James,

What would you suggest for an overview of Bronze Age Indo-European mythology. Not just the stories themselves, but I am also looking for books that help extrapolate reasons why or explain the lives of our ancient ancestors.

Hope you're somewhere that's not in this Arctic blast hitting the Midwest. It's enough to make a man want to hibernate for the duration of the season.

Cheers,

Clued.

Sir, you always spark a fire in my brain. Unfortunately I am separated from 95% of my library, which is no longer really mine, spread across 5 states as it is.

The oldest book we have, The Epic of Gilgamesh, was an Indo-European work and holds the seeds to the hero cycles of Heracles and Beowulf.

I have published my impressions of this in He along with my adaptation of various translations.

I have also written of late Bronze Age-early Iron Age Hellas in By the Wine Dark Sea, in which I provide what I think is the best extrapolation of the amazon myth.

Beowulf is worth a reread, a project that is a few years away for me, which may mean never.

The Iliad and the Odyssey are Bronze Age tales rendered in the Iron Age into final form.

The World of Odysseus, which I purchased from the Literary Guild in 2004 is an excellent overview of pre-civilized, Europe, of the days of drafty halls where chieftains and warriors gathered about their leader. This warrior culture was slowly pushed west and north and west, the realization of which should give deeper meaning to the sham that is western civilization, which means hive-based hero-negation in my mind.

Minoans, or The Minoans, a book I mined extensively for The First Boxers gives the most in depth treatment of bronze age cults.

Please keep in mind that the world of the Hall surrounded the Middle Sea in early antiquity just as it surrounded the Baltic and North Seas in the early Middle Ages. Minoan civilization was the use of introduced Indo-European war-fighting technology and warrior cult by a seductive indigenous priestess class who were possibly the models of The Sirens and Circe in the Odyssey. These bitches used wine and opium and hosted boxing matches in order to control the small elite of Indo-European warriors who had defeated their men. This is a nice enemy for our Bronze Age warriors, big-eyed raven-haired whores putting opium in our wine and fucking us stupid…

Oh, yes, of course…books—get away from me, Bitch…

Do not neglect the Old Testament either. Two Isrаeli scholars I read in a book I cannot recall, made an excellent case that the Danites, the tribe of Samson, were actually Indo-European pirates, the Dannan or Denyen who joined the Chosen People even as their cousins the Philistines fought them. A glimpse of the furthest outpost of the Indo-Europeans can be had in the stories of David and Samson, the latter of which is best told by Josepheus.

Due to the destruction of indigenous lore by the spread of Christianity, we have to look into the heavily distorted prisms of Christian literature and modern archaeology for traces of our betrayal-conquered ancestors.

There are numerous books preserving the beautiful artifacts of Celtic life available commercially. The Celts never really got out of the Bronze Age in a certain sense.

I prefer Mallory’s Life of Author for a Romano-Catholic filtered glimpse of Indo-European kingship and the first few chapters of Seamus McManus’s A History of the Irish Race.

Norse mythology is also heavily filtered by Christianity and I like Helene A. Guerber’s Myths of the Norsemen.

I would recommend the Collection of Irish Folk Tales available at Barnes and Noble for residual mythology.

For an insightful study of Indo-European myth you can’t beat Joseph Campbell’s Transformations of Myth through Time.

Frazer’s Golden Bough is very useful in the metaphysic side.

On the temporal side, try War Before Civilization by Keeley or Heeley, can’t recall his exact name.

For an excellent fictional portrait of the classic Indo-European warrior king read Harold Lamb’s Cyrus the Great.

Unfortunately, Sir, the religious scholars of the slave races, possessed of that invalidating spirit of negation forged in the bondage of antiquity around the Middle Sea, got to our history before we did and, whispering simpering slave platitudes in the ears of queens while their kings died in vein, managed to erase more of our peoples’ path than we will ever be able to retrace.