Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

What a frustrating and ultimately useless book. I enjoy exposes on forgotten areas of history, on complex conspiracies, and particularly on ancient religion and mythology. So this book promised much, a "Secret Teaching Of All Ages" for a new millennium. Ultimately though it delivered little, spitting out addle-headed supposition after supposition - each presented as fact - with nothing to back any of them up. As others have said, it's most tempting to read the book as a parody, but of what? Or whom? Because author Booth seems dead earnest throughout. Booth starts off fairly strong, with a plea for the reader to try to see the world in a different light, as the ancients might have seen it. This is a worthy request, and one well worth attempting. Also, his recounting of some of the more forgotten historiographers (ie Berossos) is interesting. This however is because Booth excels at exploiting the murkier areas of history. The less that's known about a city, a person, a structure, whatever, the more free Booth is to expound at length on its "secret" history - with of course nothing to back up his claim. Hence, the Sphinx was created as a monument to when the four dimensions came into being. Hence, Herodotus was an initiate who knew the true history of mankind (that we are descended from plantlike beings, according to Booth). Hence, it's all crap and it's all easily disproven. What's most frustrating is that Booth wants it both ways. Early on he suggests that Jesus did not exist (at least as Christians imagine him), and that literal-minded Christians should stop reading if they're easily offended. Now this I could get behind; I myself don't even believe in Jeebus, as Homer J. Simpson once said. But later on Booth wants to have it the other way: Jesus DID exist, and he was just as perfect as depicted in the gospels; not due to his facile son-of-Yahweh origins, but because he was the latest harbinger of the true god, the latest in a line of succession of gods who have come to earth to set things straight. The Jesus stuff gets even more muddled. For example, to contrast Jesus's "new" way of thinking (which earlier in the book Booth claims was actually pieced together from Socrates and Pythagoras; again, having it both ways) with the soon-to-be-replaced "old" way of thinking in the ancient world, Booth compares some sayings of Jesus with some sayings of Emperor Marcus Aurelius. With Jesus providing positive messages, Aurelius caught up in "depression." But the simple fact Booth fails to mention: Marcus Aurelius lived about 150 years AFTER the time in which Jesus is supposed to have lived! Things get downright stupid as the "Secret History" moves into the Middle Ages. Because here Booth claims that "true love" did not exist until Medieval times! That's right, the era in which eviscerations were public entertainment, priests sold forgiveness to the highest bidder, and sex was the work of the devil, was the era which saw the first appearance of true love. Any reader of the classics will know this is bull. And Booth does attempt to skirt over it; he gives ancient poet Sappho as an example, stating that even though her well-known poems SEEM to be about true love, they're really more concerned with physical love. No, true love was brand-new to the human experience sometime around the 1100s CE. That anyone could present something so idiotic is baffling. Again, maybe it all really IS a parody. I'll give you one example of how Booth so often misleads his reader. Around page 94 of the hardback (which I don't have in front of me at the moment) there's a neat little illustration of an ancient statue: a wavy-haired being with a vacant expression and crab pincers jutting from his forehead. Booth identifies this illustration as being of "The Green Man," a favorite subject of fringe scholars. If you check the image credits at the back of the book, this illustration is one of the many which are identified as being from "the author's collection." Meaning, no attestation to where Booth took it from. This is a clever little trick Booth plays throughout the book, covering up where his images are from, so he can claim they represent whatever he intends. So, this "Green Man" illustration. I happen to know that it's taken from James Morgan Pryse's 1910 treatise "The Restored New Testament;" Pryse himself took the illustration from "Specimens of Antient Sculpture," published in London in 1802 by the Dilettanti Society. Now, Pryse claimed the illustration was of "The Mystic Dionysos," with those pincers representing the constellation of Cancer, the dewlap ears representing the Ram, and etc. It's apparent Pryse based his claim off of the illustration, and that he never saw the actual statue, because do you know what this statue - which Booth claims was the Green Man and Pryse claimed was the Mystic Dionysos - is actually of? The sea god Triton. It's a shattered bust which was part of a group commissioned for Emperor Commodus's apotheosis around 191 CE. Maybe you've seen that famous bust of Commodus, where he's a pumped-up Hercules look-alike with a lion's head draped over his own. This statue of Triton stood beside it, and it features none of the things the fantasy-prone original artist depicted in "Specimens of Antient Sculpture," no pincers on its forehead, no dewlap ears. It's anyone's guess why that illustrator decided to add these spurious attributes (it's possible he just got creative when depicting the statue's wavy hair), but otherwise his illustration looks exactly like Triton; search online for "Triton right Musei Capitolini MC1121.jpg," compare that image with the illustration in your copy of "The Secret History," and you'll see they're one and the same. And you'll also see, right before your eyes, how Booth has mislead you into believing something that's not true. So if Booth is misleading you about something so trivial, why trust him with something more grand...something like, say, the "secret history" of the world?