From: Michael Lorrey (retroman@together.net)
Date: Fri Dec 19 1997 - 17:23:50 MST
Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> >Have you ever read any books written by
> >people who have actually gotten to spend time with aborigines, who have
> >closely studied their culture? If you have you'd find that the aborigines
> >are actually a very peaceful, intelligent, and wise people. May I suggest
> >Mutant Message Down Under by Marlo Morgan.
>
> The first point has some merit. Sadly, be warned that the book you cite is
> a brainless fabrication, a New Age hoax. (I gather that the publisher,
> following its debunking, now reprints it as a `novel'.)
>
Thanks Damien. SOunds like another case of the famous Maya fraud of the
30's, where socialist/communist sympathizing archaeologists from British
and American Ivy League schools developed the preposterous and
completely unsupported, and eventually debunked theories that the Maya
civilization was a socialist paradise of peaceful, communistic, unarmed
innocent heathens.
As it turns out, nothing could have been further from the truth.
Following a successful harvest, the preist/god/king typically had a
ceremony in which he sought the advice of the gods/ancestors, etc. by
piercing his penis with a series of sharpened splinters from different
trees. The pattern of splattered blood that formed supposedly told him
what the gods wanted, or that the hallucinogenic state the preist was in
gave him the illusion he was talking to the gods. In any event, the
message almost invariably was this: GO TO WAR.
Now the current politically correct theory of central american native
history was that the crash of that civilization around 800 AD was the
result of their completely deforesting the Yucatan area. "Let that be a
lesson to you!"
Australian abos I am not as familiar with, but given the
bloodthirstyness of New Guineans, Tahitians, and Hawaiians, I would not
doubt that any "socialist/pacifist paradise" theory of current
Australian intelligentsia is about as accurate as the Maya one.
-- TANSTAAFL!!! Michael Lorrey ------------------------------------------------------------ mailto:retroman@together.net Inventor of the Lorrey Drive MikeySoft: Graphic Design/Animation/Publishing/Engineering ------------------------------------------------------------ How many fnords did you see before breakfast today?
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