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Title: Voices of the 1st Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime by Robert Lawlor ISBN: 0-89281-355-5 Publisher: Inner Traditions Intl Ltd Pub. Date: November, 1991 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.08 (13 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Good Reading
Comment: A great resource for those interesting in the culture of the Australian Aborigines, this book has a very strong focus on the religion, shamanism and spirituality which is so central to indigenous culture. Lawlor pays alot of attention to the kin relations, totems, ancestors, initiation rites and the Dreamtime. Anyone with some interest in the indigenous people of Australia should check this book out. There are only a couple of flaws with this book. One, is that it goes into great detail about traditional Aboriginal beliefs without paying attention to modern day continuation and adaptation of Aboriginal beliefs. Another is that Australia is so large and diverse that its hard to make any generalization about Aboriginal culture. However, these are only minor issues. The book itself is great.
Rating: 5
Summary: Voices still haunting me...
Comment: This is the single finest book, leading to a slew of other great books (biblio) one could ask for regarding humanity on this earth. I was surprised to read the negative reviews above, but thats typical of the Humanist dogma we've all been steeped in for so long - people don't even have the patience or capacity to try and understand anything beyond their McMac and what FOX tells them: 10,000 Years of Progess and Civilization Good; naked humans living on earth for 2 Million years Bad. (and by the way...Mutant Message was formed almost entirely after Lawlor's work, not the other way around, not to mention that M.M. did not ring true to me). Lawlor takes the modern ego to the hoop and 360 dunks it.
A prime reason you know this work is great (not perfect) is that Lawlor essentially destroys the idealism he wrote naively of in his grossly idealised "Sacred Geometry" - Though containing truths about Egypt, it's as soaked in the fallacy that Egypt was little more than sacred, peaceful people living fully with nature, floating from temple to temple in robes with all the knowledge of the universe - as if the Egyptians did not cut all the timber, drain all the wetlands, overgraze all the grasslands, put 1000's of plants and animals into extinction, mine out all the precious minerals, enslave all known peoples, and blast a desert out of what was once a lush subtropical region. He dumps much of this with "Voices" in finding the earth and its peoples who never - and still don't - do such nonsense.
Not a single day has passed since 1991 when I read this book, that I've not been influenced by the ideas of this book - it has completely altered the course of my and my wife's life in a way that has allowed us both greater capacity to live in an with nature (and she's a skeptical anthropologist / socialist type - now incorporatse Lawlors work in her classes). My botanical / wildlife background was great and fulfilling, but this book helped me blow the conceptual lid off of my relationship with the natural world,as well as liberate most of the conceptual fallacies about teh greatness of modern life I'd been suckled on (which you'd likely be suspect of to even finish this book.)
He makes clear that people who live in nature are truly the masters in it and not a bunch of 'savages'. He does seem to idealize the aborigines a bit much though, but still makes clear that the concepts he presents about would equally apply to others around the world.
And to all you hard hearted skeptics out there, consider how soft we all are in this wimpy modern world where we continue to yank the rug out from under ourselves daily, replacing with an All New, Improved, Better Than Ever Wonder-Rug - Guaranteed to be better than the last!!! Lawlor challenges us on the fact that as individuals, none of us are capable of designing, creating, and maintaining any of the technologies that surround and sustain us (not to mention, be able to do anything from the past)- were we to do so, I'd bow down and swear that we were actually advanced peoples. The H/G's individually can provide all their food, water, shelter, and needs period - without need for such silly, globally complex and life destroying actions we don't even seem to know or care about that result from our way of life. I think he shows well that they are the masters of this earth, internally and externally. We're mostly just adolescents.
Lawlor blows us to bits with the fact that not 99% but 100% of human existence includes hunter / gatherers - they were here 2M, 1M, 500K, 100K, 50K, 10K years ago, 100 years ago and nearly extinct as you read this - BUT STILL HERE. Our pathetic, cancerous mess has been around in the form of agriculture of various forms for less than 10K years - and its impacts are clear. Certainly, a people who can live in Nature are stronger, smarter, and more stable than the plastic people we've become. To most people in this society - that something or someone has not changed means it has not progressed; of course, their culture is always changing, its just that we don't understand any of it to observe the changes. But the fact that they're still living much as their ancestors did even 50K years ago is evidence of a solid, stable way of life rather than the 30 second commercial zip/zap changing we come to expect and label as progress.
Lawlor has given me faith that the past 10K years will peak and be done and those humans - the meek that will inherit the earth (and I ain't one of them) - are the hunter / gatherers and that they will resume after this lame party of civility is over.
Rating: 1
Summary: Hoax!
Comment: I have worked and lived with Aboriginal people in The Northern Territory for the last 10 years and the stuff Lawlor writes is akin to the fiction of "mutant message down under". Beware, what is contained within these pages bears no relationship to the real thing. Only through learning language and understanding culture through this will you receive the smallest glimpses of the spiritual lives of Aboriginal people. Sacred and secret knowledge is well safeguarded through a strict system of law.
I see this FICTION is totally Robert Lawlors dreaming.
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Title: Wise Women of the Dreamtime: Aboriginal Tales of the Ancestral Powers by K. Langloh Parker, Joanna Lambert, Johanna Lambert ISBN: 0892814772 Publisher: Inner Traditions Intl Ltd Pub. Date: August, 1993 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Dreamkeepers: A Spirit-Journey into Aboriginal Australia by Harvey Arden, Mike Osborne ISBN: 0060925809 Publisher: Harperperennial Library Pub. Date: April, 1995 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: The Speaking Land: Myth and Story in Aboriginal Australia by Ronald M. Berndt, Catherine H. Berndt ISBN: 0892815183 Publisher: Inner Traditions Intl Ltd Pub. Date: October, 1994 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Aborigine Dreaming: An Introduction to the Wisdom and Thought of the Aboriginal Traditions of Australia by James Cowan ISBN: 0007145462 Publisher: Thorsons Pub Pub. Date: December, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Wisdom from the Earth by Anna Voigt ISBN: 1570623252 Publisher: Shambhala Pub. Date: 13 July, 1998 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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