Keeping It Local

Original European heathenism was very much involved with local, material, and observable
phenomena. The Lady of the Lake in Arthurian myth was undoubtedly a remembrance of
very local and particular water spirits, perhaps local to the wetlands that once surrounded
Glastonbury Tor. And in fact certain wetlands in Britain have been found to contain
large numbers of swords and other weapons which were sacrificed there to the local water
spirits in ancient times.

The multiple gods of polytheism are susceptible to the same shortcomings as the One God of monotheistic religions. Which is to say, once you create an abstraction that is not accessible to experience, you begin to progressively alienate yourself from the experience of the sacred. First the sacred becomes the exclusive preserve of priests, then even priests are cut out of the picture and it becomes the exclusive preserve of text. The "Word," the Bible or Koran, not your actual direct experience of the very real world. 

Problem is, not everyone's experience of the "real world" is the same. A young visitor to the USS Arizona Memorial, for example, who has no connection to WWII or Pearl Harbor, is going to experience that visit very differently to someone who was there on Dec. 7 1941. For one, it might be just a wreck and a piece of architecture. For the other, there might be a whole flood of memory and relationships, something that is as close to him as the very marrow of his bones. A sacred place. Some people might look at a lake and see a holy place, and others might just see a body of liquid. That is why the realm of the sacred tended to get shuffled off onto priests and shamans to begin with: some people have more of a gift for that sort of thing. The further you go back in time, the less specialized religion is, and the more the average person was intimately involved with his spiritual practices. The further you go back in time, the less people are polytheist, and the more they are animist. I am sort of focusing on European history here which is what I know, but basically the same principles seem to apply to some degree universally.

And the more people adopted a polytheistic viewpoint (a number of abstract gods,) the more they were setting themselves up for the eventual conquest of monotheism, because certain aspects of polytheism just don't make a lick of sense. So, I am supposed to believe that there are X number of gods and these are their exact names and those and not other gods are the gods that are actually there? At least with monotheism, the abstraction is narrowed down a bit. But unless you can actually see that god in some sense with your eyes, abstract gods of any number are all equally unworldly and, I would argue, equally unreal. 

Contrast this to the way some gods were regarded in Roman and earlier times. Sequana, the goddess of the river Seine in Celtic times, was worshiped at the springs at the source of the Seine. However, Sequana was not viewed as something distinct from the actual river Seine but as it were the whole being of which the river Seine was the visible part. Part of their reverence for the river could not be understood as merely respect for an abstraction, but that the river Seine was the goddess in a very material and sensuous way. It wouldn't have even occurred to ancient Man to have a completely invisible and immaterial religion: they were surrounded by their sacred world which was also the physical world. The hot springs of Aqua Sulis in the Celtic, Roman and later English city of Bath were originally dedicated to the Celtic goddess Sulis, but the goddess Sulis was not viewed as separate from the hot spring but inextricably one with it. The Romans came later and appended the Celtic spring goddess Sulis to their abstract goddess Minerva, creating "Sulis Minerva," since the Romans were more interested in abstract universal gods than the Celts were. 

However, even the religion of the Romans was not completely without animist aspects, and in fact even Early Medieval Christianity had its animist aspects. As well as adopting local deities and holy places under the names of Christian saints, they also had the rather heartwarming practice of relic reverence. People came from far and wide on pilgrimages to be near to the bones or blood or other possessions of a saint. The idea was that since part of the saint is physically there, you are quite literally in their presence, and so the saint could be prevailed upon more effectively to intercede for you in heaven. While relic reverence got a bad rap after the Protestant Reformation, at least you can say that people were there to revere something they could see. The relics were physical holy objects, in contrast to the completely textual and immaterial religious practices of the Protestants and Islam. There are certain survivals of this original animist perception in Christianity in certain parts of Catholicism - for instance, in continued relic reverence and in the sanctified host which is believed to be the body of Christ in a real and physical sense. 

Of course, the problem for modern Westernized Man is that we have so thoroughly desanctified the natural world (as a prelude to exploiting it) that it is an almost insurmountable perceptual leap to reunite the sacred and the physical. And it IS a perceptual deficit on our part. In the case of the WWII veteran in our earlier example, he has understood the deeper meaning of that memorial in his own body. He remembers the concussion of the bombs in his own flesh, remembers the smell of the burning fuel and bodies, and so has an understanding of that place that no casual observer ever could. The casual visitor to a sacred place sees trees and water and animals and various phenomena that he places in a 'merely' material context: in other words, in the context of a devalued materialism in which physical objects are essentially dead and inert and animals merely organic machines. A shaman who is familiar with the place knows it as the abode of many beings that are known to him and with which he has a relationship and communicates, and these beings are not something totally different from the tangible world but part of it. I would put it to you that it is the shaman and not the casual visitor who actually knows the place. His perception of the place is the deeper one.

And so I put it to you: abandon abstraction. If you cannot see your god, he isn't there. Think local, think direct. A spirit inhabiting a local lake is more likely to be encountered than a general god of lakes. A goddess that IS water is more likely to be encountered than a goddess OF water. A god that IS the Sun can be encountered every day: a god OF the Sun cannot. At the same time, abandon the perception that only sees in the world examples of what it already thinks is there. If you view a tree, for example, as mere object, you can never know it. A tree is a being; all things are in fact beings. Even a rock is not an object merely. We have inherited a certain view of dead matter: we must obtain a view of living matter and living beings and an entire world that is animated and alive. Otherwise, we will continue to deaden everything, as we have been doing now for a long time. 

"The universe is the only self-referential reality in

the phenomenal world. It is the only text without context. Everything else has to be seen in the context of the universe. 

The universe story is the quintessence of reality. We perceive

the story. We put it in our language, the birds put it in theirs,

and the trees put it in theirs. We can read the story of the

universe in the trees. Everything tells the story of the universe.

The winds tell the story, literally, not just imaginatively. The

story has its imprint everywhere, and that is why it is so

important to know the story. If you do not know the story,

in a sense you do not know yourself; you do not know

anything."

-Thomas Colebrook, describing the thought of Thomas Berry who was a Catholic priest and ecotheologian.