Beschreibung
Auf dem Rücken der Weisen Schildkröte
or Why the End Comes Before the Beginning
a philosophical-fantastic true-life fairy tale for children from 12 to 120 years
by Ulrich Taschow
Five books and an extensive glossary in three volumes, available together at a special set price.
Target groups
Children and young readers aged 14 and up, adults, classic all-age literature, lovers of sophisticated fantasy literature
Reading samples, materials, and much more information can be found on the separate web presentation of the books at Schildkröten-Seite.
On a pitch-black, stormy November night, the ghost of the famous writer Erich Kästner, long since deceased, appears to a poor and utterly desperate writer from a water stain on his ceiling. He hands his trembling colleague a mysterious manuscript and charges him with finally publishing, at any cost, a work that had been unjustly rejected eighty-five years earlier by a narrow-minded publisher’s editor.
Kästner seriously claims that this is a spectacular factual report, recorded by him in 1926, about two courageous girls and containing such shattering revelations about the world and its origin that humankind absolutely must learn of them. After its publication, nothing would ever be the same again. And the poor writer’s own life would also be magically transformed.
The very next morning, the frustrated writer begins to devour the mysterious manuscript with ever-growing curiosity and cannot cease to marvel. For the children tell of an absolutely unique journey behind the curtain that human beings mistakenly call their world, of an appointment with a mighty being made before the beginning of time, and of many other astonishing things.
On their journey through the 27 planes of being, the girls discover with horror an ominous rift in the universe, one that divides the worlds into light and darkness, body and spirit, friend and enemy, love and pain, life and death, and thus cuts through the heart of every living creature.
Only one mighty figure, the Great Master Mechanic, seems to remain as the last inhabitant of the planes to oppose this rift, which in an inexplicable way continues to spread through the worlds, and to bring an end once and for all to the deep sadness of all creatures.
Yet apparently he too, like the people of the fifth plane, is caught in an errant path that has already lasted for many millions of years. Through an ancient and mysterious creation legend, told on all the planes, about beautiful Cloeda and the terrible dragon Morsus, Jule Levitan, the central figure, gradually discovers her own story and with it the secret of the universe.
The world is asleep, and therefore all creatures are trapped only in an endless dream. What human beings take to be reality has never existed.
Yet the deeper Jule penetrates this shattering truth, almost impossible for reason to grasp, the more the boundaries between times and places, between the persons before and behind the curtain, between the self and the others, seem to blur. Is Jule falling deeper and deeper into this dream of worlds, or is she, on the contrary, just about to awaken? But is there any awakening at all? And if so, what comes after it? Who directs and rules the dreams of the inhabitants of the planes?
The five books of Auf dem Rücken der Weisen Schildkröte are not only a beautiful and suspenseful fantasy true-life fairy tale; they also take the reader on a shimmering journey through the history of known and previously entirely unknown philosophies, legends, religions, cosmologies, spiritual teachings, and scientific theories of the 27 planes.
It is a moving declaration of love to the beauty, innocence, and infinity of the universe, in which fairy tale and reality fuse into a magical unity for those who can see. The book also reveals the deeper causes of the steadily increasing intellectual and spiritual impoverishment of our present world and shows how this impoverishment can be healingly restrained.
The extensive glossary finally grants a surprising and entirely different view of the events and backgrounds of the fateful journey through the planes.
