The best books for extra-canonical voyages that will challenge your assumptions

Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods was written, as a successful breakthrough, with the technique of fiction rather than nonfiction, and as a result, is a very engaging read. In a way, one could state that Hancock is the pioneer of narrative non-fiction, which already is and will continue to be the literary medium of choice of the twenty-first century. Some of the book’s claims are... odd (Atlantis in Antarctica!), others, for example the actual occurrence of the Great Flood, have been since confirmed by various other open-minded scholars. If you are amenable to having your hard-earned assumptions challenged, start here.

Forbidden Archaeology is useful in revealing in a very methodical and indeed scientific way to what extent mainstream science has gone in suppressing the evidence pointing to the reality that humans have inhabited this planet for much longer than we are told. In Chapter 1.11, for example, there is a very lucid explanation of the “Phenomenon of Suppression”: the different stages by which an anomalous finding is either ignored, explained away, ridiculed, dismissed, or suppressed. Quite an enterprise from an activity—science—that originally set out to explain the unexplained or the seemingly unexplainable. While the ponderous tome of 914 pages doesn’t make for the liveliest reading, it is nevertheless an impressive contribution to the extra-canonical.

More on the wacky side, and far more entertaining, is Terence McKenna’s True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise. For those who will never try “heroic doses” of psilocybin mushrooms deep in the Colombian jungle, this is a wild, vicarious ride, an amalgam of science, literature, myth, and exotica from an adventurer whose genuine inquisitiveness in things psychedelic goes hand in hand with mythomania—what an exuberant explosion of literary and philosophical high kitsch! If not persuaded, there follows the endorsement from The New York Times: “The polysyllabic sentences he lards with intellectual references are an attempt to lend credibility to the otherwise debunked subject of drugs.” Yes, a hatchet job from The New York Times could not make for a more valuable endorsement.

With scholarly discipline but also with a decidedly English sense of humor, The Rough Guide to Unexplained Phenomena 2 takes a path along that shadowy territory between the known and the unknown, between the dogmas of mainstream scientists and the reality of phenomena that happen regardless of (or even in spite of) such dogmas, much as, in a dramatic reversal, Galileo said centuries ago, after being forced to recant his claim that the Earth moved around the immovable sun: “And yet it moves.” (Back then, science, in its nascent state, was based on unbiased inquiry and rejected dogmas de facto. Today, mainstream science has morphed into a scientific priesthood.) The late John Michell was the author of, among others, View over Atlantis, one of the cult reads of the 1970s; Bob Rickard is the founder and editor of the Fortean Times.

Of the trinity of essential, prescient works that describe the decadence of the West—Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, René Guenon’s The Crisis of the Modern World, and Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World—I would pick the latter, with Hermann Hesse’s warning that it is a “really dangerous” book. And so it is. It is difficult not to be swept away by this radical rethinking of history. Only later does one begin to realize that it is, after all, a phenomenally well-built... fantasy. But its Wagnerian scope and intrinsic power make it one of the most disruptive books ever written, particularly because it’s so well constructed and so profoundly erudite. I would recommend it, but with the caveat: to be read cum grano salis by a mature, Apollonian reader, not by an impressionable, Dionysian youth.