Dreamtime: A Happy Book

Mountford — was an Australian anthropologist and photographer, known for his pioneering work on indigenous Australians and his depictions and descriptions of their art. As a younger man Mountford developed an interest in Aboriginal art and became something of a self-taught anthropologist who led several expeditions into different parts of the bush to study aboriginal peoples and rock drawings.

The book consists of 82 entries, each on facing pages. On the facing page is the full color reproduction of the painting by Roberts which he created to illustrate the myth. The size and provenance of the painting is indicated. In the days of the Dreamtime all swans were white. During that time, two swans rested on a lagoon, unaware that it belonged to the eagle-hawks.

The eagle-hawks resented this intrusion, and savagely attacked the swans. Then they picked them up in their sharp, strong claws, and flew with them far to the south. Even while the swans were being carried away to this strange new land other eagle-hawks tore at their wounded bodies, plucking out still more feathers. Finally, the swans were dropped on the rocks of a stony desert. There, naked and almost dead, the swans heard the call of the black mountain-crows.

They looked up and saw hundreds of them; either on the wing or struggling for places on the few branches of the desert trees. We will send down on the breeze some of our feathers to keep you warm, and when you feel strong enough they will help you to fly again. And ever since that day all Australian swans, except for a few white feathers on their wings, have feathers as black as the crows which clad their nakedness and helped them to fly again.

The giant Witana cuts his arms to decorate youths in an initiation rite. Mountford opened the exhibition with the remark quoted above - No Australian artist has painted like this; he has followed no school — he has copied no previous artist. View all 12 comments.

Dreamtime: A Happy Book

Susan rated it really liked it Jul 20, John Hunt marked it as to-read Jul 03, Kitty Red-Eye marked it as to-read Aug 03, Lauren marked it as to-read Dec 03, Ben marked it as to-read Apr 28, Theo Logos marked it as to-read Aug 06, Chyna-Maree Hayden marked it as to-read Aug 16, Glenda Gurney-Hall marked it as to-read Aug 25, Duerr would later relate that this blow to his vanity first provided him with the idea of writing Dreamtime.

Duerr presented some of his ideas in a lecture given to the members of a philosophy seminar at the University of Constance in the autumn of , which he repeated at a housewives' club in Mannheim. He was "greatly encouraged" in his preparation for the work by the noted English anthropologist E. Evans-Pritchard — , who died before its publication. The anthropologist Rik Pinxten noted that Dreamtime was published at a time of new advancements in German anthropology. After a period of intellectual stagnation during the preceding decades, the s saw the rising popularity of the discipline, with a dramatic increase in the number of students enrolling to study ethnography at West German universities.

It also saw increasing interdisciplinary collaboration between anthropologists and philosophers, with several scholars arguing that ethnography was relevant to "philosophical analysis". This increase in philosophical discussion within German anthropology was largely rejected by the "official academic representatives" of the discipline, who believed that it exceeded the "limits of scientific respectability", but it was nonetheless adopted by Duerr in Dreamtime. When the book was first published in West Germany in , it sold hundreds of thousands of copies, becoming a bestseller and arousing both popular and academic interest.

The book was translated into English by Felicitas D. Goodman — , a Hungarian-born American anthropologist who had written several books of her own on the subject of religious trance journeys. Duerr noted that of all the translators he had worked with, Goodman showed the greatest dedication to her work. Explaining his reasoning, he remarked that "a book is not a dishwasher, where it is advisable to change malfunctioning parts.

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Hans Peter Duerr, []. Duerr examines the use of flying ointment in early modern witchcraft and draws ethnographic parallels from accused witches among the Shona people of Rhodesia and witchcraft beliefs of the Normanby Archipelago in the South Pacific.

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He concludes that some of those accused of witchcraft in early modern Europe had applied hallucinogenic ointments to their skin to make themselves believe that they were flying to the so-called witches' sabbat , a ritual gathering of witches. Noting the apparent lack of recipes for this salve in the witch trial records, Duerr posits the view that the Christian authorities intentionally covered up the existence of hallucinogenic ointments, fearing that their existence would cast doubt on various aspects of the witches' accounts, including their alleged encounters with the Devil. Duerr maintains that this knowledge might have ultimately led people to cast doubt on even the Devil, a key aspect of early modern Christian cosmology.

Although the use of hallucinogenic ointments was not a factor in every witch trial, it was more prevalent in the earlier trials of the Alpine region. Duerr connects its use to the nocturnal visionary traditions associated with the goddess Diana in that region.

Duerr then looks into the origins of the nocturnal visionary traditions, beginning with the ancient Greek deity Artemis and her influence on the Roman goddess Diana.

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In Alpine lore, Diana survived Christianization as the leader of the nocturnal procession. Duerr then describes the relationship between ancient goddesses and caves as a symbol of the female vagina and explores stories involving caves in Greek mythology , Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Yakut folklore. Duerr proposes that the association between caves and the vagina is global in scope, as societies around the world use caves in rituals symbolizing birth.

Various folk traditions across Europe are analyzed, such as the Alpine Perchtenlaufen , where women broke social conventions by attacking men or engaging in lesbianism.

THE DREAMTIME FAIRIES

Duerr compares these traditions to the benandanti of early modern Friuli , and to the Livonian werewolf , viewing them as representing the clash between order and chaos. Duerr argues that the societies of European Christendom began to increasingly accept female nudity in art and fashion during the Late Middle Ages. Examples in the historical European folk tradition where criminals have been declared to be outside of the law and banished from the community are illustrated.

Duerr connects these outsiders to executioners and warriors who were also outside the law because they had entered the world of the dead. Similarly, the witches of the early modern period also left the everyday world, and like the shamans of Siberia experienced their "wild" or "animal aspect" in order to understand their human side.

Duerr uses ethnographic examples from around the world to show that many cultures have used hallucinogenic substances to reach states of consciousness beyond ordinary societal boundaries. Duerr provides additional ethnographic examples showing how societal rules were reversed at special times of the year. In shamanic terms, societies which espouse an "archaic mentality" understand who they are by understanding who they are not; according to Duerr, modern societies fail to understand this concept.

The plant was introduced to Europe in the early modern period. Among the Huichol people of central Mexico, shamans have told anthropologists that Datura is used by malevolent witches. Duerr makes note of the anthropologists who have undertaken shamanic experiences with the people they are studying, such as Barbara Myerhoff and Carlos Castenada , but argues that such ethnographers have failed to truly understand what shamans mean when they describe their experiences as "flying".

In Duerr's view, shamans learn to evaporate their "ego boundaries", thereby experiencing themselves in a different way; it is this feeling that can be described as shamanic flying. Duerr ties these shamanic practices into the werewolves of early modern Europe, arguing that these werewolves did not physically transform into wolves, but that they embraced their "wolf nature" by crossing over the boundary from "civilisation" to "wilderness". Duerr then offers a philosophical discussion on the nature of reality, criticizing psychiatrists like George Devereux for their beliefs that shamans were mentally ill.

Instead he champions the idea that the visionary experiences of shamans should be treated as real rather than illusionary, drawing from the ideas of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to support his argument. Duerr argues that the conversations between the animal and the individual undertaking the vision are neither literal nor delusional, but that the only way to understand this is to situate oneself "on the fence", between the worlds of civilisation and wilderness.

Duerr argues that modern Western society lacks important facets found in "archaic" societies who adhere to shamanic beliefs, and he asserts that the majority of Western anthropologists who have performed ethnographic fieldwork in these cultures have failed to truly understand them.

To correct this, Duerr argues that anthropologists must understand that people in such societies take a "mythic perspective" to the world, often comparing objects and places in the material world to objects and places that exist "outside of time", in the eternal realm of mythology. He connects this with the Indigenous Australian concept of Dreamtime , an otherworld outside of ordinary space and time.

Finally, Duerr once again criticises the approach of Western society and its anthropologists to studying "archaic" spiritual beliefs. He asserts that in these "archaic" cultures, people "have a much clearer idea about the fact that we can not be only what we are if at the same time, we are also what we are not , and that we can only know who we are if we experience our boundaries".

He denounces Western scientists and anthropologists for their approaches to the study of such cultures, arguing that they have misrepresented them by attempting to fit them within the Western ideas of objectivity. He argues that in future, anthropologists must reach their own boundaries, and recognize the wilderness of their consciousness before they can truly understand the worldview of "archaic" humans.

Writing in The Journal of Religion , Gail Hinich claimed that Duerr's Dreamtime had a "maverick whimsy and passion" that stemmed from its argument that Western society had unfairly forced the "otherworld" into "an autistic tyranny of the self". On a critical note, Hinich believed that despite Duerr's extensive bibliography, he had failed to understand the "critical context in which the intellectual history of the demonized outsider continues to be examined", ignoring the ideas put forward by Edward Dudley and Maximilian Novack in their edited volume The Wild Man Within or John Block Friedman in his The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought Fayter also commented positively on Goodman's translation, noting that she had successfully conveyed Duerr's dry humour and self-deprecating wit.

Paul Fayter's review of Dreamtime , He felt that the book had brought him to the "edges of [his] own logics", but that this had not been the result of any intellectual argument posed by Duerr; indeed, he suggested that there were "crucial scholarly weaknesses" that made much of Duerr's argument suspect. He ultimately felt that because Duerr had refused to correct his factual mistakes for the English translation, the book had left the realms of scholarship and instead become an "obscure cultural artifact", one which was "represented by the myriad descriptions of cryptic symbols" that are discussed within its pages.

Going on to comment on Duerr's main argument regarding the relationship between Wilderness and Civilization, Valadez also expressed his opinion that Duerr had made a "fundamental error" in assuming that Wilderness is not accessible to everyone "by virtue of genetic heritage. Stevens-Arroyo proclaimed that it was easy "to get lost" in Dreamtime , believing that the multitude of ethnographic and historical facts presented by Duerr often distracted from the book's main arguments.

Although praising the book's contents, Stevens-Arroyo expressed his annoyance at Duerr's use of humour, believing that it was inappropriate in such a serious work of scholarship. He also remarked that Duerr "practices what he preaches", noting that the book was something of an apologia for his involvement in the counter-cultural and drug subcultures of the s and his continuing advocacy of the use of mind-altering substances, in the same style as Timothy Leary.

The Dreamtime Book by Charles P. Mountford

Considering the work to be an attack on social convention, he believes that Duerr has made use of mind-altering drugs to cross boundaries into altered states of consciousness and that Dreamtime is his invitation for others to join him. Stevens-Arroyo did praise Goodman's English translation, but argued that the index was too limited. In a commentary piece for the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford , Charles Stewart expressed his opinion that Dreamtime is best described as "the sort of book that Carlos Castaneda might have written if he were a German philosopher.