Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime

About this book

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.