First Love Stories: Diane Wolkstein 1992

First Love Stories: From Isis and Osiris to Tristan and Iseult 
(270 pp., $21.95, Harper-Collins),
is a compilation of stories from Old Europe, Greece, the Celtic Fringe, India,
by translator-storyteller Diane Wolkstein

The Inanna myth which probably developed as the war-like Indo-Europeans arrived on the scene between 4300 and 2500 B.C., who brought with them, the seeds of destruction to a balanced agronomarian culture, serves as an apt metaphor for the separation from nature we now face in the modern world, and its relationship to ecological catastrophe. Under the tutelage of scientists René Descartes (“Ergo cogito; ergo sum—I think; therefore I am”) who said the role of science was “to make us masters and possessors of nature,” and Francis Bacon, who said science should bend nature into the “service of man,” this plundering is a legacy of the Bible. In the book of Genisis, God gives humans “dominion. . .over every living thing.” In an essay, “To Avert a Common Danger,” Carl Sagan wrote, “We have become predatators on the biosphere, full of entitlement, always taking and never giving back, a danger to ourselves.”

(fragment...)  lost original tear sheet.

1992