Man, God, and magic [Unknown Binding]

Ivar Lissner (Author)

Product Details

• Unknown Binding
• ASIN: B00005WCKZ
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,421,199 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Fascinating Study of Man and His Strivings To Find and Reach His God., October 30, 2005

By 

Jeffrey Peter A. Hauck "Guerrilla Reader" (Pennsylvania USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Man, God, and magic

Author Ivar Lissner's treatise "Man, God and Magic" proffers the question "was early man monotheistic only to change to polytheism, resulting from 'magic' so as to gain greater control over his own fate in the world?"

Lissner's book tells the reader of his search for the religion of the most ancient peoples of the earth, through their own story as disclosed by their bones, artifacts, and drawings as well as through the beliefs and customs of the most primitive tribes now alive. Specifically, Lissner looks to the contemporary tribes of the remote Siberian Taiga and the Indian-like people of Tierra Del Fuego.

Lissner fills the book with absorbing accounts of worship among primitive tribes who seek evidence of one God in nature and with informed re-creations of rites of Stone-Age man, such as the sacrificial ceremonies of the bear among the Ainus of northern Japan, of the Orochon of northern Siberia, and the cave in Switzerland with fifty thousand skulls of ritually slaughtered bears of the Stone-Age. Most important though is that the treatise seeks to prove that man, in his most fundamental urge to believe in some great power outside of himself, trusted in and worshipped one Supreme Being.

An otherwise potentially dry subject has been crafted to read like a mystery novel. Well done. Four stars.