The new Apocrypha: A guide to strange science and occult beliefs

by John Sladek

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812817125
• ISBN13: 9780812817126
• Release Date: January 1974
• Publisher: Stein and Day
• Length: 375 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.

Customer Reviews

charming content, questionable motives

The exposure of human gullibility and self-delusion is such easy work - demanding only some accurate research - that one wonders why more people do not undertake it. This is, on the face of it, a peculiar project: a science-fiction writer taking time off his day job to write one long guide of the strangest kind of cultish or pseudo-scientific stuff that was wheeling around in the late sixties and early seventies (a time very sympathetic to such things). The book is economically written, well referenced and good fun, and the author, as one would expect from a capable professional writer, is able to send up his subjects with the minimum of effort, letting them speak for themselves. (One quotation from English bad-writing legend Barbara Cartland is particularly to be cherished.)One has to wonder about his own intellectual position, though. We find out with dismay that he is a friend of Michael Moorcock, who is not only a prejudiced enemy of religion but the author of some of the most odiously immoralistic books ever written (take the praise of rape in GLORIANA or of mass murder in some of the ELRIC books), viciously using a practised "literary" hand to promote views that make John Norman of GOR fame sound mild. And while there is nothing in this book of Moorcock's more extreme and ludicrous attitudes, there is a good deal to suggest that religious positions are neither taken seriously nor knowledgeably. What he describes as the Catholic position in his otherwise well-deserved skewering of Teilhard de Chardin (and he has not even said the worst of Teilhard, who was a lifelong admirer of totalitarian dictatorships and especially of Chinese Communism) makes Catholicism sound more like a variety of Hinduism than the religion of Augustine or Aquinas, Suarez or Chesterton. Besides, one would never understand from his writing that the Catholic Church has condemned Teilhard's writings for the heretical trash that they are (with loud approval, by the way, from one of Moorcock's favourite targets - C.S.Lewis, who was not a Catholic). From a different point of view, his ridiculously unsympathetic and extremely brief reference to the great philosopher Giovanbattista Vico, quoted,`alas, from Benedetto Croce, is gravely prejudicial and puts his readers - who are not likely to have read much philosophy themselves - in danger of excluding themselves from one of the most original and creative minds in many centuries, the father of half a dozen modern disciplines from anthropology to culture history.Having said all that, this book is more likely to be an influence for good than for evil. If the author has any negative view about religion as such, he keeps them to himself; there is no implication anywhere that the religious person as such is an idiot (such as one finds scattered all over Moorcock). Sladek has only attacked what is more than deserving of attack, and the dose of scepticism he delivers in this book is healthy for any intellectual constitution.

The Guru-Busters Malleus

A text well worth searching for! Sladek weaves an exciting book out of what could be a very dry subject. A must-have to be jealously guarded by any aspirant guru-buster. The only thing left to say is...when is the sequel due