Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality

Presents an analysis of the "nomadic" consciousness of our ancestors and the forces religious and political that overwhelmed it during the Neolithic era and considers its revival in the twentieth century. The third book in Morris Bermans much acclaimed trilogy on the evolution of human consciousness Wandering God continues his earlier work which garnered such praise as "solid lessons in the history of ideas" (KIRKUS Reviews) "filled with piquant details" (Common Boundary) and "an informative synthesis and a remarkably friendly good-natured jeremiad" (The Village Voice). Here in a remarkable discussion of our hunter-gatherer ancestry and the "paradoxical" mode of perception that it involved Berman shows how a sense of alertness or secular/sacred immediacy subsequently got buried by the rise of sedentary civilization religion and vertical power relationships. In an integrated tour de force Wandering God explores the meaning of Paleolithic art the origins of social inequality the nature of cross-cultural child rearing the relationship between women and agriculture and the world view of present-day nomadic peoples as well as the emergence of "paradoxical" consciousness in the philosophical writings of the twentieth century.