Sophia Geography: - Exploring Spirituality, Landscape and Archetypes

Anyone who has ever intuitively felt that the world we inhabit is a spiritual one, will be enlightened from beginning to end by ‘Sophia Geography: Exploring Spirituality, Landscape and Archetypes’. Dr.J.P. Antill, a descendant of the Te Wai Pounamu Landscape - the Greenstone South Island of New Zealand - was impelled after travels in Tibet and Northern India to undertake a personal quest to discover the spiritual meaning of landscape. This journey of the mind encountered Gnosticism and the Mystics of Persian antiquity. It took in Greek Platonism and Primal, polytheistic, animist religions – Maori, Native American and Australian Aborigine - as well as geographers’ landscapes, history of Western religion, eco-theology and archetypal psychology. From the twentieth century to the present Antill draws on, among others, postmodern theologians; archetypal philosophers Carl Jung and Henry Corbin - and more recently Anthony Stevens, James Hillman, Walter A. Shelburne and Edward C. Whitmont; quantum physicists David Bohm, Wolfgang Pauli and F. David Peat; environmentalists Barry Lopez, Lynn Ross-Bryant, Charlene Spretnak, Thomas Berry, Carol P. Christ, and James Lovelock; postmodern geographers Denis Cosgrove and Peter Bishop. With its strong line of argument and vast scope, ‘Sophia Geography’ opens up new vistas not just by the chapter but with each page turned. The end result is a hugely altered vision – that humanity and the Earth share the same soul. "…sparks with insight, commitment and understanding… it is a significant contribution to the field of large-scale archetypal synthesis, especially those which attempt to apply themselves to urgent and important social concerns… the writer’s strength lies in her ability to synthesise and in her understanding of and empathy with the Sophianic perspective, particularly as articulated by Henri Corbin. The attempt to challenge to dominant paradigms of understanding, perception and experience in most societies, not merely western…” Professor Peter Bishop -‘The Myth of Shangri-La - Tibet, Travel Writing and the Western Creation of Sacred Landscape’