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pecuniumI'm reading Richard Cohen's, "Chasing the Sun". It's a decent book, so far, about the cultural aspects of the sun. It's got some good writing, but every so often there are some real howlers:
In India and Africa the lion and the tiger are solar animals. Sunrise being represented by a young lion, noon by one in its prime, and sunset by one in its old age. Where lions are absent, local communities adapt: in the pre-Conquest Americas, the eagle and the jaguar are the chosen beasts.
In the book it's across two pages. So the badness of it is perhaps differently apparent. Either India and Africa ought to swap, or the lions and tigers ought to, to keep the order of the pairs in synch.
But that's not such a big deal. I'd also have liked to see something which talks about tigers in relation to the sun, since he made a point of bringing them up.
But the bit about lions and "Africa" is in need of some work too. Africa is a BIG place. I'll bet that set of images he tosses out so blithely as, "the way things are," is tolerably localised.
And then we turn the page and see that in the absence of lions the "local communities adapt..."
WTF? The Lion is some sort of primeval archetype... burned into the collective unconscious to the point that those who don't live near them have to, "adapt,"?
There haven't been too many howlers like that, and there have been some really good points about how what one interprets about something like Stonehenge, or the Pyramids, etc. may perhaps say a lot more about the observer than the observed, but sheesh... had he no editor?
In India and Africa the lion and the tiger are solar animals. Sunrise being represented by a young lion, noon by one in its prime, and sunset by one in its old age. Where lions are absent, local communities adapt: in the pre-Conquest Americas, the eagle and the jaguar are the chosen beasts.
In the book it's across two pages. So the badness of it is perhaps differently apparent. Either India and Africa ought to swap, or the lions and tigers ought to, to keep the order of the pairs in synch.
But that's not such a big deal. I'd also have liked to see something which talks about tigers in relation to the sun, since he made a point of bringing them up.
But the bit about lions and "Africa" is in need of some work too. Africa is a BIG place. I'll bet that set of images he tosses out so blithely as, "the way things are," is tolerably localised.
And then we turn the page and see that in the absence of lions the "local communities adapt..."
WTF? The Lion is some sort of primeval archetype... burned into the collective unconscious to the point that those who don't live near them have to, "adapt,"?
There haven't been too many howlers like that, and there have been some really good points about how what one interprets about something like Stonehenge, or the Pyramids, etc. may perhaps say a lot more about the observer than the observed, but sheesh... had he no editor?
