Sun Ra’s Full Lecture & Reading List From His 1971 UC Berkeley Course, “The Black Man in the Cosmos”

A pio­neer of “Afro­fu­tur­ism,” band­leader Sun Ra emerged from a tra­di­tion­al swing scene in Alaba­ma, tour­ing the coun­try in his teens as a mem­ber of his high school biol­o­gy teacher’s big band. While attend­ing Alaba­ma Agri­cul­tur­al and Mechan­i­cal Uni­ver­si­ty, he had an out-of-body expe­ri­ence dur­ing which he was trans­port­ed into out­er space. As biog­ra­ph­er John Szwed records him say­ing, “my whole body changed into some­thing else. I land­ed on a plan­et that I iden­ti­fied as Sat­urn.” While there, aliens with “lit­tle anten­na on each ear. A lit­tle anten­na on each eye” instruct­ed him to drop out of col­lege and speak through his music. And that’s just what he did, chang­ing his name from Her­man Blount and nev­er look­ing back.

Whether you believe that sto­ry, whether Sun Ra believes it, or whether his entire per­sona is a the­atri­cal put-on should make no dif­fer­ence. Because Sun Ra would be a vision­ary either way. Com­bin­ing Afro­cen­tric sci­ence fic­tion, eso­teric and occult phi­los­o­phy, Egyp­tol­ogy, and, with his “Arkestra,” his own brand of free jazz-futur­ism that has no equal on earth, the man is tru­ly sui gener­is. In 1971, he served as artist-in-res­i­dence at UC Berke­ley and offered a spring semes­ter lec­ture, African-Amer­i­can Stud­ies 198, also known as “Sun Ra 171,” “The Black Man in the Uni­verse,” or “The Black man in the Cos­mos.” The course fea­tured read­ings from—to name just a few—theosophist Madame Blavatsky, French philoso­pher Con­stan­tin Fran­cois de Chas­se­boeuf, black Amer­i­can writer and poet Hen­ry Dumas, and “God,” whom the cos­mic jazz the­o­rist report­ed­ly list­ed as the author of The Source Book of Man’s Life and Death (oth­er­wise known as the King James Bible).

Now we have the rare oppor­tu­ni­ty to hear a full lec­ture from that class, thanks to Ubu.com. Lis­ten to Sun Ra spin his intri­cate, bizarrely oth­er­world­ly the­o­ries, drawn from his per­son­al phi­los­o­phy, pecu­liar ety­molo­gies, and idio­syn­crat­ic read­ings of reli­gious texts. Hear­ing him speak is a lit­tle like hear­ing him play, so be pre­pared for a lot of free asso­ci­a­tion and jar­ring, unex­pect­ed jux­ta­po­si­tions. Szwed describes a “typ­i­cal lec­ture” below:

Sun Ra wrote bib­li­cal quotes on the board and then ‘per­mu­tat­ed’ them—rewrote and trans­formed their let­ters and syn­tax into new equa­tions of mean­ing, while mem­bers of the Arkestra passed through the room, pre­vent­ing any­one from tap­ing the class. His lec­ture sub­jects includ­ed Neo­pla­ton­ic doc­trines; the appli­ca­tion of ancient his­to­ry and reli­gious texts to racial prob­lems; pol­lu­tion and war; and a rad­i­cal rein­ter­pre­ta­tion of the Bible in light of Egyp­tol­ogy.

Luck­i­ly for us, some sly stu­dent cap­tured one of those lec­tures on tape.

For more of Pro­fes­sor Ra’s spaced out pre­sen­ta­tion, see the Helsin­ki inter­view above, also from 1971. And if you decide you need your own edu­ca­tion in “Sun Ra 171,” see the full read­ing list from his Berke­ley course below, cour­tesy of the blog New Day.

The Egypt­ian Book of the Dead

Radix

Alexan­der His­lop: Two Baby­lons

The Theo­soph­i­cal works of Madame Blavatsky

The Book of Oah­spe

Hen­ry Dumas: Ark of Bones

Hen­ry Dumas: Poet­ry for My Peo­ple eds. Hale Charfield & Eugene Red­mond, Car­bon­dale: South­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty Press 1971

Black Fire: An Anthol­o­gy of Afro-Amer­i­can Writ­ing, eds. Leroi Jones & Lar­ry Neal, New York: William Mor­row 1968

David Liv­ingston: Mis­sion­ary Trav­els

Theodore P. Ford: God Wills the Negro

Rut­ledge: God’s Chil­dren

Sty­lus, vol. 13, no. 1 (Spring 1971), Tem­ple Uni­ver­si­ty

John S. Wil­son: Jazz. Where It Came From, Where It’s At, Unit­ed States Infor­ma­tion Agency

Yosef A. A. Ben-Jochan­nan: Black Man of the Nile and His Fam­i­ly, Alk­ibu Ian Books 1972

Con­stan­tin Fran­cois de Chas­se­boeuf, Comte de Vol­ney: The Ruins, or, Med­i­ta­tion on the Rev­o­lu­tions of Empires, and the Law of Nature, Lon­don: Pio­neer Press 1921

The Source Book of Man’s Life and Death (Ra’s descrip­tion; = The King James Bible)

Pjotr Demi­anovitch Ous­pen­sky: A New Mod­el of the Uni­verse. Prin­ci­ples of the Psy­cho­log­i­cal Method in Its Appli­ca­tion to Prob­lems of Sci­ence, Reli­gion and Art, New York: Knopf 1956

Fred­er­ick Bod­mer: The Loom of Lan­guage. An Approach to the Mas­tery of Many Lan­guages, ed. Lancelot Hog­ben, New York: Nor­ton & Co. 1944

Black­ie’s Ety­mol­o­gy

Count­less oth­er free cours­es from UC Berke­ley can be found in our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

via Dan­ger­ous Minds and audio cour­tesy of Sen­si­tive Skin Mag­a­zine

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Her­bie Han­cock Presents the Pres­ti­gious Nor­ton Lec­tures at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty: Watch Online

Son­ic Youth Gui­tarist Thurston Moore Teach­es a Poet­ry Work­shop at Naropa Uni­ver­si­ty: See His Class Notes (2011)

Space Jazz, a Son­ic Sci-Fi Opera by L. Ron Hub­bard, Fea­tur­ing Chick Corea (1983)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness


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Comments (27)
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  • Future Twin says:

    “YOU LOSE THE LANGUAGE & YOU LOSE THE VIBRATION”

  • TRIPPO MARX says:

    If we came from nowhere here why can’t we go some­where there?

  • gerhard koehler says:

    where can i get dics of sun ra?

  • Jesus R says:

    Ger­hard:

    A great start­ing point is the new Sun Ra com­pi­la­tion curat­ed by Mar­shall Allen, “In The Orbit Of Ra”:

    http://www.strut-records.com/deep-into-the-world-of-sun-ra/

    Hope that helps. Orig­i­nals are very hard to find or incred­i­bly expen­sive. Some labels have been reis­su­ing his work and there has been a great re-release cam­paign on iTunes where you can find new­ly mas­tered ver­sions of most of his essen­tial albums.

  • greg.org says:

    seems like kind of a dick move to reskin the mp3 file and hotlink to it on Sen­si­tive Skin with­out even giv­ing them a men­tion or a link

    http://sensitiveskinmagazine.com/professor-sun-ra/

  • Joyce Dade says:

    I lis­tened and I learned. In my wildest dreams, how was I to know I would encounter the live voice of Sun Ra today and become at once, a stu­dent of his, and hang­ing on his every word. I am grate­ful to the author of this pre­sen­ta­tion, Josh Jones and Open Cul­ture for this. Thank you. I saw Sun Ra only twic and although some might say, twice ought to be enough. It was the being in the pres­ence of this man and his Arkestra that count­ed most, that I can say in hon­esty, I was there. I saw him liv­ing and breath­ing and per­form­ing live at two Jazz clubs in NYC when I was young and he was going strong. I am a visu­al artist. I know lit­tle about the mechan­ics of music, although I have stud­ied Ori­en­tal phi­los­o­phy and West­ern phi­los­o­phy, Sun Ra’s spin on phi­los­o­phy, I find fas­ci­nat­ing to say the least. I need to replay and notate and rethink and digest and come to my own con­clu­sions about the state­ments and dec­la­ra­tions he made that day this record­ing was made, almost half a cen­tu­ry ago, and make some com­pre­hen­sive sense of how it fits into my own bi-racial phi­los­o­phy and under­stand­ing of the mean­ing of life. If only I could hear Sun Ra sing, “Stars Fell on Alaba­ma,” or “I Dream to Much,” it would be as if the icing had been put on the cake, the cher­ry on the sun­dae and the dream real­ized all at once. Thank you for writ­ing and pre­sent­ing this arti­cle with the rare audio lec­ture, and now I must return to the every­day, return to earth from the cos­mos.

  • Buck Stronghard says:

    Sun Ra is so full of shit, I can’t believe some­body gave him a job teach­ing.

  • Heidi says:

    I rec­om­mend you get in touch with the Hinds broth­ers, who pub­lished a ‘zine, Sun Ra Research, for a decade or so(?).

    They spent as much time as they pos­si­bly could with Sun Ra, record­ed inter­views and basi­cal­ly every­thing the man said. They’re in San Fran­cis­co. It’s fas­ci­nat­ing read­ing. When­ev­er they could­n’t under­stand him, they wrote, “unde­ci­pher­able.” It hap­pened a lot, but you sure­ly would get the gist of what the man was puttin’ down.

    I love Sun Ra. I first saw him in 1980 in Hous­ton. The music was spec­tac­u­lar. See­ing him and the Arkestra per­form changed my life. It was live performance/life per­for­mance. After see­ing them, I under­stood that I need to be in the room when art/music/life hap­pens. It’s only by being in the room that you enter into a shared organism/experience with the per­form­ers. I’m so damn glad I was 20 when it hap­pened. It was an ear­ly incor­po­ra­tion into my sys­tem of liv­ing. (Oh, y’know I’m eas­i­ly swayed into lofti­ness and B.S. by talk­ing about Sun Ra.)

    Here’s the link:
    http://www.united-mutations.com/r/sunraresearch.htm

    Here’s a link to their works,

  • brother flagg says:

    Joyce, I feel you. Sun­Ra is way too deep for most. Nev­er the less he had much wis­dom to share, and he did. And for that I am grate­ful.

  • Sam says:

    This was a 1971 course?

    How is it that one of books, Black Man in the Nile, was pub­lished in 1972?

  • ntrs says:

    Anoth­er quote of his, from the lec­ture. Fun­ny how white lib­er­als, who are per­fect­ly described in this, pur­pose­ful­ly over­look it:

    “Ain’t noth­ing white good. Every­thing white is evil and wicked. I ain’t nev­er met a good white per­son, and i nev­er will. Because they weren’t made good. They were made evil and wicked.”

  • norma baxter brown says:

    I HAD THE AWSUME PLEASURE OF SEEING SUN RAH IN HIS NATURAL HABITAT
    BALTIMORE…AT THE FAMOUS BALLROOM.…
    THERE IS NOW WORDS TO DESCRIBE IT..
    DOZENS OF MUSIC MAKERS ON AND OFF THE STAGE AT ALL TIMES..

    IT WAS COSMIC AND I BECAME A TRUE BELIVER

    NORMA

  • brother Tom says:

    eras­mus ,
    I hope you live to re track you state­ment.
    Peo­ple judge by the way they are and think.
    A per­son who can not hear the truth from a gen­uine
    source of wis­dom i.e. Le Sun Ra , has not a source of
    wis­dom and truth w/in them­selves. Think on that for a
    good long while.
    I have met and talked w/ le Sun Ra , He was the most gra­cious man i ve EVER met. I expe­ri­enced him and June and Mar­shall and all of the singers and play­ers of instru­ments of the ARKESTRA on three sep­a­rate occa­sions.
    I was ” Grant­ed audi­ence” , just like meet­ing a roy­al King, He and I talked at length on mat­ters con­cern­ing the whole (HUMAN) race. The twins record­ed it (btw)
    He was a stream of con­scious­ness poet. A very Deep SOUL. Please Sir re- con­sid­er your own race relat­ed
    neg­a­tiv­i­ty.
    Your name is close to a answer to our prej­u­di­cial prob­lem here on plan­et earth .… Era­sism , can you Dig it ? Erase ism , we all need to make a inner com­mit­ment to doing what we can ‑seen?
    ( to Erase Racism )
    Sun Ra said him­self that he was a test to see if peo­ple could han­dle some­thing dif­fer­ent.
    Sun Ra Lives in the hearts and minds of us all who
    inner­stand his mes­sage and love .
    p.s. after all ( esp. inter­net ” trollers”)
    KEEP A SENSE OF HUMOR — fer realz!

  • Pablo Diablo says:

    SUN RA LIVES.

  • Robert Dickow says:

    I took this course in ’71 (and got an ‘A’ in it!). At least I think that was the course. The title of the course I took was ‘Per­vista’ as list­ed in the UC course cat­a­log, but–like the name of the ‘Arkestra’– the title might well have changed from day to day. It was kind of hard to know what the gist of the course actu­al­ly was. Egyp­tol­ogy? Astrology/Astronomy? Social/Race issues? It was a sum­mer ses­sion class. The sum­mer was hot. I was impressed that Sun­Ra wore a heavy African style coat and his sig­na­ture fur hat nev­er­the­less. I stuck out the lec­tures until one day, when only about 7 peo­ple (out of the 25 or so who signed up) were present in the hall. Sun­Ra announced, quite out of the blue, that ‘the rea­son I’m telling you all this is so you can under­stand my music.” Ah! He actu­al­ly only rarely brought up the sub­ject of his music (though he did screen ‘The Cry of Jazz’ one day.). Sure enough, to close the lec­ture, his band came on stage and they played for a good while, with a cou­ple of his scarf dancers in front of the prosce­ni­um, and a slide show of the stars and plan­ets on a screen. To close, the musi­cians walked off stage one by one, with the remain­der still play­ing– Farewell Sym­pho­ny style. Sun­Ra was the last on stage, and he slow­ly walked off s tage as well, while is elec­tric piano/synth seam­less­ly con­tin­ued to play with­out him. Wild!! Any­way, this expe­ri­ence of mine paid off a few years lat­er, when MacMil­lan press asked me to write the bio arti­cle on Sun­Ra that appears in Grove’s Dic­tio­nary and the Dic­tio­nary of Jazz, etc. To get the ‘A,’ I wrote a term paper. I doubt Sun­Ra him­self grad­ed it. He prob­a­bly had read­ers to do the grad­ing. The only grade record­ed for the entire course was for the term paper. Dur­ing one lec­ture he stat­ed that the black peo­ple were cursed in the Bible. I researched that top­ic, and it appeared that the notion was based on the ‘Curse of Ham’ pas­sage. The idea actu­al­ly is based on a mis­read­ing of the pas­sage. The blacks are not cursed in that pas­sage. My argu­ment and report on the analy­ses of oth­ers about the pas­sage in ques­tion was evi­dent­ly looked upon favor­ably by the grad­er!

  • Shahid JIMMI EsSpirit says:

    @🎼🎹🎶🎷🥁with The ARKESTRA = 33-Days @🇺🇸.
    An Enlight­en­ing.

  • C.Patricia Reyes says:

    Wow, I love every­thing relat­ed to the sun. I had no idea about this per­son Sun Ra. My friend post­ed this in her FB page and I clicked on it just because of the ref­er­ence to the sun. In 2005 the spoke with me when I was out­side want­i­ng to take my life. Sec­ond attempt. The Sun changed my exis­tence and from there we had a series of con­ver­sa­tions dur­ing which I received guid­ance to heal and start over. I kept this as a secret avoid­ing to be called crazy. But now, years lat­er, I am about to pub­lish a book about it. I titled it “Sun­di­al in the Shad­ow” Tak­ing my Inner Girl From Sui­ci­dal Depres­sion to a Man­ing­ful Life. I have extend­ed my research and I learned late­ly that peo­ple in the past used to adore the Sun until Chris­tians cre­at­ed Jesus and put him in the sun’s place. There are numer­ous pas­sages in their bible that appar­ent­ly indi­cate so. I don’t know. That’s not what my book is about. But I men­tion it because there is so much that we humans ignore; for­ev­er mys­ter­ies. I now keep an open mind, wel­com­ing or respect­ing what ppl like Sun Ra shares. I’ll het to lis­ten to his lec­tures and music now.

  • Richard says:

    It was Berke­ley. It was the ’70’s. Need you say more?

  • Judy sorro says:

    Man­ny years ago I was at the explorato­ri­um in San Fran­cis­co when it was at the palace of fine arts
    While wan­der­ing around I found this “thing “ for a bet­ter word and when you moved your hands with­out touch­ing it . It made this won­der­ful whis­per­ing vibra­tional tone. A man approached
    With 2 oth­er men . The one man began play­ing with me on this “thing” we did it for a bit of time smil­ing at each oth­er.
    This man was Sun Ra

    One of the trea­sured moments in my life

  • Anita says:

    The BEST live con­cert I’ve EVER experienced…and Sun Ra IS an expe­ri­ence!

  • Anita says:

    The “thing” is called a theremin.

  • JDV says:

    Same here. Oh well.

  • Stuart says:

    It is won­der­ful to see inter­est con­tin­ue in Sun Ra and his music and phi­los­o­phy. I play music in jazz and relat­ed fields, and it seems like there’s more inter­est in him now than ever. His music remains, get­ting played, lis­tened to, and talked about.

    I was for­tu­nate to see the man and his Arkestra twice in Detroit, once in a cool club, packed, and once at an out­door are­na on the Detroit Riv­er, also packed.

  • Bill Hannaford says:

    Wow this was actu­al­ly a course? After hear­ing this I came away think­ing wow what a racist. I could han­dle that ol Her­man con­vinced him­self that he built the pyra­mids and that whole crazy his­to­ry (how are Egyp­tians from Alaba­ma?) but the racist stuff, no thanks. I think it was all a crock.

  • Dr. Hand says:

    There was a dif­fer­ent read­ing list that includ­ed the Uran­tia Book, for a class before 71′ in Harlem or some­where- for the arkestra only. It has since dis­ap­peared and replaced by the 71 class read­ing list copied over and over on many web­sights — where­as the orig­i­nal list had none of the books the 71 list so called had. He’s the rea­son I got Uran­tia.

  • tom says:

    Rare Sun Ra (Sat­urn) vinyl for sale on my discogs page: https://discogs.com/tomthump

    Check it.

  • djtomthump says:

    CORRECTION: HTTS://DISCOGS.COM/DJTOMTHUMP

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