Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits

by Gordon White

A defining text of the new magical renaissance, Star.Ships addresses the question of who we are now by tracing where we come from, and by drawing out the stories and the spirits that have journeyed and evolved with us. The goal is, as Gordon writes, the restoration of context. To this end, White applies his globally-recognised data and demographics skills to realise a groundbreaking work of truly interdisciplinary research. Utilising mythological, linguistic and astronomical data to reconstruct palaeolithic magical beliefs, he maps them to the human journey out of Africa; explores which aspects of these beliefs and practices have survived into the Western tradition; and what the implications (and applications) of those survivals may be for us. Written for a magically literate and operative audience, Star.Ships displays the flair, wit and engagement with evidence that adherents of his runesoup blog have come to expect from Gordon. He deftly handles vast time scales and cosmologies to build his case; avoids the pitfalls of alternative historians with a refreshing absence of dogma or wishful thinking; and, in a masterful deployment of the latest research, simultaneously questions outworn dominant narratives and is not afraid to champion the work of independent researchers and entertain forbidden discourses. It is exactly what chaos magic should be. Göbekli Tepe, the Pyramids and Sphinx, Nabta Playa, Gunung Padang, Easter Island and Sundaland are some of the points spangled across a work of truly cosmic scope. Star.Ships beckons those who are willing to engage in the adventure to follow the great river of history that flows into and out of an ocean of stars. Minds will be blown.

Genres: History, Occult, Nonfiction, Magic, Mythology, Magick, Religion

407 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 2, 2016

About the author

Gordon White runs one of the world's leading chaos magic blogs and podcasts, Rune Soup. He has worked nationally and internationally for some of the world's largest digital and social media companies, including BBC Worldwide, Discovery Channel, and Yelp.

Gordon has presented at media events across Europe on social and data strategy as well as the changing behaviors and priorities of Generation Y. During this time, he has partied with princes, dined in castles, dived on sunken cities and even had a billionaire knight buy him bottles of champagne.

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have lately been reserving 5 stars for books that rock my world. Star.ships did that. I've read a lot of the sources White used and have similar thoughts but he crystallized some things for me. Here are a couple of random thoughts.

It's interesting that he considers Austronesia to be an important cultural source. In the last couple of years since he wrote this, the Out of Africa model quietly died. The best current theory is that modern humans originated in Austronesia.

I've never been a practicing magician in any real sense but I've dabbled in a few things over the years. His idea that there is an intelligence that has trickster/synchronicity/fractal aspects rings true for me. In my younger years, I phrased it as "God has a twisted sense of humor." Since I also have a twisted sense of humor, I found that immensely satisfying.

[Joe Crow · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is my motherfucking JAM, yo. It hits roughly seventy percent of the intellectual goodie spots that make my brain say "Oh yeah, RIGHT THERE BABY..." My only real complaints are 1) that it's too short (of course); 2) Gordon coulda spent a LOT more time developing and expanding the final section about the Other Folks and the High Weirdness of our various examples of contact with their side, especially in comparison with spirit work and ritual magic entity contacts. There's a whole book or thousand that could be done with that, comparing the volumes of work over the ages with demons, angels, and spirits by actual professional occultists with the twentieth century's UFO contacts and PSI work stuff. I mean, folks have done some preliminary work with that, but there really hasn't been the kind of detailed comparison that'd make me happy.
Also, the connection between Orion-ian starlore and the Headless Rite is a massive game changer for me. I would never have made that connection, and now I've gotta spend a shitload of time digging into Orion and his whole schtick.

I cannot fucking WAIT for The Chaos Protocols to come out.

[Jeanne Thornton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is only not a five-star for me because of the last full chapter in which speculation about the communication practices of nonhuman intelligences + NDEs and remote viewing starts to get into the act. This is my problem as a Debased Mostly Materialist Person, though, more than the book's. I kind of want everyone I know to read this so I can talk with them about it. Highlights: everything about Gobelki Tepe, the pyramids as ritual space rather than funerary space, climate change and the Vedic timeline, Bornless Ritual as subplot/through-line, I mean jeez the whole book

There is a seductiveness to this book's argument that I deeply mistrust. But I also mistrust parties where people seem to be having fun, and owing to AU's descriptions of Nile boat processions/nightlife at star temples of Asia Minor, he does not, so caveat emptor, you who read this review

Right now I live in Brooklyn, where it is not possible to watch the stars directly, and I feel an acute, pulsing sadness about that after finishing this book

[Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, I had high hopes for this book - and boy, he delivers! Beloved Gordon puts all of his historical, quite diverse knowledge into between two covers and hopefully the reader can digest it the right way. In "Star.Ships", we're taken on a tour de force from paeolthic cultures to vedic india, to egypt of old. Gordon is clear in his intent, his critiqe and his own argumentation. For the experienced reader - you might still learn something. For the apprentice - read it carefully and don't despair! This is chock-full of information, yes. Use the extensive bibliography as a gateway for further studies. I surely will.

But even Mr. White ahs his flaws, as lontime listeners to the Runesoup-podcast might know:
- it is wrong to try or wish to get academia back in the boat. Cultural and historical studies have different tasks than theological and philsoophical texts. Rather, academia and science should be shown to be not in charge of life and meaning as a whole.
- a coherent epistemology for the kind of tradition proposed in "Star.Ships" is still lacking. But maybe this rather historical treatise is not necessarily the place for it.

[Dimitris Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

We now consider it 'scientific' or 'professional' to describe cultural artefacts -- non physical objects -- in exclusively materialist terms. Only a functional analysis of the mythological process is allowed, which is like describing your grandmother's famous chicken soup solely by its molecular constituency.

This quote sets the tone brilliantly in my opinion.

Star.Ships is a prehistory of the world as seen through the unlikely lens of magic, crypto-archaeology and the history of star worship in particular. It's a truly fascinating glimpse into a completely alternative retelling of the world as we know it in the way only Gordon White can pull off. If you doubt this might be politically charged (actually, why would you?!), here is another snippet for you:

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.

Some further points from the book I wished to share with you:

1) Flood myths are so common across distinct cultures they must be referring to a single, global event. Some areas were affected more than others, as can be inferred by the frequent occurrence of flood myths in Southeast Asia, a region which lost the most territory relevant to its current size to rising sea levels globally, and its matching infrequency in Africa, which had the least of its land sink beneath the waves.

There are strong signs that if there was an advanced culture before this flood, its origins might probably be traced to Southeast Asia, and more precisely Indonesia.

2) Some of this culture's descendants seem to be the Polynesians.

3) Göbekli Tepe in Southeast Turkey is one of the greatest mysteries known to archaeology right now. It's a megalithic structure aka a complex not entirely dissimilar to Stonehenge, with the difference that it's dated to 11000 BC at the latest. To give you an idea, we are closer chronologically to the construction of the Great Pyramid than these guys were. That's way before the first agricultural communities, and thus permanent settlements or cities, arose.

So who built this thing, and why? There are indications that it served as a ritual space connected to 'drug' use (entheogens and alcohol), and it seems they even had beer and wine on site. Remember, that's before agriculture. Knowing that there's a high chance people made beer from grains before they had even learned how to make bread is a fact that somehow makes me very happy inside. It's a less utilitarian and more joyful interpretation than the official narrative, i.e. that beer was somehow discovered by the accidental fermentation that resulted inside the granaries or whatever.

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... 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 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."

"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.

4) There is no evidence that the Great Pyramid was a tomb, as it's popularly portrayed. Gordon White goes in depth how and why a big part of Egyptology is a closely guarded fabrication. We don't know of the Great Pyramid's purpose, and we don't even know how it was made -- despite recent 'explanations' involving sleds and ramps that have already been proven physically impossible.

Curious yet? Definitely read this book! I only have to warn you that Gordon's writing style can feel esoteric at times and seems to presuppose from the reader at least some knowledge of magic and myth; nevertheless, even I, more keen and less familiar with either as I am, was only mildly frustrated when things I didn't understand popped up. Don't let that stop you.

The Skeptiko interview with Gordon White I originally listened to that propped me to find this book.

[Greyer Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love a Bibliography at the back of a book? I do! This book is so good and chewy I will need to read it again. I just say also that I love books that Make me think.

[Steve Cran · Rating 4 out of 5]

The theories surrounding the advancement and history are numerous. The questions always remain. How did primitive humans manage to build pyramids ? How did they learn so much about the stars? Graham Hancock posits that there was an advanced society located on America that was wiped out during the younger dryas period by comets or asteroids . Of course this brought up a great flood which is talked about in the worlds mythologies. Other posit that aliens can down to earth and jump started our civization. All that is possible. Yet does that really explain things ?

Academia has done a terrible job. Archaeology is showing that human civilization goes back even further than imagined, possible by hundreds of thousands of years. Yet any piece of evidence that threatens the sacred narrative of human development is shelved or destroyed. Academics do t want to hear it and conspiracy theorists take things way to far.

Archaeologists think everyithing is material and totally avoid the spiritual. They tend to believe that temple are constructed only often a high degree of civilization and sophistication. Goblek Tepi proves them wrong. There is no proof of surrounding civilization rather it is hunter gathers who got together and built it.

What we thought about the development of civilization could be all wrong. It was thought that humans moved from the mainland to island meanwhile archaeologists are getting a different picture. Evidence shows that there was an advanced civilization in Sundalan close to Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia. It was a huge land mass prior to the flooding caused by an Asteroid strike which raised the ocean levels. From there they spread out teaching humanity what they learned.

In conclusion it is fair to say that we do not know everything about history and how humanity developed but the ancient humans were a lot brighter than what we give them credit.

[Brooke · Rating 2 out of 5]

The good: Sundaland, antediluvian asterisms, and the ideology of Paleolithic mythemes being transmitted through time via magical rituals and star lore.

The bad: yes, it’s the core of hermeticism and modern ceremonial magic to call upon the goetic demons/ angels/ mystical archetypes (or what have you), but to go a whole book saying “ancient aliens are rubbish” and then to end up saying the ancients were taught by spiritual teachers from another dimension was a bit, well...let’s just say I’m wondering when prehistoric human beings actually get their own agency.

Also he has a huge attitude problem and a chip on his shoulder the size of a megalithic structure. Also he ridicules my entire profession. Also he doesn’t know how to properly cite his sources, some of which I’d be very interested in following up on more thoroughly (and have collated on my own using his bibliography). But I’m trapped in academe and proper sources aren’t the point, it’s the magickal heart of the issue we’re after, after all, so what do I know?

That said, I love pseudoscience and I love magical studies, and it’s a rollicking good yarn.

And true, the point is to explore the roots of the western magical tradition, not to verify antediluvian mythologies once and for all, and for that he makes a good case. But it seems like a rather lot of just-so storytelling, trying to place modern western white men (I.e. most ceremonial magicians) at the heart of the human story, as they like to think they are and always have been.

[Kenneth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gordon White attempts to trace the roots of Western Esotericism back past the end of the last ice age, and darn if he doesn't do an amazing job. It's part critique of modern archeology, part sweeping work of comparative mythology and part who knows what. From the ruins of Gobekli Tepe to the Sundaland, lost in the rising seas after the ice age, this is an epic book. This was my second time through and I will need a third sometime, if not more.

And here we are, about two and a half years out, with my third read through. Still excellent, still pulling new insights out of this book.

[Lindsey Beat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great bibliography. I like his summaries of the books he's read on archaeology and mythology, but am not totally with him on his conclusions. Alien contact explanations--even only psychic ones-- always seem like a deus ex machina to me. It seems far more interesting to think about how humans could have come up with things. If aliens gave it to them, who gave it to the aliens? But 90% of the book was great.

[Edric Unsane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Informative and plausible, and unfortunately, not for everyone as Star.Ships seems to be more a thesis paper rather than most the easily digestible 101 books out there on the Occult/Witchcraft. It's damn good though, and I feel that although Star.Ships is an advanced read, that it really should be read by more persons in the Occult/Witchcraft communities.

[Benji · Rating 3 out of 5]

Your microscope and your telescope always belong to you.
Go, burn a little incense, out under the Stars.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gordon White’s exercise in using data analysis to speculatively reconstruct ancient belief systems is a mind-bending journey through our most ancient history. In this book, he tracks our species’ first departure from what we now call Africa, and the beginnings of both the Laurasian mythological “novel”, as well as the Gondwana “grandmother myths” that came with us. It’s an exciting synthesis of historical accounts, research into genetic migration, and the more perplexing recent archaeological finds, such as as Göbekli Tepe. All of which suggest that our historical view of our ancestors has been, and in some cases continues to be, presumptuously condescending.

Full Review

[Stuart · Rating 4 out of 5]

A comprehensive and critical look at prehistory, archaeology and comparative mythology, Mr. White's book is an excellent and thought-provoking read that spans the globe and 50,000 years of human history, providing workable alternative theories to ancient megaliths, celestial navigation and the mythological basis for all of Western esotericism. My only complaint applies to many occult texts--too much "[x], which is important now, will be discussed later..." or "as magical initiates know about [y]...". The trappings of occult writing don't have to exist within occult writing. Nonetheless a fantastic read.

[Travis Stacey Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mind Blown

Gordon White is one of those people who makes me feel like I need an IQ infusion every time I read one of his books. I don't always agree with him but I can say that his thoughts are always well researched on both the academic and practical magic level. I am going to have to set this book aside and re-read it later just to begin to absorb the sheer volume of data contained in this tome. Please, please read this if you are at all interested in: advanced technology in ancient times, the connection of the stars to ancient sites, thoughts on the use of entheogens, grimoire spirits and where they come from, the ETH and so much more.

[Rose Carpenter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having already voraciously consumed every bit of internet content by Gordon White that I could find to date , this book confirmed what “Chaos Protocols” made me suspect...that I will be following White and reading every last word he publishes until one of us dies.

This book is made for magicians without being about magic and I dig that a lot. It’s filled with little vague nods to the experiences and feelings that magicians share without describing them in too much detail. But the real purpose of the book is to re-contextualize magic and in the process of doing that it manages to succeed in redefining your entire understanding of human history, as if by accident.

[Nathan McNeel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it!

This book really put the Spirits and the cultures that came before us in perspective. I can't thank Gordon enough for these great insights, connections, and research. I would recommend this book to anybody! Even if they weren't interested in magical/ritual traditions. Love it! I also would recommend his Chaos Protocol if interested in Chaos magic and how we can navigate the current world situation that's working against us. Write more books Gordon! At least I still have Rune Soup! Haha

[Tal · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent tome. It's a sort of comparative proto-myth/proto-cosmology. The only thing I didn't like was that, although the book was very well researched, there were several places where Gordon White gives a fact coming from research but doesn't cite where it came from. With that said, the bibliography is huge, and I suspect all of that outside information is findable therein. Sometimes I read relevant cited texts alongside the place I found them. I did not always have the opportunity here.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

As with many others I started off loving this book but got very fed up with the ending. There's a great mix of archeology, mythology and so on and a refusal to get drawn into stupid "because aliens" hand waving when something tricky to explain occurs. Then, at the end.... Out of nowhere... "because aliens". Doh.

[Austin Nielson]

Finally digging in the right place. Like all good books, it comes with an extended bibliography for further reading. This book itself doesn't pretend to be thorough or academic, and often will simply present some evidence for you and let you figure out what it means yourself. Overall, it paints a beautiful and very truth-y vision of the origins of religion, magic, mythology, and civilization.

[Amp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Context

This work blew my uppity ceremonialist mind every two to three pages. It's worth it. You'll spend ten dollars on junk food, do yourself two favors at one and get this book.

[kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Do we even deserve Gordon White?

He has written a book that elevates the genre of cranky but delicious ancient aliens to a beautiful art form. Researched well and written in his distinctive voice, Star.ships was a mind opening journey to the ancient near east.. and the stars.

[Tod Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent! Fascinating insights, and quite funny. My only criticisms are of the somewhat convoluted prose, and the clubby presumption of the author that his readers have read all the same books he has.

[Mitchell Stern · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s a lot of interesting and compelling material here. It is unfortunately undermined by the author’s condescension towards those not sharing his perspective which, while not enough to ruin the whole book, does drag it down a bit.

[Helyx · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazingly researched, packed with information but somehow hard to put down. One of my favorites.

[Vince · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this so much but found that I was missing background knowledge to really understand the significance of what was being told. Because of this it was a hard slog.

[Katy Sisko · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting, meandering book. In some places, White seems very erudite and others a little crackpot.

[Adam Vandyke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bravo!

[Andreas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Man this book is good

[Angela Natividad · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was like being abducted and fed a massive download. It took an eternity to read but was worth every moment. My head is going to be making apophenic connections for years to come.