Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime »

Robert Lawlor is a writer and film producer living in Australia who has studied aboriginal culture firsthand. His published works include Sacred Geometry: Its Philosophy and Practice (Thames & Hudson, 1982), Earth Honoring: The New Male Sexuality (Inner Traditions 1991), and the translation of the works of Schwaller de Lubicz and Alain Daniélou.

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 romanticizing 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 people who rejected agriculture, architecture, writing, clothing, and the subjugation of animals

• A lifestyle of hunting and gathering that provided abundant food of unsurpassed nutritional value

• Initiatic and ritual practices that hold the origins of all esoteric, yogic, magical, and shamanistic traditions

• A sexual and emotional life that afforded diversity and fluidity as well as marital and social stability

• A people who valued kinship, community, and the law of the Dreamtime as their greatest "possessions."

• Language whose richness of structure and vocabulary reveals new worlds of perception and comprehension.

• A people balanced between the Dreaming and the perceivable world, in harmony with all species and living each day as the First Day.

Voices of the First Day is illustrated throughout with more than 100 extraordinary photographs, bark paintings, line drawings and engravings. Many of these photographs are among the earliest ever made of the Aboriginal people and are shown here for the first time.

Robert Lawlor is a writer and film producer living in Australia who has studied aboriginal culture firsthand. His published works include Sacred Geometry: Its Philosophy and Practice (Thames & Hudson, 1982), Earth Honoring: The New Male Sexuality (Inner Traditions 1991), and the translation of the works of Schwaller de Lubicz and Alain Daniélou.

The Bookwatch

"Lawlor's consideration of Australian Aboriginal culture's logic, spirituality and benefits is essential for understanding their society: it provides not the usual history of Aboriginal heritage; but a review of their beliefs, psyche and society."

Preface

Introduction

Earth Dreaming

Part One - In The Beginning Was The Dreaming
Chapter 1. Images of Our Origins Chapter 2. Time and Space in the Dreaming Chapter 3. Dreaming and Creation Chapter 4. Colonization and the Destruction of the Dreaming Chapter 5. Revelation, Paradise, and Fall: The Myth of the Golden Age Chapter 6. Earth Dying, Earth Reborn Chapter 7. In The Womb of the Rainbow Serpent Chapter 8. Seed Dreaming

Part Two - Living The Dreaming
Chapter 9. Coming Into Being Chapter 10. The Cycles of Initiation Chapter 11. Aboriginal Sexuality Chapter 12. Dreamtime and the Sense of Being Chapter 13. The Aboriginal Kinship System Chapter 14. Dream, Earth, and Identity

Part Three - Totemism and Animism
Chapter 15. Totem and Society Chapter 16. Totem and Image Chapter 17. Hunter-Gatherers and Totemism Chapter 18. Totem and Mind Chapter 19. Totem and Animism

Part Four - Death and the Initiations of High Degree
Introduction Chapter 20. Death - Expanding into the Dreaming Chapter 21. Death - The Prepared Journey Chapter 22. Wise Women and Men of High Degree Chapter 23. Preserving the Seed

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index