The Luminous Heartbeat

By Wendy Victor

Book Overview

In The Luminous Heartbeat, Wendy Victor sets out to discover why ancient, positive feminine influences have been eclipsed by a strictly patriarchal spiritual world. She proposes that the transition... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0979027578
• ISBN13: 9780979027574
• Release Date: January 2008
• Publisher: Ovation Books
• Length: 161 Pages
• Weight: 1.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.8" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

A cache of material to be read and reread

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,

Insights of Women, past and present - September 14, 2008

"The Luminous Heartbeat" is a well-illustrated and richly presented book which, while a serious study, is appealing to the general reader. The central theme of the book, as I see it, is that while it is easy and condescending to acknowledge the contribution that women have made to the development of our shared experience throughout the ages, it is correspondingly more difficult to own up to the fact that the same contribution has been marginalized, and critical secular and religious facts have been suppressed in order to consolidate and perpetuate patriarchal power and privilege. I recommend this book to both women and men alike as a thought provoking and inspirational view of women's role in our common heritage, our religious enrichment and our future.

Truly an inspired voice

This book inspired me to start a reading club with my daughters. I couldn't wait to begin sharing the wisdom that exists on every page. Wendy Victor has found a way to nourish the feminine heart searching for its spiritual source. Her style and insight flows effortlessly. I know I will read it again and again just for the sheer joy of it.

Females - Wake Up to Who You Are!

"Bring us back, O Divine One / Into Thy Luminous Heartbeat." This is the end of Wendy Victor's poem that best summarizes the central focus within this beautiful, thoughtful and inspiring book. Its contents invite the reader to connect to the female energy, presence, passion and power yearning to be re-membered! How can one connect to what has been forgotten and even deliberately erased from the history of humanity? The author has proceeded on a personal quest to explore the missing links that have made our world into the combative, frequently lost world recorded in both history and daily news around the world. Interestingly, the writer delineates how this denial of the female light and presence began with the invention of the written word. As men began to record the previously oral accounts of the past, they experienced a power that led them to prominence. Women's place? Silence, silence over the centuries because these strong females knew they retained through their oral sharing the knowledge and wisdom of Sophia, the Australian Aborigine traditions celebrating the female in the divine, the pride and silently held fertility rites in Africa and so much more. A different time, however, has arisen in our present understanding. In three potent and revealing parts, Wendy Victor explores, questions and celebrates the story of female thought, spirituality and action in the past that is to guide the female and the male's understanding of women in today's world. The text is printed on beautiful paper and embellished with the painted illustrations of Dora Frost in the "Genesis Garden" section. A unique, special read, The Luminous Heartbeat will move every reader to raise questions, seek further answers, ponder the essential reality behind the research, examine one's own place in this significant examination, and desire to share this small but meaningful text with many other readers! Reviewed by Viviane Crystal on August 3, 2008