“The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfiel
Plot: The book discusses various psychological and spiritual ideas that are rooted in many ancient Eastern Traditions, such as the claim that vegetarianism can help an individual to establish a connection with the Divine. The main character of the novel undertakes a journey to find and understand a series of nine spiritual insights on an ancient manuscript in Peru. The book is a first-person narrative of spiritual awakening. The narrator is in a transitional period of his life, and begins to notice instances of synchronicity, which is the realization that coincidences may have deep meaning.
The story opens with the male narrator becoming reacquainted with an old female friend, who tells him about the Insights, which are contained in a manuscript dating to 600 BC, which has been only recently translated. After this encounter leaves him curious, he decides to go to Peru. On the airplane, he meets a historian who also happens to be interested in the manuscript. As well, he learns that powerful figures within the Peruvian government and the Catholic Church are opposed to the dissemination of the Insights. This is dramatically illustrated when police try to arrest and then shoot the historian soon after his arrival.
The narrator then learns the Insights, one by one, often experiencing the Insight before actually reading the text, while being pursued by forces of the Church and the Peruvian government. In the end, he succeeds in learning the first nine Insights and returns to the United States, with a promise of a Tenth Insight soon to be revealed. The Insights are given only through summaries and illustrated by events in the plot. The text of no complete Insight is given, which the narrator claims is for brevity's sake; he notes that the 'partial translation' of the Ninth Insight was 20 typewritten pages in length.
In the novel, the Maya civilization left ruins in Peru where the manuscript was found, whereupon the Incas took up residence in the abandoned Maya cities after the Maya had reached an "energy vibration level" which made them cross a barrier into a completely spiritual reality.
Discussion: The book was generally well received by readers and spent 165 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. My main criticism is that the plot of the story is not well developed and serves only as a delivery tool for the author's ideas about spirituality. James Redfield has admitted that, even though he considers the book to be a novel, his intention was to write a story in the shape of a parable, a story meant to illustrate a point or teach a lesson.
I disapprove of Redfield's heavy usage of subjective validation and reification in dealing with coincidences to advance the plot thus spending more time concentrating on the explanation of spiritual ideas rather than furthering character development or developing the plot in a more traditional manner.
I also think that he improperly explained and, in some cases, completely unexplained “facts” as flaws in the story. Examples of this include the author’s suggestion of the presence of a Mayan society in modern day Peru, rather than in Central America, as well as the suggestion that the manuscript was written in 600 BC in the jungles of Peru, despite the fact that it is written in Aramaic. This shares a thread with the Book of Mormon, which is a purported history of Hebrew people who migrated to the American continent 600 years B.C. Another point of criticism has been directed at the book’s attempt to explain important questions about life and human existence in an overly simplified fashion.
The Celestine Prophecy was originally self-published by Redfield, who sold 100,000 copies out of the trunk of his Honda before Warner Books agreed to publish it. As of May 2005, it had sold over 20 million copies worldwide and had been translated into 34 languages.”
ctmock wrote this review Tuesday, September 13, 2011.
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