cover image The Black Goddess and the Unseen Sense

The Black Goddess and the Unseen Sense

Peter Redgrove, Redgrove Peter. Grove Press, $17.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-8021-1054-1

Dolphins' remarkable powers of communication, migratory birds' navigation of geomagnetism and chickens' premonitory responses to earthquakes are, to Redgrove, sure signs that human sensory capabilities are pathetically blocked. The culprit, he claims, is the ``Oedipal class war'' that has fostered a denial of the body. This, coupled with a blind scientific materialism, has pesumably shut us off from the human subconscious and the supersensory powers locked therein, which psychics and dowsers can tap. Redgrove, coauthor of The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman, believes that people can unlock their hidden senses given the proper mental and spiritual training. Much of his disorganized study is a grab bag of Jungian notions, Taoist sexual practices, yogic methods, gnostic wisdom and ruminations on the Black Goddess embodied in Isis and tribal Africans' Oduda, ``the Black One.'' His attempt to open the doors of perception via myth and the marvelous bogs down in muddy speculation. (June)