I've recently finished this:
http://strangeattractor.co.uk/shoppe/north/ and
http://polarcosmology.com/
It's by a friend of mine (DannyL knows him too - in fact I know him through Dan) so in a sense I can't really give an impartial account of it, but I'll try anyway. The central thesis is that from the very earliest cultures that had any kind of social hierarchy (i.e. from the adoption of husbandry and/or agriculture onwards) up until the Copernican revolution that heralded the transition in Europe from the Middle Ages to the early modern era, societies in many parts of the world had a shared cosmology that placed central importance on the celestial pole, envisaged as an
axis mundi or World Tree, and that this was manifested on Earth in the person of the shaman, priest-chief, Pharaoh, emperor or in later times the divinely appointed king or caliph, who formed a conduit between the earthly realm (and ordinary people) and the realm of god/s, imagined as being in some sense Up There beyond the physical heavens. This was preceded by a much longer epoch in which largely leaderless hunter-gatherer bands viewed the world in fundamentally horizontal terms (the ground/sky dichotomy, mirroring their horizontal social structure), and was followed by a period that kicked off with Copernicus's heliocentric revolution and reached its apotheosis in Newton's unification of terrestrial and celestial mechanics, in which the celestial pole lost its special meaning but the terrestrial poles, in the course of being discovered and explored, took on an aura of otherworldliness, citing hollow-Earth theorists, Nazi occultists, Poe, Lovecraft,
The Thing and
Cyclonopedia.
Um, that's the gist, anyway. I think he's walked an extremely fine line between a work that's clearly hugely personal and subjective (the prologue begins with a description of an acid trip going horribly wrong at Glastonbury festival in the early '90s) and and one that's objective and scholarly, with a huge wealth of citations, many from very serious anthropologists, archaeologists, historians and philosophers. And unlike a lot of authors with a 'fringe' theory to promote, he rarely overstates his case and is happy to admit when evidence is tenuous or open to interpretation.
I got a lot out of it, as you can see, and I'm sure it would appeal to plenty of other regulars here. Highly recommended (and no, he hasn't got me on a commission!).