Parvati Magazine December 2013 - Remembrance | Page 18

BOOKS

BOOKS

MUTANT MESSAGE DOWN UNDER
by Marlo Morgan

She goes on a walkabout
with them into the Australian outback. The journey
transforms her physically
and mentally as she learns
to face challenges few
of us would sign up for:
(literally) blistering heat,
scarce water, swarms of
flies, living on whatever
food may come - bugs,
reptiles, plants, birds - and
nearly dying of thirst at
one point. Yet she learns
from the people she is
with to find gratitude and
acceptance for all of it.
She witnesses healing
not explicable by modern medicine and experiences nonverbal communication. The contention
of this tribe, which calls
itself the “Real People”,
is that human society as
we know it has forgotten
who we are and why we
are here, such that we
live half-alive in fear and
wanting, becoming mutated from our true nature, unable to tap into
our own body’s healing
potential or to connect
with each other in honesty.

The tribe believed
that we had become mutated
through fear and
forgetting who
we are.

M

arlo Morgan watched a new silk suit, money
and her belongings go up in smoke one day
in the Australian outback. It was the beginning of
a journey that would change her life forever and
charge her with a message from an Aborigine
tribe that lived in rhythms forgotten by most of our
society. Mutant Message Down Under is the story
of that journey.
Morgan describes a tribe in which people have
remained more true to human purpose and potential, communicating without words, receiving whatever comes with gratitude, respecting
the gift of life and not doing harm to the earth.

After several weeks of
walking with the tribe,
discovering new ways
to apprach her life, Morgan learns that the tribe
is entrusting her with a
message to bring back
to her fellow “mutated”
humans, reminding of the
need to wake up to our
interconnection and reverse the damage we are

This book
resonates,
and awakens
remembered
knowledge.

doing to the planet. She
returns from the outback
and begins to share her
story.
Marlo Morgan published
Mutant Message Down
Under as a work of fiction
so that she could conceal
the identity and location

of the tribe with whom
she went on her journey.
Only she, and the “Real
People” tribe she walked
with, can truly know how
much of the book is accurate, and how much
may have been interpreted through her own
lens. Reaction to the book
has been polarized, with
many people attacking
it or seeking to discredit
it, even as it remained on
the New York Times bestseller list. Some Australian
Aboriginal groups claim it
is false and offensive; others say it is the righting of
an historical wrong.
For us, the book almost
always resonates, reawakening remembered
knowledge. You will have
to decide for yourself,
upon reading it, if you
feel it is true. We would
say that even if it turned
out to be pure and complete fiction, it would still
be worth the read for its
invocation of that memory of the real interconnection of human existence
on this planet.

Pranada Devi is a communications professional living in Toronto, Canada.
She is the Managing Editor of Parvati Magazine, and serves as an advisor
on marketing communications for Parvati’s various projects. Recently, she
edited Parvati’s new book “Confessions of a Former Yoga Junkie”, which
has gone on to sell out its first printing run.