Join Mike Brenner for a talk about our oldest tales and how they could lead to answers to the conflicts in the world and in within ourselves. After the talk there will be a discussion, book signing, and some refreshments. There will be a limited number of copies of Finding Our Long Way Home and The Mesopotamian Tale for sale at $20 and $12 respectively, cash or check only. It would be a good idea to obtain the book(s) beforehand from Amazon. Here’s a link to get you there: Ordering Books.

TIME: 7:30 pm to 9:00 pm on October 26

LOCATION: Old Haverford Friends Meeting, 235 E. Eagle Road, Havertown, PA 19083

PARKING: On the Meeting House grounds and on St. Denis Road

COST: Admission is free, though we'll be truly grateful for cash donations.

IMPORTANT: SEATING IS LIMITED so it’s critical that you reserve your place by signing up.

Finding Our Long Way Home

Guided by Humanity’s Oldest Tales

Is it possible for texts and images in clay and stone, unearthed from Mesopotamia’s ruins, to bring relief to humanity’s troubles? This book proposes that indeed they could. And as we know, relief is badly needed. Physical scientists tell us that if present trends continue, the outlook for life on Earth is not good. Social scientists say the same about the outlook for our kind. As humanity’s condition and the planet’s condition worsen, they become frightening reflections of each other.

Finding Our Long Way Home suggests ways in which we could use what our ancestors left behind to relieve our agonies, including war, exploitation, autocracy, and pollution and to work toward the kind of society for which we yearn. The path that the book envisions involves frank challenges to firmly held beliefs in science and religion. Given the state of our world, a measure of audacity is warranted.

Almost everyone familiar with the sagas from Mesopotamia takes their many gods to be creatures of human imagination, dreamt up to serve psychological need and political utility. To secure the help the artifacts can provide we must instead accept that they are telling, in a basically factual way, about huge humanoids that once ruled Earth. Approached in that way, the relics reveal how self-deified beings imposed unnatural circumstances on our ancestors, throwing them into confusion about their existence and making them abnormally vulnerable to traumatization and shame. In other words, the sagas reveal the roots of the human condition.

What these stories tell of our origin and early times at first makes them seem too far-fetched to be our true history, for they speak frankly of such things as an extraterrestrial intervention in human evolution. Yet when examined closely, our ancestors’ tales hold up quite well. This book shows that when the stories are regarded as truthful accounts, they allow us to resolve puzzling realities that can’t be understood within the limits of conventional thinking, and they help us to better grasp troubling aspects of human behavior throughout history, including the present widespread turmoil in governance.

This book earns credibility for the Mesopotamian artifacts by demonstrating their utility, that is, by showing how much their texts and images can explain, even though at this moment it’s not possible to prove them accurate beyond reasonable doubt. It proposes that our oldest recorded tales support a radical explanation for humanity’s dysfunction, one that can empower us to begin Finding Our Long Way Home.