As mentioned in the last post, my 2025 reading list is mostly going to be mythology.
Challenge:
- If liberals are right and violence is “learned” (as per Montagu and the Seville Statement) then there should be myths of the origins of the learning of this violence.
- If conservatives are right and violence gradually evolved from the killer ape (Dart, Ardrey, Jung), then there should also be myths of when this transition occurred from optimized animal combat to apocalyptic human violence.
Hypothesis: There are no myths of the origin of violence (aside from Cain & Abel and Hesiod) because violence (ROBA) constitutes the baseline operating system of humanity. All human culture is then the projection of the recursion of ROBA into deferential, recursive forms like language, sacrifice, kinship, art, etc
Reading list (total of 13,853 pages):
| Author | Title | Date | Page Count |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mieroop, Marc Van De | Cuneiform Texts and the Writing of History | 1999 | 170 |
| Bernstein, Peter L. | Power of Gold, The | 2000 | 372 |
| Darwin, Charles | Variation Of Animals & Plants Under Domestication, The – Vol 2 | 1905 | 525 |
| Prabhupada, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami | Bhagavad-Gita As It Is | 1983 / 1986 | 877 |
| Homer | Iliad & Odyssey | 2011 | 647 |
| Jung, Carl | Man and His Symbols | 1964 / 1968 | 396 |
| Multi | Mythology of All Races 1 – Greek & Roman | 1916 | 394 |
| Multi | Mythology of All Races 2 – Eddic | 386 | |
| Multi | Mythology of All Races 3 – Celtic & Slavic | 361 | |
| Multi | Mythology of All Races 4 – Finno, Ugric, Siberian | 559 | |
| Multi | Mythology of All Races 5 – Semitic | 417 | |
| Multi | Mythology of All Races 6 – Indian and Iranian | 1917/64 | 370 |
| Multi | Mythology of All Races 7 – Armenian and African | 1925/64 | 431 |
| Multi | Mythology of All Races 8 – Chinese & Japanese | 1928 | 368 |
| Multi | Mythology of All Races 9 – Oceanic | 1916/64 | 344 |
| Multi | Mythology of All Races 10 – North America | 1964 | 312 |
| Multi | Mythology of All Races 11 – Latin-American | 1964 | 344 |
| Multi | Mythology of All Races 12 – Egyptian & Indo-Chinese | 1964 | 430 |
| Boas, George | Essays on Primitivism and Related Ideas in the Middle Ages | 1948 | 216 |
| Ardrey, Robert | Social Contract, The | 1970 | 368 |
| Frankfort, Henri et al. | Before Philosophy | 1946/1963 | 264 |
| Nietzsche | Birth of Tragedy & The Genealogy of Morals | 1956 | 299 |
| Otterbein, Keith F | Evolution of War: A Cross-Cultural Study | 1970 | 158 |
| Burkert, Walter | Homo Necans | 1972 / 1983 | 325 |
| Ardrey, Robert | Hunting Hypothesis | 1976 | 336 |
| Mannheim, Karl | Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge | 1936 | 344 |
| Ovid | Metamorphoses, The | 1958 / 2009 | 457 |
| Banier, Abbe | Mythology and Fables of the Ancients Explain’d from History: London 1739-40 (Volume 1) | 336 | |
| Banier, Abbe | Mythology and Fables of the Ancients Explain’d from History: London 1739-40 (Volume 2) | 352 | |
| Banier, Abbe | Mythology and Fables of the Ancients Explain’d from History: London 1739-40 (Volume 3) | 368 | |
| Banier, Abbe | Mythology and Fables of the Ancients Explain’d from History: London 1739-40 (Volume 4) | 320 | |
| Young, Dudley | Origins Of The Sacred – The Ecstasies of Love and War | 1991 | 382 |
| Campbell, Joseph | Power of Myth | 288 | |
| Cohn, Norman | Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Revised and Expanded Edition | 1957 / 1970 | 371 |
| Fox, Robin | The Search for Society: Quest for a Biosocial Science and Morality | 1989 | 254 |
| Walsh, Maurice Nihil | War and the Human Race | 1949 / 1971 | 273 |
| Hesiod | Theogony, Works and Days, and Shield | 147 | |
| Kirsch, Jonathan | God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism | 2004 | 292 |
| Total Pages: | 13,853 |
My yearly bogey is 25,000 pages, which is 68 pages per day. To get through 13,853 pages, I need 203 days, which means the research will end on 7/26/25 at soonest, assuming I don’t get hung up on other projects, needing to research other things, etc.
In the meantime, stay tuned for announcement info about my upcoming book If These Fists Could Talk: A Stuntman’s Unflinching Take on Violence coming January 2025 to Amazon in both paperback and e-book format.
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