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Bob Denham\u2019s post yesterday on Marshall McLuhan\u2019s belief that Frye was part of a Masonic conspiracy against him, in part because of his esoteric reading list, raises the issue of Frye\u2019s interest in what he called \u201ckook books.\u201d Here are a couple of examples <\/em><\/strong>from the notebooks.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n For years I have been collecting and reading pop-science & semi-occult books, merely because I find them interesting. I now wonder if I couldn\u2019t collect enough ideas from them for an essay on neo-natural theology. Some are very serious books I haven\u2019t the mathematics (or the science) to follow: some are kook-books with their hair-raising insights or suggestions (CW 6, 713)<\/p>\n There\u2019s a lot of semi-occult fascination with Atlantis in the last two centuries: one very fine book (despite its obvious weaknesses and lapses) is Merezhkovsky\u2019s Atlantis\/Europe<\/em>, which tries to go all out for the historicity of Atlantis and doesn\u2019t mention Thera, but is really based on an ascending ladder diagram in which we go up to the future, unless we get caught in the same cycle again, while Atlantis is our buried or forgotten past. He links the Timaeus<\/em> and the Book of Enoch in some curious ways, coming close to a lot of the von Daniken mythology, but he\u2019s better than that: an example of how yesterday\u2019s kook book becomes tomorrow\u2019s standard text. (CW 6, 495)<\/p>\n Bob Denham provides some context in his introduction to the Late Notebooks volumes:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Some of Frye\u2019s reading is, if not altogether odd, at least surprising\u2014books such as Merezhkovsky\u2019s\u00a0 Atlantis\/Europe<\/em> and Maureen Duffy\u2019s<\/em> Erotic World of Faerie<\/em>. Frye admits that Merezhkovsky comes \u201cclose to a lot of von Daniken mythology,\u201d but then adds, \u201cyesterday\u2019s kook book becomes tomorrow\u2019s standard text.\u201d There are in the notebooks, as one might expect, a number of Frye\u2019s old chestnuts\u2014books such as Graves\u2019s The White Goddess<\/em>, Frances Yates\u2019s studies in hermeticism, the mythical speculations of Gertrude Rachel Levy, Huxley\u2019s Perennial Philosophy<\/em>, Carroll\u2019s Alice books, the novels of Bulwer-Lytton and Rider Haggard. But some readers will no doubt think it strange that Frye would even be curious about such books as Michael Baignet\u2019s The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail<\/em>, Robert Anton Wilson\u2019s The Cosmic Trigger<\/em>, Marilyn Ferguson\u2019s The Aquarian Conspiracy<\/em>, Itzhak Bentov\u2019s Stalking the Wild Pendulum<\/em>, and A.E. Wait\u2019s Quest of the Golden Stairs<\/em>, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, <\/em>and The Holy Grail\u2014<\/em>\u201ckook books\u201d all. It would be difficult to imagine Frye citing such esoterica in Words with Power<\/em>, but he does justify his interest in such writers as Waite, who is only \u201csuperficially off-putting\u201d:<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been reading Loomis and A.E. Waite on the Grail. Loomis often seem to me an erudite ass: he keeps applying standards of coherence and consistency to twelfth-century poets that might apply to Anthony Trolloppe. Waite seems equally erudite and not an ass. But I imagine Grail scholars would find Loomis useful and Waite expendable, because Waite isn\u2019t looking for anything that would interest them. It\u2019s quite possible that what Waite is looking for doesn\u2019t exist\u2014secret traditions, words of power, an esoteric authority higher than that of the Catholic Church\u2014and yet the kind of thing he\u2019s looking for is so infinitely more important than Loomis’ trivial games of descent from Irish sources where things get buggered up because the poets couldn\u2019t distinguish cors meaning body from cors meaning horn. Things like this show me that I have a real function as a critic, pointing out that what Loomis does has been done and is dead, whereas what Waite does, even when mistaken, has hardly begun and is very much alive. (CW 5, xxxv-xxvi)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n