[.ca] Ancient Traces (ISBN 0140264485)

trace elements:
After "The Elixir and the Stone", Ancient Traces was a major disappointment. The book is really a summary overview of some outstanding controversies, but struggles to do justice to the original works and is likely to quickly become outdated. Furthermore, in what seems like a deliberate misrepresentation (quite surprizing coming from this eminent researcher), in the ninth chapter Baigent claims that "authors John Anthony West, Robert Bauval, Adrian Gilbert, Graham Hancock and Colin Wilson ... place Atlantis not beyond the Straits of Gibraltar but much further south, in the continent now known as the Antarctic." This, of course, is patently untrue as only Wilson gave his ill-advised blessing to this idea of the Rath-Flem's. One is left to wonder if perhaps the root cause is Baigent's blind spot in thinking that the only worthwhile contribution of pre-history is the Egyptian's and the only worthwhile development within that tradition is Hermeticism. (Zecharia Sitchin and the Sumerologists must be anathema to him.) There are a couple of chapters on Egypt and on Alchemy that add some original ideas but I don't think these justify the cost of the book. In summary, the book is probably O.K. as an introduction to the themes in the table of contents but avid seekers would do well to invest elsewhere.