Saturn Articles: Sun Ra 171

Sun Ra 171

Jim Johnson

Fellow Saturnites:

In a conversation with Arkestra drummer Samurai Celestial, I mentioned an interest in the required reading list that Sun Ra issued to his students when he taught his class at Cal Berkeley in the 1970s. I have personally been interested in this list for some time, as I have always wondered what Ra would recommend book- wise. Well, thanks to Samurai's kindness, he was able to supply me with a copy of the list to share with everyone.

The course was listed as "Sun Ra 171", in Afro-American Studies. Supposedly, many students could not find a lot of the titles. Samurai has read many of the books but also can't find some of them.

Sun Ra 171 Reference List
Albums
1.	My Brother the Wind, vols. 1 & 2	Saturn
2.	The Night of the Purple Moon	Saturn
3.	The Magic City	Saturn
4.	The Nubians of Pluto	Saturn
5.	Atlantis	Saturn
6.	Fate in a Pleasant Mood	Saturn
7.	Monorails and Satellites	Saturn
8.	Strange Strings	Saturn
9.	Nothing Is	ESP Disc
10.	Heliocentric, vols. 1 & 2	ESP Disc

Books
	Title	Author	Publisher
1.	Jazz Where it Came From, Where It's At	John S. Wilson	United States Information Agency
2.	Black Man of the Nile	Yoseph Ben Jochannan	Alkibu Ian Books
3.	Stylus, 13:1 (Spring 1971)		Temple University Student Pubications
4.	Ark of Bones	Henry Dumas
5.	Poetry for my People	Henry Dumas
6.	Black Fire	LeRoi Jones & Larry Neal
7.	The Two Babylons	Alexander Hislop
8.	Missonary Travels	Livingston
9.	Radix	Bill Looney
10.	God Wills the Negro	Theodore P. Ford
11.	God's Children	Archibald Rutledge
12.	Ruins of Empire	Volney
13.	The Source Book of Man's Life and Death (i.e, The Bible, "King James")	God	numerous
14.	A New Model of the Universe	P.D. Ouspensky
15.	The Loom of Language	Frederick Bodmer
16.	Blackiesetymology		published in London, England

Can anyone familiar with any of these works provide any additional information?

Space,
Jim Johnson

An Addendum

The liner notes of the Evidence CD Soundtrack to the Film Space Is The Place, ECD 22070 (1993), contain text by John F. Szwed (author of Space Is the Place the biography of Sun Ra), in which we can read:

... in 1971 ... Sun Ra returned to California to become a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. ... with class handouts, assignments and a reading list which included The Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Radix (a 19th century astrology journal), Alexander Hislip's Two Babylons, books on etymology, hieroglyphics, color therapy, Afro-American folklore, ex-slaves' writings, the theosophical works of Madame Blavatsky, spiritually channeled tomes like The Book of Oahspe, Henry Dumas' poetry and short stories, Dr. Livingston's travels in Africa, the Bible, and accounts of the origins of the Rosicrucians.

These less detailed references do no match completely the Booklist given here on the list above, - there are missing but also additional works (apart from the question if it's Hislip, as on Evidence liner notes, or Hislop, as on the list above).

Now, when thinking of our attempt to get additional information on these works, I am getting some doubts when reading on what John F. Szwed also mentions in the liner notes:

When distressed students told Sun Ra that the books were either missing from the library or had never been there in the first place, he merely smiled knowingly.

So what? ;-)

Dr. Anton J. Kuchelmeister

Moudry here:

The author's surname is, according to the Library of Congress and Amazon.com, Hislop. The Two Babylons; or, the Papal Worship was reprinted in 1997 and has a few interesting readers' reviews about it @ amazon.com.

More Information on the Books

Dumas, Henry (1934-1968). Ark of bones and other stories. Edited by Eugene B. Redmond. New York, Random House [1974].

Dumas, Henry. Poetry for my people. Edited by Hale Chatfield and Eugene Redmond. With a pref. by Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and an introd. by Jay Wright. Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press [1971, c1970].

Baraka, Imamu Amiri (1934- ). Black fire; an anthology of Afro-American writing, edited by LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal. New York, Morrow, 1968.

Hislop, Alexander (1807-1865). The two Babylons, or, The papal worship proved to be the worship of Nimrod and his wife : with sixty-one woodcut ilustrations from Ninevah, Babylon, Egypt, Pompeii, &c. / by Alexander Hislop. 3rd ed. Edinburgh : J. Wood, 1862. Also from: New York : Loizeaux Bros., 1956.

Livingstone, David (1813-1873). Missionary travels and researches in South Africa : including a sketch of sixteen years' residence in the interior of Africa, and a journey from the Cape of Good Hope to Loanda, on the west coast, thence across... New York : Harper & Bros., 1858. There are other publishers for this, too.

Looney, Bill. Radix / by Bill Looney. 2nd ed. Fort Worth, Tex. : Branch-Smith, c1975.

Ford, Theodore, P. God wills the Negro; an anthropological and geographical restoration of the lost history of the American Negro people,. Chicago, Ill., The Geographical institute press, 1939.

Rutledge, Archibald Hamilton (1883-1973). God's children, by Archibald Rutledge, illus. with photographs by Noble Bretzman. Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, c1947.

Richard J. Callahan, Jr.
Dept. of Religious Studies
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106

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