Peter Kingsley (born 1953) is a mystic, philosopher, and scholar."Peter Kingsley and the Discomfort of Wisdom: An interview by Jeff Munnis,” Black Zinnias vol.1 (Winter 2003/Spring 2004) 20–26. He is the author of seven books and numerous articles, including Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic; In the Dark Places of Wisdom; Reality; A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tibet and the Destiny of the Western World; Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity; A Book of Life; and The Watching Words. He has written extensively on the pre-Socratic philosophers Parmenides and Empedocles and the world they lived in.
Kingsley’s books have been translated into over a dozen languages including simplified Chinese (Beijing) and traditional Chinese (Taipei), Dutch, Farsi, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish and Turkish.
Biography Peter Kingsley attended Highgate School, in north London, until 1971. He graduated with honours from the University of Lancaster in 1975, and went on to receive the degree of Master of Letters from the University of Cambridge after study at King's College; subsequently, he was awarded a PhD in classics by the University of London for his research under the guidance of Martin West.https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/983/Memoirs_17-08_West.pdf, p.119 n.62. A former Fellow of the Warburg Institute in London, Kingsley has been made an honorary professor both at Simon Fraser University in Canada and at the University of New Mexico. He has lectured widely in North America and Europe. Kingsley has noted in public interviews that he is sometimes misunderstood as a scholar who gradually moved away from academic objectivity to a personal involvement with his subject matter. However, Kingsley himself has stated that he is, and always has been, a mystic, and that his spiritual experience stands in the background of his entire career, not just his most recent work.
Major themes Kingsley's work argues that the writings of the presocratic philosophers Parmenides and Empedocles, usually seen as rational or scientific enterprises, were in fact expressions of a wider Greek mystical tradition that helped give rise to western philosophy and civilisation. This tradition, according to Kingsley, was a way of life leading to the direct experience of reality and the recognition of one's divinity. Yet, as Kingsley stresses, this was no "otherworldly" mysticism: its chief figures were also lawgivers, diplomats, physicians, and even military men. The texts produced by this tradition are seamless fabrics of what later thought would distinguish as the separate areas of mysticism, science, healing, and art.Kingsley, P. (2003). Reality. Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Center Publishing.Peter Kingsley, A Book of Life (London: Catafalque Press, 2021), pp. 81–3, 104–107, 219–220.
Parmenides, most famous as the "father of western logic" and traditionally viewed as a rationalist, was a priest of Apollo and iatromantis (lit. healer-prophet).Kingsley, P. (1999). In the Dark Places of Wisdom. Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Center Publishing.Laura Gemelli Marciano, Parmenide: suoni, immagini, esperienza (Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 2013), pp.16, 60–65. Empedocles, who outlined an elaborate cosmology that introduced the enormously influential idea of the four elements into western philosophy and science, was a mystic and a magician.Kingsley, P. (1995). Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic. Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Peter Kingsley, “Empedocles for the New Millennium,” Ancient Philosophy 22 (2002), pp.351–360, 388–401.Anton Bierl, “Riddles over Riddles” in Poetry as Initiation, ed. Ioanna Papadopoulou and Leonard Muellner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p.190.Christopher Faraone, “Empedocles the Sorcerer and his Hexametrical Pharmaka,” Antichthon 53 (2019), pp.14–32. Kingsley reads the poems of Parmenides and Empedocles as esoteric, initiatory texts designed to lead the reader to a direct experience of the oneness of reality and the realisation of his or her own divinity. A significant implication of this reading is that western logic and science originally had a deeply spiritual purpose.
Kingsley's reading of early Greek philosophy and, in particular, of Parmenides and Empedocles, is at odds with most of the established interpretations. However, Kingsley agrees with other recent critics in contending that later ancient philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus, among others, misinterpreted and distorted their predecessors; hence, conventional scholarship that uncritically accepts their misrepresentations of the presocratics is necessarily flawed.Harold Cherniss, Aristotle's Criticism of Presocratic Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935).Peter Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).Peter Kingsley, "Empedocles for the New Millennium," Ancient Philosophy 22 (2002), pp.340–356. Kingsley's procedure is to read presocratic texts in historical and geographical context, giving particular attention to the Southern ItalianPeter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom (Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Center Publishing, 1999).Alessandro Lattuada, L'opera di Peter Kingsley e la tradizione "aidetica" occidentale (Catania: Università di Catania, 2011), https://www.docsity.com/it/peter-kingsley-e-la-tradizione-aidetica-occidentale/8864673/ and SicilianHermann S. Schibli, review of Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic in Ancient Philosophy 16 (1996), pp.456–461.Peter Kingsley, “Empedocles for the New Millennium,” Ancient Philosophy 22 (2002), pp.382–395. backgrounds of Parmenides and Empedocles. Additionally, he reads the poems of Parmenides and Empedocles as esoteric and mystical texts, a hermeneutical perspective that, according to Kingsley, is both indicated by the textual and historical evidence and also provides the only way to solve many problems of interpretation and text criticism. Kingsley argues that esoteric texts designed to record or induce mystical experiences can never be understood from an "outsider's perspective"; understanding must come from a reader's lived experience—or not at all.Peter Kingsley, Reality (Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Center Publishing, 2003)
Parmenides and Empedocles
Kingsley presents Parmenides and Empedocles as representatives of a mystical tradition that helped give rise to western philosophy and civilisation and that is still available to people today. Kingsley argues that this tradition is of profound importance and has something essential to offer, both inside the world of academic philosophy and beyond in the wider, contemporary West.Donald H. Sanborn, “Peter Kingsley’s Philosophical Mysticism and Mystical Philosophy,” Sacred Web 25 (Summer 2010), pp.89–127. Though Parmenides and Empedocles are often viewed as philosophical antagonists, Kingsley argues that beneath the superficial or apparent differences, the two men are profoundly united by the common essence of this one tradition, a connection that finds expression in their intimately connected understandings of reality, the body and the senses, language, death, and divine consciousness.Peter Kingsley, Reality (Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Center Publishing, 2003), pp.315–461Jessica Elbert Decker and Matthew Mayock, “Parmenides and Empedocles,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Western Mysticism and Esotericism, ed. Glenn A. Magee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp.26–37.
Parmenides and Empedocles are united by, among other things, a somewhat unorthodox mysticism with respect to the body and the senses. Empedocles' cosmology, both born out of and directed towards mystical experience, deeply influences the peculiarities of the spiritual path as he offered it. Empedocles described a cosmic cycle consisting of the uniting and separation of the four divine "roots," or elements, of earth, aithêr or air, fire, and water. The divine power of Love (at times simply called Aphrodite), in Empedocles' cosmology, brought the elements together into one, while the divine power of Strife separated them out from each other. For Empedocles, then, there is nothing in the cosmos that is not divine. Thus, there is nothing to "leave behind" as one travels the spiritual path. His mysticism is not what one might anticipate—the ascetic strain of shutting out the senses or dissociation from the body. While many forms of mysticism reject and renounce the supposed crudity of matter and the senses for something higher or loftier, Empedocles does not. Instead, he teaches the conscious use of the senses themselves as a path to recognising the divine in everything—including oneself.Kingsley, P. (2003). Reality. Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Center Publishing. pp.472–559. Similarly, Kingsley argues that the imagery and wording of the proem, or introductory part, of Parmenides' poem record an initiate's descent to the underworld and indicate a mystical background connected to the ancient practice of healing and meditation known as incubation.Kingsley, P. (1999). In the Dark Places of Wisdom. Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Center Publishing.Laura Gemelli Marciano, “Images and Experience,” Ancient Philosophy 28 (2008), pp.21–48.Paul Bishop and Richard Seaford in The Descent of the Soul and the Archaic, ed. Paul Bishop, Terence Dawson and Leslie Gardner (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2023), pp.1–30.
More than just a medical technique, incubation was said to allow a human being to experience a fourth state of consciousness different from sleeping, dreaming, or ordinary waking: a state that Kingsley describes as "consciousness itself" and likens to the turiya or samadhi of the Indian yogic traditions.Kingsley, P. (1999). In the Dark Places of Wisdom. Inverness, CA: Golden Sufi Center Publishing. pp.106–115 Kingsley supports this reading of the proem with the archaeological evidence from the excavations of Parmenides' hometown of Velia, or Elea, in Southern Italy. This evidence, according to Kingsley, demonstrates that Parmenides was a practising priest of Apollo, and would therefore have used incubatory techniques as a matter of course for healing, prophecy, and meditation. As Kingsley notes, this physical evidence from Velia merely conforms to and confirms the incubatory context already suggested by the proem itself. In Kingsley's understanding of this mystical tradition, the descent to the underworld is deeply connected with the conscious experience of the body—it is, in reality, a conscious descent into the depths and darkness of the very sensation of the physical body. Thus, in contrast to mystical paths that hope to "transcend" the physical, embodied state, Parmenides and Empedocles both find the divine in and through the body and the senses.Gregory Shaw, review of Reality in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2004.07.43. https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2004/2004.07.43/)Christopher Bamford and Lorraine Kisly, “Common Sense: An Interview with Peter Kingsley,” Parabola 31/1 (Spring 2006), pp.24–30.