Description
Australian aboriginal people have lived in harmony with the earth for perhaps as long as 100,000 years, in their words, since the First Day. In this absorbing work, Lawlor explores the essence of their culture as a source of and guide to transforming our own world view. While not romanticising the past or suggesting a return to the life of the hunter/gatherer, Voices of the First Day enables us to enter into the mentality of the oldest continuous culture on earth and gain insight into our own relationship with the earth and to each other.
This book offers an opportunity to suspend our values, prejudices, and Eurocentrism and step into the Dreaming, to discover a culture whose antiquity predates even the controversial civilizations of Atlantis and Mu, initiatic and ritual practices that reveal the origins of esoteric, yogic, magical, and shamanic traditions of ancient and modern times, a culture that rejected agriculture, architecture, the subjugation of animals, writing, and clothing, a people that valued kin, community, and the law of the Dreamtime as their greatest “possessions,” a people that did not see themselves as “greater” or “lesser” than the earth or its plants and animals, languages whose richness of structure and vocabulary open new worlds of perception and comprehension. Illustrated with more than 100 extraordinary photographs, bark paintings, line drawings and engravings from the early 20th century, never before published.
