The studies in this volume concern cultural history. They grew out of the author's work over the last two decades with colleagues in the Lindisfarne Association, and especially his eighteen-year collaboration with the chaos mathematician Ralph Abraham. In his foreword, Thompson confesses that, 'like many people in the humanities, I suffer from a severe case of "math anxiety". Much to my surprise and delight, Ralph was interested in everything - art, religion, science, as well as mathematics - and was not at all interested in controlling experience with abstractions. Not at all like so many of the scientific reductionists I had met before, Ralph and his attraction to Chaos Theory seemed energized precisely because of an interest in the relationship between lively intellectual structures and living forms in nature.' It is in this spirit that Thompson writes on the great themes that have evolved along with humankind, the afterlife and consciousness, love and hate. He concludes, looking forward for Abraham as well as himself, 'that the art and science of this new emergent culture is not going to be an embodiment of the reductionism and eliminativism of the present, or the past five hundred years. Neither abstract nor concrete, this new way of knowing seems to us to be a kind of visual math that is also musical.'