awareness is its trunk”). Endorsed by Huston Smith (“Stunningly original, Reality is momentous in its implications”), Seyyed Hossein Nasr (“This epochal work … forces contemporary human beings to reexamine what it means to be human”), Thomas Moore, Larry Dossey, Robert A. Johnson and Michael Baigent; the 2020 edition adds Eckhart Tolle and Rupert Spira. Translated into German, Greek, Slovenian and Spanish.⁴³

Argument: Part I, “The Final Journey”. “I had better write these things down before they are lost for another two thousand years.” So the book begins, and its first chapter sets the terms. The reader who wants “to keep a grip on what you think you already know” must dismiss what follows; the inscriptions at Velia “are written in stone. And the writing on the stone is about you. And you are the stone.” Parmenides was “the founder of logic”, but “what we have ended up calling logic and reason are just frauds, posing as what they are not”; logic’s purpose “was to awaken”; “Western civilization may soon be nothing but an experiment that failed.” The poem is translated, the descent, the kouros, the iatromantis and incubation are explained, the inscriptions read, and the chapter closes on Ameinias and stillness: “For Parmenides it’s through stillness that we come to stillness … all our thinking is nothing but the longing for this.” Chapter Two takes the goddess’s opening command, “I will do the talking; and it’s up to you to carry away my words”, as the charter of the prophet who must not alter what he receives; reads the two paths as a riddle and the poem as “in itself, an initiation”; retranslates fragment 3 as “For what exists for thinking, and being, are one and the same” — “whatever you think exists” — and finds in fragment 6, on the “two-headed” mortals whose “helplessness steers their wandering minds”, a joke built on the vocabulary of mētis: “we humans are already in the underworld. We are already dead”; “everyone we see or know is a ghost”. The chapter ends with the three paths — “There is a path that turns back on itself and goes nowhere. There is a path that doesn’t exist. And there is a path that finishes where it begins” — and the verdict that “all of the goddess’ paths are just a trick … as soon as you put one foot on the first, it stops you in your tracks. You have already arrived at the end.”⁴⁴

Chapter Three, the longest, is the assault on “judge by reason”. “Our minds are like a dog’s bladder”; the modern reading of fragment 7, which makes the goddess tell the hearer to reject the senses and judge by logos, is “the smell of our own pee”. “Our problem is not that we see and hear. It’s that we don’t.” The received text is a Stoic corruption; restored, the goddess asks the hearer to judge in favour of “the highly contentious demonstration of the truth contained in these words as spoken by me”, and logic is revealed as “a fine, fine thread connecting us with another world … before the goddess was violated, discarded like a piece of rococo junk”. The elenchos, the goddess’s “refutation”, “means war”; Socrates’ refutations and his divine mission are its Athenian echo, and “there is only one way to wisdom: by facing the fact that we know nothing and letting our reasoning be torn apart”. Fragment 8’s signs of what is — “You are a myth. And this is the truth”; “put death to death”; “the cosmic order is being established at the only possible moment it ever can be: right now”; “thought itself is a circle”; “we are responsible even for our irresponsibility” — culminate in the naming ceremony, “its name shall be everything”, and the chapter ends with the instruction to go to the window and listen: “All the intellectual and mystical journeys end here.” Chapter Four is the deception: the “honest deceiver”, the moon as “nightbright earth-roaming foreign light”, Aphrodite who “steers everything through mētis”, the two-faced goddess, and Parmenides’ discovery of the spherical earth and its five zones, read as Phocaean navigators’ knowledge — Phocaea “City of Seals”, the seal an animal of mētis; Euthymenes to Senegal; Pytheas of Marseilles to the Arctic — so that science “was offered to the West with a warning tag attached to it”. “There is no deception apart from reality, and no reality apart from deception … we are simply reality completing itself.” Chapter Five follows Pytheas to “the lung of the sea” and the “bonds of everything” at the edge of the world, and Parmenides, who “went even further — by going nowhere”, to the same bonds within: “when we keep believing we are free, that’s bondage”; “there is no leaving … And there most definitely is no death”; binding is deceiving, and “what can be described from outside as the binding of existence is experienced, from inside, as this: the wonderfully enchanting world you see and hear all around you”. Zeno’s paradoxes and his death at Lipara close the line, and Plato’s patricide closes the part: “Plato took logic and put it in everyone’s hands”; “the time for thinking and for reasoning is over now … The reality is here, in the middle of the illusion; has been all along, longing to be recognized. Now we need to become that reality, take responsibility for it, make it real again.”⁴⁵

Argument: Part II, “Sowers of Eternity”. “This book is simply an expression of that line Parmenides belonged to … Every word in this book carries the consciousness of its unimportance.” Chapter Six introduces Empedocles — “He was a magician … he was a sorcerer … He announced he was a god” — and the Strasbourg papyrus, which showed that his cosmology was “there to save the soul”; retranslates the address to Pausanias with its “palms” and its hidden mētis; and ends: “This is how the line progresses. Parmenides warms. Empedocles burns”; “Human existence is nothing but the divine life unlived.” Chapter Seven lays out the cycle of Love and Strife and the divinity of everything, argues that the cycle begins and ends in Strife, and reaches the inversion: “the power responsible for drawing the soul out of heaven is not Strife but Love. And the one power … that can finally get us home is not Love but Strife.” Chapter Eight reads Aphrodite’s philotēs as deception, the painters’ fragment as a warning not to “let deception overthrow the seat of your awareness”, the sexual puns of fragment 17, and the doctrine that consciousness “is the blood around the heart”, Love’s product, so that the immortal soul cannot be Love: “Behind Aphrodite, for Empedocles, stands death in the form of Strife. Behind Aphrodite for Parmenides stands … Persephone”; “Love traps the soul while Strife sets it free.” Chapter Nine is the chapter of “the mystery of inversion”: Empedocles’ “For all mortal beings, there is no such thing as birth”, his “And I myself conform to their convention” — “He is simply infiltrating our illusory existence, sabotaging it from the inside … He has disappeared” — his trust in “mad Strife”, the two madnesses, the Arabic Plotinus’s Empedocles “calling out to people … to reject this world”, the “Empedocles groups” of the alchemists and Sufis, and the conclusion that the real axis of the teaching is mētis: “a trick inside a trick inside a trick”; “the greatest deception of all is to tell the truth … the greatest truth is to deceive”. Chapter Ten denies free will — “We have no free will at all; but we are predetermined to think we do … Then we are free: free from the illusion of having to choose” — and turns to Gorgias, who “surrendered to the moment”, held that “whoever deceives is more just than whoever does not deceive and whoever is deceived is wiser than whoever is not deceived”, and destroyed the line so consciously that “he made sure it would always be available to come back”. Chapter Eleven is the instruction: “And now there is nothing left to do except to give it. It will make you a god.” Perceive with every palm; perceive that you are perceiving; press the words beneath the diaphragm; “we are becoming the farmers of our immortality”. Chapter Twelve takes fragment 4’s “pledges from our Muse” as “the kernel of religion” — “as a pledge from our Muse take the world” — reads the “splitting” of the words in the entrails as grafting, and returns to the roots of the cosmic tree in Tartarus, “where this whole book started … Here is where Parmenides came to meet the goddess”. The last paragraph: “And you are fresher than time: the indescribable treasure that was never lost and that no one exists to find. For in the whole universe of shifting shapes and forms you are completely alone. But, once you have realized this, you might just happen to throw a glance over your shoulder for the briefest moment and catch a glimpse of those who are like you — your true companions.”⁴⁶

Characters. Parmenides, the messenger; the goddess, Persephone in the first half and Aphrodite in the second, “life in death, death in life”; Zeno; Empedocles, sorcerer and exile; Pausanias, the disciple; Gorgias, who destroyed the line to save it; Socrates as ally; Plato, Aristotle and Theophrastus as the falsifiers; Pytheas and Euthymenes, the navigators of mētis; and Suhrawardī and the Sufis as the line’s heirs.

Major themes. Logic as initiation; stillness; the deception that is reality; the bonds; Love that binds and Strife that frees; the senses as the way beyond the senses; words as seeds; the visible and invisible line; the end of the age of reasoning.

Esoteric symbolism. The court of law at the roots of existence; the circle completed by mētis; the naming that hands all names back; the Nobody of the Odyssey; seals, amber, Hyperborea and Avalon; the two-faced goddess; the diaphragm as the seed-bed; grafting; the cosmic tree rooted in nothingness.

Relation to other works. Reality absorbs Dark Places, the Oxford book’s Part I and the article of 2002, and is the fullest statement of Kingsley’s teaching; A Story Waiting to Pierce You takes up its Hyperborean thread and Catafalque its prophetic one. Its epigraphs from Rūmī, Hanshan, Saraha and the Mahābhārata are the first open signs of the perennialism that Nasr saluted.

Takeaway. Shaw called it “a work of rare genius” that “will strike many if not most readers as monstrous, and in the true sense: it is wondrous, portentous, even frightening”; Gemelli Marciano judged it “fundamental and certainly revolutionary”, a book that “seems unscientific in its approach but presupposes an enormous labour on the texts and on the secondary literature”, and that puts in question “the very conception of philosophy as intellectual exercise”. It is the book by which Kingsley asks to be judged.⁴⁷

Essays (2004–2010)#

Four shorter pieces belong to the years between Reality and A Story. “Raven’s Appearance: The Language of Prophecy,” ReVision 26:4 (2004), a talk to a conference on Native American traditions and Western science, proposes the origins of the West as the “third point” of a triangle and tells the story of the raven of 8 September 2001 as an instance of “the language of the birds”, sacred speech “from” oneness as against profane speech “about” things. “As Far As Longing Can Reach,” written with Maria Kingsley for Parabola 31:2 (2006), is a meditation on thumos in Parmenides’ proem that ends: “Longing longs for us. It wants us to wake up, to become conscious. It is divine intelligence longing to become known.” “Paths of the Ancient Sages: A Pythagorean History,” Rosicrucian Digest 87:1 (2009), opens with the execution of Suhrawardī at Aleppo in 1191 and retells the chain — “the real mirage is the ‘Greek mirage’”; the gold plates “in origin … plainly Egyptian”; Poimandres as “the knowledge of Re”; Zosimus; Ibn Suwayd’s Book of the Gathering “presided over by Pythagoras himself”; Dhū ’l-Nūn of Akhmim, “the head of the Sufis”; the “red sulphur” as “the light in the depths of the underworld, the sun at midnight, the fire at the centre of the earth” — and closes with Shahrazūrī’s sentence about the West and the assurance that “these realities are never lost for good”. A related essay, “The Paths of the Ancient Sages: A Sacred Tradition Between East and West,” appeared in Harry Oldmeadow’s perennialist anthology Crossing Religious Frontiers (2010).⁴⁸

A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tibet, and the Destiny of the Western World (2010)#

At a glance. Point Reyes, California: The Golden Sufi Center, November 2010; 192 pages; a short narrative followed by endnotes of nearly equal length, one of them a sixteen-page essay on the pre-Buddhist shamanism of Tibet and its suppression; foreword by Joseph Rael (“A true encanto, an incantation, this book is pure music … This is what the native people of the Americas have been trying to say, but were never permitted to”). Second, revised edition, London: Catafalque Press, May 2025. Endorsed by Walter Burkert (“Scholarly discussion depends on evidence — of which this book offers the most surprising riches”), Jack Weatherford, Victor Mair, Pir Zia Inayat-Khan, Coleman Barks, Jacob Needleman, Jean Houston and Adyashanti. Dedication, epigraphs and any chapter titles could not be verified.⁴⁹

Argument. Centuries before Christ a stranger arrived in the Greek world from the far north-east. The Greeks called him Abaris the Hyperborean; “his name was Abaris, which simply means ‘the Avar’”, the name of the nomadic bowmen of Central Asia ancestral to the Mongols. He “has the makings and markings of a shaman — of one of those strange, uncontrollable healers and mystics found across the world but especially familiar in the areas around Siberia and Central Asia”; he carried a golden arrow, “simultaneously arrow, dart, dagger, and stake”, the kin of the Tibetan phurba, and on it he “travelled” thousands of miles, a “skywalker” in the manner of the Tibetan lung-gom-pa runners who move “in one unbroken trance, holding their god inside them”; he removed sickness from cities. Hyperborea, the land of Apollo, lies to the north and the east, in Mongolia and Siberia; “the most sacred Greek shrines had been founded by the same strange visitors from Hyperborea”, and the arrow-bearing envoys of the Mongols, the “arrow-circulators”, are their later form. Abaris recognised in Pythagoras an incarnation of the same god, Hyperborean Apollo, and gave him the arrow, “activating and confirming him in his role”; for “such a great gesture of generating a new culture for a sacred purpose … can never be performed by a single person alone. Someone else was needed, somebody from outside”. Pythagoras thus became “a culture-creator, a shaper of civilization, as originator of the word ‘philosophy’”, and the West was seeded in “the mysterious dance in which germs of new cultures are scattered and sown”. The narrative then widens into a defence of the “barbarians”: the “grand fantasy invented by the so-called ‘higher’ cultures to preserve their sense of superiority” over shamanic peoples; the Tibetan Buddhists’ suppression of their shamans set beside the fate of the Native Americans; the Mongols who “as long as they kept faithful to their nomadic traditions … were able to perform the strangest alchemy”, and whom the Sufis believed to be led by the Pole or by Khidr; and the conclusion that “civilizations are brought into existence out of a place of creation and destruction that no civilization by itself is ever able to understand” — “there is no escaping the barbarians, because they are the life behind what we think of as life”. The passage the book is remembered for is its statement of how cultures begin: “Civilizations never just happen. They are brought into existence quite consciously, with unbelievable compassion and determination, from another world. Then the job of people experienced in ecstasy is to prepare the soil for them; carefully sow and plant them; care for them; watch them grow.” Plato is the culprit once more: “the vessel of the western intellect is cracked beyond repair, completely unable any longer to contain the fullness of life; and Plato himself, through his rationalizing of older traditions, is to a considerable extent responsible for that fracturing.” The “destiny” of the title is a return to “the place of origin” and to life “in service not to our flimsy expectations but to the power of life itself”: “at any given point in time there will only ever be one single way to put a real step forward — which is in a state of ecstasy that takes us out of ourselves”.⁵⁰

Characters. Abaris, the shaman-envoy; Pythagoras, the god recognised and confirmed; Apollo, “a brightness we have no experience of any more”; Hermotimus, a previous incarnation of Pythagoras; the Tibetan wind-walkers and the Mongol arrow-bearers; Padmasambhava and the suppressed shamans of Tibet; Genghis Khan as an agent of renewal.

Major themes. The seeding of civilisations from “another world”; the shamanic origin of the Greek sages; East and West as one; the barbarian as the life behind life; the destiny of the West as return.

Esoteric symbolism. The golden arrow as arrow, dagger and axis; the “skywalker”; Hyperborea as the place where north and east, east and west, are one; the seed and the tree; the Pole and Khidr behind the Mongol armies.

Relation to other works. The book develops the shamanic reading of the iatromantis first stated in “Greeks, Shamans and Magi” (1994) and Dark Places, where Apollo’s home is “in the most distant north where east and west are one”; its theory of seeded cultures becomes the frame of Catafalque. Its 2025 reissue followed the exchange with Bremmer, to which “Shamans among the Greeks” is the reply.

Takeaway. Shaw, in Ancient Philosophy, found the scholarship “impeccably fine-edged” and the notes “a second book … even more compelling”; a reviewer in Eras thought the Avar etymology rested “on weak nineteenth-century sources” and the phurba theory “a little far fetched” but the whole “an invaluable first step”; Bremmer, in the most detailed critique Kingsley has received, judged the Mongol Abaris to be “based on non-evidence, on distorting available evidence and on misreading sources”, and concluded that “there was no Greek shamanism and no influence of Central Asia”. The controversy is described under Reception.⁵¹

Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity (2018)#

At a glance. London: Catafalque Press, November 2018; two volumes, the first of 445 pages of text, the second of notes (365 of them) and index; one-volume paperback, November 2021, 844 pages; Spanish translation, Catafalco (Atalanta, 2025). Volume One is in four parts — “Mystical Fool”, “Back to the Source”, “The Sunset Way” and “Catafalque” — apparently of sixteen chapters each, according to the one reader who has itemised them; the publisher describes the book as “a revolutionary new reading of the great psychologist Carl Jung as mystic, gnostic and prophet for our time”, “the first major re-imagining of both Jung and Jungian psychology since the original publication of Jung’s Red Book in 2009”, which uncovers the Red Book’s “great secret, hidden in plain sight” and tells “the untold story” of Jung’s relationship with Henry Corbin and Persian Sufism. Endorsed by Paul Bishop (“an extraordinary achievement”), Jeffrey Kripal (“writes with the force of a sorcerer”) and Adyashanti (“a dangerous book”). Dedication, epigraphs and opening sentences could not be verified; the summary that follows rests on the reviews and on quotations gathered by readers, with the page numbers they give.⁵²

Argument. The book opens at Eranos, with Jung and Corbin, and with the claim that the sacred has been “domesticated … trivialized and thoroughly prettified”; Jung’s task was “to shock people into an awareness that all life comes from, and returns to, the sacred” and “to turn people around to face their Ancestors whom they imagine they can do without”. Part One, “Mystical Fool” — Kingsley identifies himself with the Contrary of the Plains peoples, the sacred clown who does everything backwards — sets Jung’s two personalities, the empirical scientist and the prophet, against each other and reads Jung’s own words “empirical” and “science” in their etymological sense, so that the true empiricists are “alchemists and healers like Empedocles”. Jung, on this reading, was a mystic who knew it and concealed it, a prophet who said in 1941, “It is the truth, a force of nature that expresses itself through me — I am only a channel”, who saw himself helping “God to be alive and free from the suffering man has put on him by loving his own reason more than God’s secret intentions”, and whose life “wasn’t the story of Jung realizing himself. It was a story of the unconscious realizing itself through the passing appearance of a conscious Jung”. The Red Book is “a deadly virus, a massive earthquake capable of shaking every rational edifice built up on the work of Jung to the ground”; its Spirit of the Depths warns that “to explain a matter is arbitrary and sometimes even murder. Have you counted the murderers among the scholars?”; its guide Philemon is the Gnostic Simon Magus, whom Jung called “my Lord” into his seventies and about whom he said, “I know. I don’t need to believe. I know”; Bollingen is Philemon’s shrine; and the Seven Sermons to the Dead are addressed to the dead in earnest. Jung concealed the revelation because revelation was professionally dangerous, and his editors — Aniela Jaffé, “cheerleader-in-chief”, the Philemon Foundation, Sonu Shamdasani, with Edward Edinger, James Hillman and Richard Noll in the same “crosshairs” — completed the concealment by calling it “literary experimentation”: “many expert hands came together to smooth over and set straight what he had said; domesticate it; ‘auntify’ it”; “in Jung’s own name, officially and very efficiently, Jungians were managing to get rid of Jung”. Part Two, “Back to the Source”, traces the line behind Jung — Parmenides, Empedocles, the Gnostics, the alchemists, “Khidr, Mani, Joachim of Fiore” — and sets Plato’s and Aristotle’s “murder” of Parmenides beside the modern handling of Jung as the same manoeuvre: the preference for clarity over the “dark substance”, for reason over “God’s secret intentions”. Part Three, “The Sunset Way”, concerns prophecy, Answer to Job — “a book which was to lead to so many misunderstandings” — and the definition of the prophet as “one who at any moment in history speaks or writes or communicates faithfully, accurately, without interfering with the process, on behalf of the divine”; “the only possible approach to the reality of the prophets will always be from the scorned side, the silenced side, the disgusting side of prophecy”. Part Four turns to Corbin, who at Eranos in 1949 found “an atmosphere of absolute spiritual freedom”, whose “inner sheikh” Suhrawardī traced his own lineage back to Pythagoras and Empedocles, who “alone saw almost immediately who and what Jung really was”, and whose last conversation with Jung, in September 1955, was sohbet, “communion between two individuated people”, monos pros monon; Corbin’s imaginatio vera is distinguished from Hillman’s “imaginal”, which “privately infuriated Corbin”. Then the ending: Jung’s vision of 1913, “a great tide of blood, full of limbs and destruction washing up against the Alps”; his last visions, of the destruction of a substantial portion of the planet, and the one that von Franz locked in a drawer, in which the West is “already quite still, poised at the point of stasis before the inevitable unwinding begins” — “the movement has stopped. The energy behind its momentum is over; spent”; humanity running “above empty space” like cartoon characters; “unless we are prepared to go even deeper into the darkness … we don’t stand a chance”; and the title, which came to Kingsley in a dream and means the bier on which a coffin rests: the book’s purpose is “to provide a catafalque for our western world”, and its last pages join Jung’s final visions to Kingsley’s own dreams, “tracing out the desolate outlines of the ending of our culture”, with “the cry of Merlin”, the soul’s cry for freedom from the glass cage of reason, as their sound. The notes, Kingsley says, are “a joke, grotesque monuments to a culture that abandoned itself”.⁵³

Characters. Jung, prophet and concealer of prophecy; Philemon, who is Simon Magus; Corbin and his inner sheikh Suhrawardī; Stella Corbin, whose recollections Kingsley uses; Toni Wolff and Marie-Louise von Franz; the Jungian editors and critics as the murderers of the father; Parmenides and Empedocles as the ancestors; and the Contrary, who is the author.

Major themes. Jung as prophet; the domestication of the sacred; revelation against explanation; the line from the Presocratics through the Gnostics and alchemists to Jung and Corbin; the end of the West and the duty of mourning.

Esoteric symbolism. The catafalque; the Spirit of the Depths; Philemon and the Seven Sermons; the inner sheikh; sohbet and monos pros monon; the cry of Merlin; the tide of blood against the Alps; “empty space”.

Relation to other works. Catafalque grew from a chapter of A Book of Life and is, Kingsley says, “contained” by it; its theory of seeded and dying cultures is that of A Story Waiting to Pierce You; its Corbin and Suhrawardī are those of Dark Places and Reality; its Jung is the Jung whose Symbols of Transformation Kingsley had cited for the pipe hanging from the sun as early as 1999.

Takeaway. The book divided its readers along a line that had nothing to do with their competence. Gemelli Marciano, a classicist, called it “a salutary shock” and Shaw “a prophetic masterpiece”; Bishop, a Jung scholar, “an extraordinary achievement”; Cavalli, a Jungian analyst, “masterful and worth the time of analysts and students alike” but given to “idealizing (or literalizing!) Jung, even deifying him”; Angela Voss found “brilliant intuitive insights” and “a grave lack of self-reflection”; Robert Segal, in the Times Higher Education, that “Kingsley never offers arguments for his intuitions about Jung”; and Richard Noll, whom the book attacks, that it is “hyper-hagiography” and its author “the self-appointed prophet of the obvious”. Kingsley answered Segal in a comment on the newspaper’s website the same day.⁵⁴

A Book of Life (2021)#

At a glance. London: Catafalque Press, 1 September 2021; 258 pages; German translation, Ein Buch des Lebens (Novalis, 2025); a Russian digital edition with an appendix of four articles. The publisher calls it “the culmination and completion of an extraordinary body of work”: “Hauntingly personal, almost autobiographical, this is not the story of one man’s life. It’s the secret story of us all … A Book of Life offers a roadmap to reality by showing how it still is possible to experience the sacred truths our ancestors knew and lived — that inside every human being lies the universe and that life itself, in all its splendour, is what lies behind our tiny lives.” And: “to encourage anyone to read it now would be totally wrong — because it was written to be read not by people today but in a distant future.” Endorsed by Pir Zia Inayat-Khan: “This indescribable book is more than a book. It’s an apocalypse — a fire from another world.” An audio introduction by the psychologist Robert Sardello accompanies it. No table of contents has been published and no substantive review located; the account below rests on the publisher, on readers’ reports and on quotations they have transcribed.⁵⁵

Argument, as far as it can be reconstructed. The book began in 2012 as “a simple account of what it means to live an ancient tradition in the modern world”, and its first chapter, one reader reports, “sets the tone of the book and gives you fair warning … a description of the call on his life that presented itself very early”. Its fifth page tells the reader that “this book has been written to be read — but not by you”. It recounts, in the first person, the “invisible influences” and “supernatural guides” of Kingsley’s early life, the raven of September 2001, the Tiwa elder who identified him as Coyote, the ravens that recur, and the Sufis, of whom it says that “the song of the Sufis, once it starts, never ends. There is a traditional saying that you should never waste your time trying to find real Sufis because they are the ones who will find you.” Its teaching is the teaching of Reality turned into rule: “The rules are simple. Prepare in silence. Train in stillness. Strain as much as possible to become worthy of facing the impossible. Maybe you’ll be unlucky, or lucky, enough to be chosen but the chances are you won’t. It’s much more likely someone else will be picked who is far simpler and purer than you, untrained, unprepared: the timeliest reminder of what matters most. Intelligence, everything anyone would think of as intelligence, is entirely irrelevant. It’s just a question of being empty enough to transmit the will of the gods.” “All nature is waiting for us to become conscious because there’s a particular quality of consciousness that only humans can provide.” “As the ancient Gnostics patiently explained almost two thousand years ago, there is no greater trap than to believe one has arrived at ‘the completion of all completions’ … Then even liberation traps us in its net.” “The precision of existence can never be known by the human mind … the purpose of being human is to leave everything human behind.” And, in a voice that is no longer the author’s, “I am behind all and I am all … I am the one who sleeps forever, twin watchers perched at either shoulder. Here I lie waiting, so patiently, to draw everybody back to me.” Of his critics the book says that what he has written “has not only already refuted each of their arguments. It’s refuted what they are.” How it ends I have not been able to establish.⁵⁶

Major themes. The call and the guides; transmission as emptiness; the Sufis who find you; the trap of liberation; the book written for the future.

Relation to other works. The “container” of Catafalque; the personal counterpart of Reality’s “you are the stone”; the source, in its “twin watchers”, of what may be the title of The Watching Words.

Takeaway. The most personal of the books and the most divisive: its readers on Goodreads split between five stars and one, and the publisher’s warning that no one should be encouraged to read it now is, in the terms of Reality, an honest deception.⁵⁷

“Shamans Among the Greeks” (2024) and The Watching Words (2026)#

Kingsley’s reply to Bremmer, “Shamans among the Greeks,” Asdiwal 19 (2024), 237–248, is his first publication in a scholarly journal in twenty-two years. It defends Hyperborea as north-and-east (“the modern concept of cardinal points … simply didn’t exist back then”), the Avar practice of giving envoys impersonal titles, the Mongol arrow-bearers and the trade links of Clazomenae with China; accuses Bremmer of “distortion and misdirection … the cloth of which it’s made” and of “inventing imaginary evidence that never existed”; sets academic resistance to shamanism in a history of suppression — Tibetan Buddhist, Christian, Soviet — whose rule is “appropriate, invalidate, exterminate”; describes the classicists’ project as an effort to “strip the rational Greek miracle as far as possible of anything alien, hide whatever might relate to magic well away out of sight”; and closes with Burkert’s approval of the book and his fondness for a quotation Kingsley had given him long ago about “inverse credulity parading as skepticism”. The Watching Words (London: Catafalque Press, 316 pages) is announced for 9 September 2026 as “an astonishing book about the reality that lies behind religion and beyond philosophy”: “seemingly about many different things: the meaning of education, the dangers of imitation, the purpose of alchemy, the true roots of Sufism, the depths of eternity”, honouring “Pythagoras and Socrates, Empedocles, Parmenides and Heraclitus, Aeschylus and Solon, Dhu’l-Nun and Suhrawardi”, and beneath them “the one story of human unconsciousness in all its absurdity always trying to find a greater reality and never discovering how”. At the time this entry was written it had not appeared.⁵⁸

Recordings and Translations#

Nineteen audio recordings of talks and retreats given between 2003 and 2015, and several films, are sold from Kingsley’s website: among them “Philosophy as a Sacred Tradition” (International Society for Neoplatonic Studies, New Orleans, and University of Texas, 2003), “Primordial Meditation: An Introduction” (Esalen and Berkeley, 2004), “The Path that is No Path: From the Ancient Greeks to the World of the Sufis” (Bellevue, 2004), “The Golden Chain” (Rhinebeck, 2005), “Return to Eternity” and “The Great Secret” (2006), “Everything”, a set of eight lectures given at the Abode of the Message in October 2006, “The Language of the Birds and the Secrets of Depression”, “Christ: The Forgotten Song”, “The Elders”, “The Shape of God”, “The Language of Silence” and “The End of Silence” (the Sufi Conference of 2006); the documentary Finding Our Ancient Wisdom (2008); the conversation with Murray Stein on the Red Book (Zurich, 2018); and “Spirit of the Depths”, a film by Thomas Gray on the writing of Catafalque. His books have been translated, by his own count, into more than a dozen languages, most fully into Spanish (Atalanta), German, Italian, French, Greek and Turkish.⁵⁹

Reception and Significance#

Kingsley has been read by three publics that seldom read one another, and each has judged a different book. Classicists judged Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic and, with more difficulty, Reality; Jungians judged Catafalque; the readers of Parabola, the Golden Sufi Center, the Temenos Academy and the perennialist and contemplative press judged the whole as a single revelation. The reception that matters for the history of esotericism is the interplay between them.

Among classicists the 1995 book was received as a serious and original work by a scholar of unusual range. Anne Sheppard in the Classical Review called it “a remarkable achievement: challenging, learned and at the same time enthralling to read”; John Bussanich, accepting the reidentification of Empedocles’ roots and the Sicilian correspondences of the Phaedo myth while noting that Kingsley “often argues from silence”, judged it “a great contribution to scholarship: invigorating, profoundly learned, polemical, original, and provocative”; Michael Morgan thought it “may well be the most important book about Presocratic philosophy in years”; Anthony Long, in a phrase reprinted in every later book, called it the once-in-a-generation work “that can transform a whole discipline”. Denis O’Brien dissented on the philology and on the magic. Walter Burkert, the leading historian of Greek religion of the age, endorsed Dark Places and A Story in print and, on Kingsley’s account, in private. The mystical books were harder to place. Gregory Shaw, the historian of Iamblichean theurgy, has been their steadiest scholarly advocate, calling Reality “a work of rare genius” and Catafalque “a prophetic masterpiece”; Laura Gemelli Marciano, a Presocratic specialist at Zurich, gave Reality a fifteen-page review in Gnomon, endorsed its shift “from doctrine to the method of esoteric transmission”, and in a later article of her own on Parmenides wrote that “Kingsley 2003 has recently solved this problem” of joining the ecstatic proem to the goddess’s teaching; Seyyed Hossein Nasr found in Reality a reading “remarkably close” to the Sufis’ own and opened his history of Islamic philosophy with Kingsley’s “brilliant studies”. Others held the incubatory reading at arm’s length as “very difficult to assess as a truth claim”, and the shamanic reading of the iatromantis met its sharpest rebuttal from Jan Bremmer, who had already argued that there was no Greek shamanism, and whose “Method and Madness in the Study of Greek Shamanism: The Case of Peter Kingsley” (2018) concluded that Kingsley’s Mongol Abaris rested “on non-evidence, on distorting available evidence and on misreading sources”. Kingsley’s reply of 2024, which accuses Bremmer of “inventing imaginary evidence that never existed”, and the 2025 reissue of the book, keep the quarrel open. What no classicist has disputed is the philology of the articles: the Poimandres etymology, the analysis of the four-element doxography and the reading of Xanthus are cited as standard, and Samuel Loncar’s judgement of 2021 — “No one who works on Greek philosophy can ignore Kingsley’s scholarship. A reckoning with Kingsley is ineluctable because the quality of his work is unignorable” — states the position that the discipline has, uneasily, adopted.⁶⁰

The reception of Catafalque among Jungians was described under Works; it ranged from Paul Bishop’s “extraordinary achievement” and Cavalli’s “masterful” through Voss’s “grave lack of self-reflection” to Segal’s and Noll’s dismissals, and it was conducted, unusually, in public exchanges in which Kingsley took part. The wider spiritual reception has been consistent since 1999. Jacob Needleman wrote of Dark Places that “to absorb what this book says is to encounter a completely new vision of the ancient world”; Huston Smith, Thomas Moore, Larry Dossey, Robert Johnson, Eckhart Tolle, Rupert Spira, Adyashanti, Jeffrey Kripal and Pir Zia Inayat-Khan have endorsed the later books; Adyashanti, who recorded a long conversation with Kingsley in 2020, calls him “a first-class mystic”; Arthur Versluis’s American Gurus (2014) treats him as the exponent of an “immediatism” of Western rather than Eastern origin; and his essays have appeared in the perennialist anthology Crossing Religious Frontiers and in the Rosicrucian Digest. Richard Smoley, who interviewed him for the Theosophical Society’s Quest in 2011, has called him “probably the only person alive who understands the Presocratics”. The documentary of 2008, the retreats and lecture tours of 2003–2015, the Foundation and Catafalque Press, and a large online following, much of it reached through podcasts and social media rather than through the academy, complete the picture of a writer who has done what few scholars of esotericism have done: he has become, for a public, a teacher of the tradition he studies.⁶¹

Three questions about Kingsley’s significance remain open, and the entry can only state them. The first is historical: whether the Velia inscriptions, the testimony about Ameinias and the imagery of the poem really establish that Parmenides belonged to a lineage of incubatory healer-priests of Apollo, or whether they establish that Roman-period Velia remembered him as one. On this the specialists remain divided, and the division is the measure of how much Kingsley has changed the question. The second is methodological: whether the “academic high treason” of placing oneself inside the tradition one studies, which Kingsley committed deliberately and which Loncar names, disqualifies his history or is the condition of its insight; his own answer, that “each of us has a scholar living inside us” and that scholarship of the ordinary kind is “an exercise in cunning”, is not one the discipline can accept and is the one his readers accept. The third is the question that Wouter Hanegraaff’s history of esotericism as “rejected knowledge” poses in general and Kingsley’s career poses in particular: what happens when a historian of a rejected tradition ceases to describe it and begins to speak for it. The Presocratic healer-prophets, the Hermetic revealer whose name means “the knowledge of Re”, the alchemists of Akhmim and the Sufis of Persia, the “leaven” passed from centre to centre — these Kingsley recovered as a historian, and they are now part of the map. Parmenides’ goddess, “whatever you think exists”, the honest deception, the catafalque for the West — these he asserts as a witness, and the entry records them as his testimony. That both can be found in the same books, written by the same hand, is his contribution and his problem.⁶²

Bibliography#

Primary#

Books

Kingsley, Peter, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995; paperback 1996.

——. In the Dark Places of Wisdom. Inverness, CA: The Golden Sufi Center, 1999; London, 2001.

——. Reality. Inverness, CA: The Golden Sufi Center, 2003; second edition, London: Catafalque Press, 2020.

——. A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tibet and the Destiny of the Western World. Foreword by Joseph Rael. Point Reyes, CA: The Golden Sufi Center, 2010; second edition, London: Catafalque Press, 2025.

——. Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity. 2 vols. London: Catafalque Press, 2018; one-volume edition, 2021.

——. A Book of Life. London: Catafalque Press, 2021.

——. The Watching Words. London: Catafalque Press, announced for 9 September 2026.

Articles and essays

——. “The Greek Origin of the Sixth-Century Dating of Zoroaster,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 53:2 (1990), 245–265.

——. “Ezekiel by the Grand Canal: Between Jewish and Babylonian Tradition,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3rd ser., 2:3 (1992), 339–346.

——. “Poimandres: The Etymology of the Name and the Origins of the Hermetica,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 56 (1993), 1–24; reprinted in van den Broek and van Heertum (eds.), From Poimandres to Jacob Böhme (2000), 41–76.

——. “Empedocles in Armenian,” Revue des études arméniennes 24 (1993), 47–57.

——. “Empedocles and His Interpreters: The Four-Element Doxography,” Phronesis 39:3 (1994), 235–254.

——. “Empedocles’ Sun,” Classical Quarterly 44:2 (1994), 316–324.

——. “From Pythagoras to the Turba philosophorum: Egypt and Pythagorean Tradition,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 57 (1994), 1–13.

——. “Greeks, Shamans and Magi,” Studia Iranica 23 (1994), 187–198.

——. “The Christian Aristotle: Theological Interpretation and Interpolation in Medieval Versions of On the Heavens,” Le Muséon 107 (1994), 195–205.

——. “Meetings with Magi: Iranian Themes among the Greeks, from Xanthus of Lydia to Plato’s Academy,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3rd ser., 5:2 (1995), 173–209.

——. “Notes on Air: Four Questions of Meaning in Empedocles and Anaxagoras,” Classical Quarterly 45:1 (1995), 26–29.

——. “Artillery and Prophecy: Sicily in the Reign of Dionysius I,” Prometheus 21 (1995), 15–23.

——. “Empedocles’ Two Poems,” Hermes 124:1 (1996), 108–111.

——. “Knowing Beyond Knowing: The Heart of Hermetic Tradition,” Parabola 22:1 (1997), 21–25.

——. “In the Dark Places of Wisdom,” Parabola 23:4 (1998), 40–46.

——. “Paths of the Ancient Sages,” Lapis 10 (1999), 63–68; revised as “Paths of the Ancient Sages: A Pythagorean History,” Rosicrucian Digest 87:1 (2009), 2–9.

——. “An Introduction to the Hermetica: Approaching Ancient Esoteric Tradition,” in Roelof van den Broek and Cis van Heertum (eds.), From Poimandres to Jacob Böhme: Gnosis, Hermetism and the Christian Tradition. Amsterdam: In de Pelikaan, 2000, 17–40.

——. “Empedocles for the New Millennium,” Ancient Philosophy 22:2 (2002), 333–413.

——. “Raven’s Appearance: The Language of Prophecy,” ReVision 26:4 (2004), 43–45.

——, with Maria Kingsley, “As Far As Longing Can Reach,” Parabola 31:2 (2006), 56–59.

——. “The Paths of the Ancient Sages: A Sacred Tradition Between East and West,” in Harry Oldmeadow (ed.), Crossing Religious Frontiers. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2010, 43–49.

——. “Shamans among the Greeks,” Asdiwal 19 (2024), 237–248.

Translation

Addas, Claude, Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn ʿArabī. Translated by Peter Kingsley. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1993.

Interviews

Munnis, Jeff, “An Interview with Peter Kingsley” (2003), AntiMatters 1:2 (2007).

Smoley, Richard, “Original Instructions: An Interview with Peter Kingsley,” Quest 99:3 (Summer 2011), 101–106.

Whittaker, Richard, “Peter Kingsley: Remembering What We Have Forgotten,” Conversations, 21 May 2011; edited version in Parabola 35:4 (2010–11).

Secondary#

Bishop, Paul, review of Catafalque, Journal of Analytical Psychology 64:3 (2019), 423–427.

Bremmer, Jan N., “Method and Madness in the Study of Greek Shamanism: The Case of Peter Kingsley,” Asdiwal 13 (2018), 93–109.

Burkert, Walter, “Das Proömium des Parmenides und die Katabasis des Pythagoras [The Proem of Parmenides and the Descent of Pythagoras],” Phronesis 14 (1969), 1–30.

Bussanich, John, review of Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 97.10.19 (1997).

Cavalli, Thom F., “Kingsley’s Howl and the Open Secret of Jung’s Life,” Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche 13:4 (2019), 85–97.

Christov, Ivan, review of Reality, Rhizai 2:1 (2005), 115–117.

Cornelli, Gabriele, In Search of Pythagoreanism: Pythagoreanism as an Historiographical Category. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013.

Corrigan, Kevin, review of A Story Waiting to Pierce You, Philosophy East and West 62:2 (2012), 281–286.

Detienne, Marcel, and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Les ruses de l’intelligence: La mètis des Grecs [The Ruses of Intelligence: Greek Mētis]. Paris: Flammarion, 1974.

Dodds, E. R., The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951.

Gemelli Marciano, M. Laura, review of Reality, Gnomon 78:8 (2006), 657–671.

——. “Images and Experience: At the Roots of Parmenides’ Aletheia,” Ancient Philosophy 28:1 (2008), 21–48.

——. “Revisiting Jung and Corbin: A Review of Peter Kingsley’s Catafalque,” Dionysius 37 (2019), 235–256.

Hartney, Christopher, review of In the Dark Places of Wisdom, Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review 9:1 (2018), 118–121.

Loncar, Samuel, “Is Philosophy Magic? The Roots of Reason in Parmenides,” Marginalia Review of Books, 24 September 2021.

Miller, Mitchell, “Ambiguity and Transport: Reflections on the Proem to Parmenides’ Poem,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 30 (2006).

Morgan, Michael L., review of Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic, American Historical Review 102:4 (1997), 1129–1131.

Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, review of Reality, Parabola 29:2 (2004), 106–111.

O’Brien, Denis, review of Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic, Isis 89:1 (1998), 122–124.

Ratcliffe, Jonathan, review of A Story Waiting to Pierce You, Eras 16:2 (2015), 124–127.

Ruiz, Nicolas Leon, review of A Story Waiting to Pierce You, Sacred Web 26 (2010).

Schibli, H. S., review of In the Dark Places of Wisdom, Ancient Philosophy 19:1 (1999), 145–151.

Segal, Robert A., review of Catafalque, Times Higher Education, 13 June 2019.

Shaw, Gregory, review of Reality, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2004.07.43.

——. Review of A Story Waiting to Pierce You, Ancient Philosophy 32:1 (2012), 171–174.

——. “The Cry of Merlin: Carl Jung and the Insanity of Reason,” Marginalia Review of Books, 17 January 2020.

Sheppard, Anne, “Empedoclea,” Classical Review 46:2 (1996), 269–271.

Versluis, Arthur, American Gurus: From Transcendentalism to New Age Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Voss, Angela, review of Catafalque, Journal of Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred 1:1 (2021), 113–124.