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In 1926, C. G. Jung visited Taos Pueblo in northern New Mexico, whose chief said, “How can there be another god? Nothing can be without the sun.” Nineteen years later and some sixty miles away, on land appropriated by the US government from the Ildefonso Pueblo, the Los Alamos National Laboratory was built. Here the first atomic bombs were designed and constructed. Then, in the summer of 1945, the first nuclear device was tested in the desert of southern New Mexico, lighting “a thousand suns.” In The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post–Cold War New Mexico, Joseph Masco, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, offers a unique ethnographic analysis of the people and land that was appropriated for the birthplace and continued research and development of nuclear weapons that have prompted, along with global warming, the so-called Doomsday Clock to be set at two minutes to oblivion.

When C. G. Jung was about to begin his university studies, uncertain as to which direction he should take, he was “intensely interested in everything Egyptian and Babylonian, and would have liked b...

It is strange how purposefully piled rocks have made such an impact on the earth. They are found everywhere suitable materials are available. They may be simple trail markers, offerings to local de...

This collection of Joseph Campbell's essays, spanning nearly thirty years, reflects his originality, wit, and range as a student of mythology and ethnography and as a consummate teacher. It offers a sample of essays by the iconic teacher of mythology that fall into two major categories: Mythology and History, and Mythology and the Arts. The book opens with a talk Campbell gave on what and how he taught during his thirty-eight-year tenure at Sarah Lawrence College, the then experimental women's college located in Bronxville, NY. I chose three of the ten essays, discussing a few of what I see as weaknesses in Campbell's arguments, some of which can be allotted to progress the natural sciences have made since the essays were written and Campbell's death twenty-one years ago. I suggest that this is an important collection, one that offers an array of information on, and insights into, world mythology and human creativity, written with erudition in a style that is accessible to both the lay reader and...

Myoe Koben (1173–1232) was born into the Yuasa family in the Arita district of Kii, Japan. He was ordained into two Buddhist sects: Kegon, the Japanese version of the Chinese Hua-yen, and Shingon, a tantric sect related in spirit to the Tibetan Vajrayana. He also practiced zazen, Zen meditation, which scholar of religions George J. Tanabe, Jr., in his book on Myoe, misrepresents as a practice one does “to have visions.” 1 In fact, according to Eihei Dogen, the great Zen Master and philosopher who was Myoe’s contemporary, the purpose of zazen is to “drop body and mind.” Nevertheless, Myoe’s soteriological practices seem to have had a more visionary intention. A scholarly monk, Myoe wrote over fifty works in several genres, including philosophical treatises, letters, travel journals, and poetry. Although Myoe was abbot of Kozanji, a Kegon monastery, Mark Unno points out that Myoe devoted the last decade of his life to Shingon Buddhism’s “Mantra of Light.” Under the title, The Sutra of the Mantra of the Unfailing Rope Snare of the Buddha Vairocana’s Great Baptism, the mantra was brought to Japan from China around 300 years before Myoe’s birth. But it was he who brought it into practice. I first learned of Myoe when, in the early 1990s, I came across

HACKING IT cast iron pipe sawed straight through, blisters rising from the small hacksaw rushing to meet its end, singing, with you with you with you with you...LAYING NEW PIPE Where turds bob up with clogs of toilet paper and Tampax, mint trees & flowers thrive, the line was cracked by roots. One hundred year old terra cotta pipe, a young Bay tree broke her way through. We lay ten foot lengths black plastic tube, glue the joints, cross the stream, on out... CLEARING THE GROUND Clearing the ground, Frantically working the gears, Grabbing handles, pulling levers, billows of dust... O MAN, dragged over the land Behind a machine!! Tearing freeways, cracking sidewalks, Universities, libraries...whole worlds Of consciousness plowed back to seed.

With pick and shovel, find the brokencast iron pipe, pry out old lead,knock off rusty joints.20’ of 4” 40-schedule ABS sawedand coupled with rubber collarswith stainless steel braces,joined to pipe at next streamcrossing, joined to terra cottapipe under tea house site, joined to three lengths ironpipe cut three poems ago.1 lb brick of dull lead meltedin a pan becomes silver liquidpoured into iron bell-collars.Black cement smeared over allconnections is a waterproof coating.Taps turned and draining,toilets flushed... Give it all back.

Peter Pereira is a family physician and a poet. I weave excerpts from Dr. Pereira's poems into a brief history of medicine's mythological and historical roots, beginning with the Egyptian god Thoth, and the Greek physician Hippocrates. Along the way, I touch on the European Middle Ages and the Islamic World. Finally, I quote poet-critic T.S. Eliot, who was an early influence on Dr. Pereira's decision to become a poet, and contemporary physician-poets Rafael Campo and William Carlos Williams. I end by placing Dr. Pereira, whose practice is oriented toward immigrant families, in his indigenous Pacific Northwest, arguing that being both physician and poet helps Pereira to live in a world that is both intimately human and naturally impersonal.