Neo-Pagan Harmony and the Harsh Reality

‘I learned the lesson that an animal is an animal, essentially and practically removed from us, twice: once with Father and once with Richard Parker [the Bengal tiger].’
~ Life of Pi , p.31

In nature there is no more beautiful a process than reproduction, it is the point where a male and female come together to make love and produce new life. Take for example the sleek and beautiful sand shark: a male and female will come together to make love to each other. This will in turn produce a number of embryonic brothers and sisters that will mature and develop in the womb. Then the little bastard that happens to be the largest one there will start tearing chunks out of its smaller brothers and sisters, cannibalising his close family…ahhhh bless.

This article is being written in response to a worrying tendency for books on neo-paganism to depict nature as being harmonious, and mankind as being destructive and out of balance. For example in The Witches’ Bible it describes all things as being manifested from complementary pairs and opposites. This relates specifically to the idea that the God and the Goddess are manifest in every part of nature. Early in the book it places an emphasis on these two being complementary beings and supporting each other i.e. the Goddess being supported and energized by the God. Another example of the tendency to view nature as harmonious and loving comes from the book Teen Witch by Silver Ravenwolf. In this book’s creation myth the Goddess and the God create the world and its animals out of love and joy and it is humans who ruin the earth with hate and ignorance. Now as nice as the views of nature above are, they simply aren't true.

To start with let us look at the way planet Earth was formed. In the beginning the Earth and three of the other planets were created out of a dust cloud which had been saved from collapsing into the sun by centrifugal force. This cloud had been spun into position round the sun and began to collide and stick together forming larger lumps of rock. This process created violent static charges which were sometimes released in lighting, splitting smaller lumps apart. The clumps that had been formed became larger over time eventually forming asteroids and then massive embryonic planets. Of course with thirty large rock clusters circling the sun on elliptical orbits collisions were bound to happen and when they did it was with horrific violence. The planet Earth was formed by swallowing the violently impacting rocks that pelted its surface with such force that they could have been shattered, melted or vaporised. This article won’t even go into the processes that caused the first rain to fall on our planet to be over six hundred degrees centigrade.

Now the idea of nature being red in tooth and claw is something that a lot of pagans will appreciate. But if this is really the case then why do so many pagan books espouse theories that we should try to heal our relationship with nature (see Pagan Pathways, Teen Witch) or connect spiritually to its harmonious processes (Trancing the Witches Wheel, A Witches Bible). Firstly there is no need to heal our relationship with nature; it could be argued that we act exactly as nature intended us to be. Most evolutionary scientists' take on behaviour is that behavioural development is adaptive and is driven by a Darwinian process of natural selection. Now as pagans, when looking at ourselves, we can argue that our cultural and scientific advances have led us away from the natural world. But from a behavioural perspective humanity is shaped both by natural selection and by our cultural environment. This means that at least half of our current behavioural patterns, including our ability to be destructive towards the natural world could be a natural development for us. Even our cultural development has been influenced by our genetic past, with the suggestion that scientists can predict our behavioural development by using evolutionary parallels with other animals.  If this is the case then we as pagans can at least take comfort in the fact that our drive to create a better world is also a natural development as are our more altruistic tendencies.

Now this leaves us with the problem of how we can connect to nature’s more spiritual processes. Well we could always reproduce at an exponential rate until we reach a point where a large number of us die off due to disease, overcrowding and a lack of vital resources. This is a process that occurs within nature all the time in everything from bacteria to higher mammals. Or we could show signs of territoriality based on our food resources and our ability to acquire and defend potential mates. You see, what books on neo-paganism are talking about when they promote a spiritual connection with nature, is their own idea of how nature should be. Even when prompting spiritual meditations on the bloodier side of nature there is still a tendency to shy away from the darker aspect of devotions. For example in Trancing the Witches Wheel there is a mediation exercise focusing on Artemis and the hunt. In this exercise the reader is invited to run with the pack and anticipate the bloody kill at the end. But awaiting the reader at the end of the visualisation is not a kill but a clear pool with a gift from Artemis at its bottom. This seems a long way away from the Goddess of Greek myth who turned a man who accidentally saw her naked into a stag and had his own hounds tear him to shreds. But maybe that is the problem with modern day paganism - that we can long for a closer connection to nature and its ‘harmonious’ processes but balk at the reality of what nature actually is.

This article has been written to be controversial and perhaps a little offensive, and if it has turned out that way then good. Because, to be honest, would you rather be reading a soppy tirade about life and nature being all hearts and flowers when it simply isn’t true? For the big truth is that if nature wasn’t driven by conflict and natural selection then there would be no room for evolution. No room for change and certainly no room for us to develop social behaviour, culture, altruism and even love - and that’s the harsh truth.

Bibliography

Life of Pi, Yann Martel

Dr Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation, Olivia Judson

A Witches Bible, Janet and Stewart Farrar

Teen Witch, Silver Ravenwolf

Mapping The Deep, Robert Kunzig

Animal Behaviour, Chris Barnard

Ovid's Metamorphoses, translation by A.D Melville