John Lamb Lash (b. 1945 New York City) has been called the true successor of Mircea Eliade and the rightful heir of Joseph Campbell. Unlike those two world-class academics, John is a self-educated free-lance scholar who specializes in directive mythology: that is, the application of myth to life, rather than its mere interpretation. He is a leading exponent of the power of myth to direct individual experience and drive historical events over the long term.

Due to the scope and diversity of his life-long pursuit, it is difficult if not impossible to characterize John's legacy in a single, one-point formula. In his early fifties, John's interest turned sharply to a subject he had been contemplating since the age of sixteen when he discovered the Pagan Mysteries via Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy) and Gnosticism, via C. G. Jung and, strangely, The Alexandria Quartet of Lawrence Durrell. Ten years of intensive research and reflection produced Not in His Image (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2006), widely regarded as an underground classic. In this work John recovered and restored the single, coherent and comprehensive myth of human origins, the Fallen Goddess Scenario centered on the figure of the wisdom goddess, Sophia. Little did he know it at the time, but this book would provide the bedrock for a program of upscaled, nature-based mysticism that would be practiced by growing numbers of people around the world. "Planetary Tantra" (his neologism) is a method for communion and interaction with the living presence of the earth, Gaia-Sophia

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