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| Pythagoreans celebrate sunrise by Fyodor Bronnikov. Already in ancient Greece there existed a significant tension between reverence and exploitation, between pagan worship of the natural world on one hand and the world-denying abstract philosophers like Plato on the other, and of course between democracy for some (male citizens) and servitude for others (women, slaves.) The Pythagoreans to their credit gave women equal place among them. |
It would be nice and tidy to blame the Christians for the process by which the natural world was stripped of its sacred nature. To blame them for the process which led to the natural world being considered "dead" matter and which led to the Spirit being considered at first completely otherworldly in nature, opposed to Nature itself, and then ultimately nonexistent as Christianity gave way to scientific materialism. However, they didn't start that fire, it started burning long before they came around. At the risk of sounding politically correct, you can start tracing that arc from the moment that power shifted to men from women; when people started mainly worshiping male gods; when the aggressive, property-making and property-seizing and objectifying aspects of the male nature started running rampant; when women became property. Science, which was once upon a time fostered by pagans who at least claimed to worship gods of Nature, got in bed very nicely with Christian philosophers who considered all except the "immortal human soul" to be dead matter. Cartesian dualism: the soul is alive, the world is dead. And then of course Science got rid of the soul too, so now there is no pesky religious reverence of anything to get in the way of the conquest of Nature.
It's really a simple process, and Christianity is only the latest in a long line of ideologies which can be used to justify exploitation. In wars, your government does its best to make you consider the enemy less than human. In political struggles, you do the same thing. Damn hippy liberals or stupid redneck conservatives. When you want to steal the land of some minorities or other, you do the same thing, as was done to the Native Americans when the Europeans wanted to steal their land, or to Mexico when the United States wanted to steal the Southwest. When you want to despoil the planet, you first kill it in your ideology before you kill it in fact. If you want to kill a river, choke it with pollution and the debris of industry and dam it and divert it, you first have to regard it as having been dead all along. Mere matter, mere things. Things don't matter. The ducks and fish and frogs and birds and beavers and raccoons and everything else that lived there, really they were always dead matter all along and of no importance. Only people matter... until THEY get in your way, in which case they don't matter either. So says power, so says the objectifying male worldview, so says the worldview that makes all things, even people eventually, mere property. To save a river you must first love it. To save the planet, you must love it. Not intellectually, not with your cerebral cortex alone, but with your heart. It is not enough to want to curb human predations on the environment for humans sake. A mother doesn't risk her own life to save her child, for her own sake. She does it because she loves the child and would do anything for it.
I can promise you that if the despoilers of the planet love their money more than you love the Earth, they will win. Because they love their money a lot. They love turning woodlands into Wal-Marts. They love razing boreal forests for tar sands. Unless a lot of people come to love Nature more than that, they will always win.
Therefore I want to make a scandalous proposal: bring back the old gods. Not the old gods of Odin, Tiw, Frig, or Apollo, Zeus and Aphrodite - older than that. Before the worship of the anthropomorphic, abstract and composite gods of ancient Greece, Rome, or the Vikings, was the worship of the concrete, nonhuman, mortal material gods of the real world.
It's really a simple process, and Christianity is only the latest in a long line of ideologies which can be used to justify exploitation. In wars, your government does its best to make you consider the enemy less than human. In political struggles, you do the same thing. Damn hippy liberals or stupid redneck conservatives. When you want to steal the land of some minorities or other, you do the same thing, as was done to the Native Americans when the Europeans wanted to steal their land, or to Mexico when the United States wanted to steal the Southwest. When you want to despoil the planet, you first kill it in your ideology before you kill it in fact. If you want to kill a river, choke it with pollution and the debris of industry and dam it and divert it, you first have to regard it as having been dead all along. Mere matter, mere things. Things don't matter. The ducks and fish and frogs and birds and beavers and raccoons and everything else that lived there, really they were always dead matter all along and of no importance. Only people matter... until THEY get in your way, in which case they don't matter either. So says power, so says the objectifying male worldview, so says the worldview that makes all things, even people eventually, mere property. To save a river you must first love it. To save the planet, you must love it. Not intellectually, not with your cerebral cortex alone, but with your heart. It is not enough to want to curb human predations on the environment for humans sake. A mother doesn't risk her own life to save her child, for her own sake. She does it because she loves the child and would do anything for it.
I can promise you that if the despoilers of the planet love their money more than you love the Earth, they will win. Because they love their money a lot. They love turning woodlands into Wal-Marts. They love razing boreal forests for tar sands. Unless a lot of people come to love Nature more than that, they will always win.
Therefore I want to make a scandalous proposal: bring back the old gods. Not the old gods of Odin, Tiw, Frig, or Apollo, Zeus and Aphrodite - older than that. Before the worship of the anthropomorphic, abstract and composite gods of ancient Greece, Rome, or the Vikings, was the worship of the concrete, nonhuman, mortal material gods of the real world.
What gods am I talking about? It is I think a testimony to how far we've gone along the path of devaluing the natural world that most people really aren't going to get this at all, or will immediately think it foolish.
I am talking about the Sun. I am talking about Water. I am talking about Earth, the soil under our feet, that grows our food and accepts our bones. Wind, clouds. Spirits of place. Rivers. Oak trees. The Celts had sacred groves of oak trees, as did the Romans (though this did not keep the Romans from destroying the Celtic sacred groves in their wars.) What is the difference between holding the oak trees holy in their own right or holding them holy because of their association with a god? One: to hold them holy on a god's account places holiness in an abstraction. To hold them holy in their own right is not an abstraction, it is an encounter with the real trees themselves. Sequana was held to be the goddess of the River Seine in Celtic religion, but Sequana was not a separate being floating around in some heaven somewhere. Sequana was in fact the Seine herself. Sulis was the goddess of the thermal springs at what is now Bath, England: but Sulis was not regarded as an abstract heavenly being that had adopted the springs but was the spring herself. Later on the Romans tagged on their abstract goddess Minerva to Sulis' name, and they became the springs of Sulis Minerva, but originally Sulis was a very local goddess.
Look at the picture at the top of the page, of Pythagoreans celebrating sunrise. Does it look like they are revering the Sun on behalf of some otherworldly god, or are they in fact just revering the Sun? The Sun, it seems to me. It is unfortunately an experience most modern people will never have. Their loss. Of course it will be said that the Sun is mostly a ball of hydrogen plasma, and who would worship that? This is because people think the Sun is "really" their abstract understanding of it (ball of mostly hydrogen) and not their actual experience of it (source of light and heat, powering all that lives.)
I was sitting in my Dad's old room a minute ago, with my cat Mango napping on the bed, and realizing that the Sun in fact powers all of this including myself. The Sun powers Mango by way of animal flesh, which is fed on plant flesh, which gets energy from the Sun. The lights overhead are mostly powered by the Sun by way of fossil fuels (some nuclear energy). I am powered by the Sun. All my friends and family and everything I know is powered by the Sun. If the Sun is not holy, nothing is holy. I have never seen a hydrogen atom with my own eyes, but I see all this with my own eyes, and none of it would live without the Sun. And yet all the time we regard the abstract Sun (ball of hydrogen plasma) as the "real" Sun. The scientific experience of the Sun is just another experience of the Sun, and is valid as far as it goes. It is not the ONLY experience of the Sun. The understanding of the Sun as ball of hydrogen plasma does not trump the understanding of the Sun as that which enables any of this to be here at all. They are just two different views of the Sun, one is not more real than the other.
I was sitting in my Dad's old room a minute ago, with my cat Mango napping on the bed, and realizing that the Sun in fact powers all of this including myself. The Sun powers Mango by way of animal flesh, which is fed on plant flesh, which gets energy from the Sun. The lights overhead are mostly powered by the Sun by way of fossil fuels (some nuclear energy). I am powered by the Sun. All my friends and family and everything I know is powered by the Sun. If the Sun is not holy, nothing is holy. I have never seen a hydrogen atom with my own eyes, but I see all this with my own eyes, and none of it would live without the Sun. And yet all the time we regard the abstract Sun (ball of hydrogen plasma) as the "real" Sun. The scientific experience of the Sun is just another experience of the Sun, and is valid as far as it goes. It is not the ONLY experience of the Sun. The understanding of the Sun as ball of hydrogen plasma does not trump the understanding of the Sun as that which enables any of this to be here at all. They are just two different views of the Sun, one is not more real than the other.
Water: is "two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen" more "real" than our actual experience of water? Our actual experience - water is what makes life possible. It gives life and it takes it away. Water has innumerable moods: fog, ice, snow, floods, gentle rain, terrible storms, heaving oceans, lily ponds. If the Sun is a god, Water is surely a goddess, by turns wrathful and benevolent. Again, if Water is merely di-hydrogen oxide to you, you will be unlikely to protect the places where it is busy giving life. Because you will think it is mere dead matter, and so you will not love her. Not loving her, you will not respect her.
Soil, earth, the ground below us, what a pregnant goddess that is. Accepts all the dead and brings forth new life from it. For very early Europeans, "heaven" (the afterlife) was not usually above us, it was below us. The soil is the past, and brings forth the future. It is not for nothing that in Greco-Roman mythology, Ceres, the goddess of fertility, grain, agriculture and motherly relationships, was deeply connected to the underworld. In the very center of Rome there was a deep pit that was considered the connection to the Underworld, and most days of the year it was covered, but three days a year it was opened and people threw offerings into the pit including the first fruits from the harvest, and one of the goddesses that were sacrificed to there was Ceres. Goddess of life and of the dead at the same time, because we are all either busy growing or busy becoming compost, and yesterday's compost is today's apple. ;)
Soil, earth, the ground below us, what a pregnant goddess that is. Accepts all the dead and brings forth new life from it. For very early Europeans, "heaven" (the afterlife) was not usually above us, it was below us. The soil is the past, and brings forth the future. It is not for nothing that in Greco-Roman mythology, Ceres, the goddess of fertility, grain, agriculture and motherly relationships, was deeply connected to the underworld. In the very center of Rome there was a deep pit that was considered the connection to the Underworld, and most days of the year it was covered, but three days a year it was opened and people threw offerings into the pit including the first fruits from the harvest, and one of the goddesses that were sacrificed to there was Ceres. Goddess of life and of the dead at the same time, because we are all either busy growing or busy becoming compost, and yesterday's compost is today's apple. ;)
And the old gods are capable of infinite gradations of being. There are little gods everywhere. I am a little god, you are a little god, the live oak tree at Flag Pole Hill is a little god. The goddesses of the thermal springs at Bath and the goddess of the Seine are examples, very local and small and not big headliners like the Sun, but maybe very important to your experience if you live near them.
So in the end, either all are holy or none are, take your pick. If the Sun is not a god, there are none. I prefer to say that all is holy, even the little and perishable gods are holy, even maybe those less than gods are holy in their own right. All are holy, or none are. You will regard the world as either your property to be despoiled as you please, or as something that you should respect and love in its own right. As what it is, not as what you can use it for, not merely a means to your own ends. As beings not things.
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| "Druids cutting the mistletoe" by Henri-Paul Motte |
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