Star.Ships Quotes

“Over the last century, a new power narrative has emerged that warps archaeological data into a specific shape the way a magnet affects iron filings. It is the unspoken belief that humanity is on a journey from worse to better, from primitive to complex, uncivilised to civilised. Our civilisation of perpetual war, total surveillance, obesity, runaway mental illness, overmedication, environmental degradation, widespread unemployment and scientific materialism has nothing to learn from the past because it is better. Enjoy that smartphone made by suicidal Taiwanese slave labour. Continue shopping.”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“As Patrick Harpur points out, we cannot ‘explain’ or ‘decode’ a myth. To look for the historic or scientific ‘truth’ of a myth is but to retell the myth, albeit in a less satisfying way. We render unto materialism the control of our most precious mythologies if we allow them to be ‘scientifically explained’ to us. A new language is required. New words.”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“Civilisation is the tobacco of river spirits. They seem to crave it, to will it into being up and down their banks, even though the relationship appears damaging over the long term.”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“History may well be written by the victors, but victors change and if we do not unwrite history then the propaganda from the previous regime still stands.”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“When Michael Cremo visited Ukraine’s Dnepropetrovsk Historical Museum, the head of the archaeology collection, Dr Larisa Churilova, showed him artefacts that indicated an early Stone Age belief in reincarnation. Her reason for not publishing her findings was that the editors of journals are uncomfortable with cultural interpretations. They just want to print things like ‘a stone flake two centimetres long was found at a depth of one metre in the excavation.”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“The historical is supremely political, supremely personal. There is a reason the stories of a culture are always kept with its priests. To tell someone where they are from is to tell someone who they are. A slave, a weaker gender, a god-king’s subject, a sinner, too brown-skinned to understand property ownership.”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“Absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Instead,”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“The ancient einkorn wheat, found in the hills surrounding Göbekli Tepe, just happens to be the single genetic ancestor of every strain of wheat grown and eaten across the earth. People gathering at a temple on a hill to worship ‘heavenly beings’ were like passengers in an airport during a pandemic. Wheat, and what to do with it, spread to every corner of the land. Mankind”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“Mythology is not history, but sometimes it is the vehicle in which history travels. Mythology is the wallpaper and history is the wall. A”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“Before we knew how to farm, before we lived in villages, before we even knew how to make pots, we built a star temple on a hill. The”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“The complete hijacking of all non-physical criteria of being human in favour of the unfounded belief that we are meat robots, lacking in free will, has enormous implications for what it is the archaeologist actually finds. As she thinks, so she proves.”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“The twenty first century offers us a new Holy Land Syndrome. There is still the spade in one hand, but the Bible has been replaced with a very selective reading of On the Origin of Species. Science does not consider itself an ideology, as it claims to only deal with what is real. This is, of course, what every ideology thinks of itself. The”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“The belief that the stories told in the Bible are in some or any sense accurate forms the baseline mythology of the field. In the words of Robert Anton Wilson, ‘what the thinker thinks, the prover proves.”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“Discoverer of Göbekli Tepe and its chief excavator, Dr Klaus Schmidt, famously warned against what he called ‘Holy Land Syndrome,’ which is the propensity for archaeologists to head out into the field with a spade in one hand and a Bible in the other. Holy Land Syndrome precludes the finding of something you didn’t already expect to find.”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“In the Spring 2014 issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Linda Heuman wrote in her article, ‘The Science Delusion’: In White’s view, once scientism rewrites our story so that the things human beings care about – like love, wonder, presence, or play – are reduced to atoms, genes, or neurons, human lives become easy prey to corporate and political interests. We become ‘mere functions within systems.’ White wants us to wake up and recognize that this view is not scientific discovery, it is ideology. Mistaking one for the other has profound consequences, ‘not just for knowledge but even more importantly for how we live.”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“There is a reason the stories of a culture are always kept with its priests. To tell someone where they are from is to tell someone who they are. A slave, a weaker gender, a god-king’s subject, a sinner, too brown-skinned to understand property ownership.”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“A new scientific discovery does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“Giordano Bruno, my unofficial patron saint, wrestled with these familiar imbalances between lived personal experience and available physical evidence in this very town. Precisely what Bruno was doing in Oxford in 1583 is a matter of endless academic discussion. But it clear he was preaching and debating his own hermetic infinitism. Having stepped beyond Ficino’s Catholic veneer and returned to a fully pagan hermetic system, he believed his use of Egyptian symbols, talimans and visualisation had uncovered humanity’s ‘source religion’ and our clearest insight into the nature of reality. What he found in the Hermetica was a fervent belief in mankind’s stellar origins and immortal destiny among innumerable worlds. The”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“All archaeological evidence of contact is accompanied by cultural evidence, but not all cultural evidence of contact is accompanied by archaeological evidence. Stories”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“Israelites standing uncomfortably under a banana tree spirit, warily eyeing the ancestral death masks, like confused foreign guests at a wedding reception. The”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

“Any given field makes ‘truth statements’ that form a network of relationships with themselves, governed by a worldview that establishes what is or is not knowledge within that field. Stories that fall outside this network first become untrue, and then they fade completely from reality. In the early years of the twenty first century, the empowered, informed shaman is presented with the opportunity to rescue these fading stories from the spirit world and restore them to the tribe. As with all journeys to the spirit world, dangers abound for the unprepared. Discretion, parsimony and evidence-based reasoning, now that they exist in the wider culture, belong here as much as they do in the hard sciences. These are the fetishes we must carry to extract truthful stories from the spirits.”
― Gordon White, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits