Dreamtime was John Moriarty’s first book, published in 1994, when he was fifty-six. You will come across it in the ‘Philosophy’ or ‘Religion’ sections in your bookshop, but it is just as rich in humour, imaginative daring, mythological exploration and cultural history. Open any page and find yourself on safari across three millennia of the Western psyche and numerous world mythologies. Just shy of three hundred pages, Dreamtime contains wondrous multitudes. Moriarty’s aim in Dreamtime is both simple and daring: in a time of ecological and spiritual trouble, he seeks to reimagine the wrong-headed myths out of which our Western societies emerged.

The title, Dreamtime, borrowed from the Australian Aboriginal tradition, refers to a sacred time of creation in the beginning. The Earth at that time being a featureless waste, beings known as the Eternal Ones of the Dream (the ‘Altjeringa Mitjina’) emerged and went walkabout across this featurelessness. As they walked, the dreamed: as they dreamed the vast variety of things of which they dreamed came to exist objectively and independently of their dreamers. Similarly, culture came about, rooted in things said and done in the beginning. The paths followed by the Eternal Ones became known as songlines, routes across the land marked by riches of locality, story and culture.

For Moriarty, just as the Australian Aboriginal world has a Dreamtime, so too does the West. Moreover, he believes this Western Dreamtime to be still accessible today. Entering this Dreamtime is a cultural imperative for us now, simply because the stories in which the West is rooted have led to cultural and ecological havoc. Moriarty’s diagnosis here is not kneejerk; published in his mid-fifties, Dreamtime is the fruit of many years’ thought and reflective action. Here is an author who has read widely and deeply, taught for a decade in universities and passed a further decade at manual labour in relative obscurity.

Dreamtime comprises sixty-two titled prose pieces, few longer than half a dozen pages. Some titles may have familiar names, others sound achingly strange. Job, Matthew Arnold, the Mona Lisa, the Festival of Passover, W.B. Yeats – all rub shoulders. Dubbing these sixty-two pieces songlines, Moriarty revisits the underpinning stories and myths of Western Culture. But Moriarty is not revisiting as a tourist here, he goes as poet and healer. He goes in the bold and hopeful belief that ‘[o]ut of a healed past a healed present will grow.’ So it is that you will find a diagnostic thread and tone running through Dreamtime. Moriarty’s ambitious aim is to uproot our minds from the ground in which they have long been sickening and replant them in more nourishing soil. This nutrient-rich soil is in Dreamtime in spades: Moriarty recasts beautifully the stories which have led us to our current cultural and ecological stagnation. This is, ultimately, both an urgent and immensely hopeful book.