New Templar/Rennes Books

[Anonymous]

For those of you who take an interest in the Knights Templar and/or Rennes-le-Chateau there are a couple of books coming out this month that might interest you.

Still Spins the Spider of Rennes-le-Chateau?
Bill Kersey (Editor)
14th March

The Templars' Secret Island
Erling Haagensen, Henry Lincoln
31st March

I wonder if these will add anything to the mysteries or just regurgitate past material. Lincoln's book seems to be moving in the direction he indicated in his last book.

Sorry about the bizzare thread title I don't know how it happened!

 

[Anonymous]

"I wonder if these will add anything to the mysteries or just regurgitate past material."

Well, there's a first time for everything I suppose...

 

[Anonymous]

Well, there's a first time for everything I suppose...

Hmmm a lot of the books on these two subjects seem to walk the same well trodden paths. Amazing how each one gets to a completely different place. I think they copy each others work and then just make up a new ending.

 

[Anonymous]

What is worse is that they take the suppositions of previous writers and treat them as universal absolutes. The result is a large number of books with very little to connect them to the known facts. People reading them without any additional background knowledge then buy the theory regardless of how unlikely it may seem on closer examination

'These are not books to be set aside lightly. They should be thrown with great force'

 

[NilesCalder]

'These are not books to be set aside lightly. They should be thrown with great force'

Shirley, therion, they're more like many a Australian wine: "good for laying down and avoiding".

Niles "Number 3: A Larch" Calder

 

[Anonymous]

O Ghod, now you're going to offend the Australians...

 

[Anonymous]

I never buy a theory straight off. Hell I rarely buy a theory, they are much to expensive.

These authors all obviously have there own agendas. Many of their conclusions seem a little rash (undertstatement much) but most have done a lot donkey work and some have even turned up some interesting facts/ideas. Most of them are amateurs who have an enthusiam that most professionals lack. Discounting their work and theories out of hand smacks of elitism to me.

History books are alot like wine. The more expensive and more highy rated by the experts the more I find they taste like vinegar.

 

[FraterLibre]

Basic Publishing

The basic fact is that such books are lucrative within a predictable range, there being a ready-made audience. It's not really about scholarship or any genuine search for what's real. The focus is on bookselling. It's a cottage industry, a subcategory of publishing that some writers swim in confidently, using this or that reference, citation, or pilfered passage with impunity, winking and nudging their way to the bank.

This sort of superficial "research" of simply echoing each others' books without regard to original sources or three-sourcing "facts" is rather common in any of the popular "science" books, and especially egregious in books on Fortean topics, alas. And in fact this practice haunts academia as much as it does the occult arts, enough that one may be safe in comparing the practitioners of university conjuring to the alchemists and would-be sorcerers.