Dr. John Knight Lundwall | Wisdom & The Oral Tradition: Memory and Storytelling From Mythos to Logos

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Dr. John Knight Lundwall joins InnerVerse to discuss his groundbreaking book, Mythos and Cosmos: Mind and Meaning in the Oral Age. Picking up the torch where hundreds of years of academia missed the mark, Dr. Lundwall guides our understanding of mythology as a technical language akin to scientific jargon, exposes the epistemological wall between literacy and orality, explains the analogical aspect of oral myth via the example of human sacrifices, and ponders why oral cultures did not keep histories as we know them.

In the Plus+ Extension we turn our discussion towards the category error of modernity to consider oral rites and stories as religion, question just what religion is through the example of the cult of state mandated "public health," the Renaissance prodigy Camillo and what his memory theater informs us of our own potential to recall complex ideas, the relationship between light pollution and literacy, and what it means to marry the best of both the oral and literary mind.

ChaptersInside the full 2h 18m episode27 chapters

0:00Opening Invocation and the Oral Age

5:59A Doctorate in Myth, and Orality's Missing Piece

8:13Stonehenge Decoded and the Howling Barbarians

12:14How the Lakota Followed the Sun

18:14Ninety Nine Percent of History Had No Writing

26:51Why Orality Produces Polytheism

31:38The Baboon's Penis and Orion's Sword

38:02Analogical Minds, Severed Heads and Rain

47:54Godfrey Higgins and History Before Herodotus

51:05Voodoo, Zombies and Cyclized History

59:25Gilgamesh, the Flood and the Resurrection Spell

1:05:57Religion Is a Category of Literacy

1:08:16No Word for Religion in Oral Cultures

1:09:59Religion's Roots in the Cult of the State

1:14:19Christianity, the First Religion Born in Literacy

1:21:31Religion Begins With a Supreme Good

1:23:56Public Health Framed as a Supreme Good

1:26:12The Opposite of Science Is Politics

1:27:23Pluto and the Cycle of Corruption

1:32:37Cain and Abel, the First Human Story

1:35:53Memory Palaces and the Untapped Mind

1:38:14Camillo's Renaissance Memory Theater

1:40:26The Siberian Memory Keeper

1:47:16A Pueblo Song That Kept the Calendar

1:52:00Light Pollution Rises With Literacy

1:57:27Marrying the Oral and Literate Minds

2:02:44Closing Thoughts on the Cosmic Egg

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Mythologist and author

Dr. John Knight Lundwall is an academic specializing in mythology and the history of oral versus literate cognition. He is the author of "Mythos and Cosmos: Mind and Meaning in the Oral Age," exploring mythology as a technical language of oral cultures.

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