On September 17 guest speaker, Susan Brind Morrow, will speak about her book The Dawning Moon of the Mind: Unlocking the Pyramid Texts. Published in 2015, Brind Morrow’s writing has been described as “opening the language of hieroglyphs with the skill of a scholar and the sensibility of a poet.” Brind Morrow recasts the Pyramid Texts as an important poem, arguing that these immaculate engravings describe not only a foundational religion and philosophy but a radical way of viewing the world.
Buried in a tomb in the Egyptian desert some four thousand years ago, the Pyramid Texts are among the world’s earliest complex and extensive body of writing. Morrow argues that the Pyramid Texts should be recognized as a formative event in the evolution of human thought which—almost before science, art, and written language—set forth the relationship between time and eternity, life and death, history and ideas with astonishing parallels to Judeo-Christian culture, Buddhism, and Tantra. More than twenty years in the making, her book is a monumental achievement that locates the origins of poetic thought in Western Culture.
Susan Brind Morrow studied classics, Arabic, and Egyptology at Columbia University. She has lived and traveled extensively in Egypt and Sudan, working as an archaeologist and as a Guggenheim Foundation fellow studying natural history, language, and the uses of poetry. Her first book, The Names of Things: A Passage in the Egyptian Desert, was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir in 1998. She is also the author of Wolves and Honey: A Hidden History of the Natural World. She lives in upstate New York.
10 AM: Lecture
2 PM: Seminar
Events are free; light Saturday lunch provided.
RSVP: (212) 877-8227, ext. 201