The Thread-Spirit: The Symbolism of Knotting and the Fiber Arts Paperback – July 1, 2010

This wonderful book takes much of its method and information from Carl Schuster and E.S.Carpenter's "Social Symbolism in Ancient and Tribal Art" (a much shortened title)( Rock Foundation NY 1988). Siegeltuch's is a beautiful book designed along the same lines as the Schuster/Carpenter book with every image discussed right there on the page. No flipping back and forth for the reader. As a pure reading experience, the book is a delight (information: my wife Aileen Winter, designed the book, and I was a reader. Both of us, and Mark Siegeltuch worked on Schuster and Carpenter's 'big' book. Siegeltuch worked on the smaller version of the big book, "Patterns That Connect" (Harry Abrams, 1996). This is another example of comparative anthropology/archeology, a style of thinking about the past that went out of style a long time ago. There is room, however for the comparative method as all the books mentioned so far demonstrate. Siegeltuch's book goes over the points of discussion, without reference to far fetched contemporary theories involving aliens and spaceships. He defines knots in the table of contents, Magic Knots, Love Knots, Marriage Knots, Birth Knots, etc. In the next chapter, Mnemonic Knots, the distribution of those knots, Knot Calendars, Records, The Quipu, Biblical and Talmudic, the Abacus, Musical Knots (I'm skipping around), and finally "The Sutratman" the name given to the "Thread-Spirit" by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy to tie all the material to God and rebirth and to life and its representation over thousands of years and over all continents. This book is wide ranging in its use of images from far and wide but is so beautifully written that even a person who has difficulty tying his or her shoe will find the book eminently readable and a thorough education in ideas that are given no platform in today's academy.There are sections on "The continuous line," "Mazes and Labyrinths," "Knots, Joints and Ancestors." Chapter Four is devoted to the work of Carl Schuster. The closing paragraphs rise to a heigh of sublime speech as if to remind us that there are other types of world than the miserably material one that makes such demands on our pocketbooks and so little demand on our brains, except that we believe the propaganda that our world spews out like so much garbage--and there's no place to put it, either. Siegeltuch does great and beautiful service to the ideas represented in the book, and is generous not only with the earlier scholars, mainly Schuster, Carpenter and Coomaraswamy, but is generous to the reader in that Siegeltuch means to be understood rather than puzzled over. Bravo!, Mr. Siegeltuch for a wonderful book on a neglected topic. I hope we can expect more in the cloudy future.