Customer Reviews

Dawn Behind the Dawn: A Search for the Earthly Paradise

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This book combines readability and scholarly restraint. It's exciting to turn the pages. The discussion involves our eternal quest for a "lost Eden," and more significantly our widespread belief in Western Culture that there is a lost "ancient wisdom" (involving that lost Eden) that we can discover again if we search history for buried clues. I first read the book in 1997, and have only re-discovered it in the last few days. It provides one of the most responsible discussions I've ever read of the appeal of the New Age --- that is, that we turn to myths of Atlantis (or theories of ancient astronauts) and the like because we're convinced that there is a "missing piece" to all this (life on earth), and that we can find that "missing piece" if we uncover lost truths from an earlier age or the primal age which historians and scholars have not always recognized. Ashe has his own theory as to what that "lost Eden" actually is: a time on earth, demonstrable through archaeology and a study of myth, when the great goddess was worshipped and society had a "rightness" to it. Whether one agrees with this or not, one will find this book filled with important information about our cultural history. Again, and again, Ashe makes astute observations, based on substantial evidence, that inspire and raise important questions. I recommend this highly for anyone who has read the work of Mircea Eliade or Robert Graves, or Joseph Campbell. And it is a perfect book for those who are new to speculative historical investigation --- baffled by theories of matriarchy vs. patriarchy in history, etc. --- because it puts into solid perspective a lot of what other scholars have offered in the fields of archaeology, philology, study of myth, etc. The book doesn't hesitate to discuss authors and psychics that some dismiss out of hand, searching for kernels of truth in the work of persons such as Madame Blavatsky. It's this willingness to seriously examine many sources of "truth" that makes the book so very unusual. Very very enjoyable.

This is one of the most interesting books I've ever read on history or on shamanism. Historian Geoffrey Ashe is an entertaining writer who has pulled together a huge amount of research and come to some fascinating conclusions.

Ashe traces the nearly universal legends of a Golden Era or paradise at the beginning of human existence to, of all places, Siberia. As the story unfolds he also shows that the Greek god Apollo and (his sister?) Artemis probably originated in Siberia.

Early in the book, Ashe explains the extensive work of Russian anthropologists and linguistics experts showing that women were the first shamans.

This book should never have been allowed to go out of print. It is still one of the best books out there. I read it years ago and still constantly recommend it to people. I hope it is reprinted soon!

Grab a copy of Dawn Behind the Dawn while you can. It will entertain you and make you think. While well researched and factual, it is written in such an engaging style that you will fly through it.

The revelations in this book will stay with you for awhile. This book could change the way that you look at history.

SPOILER ALERT

Seven. Seven, 7, seven. Most of the book is taken up with this mystical number, a number with little practicality to explain its lofty status. Our seven-day week, for example, derives directly from the Hebrew reverence for this number, but it's clumsy; seven divides neatly into neither a 30-day month nor a 365-day year. Why not a five-day week?

As a scholar of Revelation, I'm certainly familiar with the number seven. Seven churches, seven seals, seven angels, seven trumpets, seven bowls of wrath, seven-headed dragons, and more. The number seven bleeds into the Gospel of John as well, with seven I AM's and seven signs. But the mysticism of this number precedes Hebrew beliefs and is inexplicably common throughout several civilizations, dating back thousands of years.

The subtitle of Ashe's book is "A Search for Earthly Paradise," and while the analysis of the number seven is interesting, it isn't worth half the book; it doesn't bring us very close to paradise. More interesting is the author's research into shamanism and the various myths of a northern mountain paradise, an exalted Eden.

In the end, uncovering an earthly paradise is revealed to be too lofty a goal; at best, the most the author uncovers is a distant memory of a golden age of female shamans, with implications about a cultural source or seedbed somewhere between Siberia and Mongolia, which may have been a sort of paradise of Goddess wisdom. By book's end, even this has dissolved into a number of obscure theories about the origins of our myths and mystical numbers. I'm afraid paradise is forever lost, my friends.