Turtle Was Gone a Long Time, Volume Two: Horsehead Nebula Neighing

Turtle Was Gone a Long Time: Horsehead Nebula Neighing, the second volume of a remarkable trilogy, continues John Moriarty’s spiritual journey embarked upon in Crossing the Kedron. In a Prelude to Horsehead Nebula Neighing, the author poses two questions. Are we the iceberg into which the earth has crashed? Have we lost, or did we ever acquire, evolutionary legitimacy? Moriarty goes on to question the axioms and assumptions of the late twentieth century and to suggest other cosmologies, myths and metaphors through which we may ‘walk beautifully upon the earth’. Mediated through poetry, philosophy and literature – from the sacred writings of Christian mystics to coffin texts of the Egyptians and cradle texts of the Navajo Indians – Moriarty transforms humanity’s Pequod voyage of self-destruction into an Ishmaelite quest for Divine Ground.

In his call for cultural regeneration, the author invokes alternative tongues, Native American and Hindu, shamanic north and classical south. Readings from Meister Eckhart, Malory and William Law, Pascal and Melville, Berkeley, Blake and Black Elk, Darwin and Nietzsche, the Bible, medieval morality plays and the Mandukya Upanishads guide us along ancestral trails in dialogue with ‘the great tradition’.

With exhilarating singularity of vision, Moriarty offers readers paradigms of co-creation and self-interrogation, and through a process of calling-to-witness makes manifest ways of being in the world.