The Luminous Heartbeat
Wendy Victor
Ovation Books

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„The Luminous Heartbeat“ is a stimulating work set down in three separate partitions: Five Thousand Years of Silence in which Victor investigates why women stepped out of the midpoint of influence and the repercussions held for our particular time. Next Victor scrutinizes The Genesis Garden where what she terms as the fable of Creation is recreated through art and poetry, and as a final point she makes available a straightforward tale of female action in the world in the section titled Wings of the Cherubim.

On the pages of „The Luminous Heartbeat“, Wendy Victor offers women a general idea of why the helpful female influences upon lives have been for the most part ignored, downplayed or hidden from view. She offers insight into the spiritual world and why it appears to be so patriarchal in scope.

Exquisite photographs and magnificent prose are found on the pages of Division 1; five thousand years ago sexuality, and authority of women were viewed in a very different way than is found today. Those were the days of the formal procedure of Sacred Marriage, in which a male was united sexually with a goddess or her priestess, before he was sacrificed. Seven chapters, an epilogue and bibliography are found on the seventy four pages comprising Five Thousand Years of Silence. Part 2, The Genesis Garden continues the theme that through the ages women have made many contributions to society and the furthering of humanity despite the reality that those contributions have largely gone unsung. The Genesis Garden beginning on page 75, offers illustrations from Dora Frost, begins with a Prologue, continues through Five Chapters, Acknowledgments and an extensive Bibliography.

Victor wraps up her work with Part 3, titled The Wings of the Cherubim. Illustrated with a grouping of photographs, taken by the author who is a proficient photographer and showing the people and villages throughout Africa; the reader is brought to a perceptive of a vibrant location filled with vibrant women. This is a place where women worship, live, raise their children and restore their lives and their hope.

Victor has crafted a justifiably provocative book in which she investigates how we, as an advanced nation, can gain knowledge from cultures and communities and people who are not nearly so advanced as we.

Victor discovered much of history has been recorded by men and she has come to the conclusion that because men are the recorders of history; they tend to down play the contributions of women. Gilded pages coupled with a medieval type design for the frontispiece provides a lovely design for this work provided by gifted writer, story teller Victor. She has intertwined events of history, her own life and that of the women she continues to meet into a single compelling strand.

„The Luminous Heartbeat“ is a good-looking, robust volume completed with heavy, satiny paper, gilded edges, a ribbon marker, and copious illustrations. Writer Victor is a woman interested in comparative religion, is a skilled photographer, and lives with her husband in Florida. Her book is a cache of material to be read and reread. Happy to recommend.