Ring of Fire:
An Indonesian Odyssey

The fourth release of the paperback edition and the newly launched Kindle edition of Ring of Fire: An Indonesian Odyssey are now available on Amazon.

Ring of Fire, illustrated with stunning photographs, is a gripping story of courage and determination, and a fascinating visual record of Indonesia’s endangered peoples, threatened species and disappearing cultures.

First published in 1988 by Bantam Press in London and New York, Ring of Fire enjoyed ten weeks on the top ten non-fiction Best Seller List. It is the true story behind the award-winning PBS television series, Ring of Fire charts the Blair brothers’ 10-year sojourn through the world’s largest and least-known archipelago – the Islands of Indonesia. Amid impenetrable rain forests, erupting volcanoes and startling natural beauty, the brothers have captured on film and in words the story of one of the most captivating and intriguing explorations ever made.

Their odyssey began in 1972 with a 2,500-mile voyage through the fabled Spice Islands, in search of the Greater Bird of Paradise. A decade of further exploration followed, during which the authors lived amongst the Asmat cannibals of West Papua and the healers of Bali, and encountered man-eating dragons in Komodo and the elusive ‘dream wanderers’ of Borneo. With extraordinary courage, humour and passion for the unknown the Blairs draw us into a magical land where ancient myths still flourish.

Rhythms of Vision:
The Changing Patterns of Belief

This brilliant and mystical book threatens to overturn the Western ordered view of the world. It argues, in the romantic vein of the co-culture, that we are poised on the brink of a major revolution of thought of the kind that shattered medieval geo-centric cosmology.

The ‘ground of meaning’ now being dissolved is the dominant cultural assumption that the objective world of tangible, measurable fact is the ultimate ‘truth’. Evidence is drawn from many different branches of knowledge to show how the single-minded pursuit of objective scientific truth is already forcing humans back into themselves, into the subjective psyche which actually experiences. Here we see how the ancient occult arts, the mystical and mantic rituals of religion, are but the shards of a long-lost science of the energy- rhythms in which Life is borne and maintained – both its inner mythical geography, as well as its outer physical anatomy.

The book shows how the romantic revival of the ‘co-culture’ is melting the rigid assumptions of the scientific Enlightenment, revealing beneath it the inchoate embers of an entirely different meaning. Fanning these embers to life shows the outline of ‘religion’ in the new post-Christian age – an era when the rifts between ‘science’ and ‘religion’ – reason and the heart – are healed, fusing them into a single, organic cosmology. Above all the book concerns the growth of human understanding, and our recent realization that we are all aware only of a tiny fraction of the vast vibrationary spectrum in which we, and the Universe of Life, has its being.