Sun Ra's Syllabus

In the 1970s Sun Ra taught a class at UC Berkeley listed as 'Sun Ra 171' in the Afro-American studies department. His syllabus, as recounted by Arkestra drummer, Samurai Celestial, and others, follows:

John Wilson, Jazz: Where it Came From, Where It's At (United States Information Agency, 1967)

Yosef Ben Jochannan, Black Man of the Nile (Alkibu Ian Books, 1972)

Stylus, 13:1 (Temple University Student Publications, Spring 1971)

Henry Dumas, "Ark of Bones," Ark of Bones And Other Stories, ed. Eugene B. Redmond (New York, Random House, 1974), pp. 3-18

Henry Dumas, Poetry for My People, ed. Hale Chatfield and Eugene Redmond. With a pref. by Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and an introd. by Jay Wright (Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1971)

Imamu Amiri Baraka, Black fire; an anthology of Afro-American writing, ed. LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal (New York, Morrow, 1968)

Alexander Hislop, The two Babylons, or, The papal worship proved to be the worship of Nimrod and his wife : with sixty-one woodcut ilustrations from Ninevah, Babylon, Egypt, Pompeii, &c. (3rd ed. Edinburgh : J. Wood, 1862; Also: New York, Loizeaux Bros., 1956)

David Livingstone, Missionary travels and researches in South Africa : including a sketch of sixteen years' residence in the interior of Africa, and a journey from the Cape of Good Hope to Loanda, on the west coast, thence across..., (New York, Harper & Bros., 1858)

Bill Looney, Radix, 2nd ed. (Fort Worth, Branch-Smith, 1975)

Theodore P. Ford, God wills the Negro: an anthropological and geographical restoration of the lost history of the American Negro people (Chicago, The Geographical institute press, 1939)

Archibald Hamilton Rutledge, God's children, illus. with photographs by Noble Bretzman (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1947)

C.F. Volney, The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires: And the Law of Nature (New York, The Truth Seeker Co., 62 Vesey St, 1913)

"The Source Book of Man's Life and Death," i.e. The Bible, King James Version

P.D. Ouspensky, A New Model of the Universe: Principles of the Psychological Method in Its Application to Problems of Science, Religion and Art, Tr. by R. R. Merton, under the supervision of the author (New York, Knopf, 1931)

Frederick Bodmer, The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages, ed. Lancelot Hogben

"Blackie's Etymology," C. Blackie, Geographical Etymology: A Dictionary of Place Names Giving their Derivations (London, John Murray, Albemarle St, 1887)

Thomas Browne, Hydrotaphia (London, Cambridge UP, 1922)

John Ballou Newbrough, Oahspe, A Kosmon Bible in the Words of Jehovih and his Angel Embassadors, 3rd ed. 1912 (dictated to him in a trance)

Radix (a 19c astrological journal, of which I have been able to find no further information)

Helena P. Blavatsky, Collected Writings, compiled by Boris de Zirkoff, (London, Theosophical Publishing House, 1950)

Arthur Edward Waite, The Real History of the Rosicrucians (London, George Redway, York St, Covent Garden, 1887)

Franz Hartmann, In the Pronaos of the Temple of Wisdom (Boston, The Theosophical Society and Occult Publishing Company, 1890)

Magus Incognito, The Secret Doctrine of the Rosicrucians (Chicago, L. N. Fowler & Co., 1918)

Hargrave Jennings, The Rosicrucians: Their Rites and Mysteries (New York, E.P. Dutton and Co., 1907)

"Those that imagine heaven and hell neighbors, and conceive a vicinity between those two extremes, upon consequence of the parable, where Dives discoursed with Lazarus, in Abraham's bosom, do too grossly conceive of those glorified creatures, whose eyes shall easily out-see the sun, and behold without perspective the extremest distances: for if there shall be, in our glorified eyes, the faculty of sight and reception of objects, I could think the visible species there to be in as unlimitable a way as now the intellectual"

-Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1643