Why am I passionate about this?

As a student of mythology and archetypal psychology, I invite you to interrogate your assumptions about self and society, to consider the narratives that we all take for granted. We live between great polar opposites. One is how our leaders embody old, toxic stories. The other asks who we might become if we imagine new ones. But only by dropping our sense of innocence and acknowledging the depths of our darkness can we open ourselves to the possibilities of real transformation. I invite you inside our mythic walls, to examine what it means to be an American. I hope to facilitate a collective initiation and invite you to think mythologically.


I wrote

Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence

By Barry Spector,

Book cover of Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence

What is my book about?

Conventional authorities can no longer make sense of the violence, intolerance, and sheer madness that we encounter on a daily…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: and Other Writings

Barry Spector Why did I love this book?

This country was settled primarily by Puritan extremists who imprinted their deep distrust of the body’s needs onto future generations. The Calvinist obsession with sin and predestination led to a uniquely American situation. As wealth became a sign of grace, poverty indicated moral failure.

Weber’s classic book describes the process in which a perspective that began in renunciation was transformed into the drive to work incessantly in the pursuit of worldly success and, eventually, conspicuous consumption. As the strictly religious fervor dissipated over time, the competitive quest for efficiency, productivity, wealth, and the self-validation they symbolized remained and became our most fundamental value.

What others would later call the “American Dream” endures because, like no other myth, it promises fulfillment both in this world and the next. This helped me understand our obsession with individualism and why America ignores or mistreats many of its children simply because their parents are poor.

By Max Weber, Peter Baehr, Gordon C. Wells

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In The Protestant Ethic, Max Weber opposes the Marxist concept of dialectical materialism and relates the rise of the capitalist economy to the Calvinist belief in the moral value of hard work and the fulfillment of one's worldly duties.


Book cover of The American Monomyth

Barry Spector Why did I love this book?

My introduction to world mythology was Joseph Campbell, who described a nearly universal narrative – or monomyth – in which a young man (such as Christ, Percival, or the Buddha) ventures from his land, defeats opponents or temptations and returns with a critical gift for his people.

America, however, inverted this myth in profoundly important ways. In our story, repeated over three centuries in thousands of sermons, novels, movies, television, and video games, an innocent and racially pure community is threatened by evil (usually non-white).

When democratic institutions fail to suppress the threat, a selfless superhero arrives – from elsewhere – to defeat the villains and restore the community to harmony. Then, however, disdaining the feminine values of community and relationship, this hero disappears (often into the West).

I realized that he is the model for both our ideas of distant fathering as well as our unshakable belief in American exceptionalism, a nation divinely ordained to save the world, often by utilizing extreme violence.

By Robert Jewett, John Shelton Lawrence,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The American Monomyth as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Sociology


Book cover of Rituals Of Blood: The Consequences Of Slavery In Two American Centuries

Barry Spector Why did I love this book?

This Black sociologist demands that we take a deep look into the religious basis of American racism.

Of 5,000 cases of lynching reported between 1880 and 1930, at least 40% functioned as actual human sacrifices, very large communal rituals that identified certain individuals as the source of the community’s problems and eliminated them. The sacrifice created a compact between the people and their deities, expiating their sins and reinforcing their values.

"The victim mediated between the sacred and the profane...the burning cross distilled it all: sacrificed Negro joined by the torch with sacrificed Christ, burnt together and discarded...” Well into the 20th century, “The cross – Christianity’s central symbol of Christ’s sacrificial death – became identified with the crucifixion of the Negro.” Forced to carry all the projections of the white unconscious, the Black man became the American Dionysus.

Patterson observes that in recent generations the stereotype of America’s internal “Other” has expanded to include aspects of which white America is now nervously envious. This ultimate Dionysian symbol crosses boundaries and dissolves them. “The Afro-American male body – as superathlete, as irresistible entertainer...as sexual outlaw, as gangster.”

By Orlando Patterson,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Rituals Of Blood as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In the first essay, Patterson analyzes the very latest survey data to delineate the different attitudes, behaviors, and circumstances of Afro-American men and women, dissecting both the external and internal causes for the great disparities he finds.In the second essay, Patterson focuses on the lynching of Afro-American boys and men during the decades after Reconstruction, particularly on the substantial number of cases that constituted apparent ritual human sacrifice. As no one has done before, Patterson reveals how the complex interplay between Christian sacrificial symbolism and the deep recesses of post-bellum Southern culture resulted in some of the most shameful, barbaric…


Book cover of Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag

Barry Spector Why did I love this book?

This is the scariest book I have ever read. The authors, a communications professor and a psychologist (and veteran), argue that nationalism is the most powerful religion in the United States.

The doctrine that provides the central experience of Christian faith is the sacrifice of an irreplaceable son by an all-powerful father whose will it was that the son should die violently. In the modern world, and especially in America, nationalism has taken on and replicated this mythic function.

What keeps the group together and makes us feel unified is not the sacrifice of the enemy but the sacrifice of the very best of our own. Through successful sacrifice (when enough of our young men are killed), internal hostilities are discharged and the group is re-unified. Sacrifice restores the authority of the nation/god and reconsolidates the group.

This is why we die for the flag, commit our children to do so, and when society seems to be collapsing, why we thrill to the possibility of another war. Then the cycle begins again.

By Carolyn Marvin, David W. Ingle,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Blood Sacrifice and the Nation as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This compelling book argues that American patriotism is a civil religion of blood sacrifice, which periodically kills its children to keep the group together. The flag is the sacred object of this religion; its sacrificial imperative is a secret which the group keeps from itself to survive. Expanding Durkheim's theory of the totem taboo as the organizing principle of enduring groups, Carolyn Marvin uncovers the system of sacrifice and regeneration which constitutes American nationalism, shows why historical instances of these rituals succeed or fail in unifying the group, and explains how mass media are essential to the process. American culture…


Book cover of Shadow Dancing in the USA

Barry Spector Why did I love this book?

This journalist, screenwriter, and novelist is well-versed in psychology, mythology, history, and musicology. His essay in this book, Hear That Long Snake Moan, is the single best piece of non-fiction I have ever read, and it inspired me to write my book.

Our disease – the Western divorce of consciousness from flesh – appears as consumerism, environmental degradation, fundamentalism, perpetual war, genocide, and racism. Yet, mysteriously, it may be possible that the terrible uprooting and enslavement of some fifty million black people over three centuries actually initiated a great healing process.

For all its sorrows, the twentieth century saw periods when Dionysian madness seized the Apollonian mind in its flight from the body and brought it back to Earth. African-American music fundamentally altered America and began the slow process of cleaning out the festering wounds underlying puritanism, nationalism, and materialism. We have a long way to go, but Ventura has charted the territory. One, two, three, four, let’s dance!

By Michael Ventura,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Shadow Dancing in the USA as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Essays discuss marriage, sexuality and religion, dance, the sixties, conversation, the American Revolution, television, rock music, motion pictures, cities, and modern myths


Explore my book 😀

Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence

By Barry Spector,

Book cover of Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence

What is my book about?

Conventional authorities can no longer make sense of the violence, intolerance, and sheer madness that we encounter on a daily basis. We need a new—or very old—way of thinking. The study of mythology offers us a broader perspective and can help us become aware of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

This book shows how we, individually and collectively, re-enact old patterns that cause us to subvert our goals, miss the deeper meaning in events and, perhaps, fail to prevent our headlong slide into cultural collapse. But by looking at our history and popular culture through the lenses of Greek myth, indigenous wisdom, and archetypal psychology, we may find a path toward a vision of what we might become.

Book cover of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: and Other Writings
Book cover of The American Monomyth
Book cover of Rituals Of Blood: The Consequences Of Slavery In Two American Centuries

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Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism

By John Kenneth White,

Book cover of Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism

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Why am I passionate about this?

Reading was a childhood passion of mine. My mother was a librarian and got me interested in reading early in life. When John F. Kennedy was running for president and after his assassination, I became intensely interested in politics. In addition to reading history and political biographies, I consumed newspapers and television news. It is this background that I have drawn upon over the decades that has added value to my research.

John's book list on who we are, how we’ve changed, and what gives us hope

What is my book about?

It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. When the Republican Party lost five straight presidential elections during the 1930s and 1940s, three things happened: (1) Republicans came to believe that presidential elections are rigged; (2) Conspiracy theories arose and were believed; and (3) The presidency was elevated to cult-like status.

Long before Trump, each of these phenomena grew in importance. The John Birch Society and McCarthyism became powerful forces; Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first “personal president” to rise above the party; and the development of what Harry Truman called “the big lie,” where outrageous falsehoods came to be believed. Trump…

Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism

By John Kenneth White,

What is this book about?

It didn't begin with Donald Trump. The unraveling of the Grand Old Party has been decades in the making. Since the time of FDR, the Republican Party has been home to conspiracy thinking, including a belief that lost elections were rigged. And when Republicans later won the White House, the party elevated their presidents to heroic status-a predisposition that eventually posed a threat to democracy. Building on his esteemed 2016 book, What Happened to the Republican Party?, John Kenneth White proposes to explain why this happened-not just the election of Trump but the authoritarian shift in the party as a…


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