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The Arch of Metahistory:
Sacred Nature
Whatever the origins of humanity in cosmic
terms, its immediate source is Nature, the habitat provided by
Gaia, the living planet. All preliterate traditions around the
world reflect the belief that the natural world is charged with
magical and spiritual power variously called mana, wakonda, dema,
deva and many other names. All of these words indicate the
presence of the sacred in the realm of the senses, not in some
remote realm beyond human reach. Almost universally, this presence was imagined in the form of a Goddess, not a God.
In the beginning there was Isis-Hathor:
Oldest of the Old. She was the Goddess from whom all Becoming
arose. She was the Great Lady, Mistress of the Two Lands of
Egypt, Mistress of Shelter, Mistress of Heaven, Mistress of the
House of Life, Mistress of the Divine Word. She was the Unique.
In all Her great and wonderful works She was a wiser magician
and more excellent than any God.
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Theban sacred text,
14C BCE, Egypt.
Sacred comes from the Sanskrit root sak-,
“to be powerful”. What supports something must be more
powerful than that which it supports. Thus, Nature, which
supports life, is more powerful than humanity, which is but one
species woven into the web of Nature. Whether God creates Nature
or Nature itself is God, the mysterious wellspring of life is
sacred and all forms of life partake of that sacredness.
The certainty that Nature is sacred is the
point of departure for all forms of human spirituality, and so
it represents the founding stone of the arch of metahistory. If
the arch is imagined as a bridge, Sacred Nature is the footing
that has to be erected on the bank of the river from which we
proceed. Life proceeds from Nature and all human activity is
grounded in the Gaian habitat. All stories and scripts that
encode beliefs about our relation to Nature reflect this master
theme.
In the religious life of humanity, God first
appears in Nature. Only later does God depart and hover outside
as the disembodied creator of the natural world. Religion
originates in “nature-worship” The Divine thus recognized
is invariably feminine: hence, Gaia is a goddess, not a god.
Long before institutionalized religions arose, the Nature
Goddess was the Supreme Being. Among the Gnostics she was
understood as Sophia, the Godhead of Nature. Sophia means
“wisdom,” stressing the universal awareness that Nature is
alive and intelligent, wise in her ways. Gaia-Sophia,
all-knowing Mother Nature, appears in many guises in diverse
myths and legends. Sacred Nature and the Goddess are thus
identical. Indigenous cultures constantly assert that everything
they know about how to live comes from direct communication with
the Goddess. These scripts say: Goddess births all, Goddess
sustains all, Goddess knows all.
“Animism” is
the name given by anthropologists to the experience (or, if
you will, the belief) that all nature
is alive, animated and
animating. The Goddess equated with Sacred Nature was
embodied in a myriad forms and worshipped in her
manifest guises, such as
trees. (Clay impression, Indus Valley, c. 2000 BC)
Navigator for Psychonautics
All races are born from a single genetic
matrix in Sacred Nature. The Biblical Eve has thousands of
counterparts in other cultures, each one a legitimate version of
the Great Mother. This mythological notion has recently emerged
in scientific theory which now speaks of “Mitochondrial
Eve,” the genetic mother of the entire human species. She is
the biological matrix of the DNA code for all of humanity.
Ancient racial scripts such as the Dynastic history of the
Egyptians confer identity on the people by descent from the
primordial Mother-Goddess known under various names: Nut, Mut,
Neith, Hathor, Isis. In Egyptian religion the continuity of the
blood-lines of the royal family (pharaohs) was constantly
renewed by the Goddess Hathor. The script that asserts that the
Goddess confers authority upon those who will guide society is
one of the most ancient formulas of civilization. Theocracy is
routinely defined by historians as “rulership of human society
by the gods or their descendents,” but this definition is
misleading because it overlooks the central role of the Goddess
in the selection and empowerment of the king who will rule over
civilization. A tremendously problematic issue in metahistory,
sacred kingship links Sacred Nature to Origins in a crucial way.
Many scripts trace the ancestral origins of a
race to the mating of a goddess and a human progenitor, a hero.
Hence, the Trojan hero Aeneas is the son of another hero,
Anchises, who mated with the goddess Aphrodite. Technically,
divine-human intercourse is called theogamy: god-mating.
Stories of theogamy precede stories of theocracy, upon which all
ancient civilized nations were originally founded. The mytheme
of theogamy is prevalent in many indigenous cultures and it was
widely evident in pagan religion, but the subject matter
associated with this motif (including the controversial
practices of temple prostitution and sacred sexuality) came to
be diabolized and forbidden when the Judeo-Christian ethic rose
to dominance.
The Trojan War dates to 1200 BC, but more
than 2000 years later charters written for the royal families of
Europe cited Aeneas as their racial-national ancestor. To this
day, many families of the European nobility still trace their
ancestral lines back to mythological figures. In Japan the
Emperor was viewed as the “Son of Heaven,” a human being of
divine ancestry, until the last Emperor, Hirohito, was forced to
renounce this claim at the end of World War Two. Among
indigenous peoples, the various tribes and nations are all
children of the Great Mother. The ancient Celts considered
themselves to be the Tuatha de Danaan, “Children of Dana,”
the primordial Mother Goddess who gave her name to the River
Danube.
The scripts say: The Mother Goddess produces
heroes and heroes found races, so she is the common mother of
all races.
When racial-national scripts become
explicitly sexual, the male national heroes, or “founding
fathers,” become more important than the Goddess who mothers
them. Though the role of the Sacred Nature Goddess may be
minimized, the Goddess is always present in the background. In
indigenous societies tribal identity is based on matrilineal
descent, often in the form of identification with magical
totemic ancestors (plants, animals, i.e., sacred forces in
nature). These ancestral bonds are rigorously preserved over the
millennia. The vast spectrum of tribal groups around the world
all share a universal reverence for other species in nature and
recognize spiritual powers in animals such as the lion, eagle,
bear or jaguar. The interspecies bond was profoundly ruptured in
Judaeo-Christian religion that makes humanity superior to all
other creatures. The story of human-species dominance is told in
Genesis where the creator god, Jehovah, gives his progeny Adam
dominion over all the creatures of the earth.
This shift produced what scholars call the
desacralization of nature. The script says: humanity appears
in the natural world but is superior to it. The vital bond
between humanity and Sacred Nature is replaced by a devotional
bond between humanity and the Creator God, outside and above
nature. In the course of human history, the master theme of
Sacred Nature has undergone a massive shift from participation
in nature to domination of it. The consequences of this
monumental shift emerge under the second master theme, Eternal
Conflict.
Due to a seemingly innate antagonism between
the sexes (which no single myth explains) scripts often mingle
these two master themes. In the Bible Eve is the troublemaker
who causes both Adam and Eve to get thrown out of Eden, i.e.,
alienated from Sacred Nature. This script is rather twisty
because it makes Woman, the embodiment of Nature, the cause of a
rupture from the natural world. In the Gnostic version of the
Fall, the twisty serpent who tempts Eve to acquire forbidden
knowledge is presented as a benefactor rather than an evil
interloper. The Gnostic version of the Fall is a rare example of
a direct and deliberate inversion of a script. (Basic Reading:
The
Gnostic Gospels.)
Most scripts on the theme of Sacred Nature
give superiority to the feminine, but some religious texts were
composed with the intent to eliminate the feminine component
from Divinity. The Hebrew Goddess Hokmah, identical with many
pagan Goddesses such as Astarte, Asteroth and Elath, was
originally the wife and co-equal of Jehovah. By the time most of
the Torah (Old Testament) texts were written, a few hundred
years BCE, Her role in the religious life of the ancient Hebrews
was virtually obliterated. The purpose of this script change was
to endorse patriarchal authority and promote monotheism.
Scholars have labored arduously to understand the actual role
played by pagan goddesses in ancient Hebrew culture. (This
effort has been named “Goddess reclamation”)
Within Goddess-based religion, a vast
spectrum of divinities, male and female, comprise the sacred
dimension of the natural world. Imposition of monotheistic
belief went hand in hand with the repression of the Goddess.
Over a period of hundreds of years, the gradual waning of
awareness and belief in the power of Sacred Nature (desacralization)
prepared the way for monotheistic belief in a remote omnipotent
deity.
Religious beliefs converge with familial
scripting when Mother Earth is described as the parent of all
living creatures, all species. This view of the earth implies an
innate human ability to feel reverence toward the natural
habitat — a sentiment partially recovered in the environmental
movement. Except in the case of native-mind cultures, reverence
for the earth as mother has been largely diverted to the human
realm. (The term “native-mind” denotes the outlook of
indigenous peoples who see their values reflected in the habitat
of which they are natives. It is interchangeable with
indigenous.) In many families the mother is still a matriarch
and held to be the mysterious source of life that sustains the
whole family, even though her role and influence may be
crippling to the psychological growth of individual family
members. Likewise, the bond to Sacred Nature can become
pathological and degenerate into blind superstition and sinister
games of power. Taboos around incest and menstruation indicate
how humanity can slip out of harmony with nature into fearful
obsessions.
Incest belongs to the mytheme of
Sacred Nature because it represents the risk of binding the
human family to the Mother Goddess in an unhealthy and
regressive way. Concern about incest is present in most ancient
and tribal mythologies, with taboos to prevent it from becoming
too overwhelming. In the ancient cult of Cybele priests
castrated themselves in honor of the Goddess. This practice
recalls a religious-sexual-familial pattern of great interest in
modern psychology which is full of case studies of men who are
emotionally castrated. The parallel is odd because it appears
the modern male is castrated due to lack of a vital connection
with Sacred Nature, while in the ancient cult castration was
symbolic of dedication to its feminine embodiment, the Goddess.
The mythemes carried in any script or ritualized form of
behavior can mutate, and their meanings can be reversed.
Catholic priests, who renounce sex, are
symbolically imitating the devotees of Cybele, but they do it in
dedication to a male father god, not a goddess. The motif of
castration is constant even though its application varies as the
script varies.
Religious-familial stories that follow the
patriarchal model represent the father as the supreme deity of
the family, a harsh judge who rewards his children only when
they follow his rules, and punishes them severely when they don’t.
The religious script, “God gives commands,”
translates readily into the familial script, “father
knows best” Since father as male deity represents an authority
beyond Nature, this story conflicts with the one that says,
“mother” (nature) nurtures all.
In indigenous societies, the family remains
closely related to Nature as the source of survival. This
dependence generates a set of scripts in which the familial
interactive patterns do not consume the family members, or
obscure each member’s primordial bond with the natural world.
The identity of the family group and the individuals within it
are both reflected in active rapport with Nature — in
participation,
to cite the key anthropological term for this relationship. In
modern life a family dedicated to conservation and exploration
of nature would be acting to restore the primordial bond. Such a
family would operate from scripts that say “nature provides
inspiration” and “nature unites humanity.”
Blackfoot Physics by F.
David Peat compares indigenous views about Nature to the ideals and
assumptions of modern science.
Inanna, by Diana Wolkstein and Samuel
Noah Kramer recovers in vivid erotic language the mystique of
the Goddess central to all pagan and indigenous societies.
Voices of the First
Day by Robert Lawlor presents a deep and far-reaching
evaluation of the worldview of Australian Aborigines, heirs to a
40,000-year-old cultural tradition in which all aspects of
spiritual and practical experience are based on symbiosis with
Sacred Nature. |
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