 William C. Mullen | William Mullen has been writing about quantavolution and historical catastrophism
since the early 1970's, when he was scholarly assistant to Immanuel Velikovsky in
Princeton and at Alfred deGrazia's experimental school in the Valais canton in
Switzerland, L'Université du Nouveau Monde. This early work fructified in several
Velikovksian publications—on the Egyptian Pyramid Texts, on Mesoamerica, and on
interdisciplinary synthesis— in Pensée's ten issue series "Immanuel Velikovsky
Reconsidered", of which he served as a member of the editorial board. In 1988 he
became acquainted with Gunnar Heinsohn's revision of Mesopotamian and related
chronologies, and at the 1995 symposium in New York celebrating the centennial of
Velikovsky's birth he presented "Worlds in Collision after Heinsohn" (later published in
the S. I. S. Review, Spring 1998), which argues that if Heinsohn's revised chronology is
correct the scenario of Worlds in Collision is no longer tenable with the dates and agents
proposed there.
Mullen's later work has set aside adherence to a specific Velikovskian scenario and taken
into account the important later astronomical theories of de Grazia and Milton, Clube and
Napier, and most recently Anthony Peratt. Setting aside the question of the precise
dating and astronomical phenomena in the most decisive catastrophes in human memory,
he has chosen to pursue instead the simultaneous reconfiguration of civilized thought
across Eurasia in the period just after the last Bronze Age and Iron Age catastrophes,
often referred to as "The Axial Age". At the groundbreaking 1998 conference "Natural
Catastrophes during Bronze Age Civilisations" in Cambridge, England, he presented the
opening sections of his projected work Catastrophism and the Pre-Socratics, consisting
of studies of proto-science among 7th-4th century BCE Greek thinkers. The monograph
he then published in the conference's proceedings, The Agenda of the Milesian School
(Archaeopress, Oxford, 1998), covers the inaugural figures in that Greek development,
Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander, and Xenophanes. He is currently working on
Heraclitus, about whom he presented a paper in honor of Alfred deGrazia, "Q-Lightning",
at The Center for Quantavolution Conference June 8-10, 2008 at the Université
Pierre-et-Marie-Curie in Paris. Both the Milesian School and Heraclitus essays
will form part of the opening volume of a projected Axial Age series, Catastrophism and
the Axial Age.
Mullen received his B.A. in Classics from Harvard College in 1968 and his Ph.D. from
the University of Texas in 1972. He was a Professor or post-doctoral Fellow at Berkeley,
Princeton, Boston University, Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies, and St. John's
College, before settling in the Classics Department at Bard College in 1985. In 1999 he
began to teach his course "Catastrophe/Apocalypse" there, whose "inside.bard.edu"
website is listed below. His other Greek teaching and publication at Bard has included
specializations in ancient Greek poetry, philosophy, rhetoric, athletics and cultural
geography; in the latter category should be included his expeditions and publications
exploring the validity of Felice Vinci's thesis in The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic
Tales (subject of the "vteam06" website below). In addition to ancient Greece he has
taught courses and published on Roman influences on the American Founding Fathers;
and the revisionist Hellenism of Nietzsche; and on East-West comparative studies
(courses on "Confucius and Socrates", "Aristotle and Xunzi", "India and Greece").
Since 1982 he has initiated and led Joint Seminars between the U.S. Military
academies— first between the Naval Academy and St. John's College at Annapolis, then
between West Point and Bard College— and in the last few years has broadened the West
Point relation into the Academy-Bard Exchange Program. He has also taught public
speaking in prisons, and has worked with therapists of combat trauma and trainers of
guards of juvenile delinquents. He was a regular contributor of book reviews and op-ed
pieces to The New York Sun during its years of publication between 2002 and 2008.
Over the last forty years he has also published, in a wide range of magazines, his own
poetry and his translations of Greek, Egyptian and Chinese poetic texts. His poem
"Enchanted Rock" was chosen for inclusion in Best American Poems of 1998. |
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