Parallel Pathways to the Forgotten Source
An Appreciation and Comparative Reflection on the Work of Peter Kingsley
by Ed Reither
Introduction: In Conversation with Peter Kingsley
It is no simple task to speak of Peter Kingsley’s work. One does not merely read Kingsley—one is drawn into his ancient voice, and the profundity and pierced by the unrelenting demand it places on modern minds.
His newly published book, A Story Waiting to Pierce You, transcends the boundaries of history, scholarship, and mysticism. He moves (and destroys) the traditional view of Western Civiliation held so deeply in the Greek and Roman tradition.
Kingsley brings with him an epic claim—perhaps the most threatening a scholar can make: that the West, in constructing its rational edifice, has lost its soul. Philosophy, which once meant initiation into truth, wisdom, and the deeper meaning of existence, has become a shell of itself. We are not only living in a global crisis of consciousness, but doing so under the lingering shadow of 18th-century nation-building ideals—politically, psychologically, and intellectually. And in the midst of this, voices like Kingsley’s—true wisdom transmitters—are too often marginalized by a self-proclaimed intelligentsia, a pseudo-erudite class more invested in performance than in truth.
My own work on Beezone does not carry the same poetic or scolarly depth as Kingsley’s. It goes along by a scribe’s path, one shaped by long study and reflection—through archives, oral histories, overlooked scholars, and sacred texts. And yet it, too, points toward what has been forgotten: the possibility that what we call “Western civilization” is not Western in origin, but built upon ancient Eastern foundations—India, Egypt, and the intercultural web that linked them with Jewish and Greek traditions.
I do not place my research against Kingsley’s, but beside it. His focus on the Scythian and Central Asian origins of pre-Socratic mysticism and mine on the Indian and Egyptian transmission of sacred knowledge may differ in terrain, but they are bound by the same urgency: to reawaken a memory that has been buried beneath centuries of abstraction, conquest, and amnesia.
This essay is an offering—not a rebuttal, but a comparative call to understand what he so simply and poetically writes in this small book. Where do our works align? Where do they diverge? And how might these differences themselves illuminate the greater story we are both attempting to serve? It is a story that does not belong to any one culture, and certainly not to the modern West. It is the story of soul, of sacred origin, and of the long-forgotten intelligence of the heart.
Shared Vision: The Fractured West and the Sacred Origins
Both Kingsley and I begin from a diagnosis: that Western civilization, as it exists today, is scientifically and spiritually fragmented. We agree that logic and rationality, once a tool for orienting human beings toward reality, has become a barrier to Reality itself. Kingsley names this with poetic precision—a crisis of consciousness, a forgetting of the sacred, mystical foundations of philosophy. I arrive at a similar conclusion, though my language is shaped more by comparative historical research than a prophetic call.
What we both seek is not a return to old or outdated beliefs, but a reconnection with the ancient streams of wisdom that nourished the human soul long before the West became a story about Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Hebraic tradition, Greece, Rome, and Christian myth. Whether through the oracular descent of Parmenides or the esoteric cosmology of the Skandha Purana, both paths trace back to cultures where the divine, the natural, and the rational were not yet separated. Both Kingsley’s path and mine challenge the institutional mind to remember what it was trained to forget: that philosophy was once a spiritual practice—not merely a discipline of memory or abstraction, but a living transmission brought into this world by Divine Beings.
Geographic Divergence: Central Asia and the Steppe vs. India and Egypt
Kingsley’s work lifts the veil on a forgotten northern pathway—from Mongolia, Scythia, and the Tarim Basin, through shamanic figures like Abaris and Aristeas, into the sacred heart of pre-Socratic Greece. This is a bold re-mapping, overturning the Mediterranean-centric worldview by pointing north and east into the soul of Central Asia.
My own work has followed a more southern arc: beginning in India, where spiritual, mathematical, and metaphysical sophistication blossomed early; then moving westward through Egypt, which served as a bridge for sacred transmission into Jewish and Hellenistic cultures. I’ve drawn upon scholars like Wilford, Brugsch, and Klostermaier, alongside ancient records from Josephus and Clement of Alexandria, to show that long before Plato, Indian sages, Egyptian priests, and Jewish philosophers were already engaged in a transcontinental dialogue.
The divergence between our geographies is not a contradiction, but a complement. If Kingsley reveals the routes of mystics and warriors on horseback, I uncover the temple courtyards and scholarly ports where Indian, Egyptian, and Greek minds met.
Temples and Oracles: Paths of Initiation
In Kingsley’s world, the sacred enters through rupture—through caves, deserts, and death-trances. His initiates descend into the unknown to be remade. My research traces formal initiatory cultures, where sacred knowledge was ritually veiled and disclosed—in temples, sanctuaries, and encoded texts.
Kingsley uncovers wild sacredness. I follow disciplined sacred science. But both affirm that initiation is not instruction. It is a crossing—of the threshold, of identity, of time.
A Shared Call: Not to Prove, But to Remember
Neither of us writes to prove a point in conventional academic terms. What Kingsley calls remembrance, I call for study—a return to discipline and real practice.
Conclusion: Returning to the East, Awakening in the West
At its heart, this essay is not only a reflection on Peter Kingsley’s visionary work or a parallel offering from my own lifelong inquiry—it is a summoning to remember. It is a meditation on how both Kingsley and I, through different gateways and lineages, point beyond the conventional origins of the West toward the sacred East, where the roots of civilization once drank deeply from the waters of cosmic consciousness.
Kingsley’s A Story Waiting to Pierce You is not merely a historical book; it is, as one review rightly called it, a book of Remembrance—the kind that emerges when a long spell of forgetfulness begins to lift. His narrative reactivates a memory older than any text: a story of shamanic ecstasy, divine lineage, and soul migration, where East and West were once joined in sacred union, and wisdom did not yet fear its own power. He reminds us that civilizations begin and end in ecstasy, and that we are—whether we know it or not—the inheritors of a lost transmission that still longs to reach us.
My own work echoes this remembrance from another trail. I follow the footprints of Indian sages, Egyptian priests, and Mediterranean seekers whose teachings flowed across time, geography, and culture—embedding themselves quietly into the foundations of Western thought, only to be later erased, edited, or rationalized into abstraction. Like Kingsley, I see the fracture in the Western soul not as a modern affliction alone, but as the result of a profound forgetting—of origin, of the sacred, of the unity between the individual and the cosmos.
To remember, in this light, is not nostalgia. It is a rite of passage, a re-collection of essence, a sacred task assigned to this moment in history. As the review states, “Remembering is a matter of recollecting the essence of ourselves—of gathering our own finest pollen into the present for the sake of the future.”
We are, perhaps, gatherers of remembrance—each in our way. And just as Kingsley offers us Abaris, the golden-arrow-carrying shaman from Mongolia, I offer the remembered presence of Indian cosmology, Egyptian sacred science, and the unacknowledged influence of these traditions on the Jewish, Greek, and early Christian mind.
The message in both paths is the same: that rationality alone cannot save us, that the soul of the West is cracked not because it is Western, but because it has been cut off from its Eastern bloodline—its inner sun. Kingsley calls us to the edge of myth, and I invite readers into the living web of cultural and metaphysical interconnection.
To accept this call is to risk awakening—to face the chaos of egoic resistance and the seduction of forgetfulness. But to refuse the call is to bypass a rare and urgent opportunity: to join those who carry the memory, not for the sake of history, but for the sake of the future soul of humanity.
This is more than scholarship. It is a sacred obligation to truth.
And yes—this, too, is A Story Waiting to Pierce You.