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304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1987
Very early in my life I saw that what people in different cultures consider given - just the way things are - is not the same everywhere. I also very early developed a passionate concern about the human situation.
Why do we hunt and persecute each other? Why is our world so full of man's infamous inhumanity to man - and woman? How can humans be so brutal to their own kind? What is it that chronically tilts us toward cruelty rather than kindness, toward war rather than peace, toward destruction rather than actualization?
the original direction in the mainstream of our cultural evolution was toward partnership but that, following a period of chaos and almost total cultural disruption, there occurred a fundamental shift.
The chapters explore the roots of...how the original partnership direction of Western culture veered off into a bloody 5,000 year dominator detour
[Our prehistoric ancestors] must have noted that life emerges from the body of a woman. It would have been natural for them to image the universe as an all-giving Mother from whose womb all life emerges and to which, like the cycles of vegetation, it returns after death to be again reborn.