March 2010
The Mother
About thirty years ago I was at a lecture by Rob Hand, whom I vastly admired (still do), that blew my mind. I haven’t thought the same way again, about history, ecology or the state of the world.
But at the end of his talk, he said something that appalled me.
His was discussing how the concept of a maternal Earth had changed over the eons. He talked about how, before the advent of what historians call “history,” people lived with Nature as if they saw themselves as children of the Earth1.
I found myself profoundly moved by this. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard of the Earth-as-Mother idea; but I‘d always heard it framed in a lyrically metaphorical way. It struck me now, though, that early peoples must have felt the idea quite literally. To them it was not a concept but a fact, and the most important fact of existence. They were born of the Earth Mother, fed, sheltered and held by Her. She took care of them every day in a thousand different ways.
I started feeling, in my body, what it must have felt like to be as intimately connected to the Earth as an infant feels connected to its mother.
Instinctive Ecology
I don’t mean to romanticize pre-industrial cultures. We can well imagine the hideous brutalities of ancient life. But, clearly, pre-civilized humanity had a far more “civilized” attitude when it came to stewardship of the planet. How could it not be so, if they saw her as their mother? I doubt if we moderns can fully fathom the implications of a deity-devotee relationship this personal.
I think we can assume that the idea of human-created pollution would have been quite unimaginable to these early tribes2.. The closest analogy we have is the sense of blasphemy a Muslim feels when he perceives the Koran being befouled, or a Christian when she sees a cross defiled. But for ancient devotees of Mother Law, surely the idea of fouling the air on a planetary scale would have seemed not only a mass sacrilege, but a subjectively horrible one; because of the mother angle. They would have seen it as macrocosmic matricide.
Cellular Memory
Not to mention, suicide. Like a fetus uncorking a vial of poison while in the womb.
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As I sat in the auditorium I started to think about the difference in emotional tone between the more recent sky-god religions and that of the Earth goddess3.. For the ancients, “God” wasn’t some power-wielding boss, demanding slavish obeisance and passing judgment. She was the life force; adored as a baby adores its all-powerful, all-providing mother. Nor was she seen as remote, sitting on a throne up in the clouds. She was right there; in every rushing stream, in every plant growing, in every pregnant woman.
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At this point I became aware of a mass yearning flooding the lecture hall. I could feel every proto-ecologist in attendance (remember, this was in the ’70s) aching to return to that golden age. It was heartbreaking to consider the difference between the way humanity had seen itself before — as beloved, protected children — and the way we have come to see ourselves now — as masters and destroyers of our planetary home.
Leaving Home
Hand went on to describe how the collective viewpoint slowly evolved from tribal identification into individualism. It had to be so, if humans were to develop into unique selves4.
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It made sense to me, that this would be part of the cosmic plan. Just as each child must develop a singular ego if she is to mature properly, the human race itself had been in a juvenile state, beyond which we needed to mature. In the process, we left behind that undifferentiated identification with Mother Earth. We separated from her. And, finally, we went way too far; to the point of denying Her (as hurtful teenagers often do, with their human mothers), in our wayward attempt to cultivate full agency and rational minds.
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We were expelled from the Garden, or expelled ourselves. And it was for a reason: we had to grow up. We moved from an aboriginal state of ontological infancy – seeing ourselves as part of the universe, afloat in the undifferentiated All-That-Is – to a state of being cosmically un-tethered. At that point we found ourselves all on our own: big boys and girls who had to figure things out from scratch (thus Copernicus, Descartes; The Enlightenment)5..
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Then Hand dropped the bomb. “Perhaps the Earth is not a Mother after all,” he said, “but only a womb.”
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I was aghast, hearing this. As a devotee of the ancient ways, I felt I was hearing a blasphemy. The murmur of distress rippling through the auditorium told me I wasn’t the only one.
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But that lecture was a long time ago in my conceptual process. And it was before the 2012 years had brought humanity to the precipice.
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Beyond Terra
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The times we find ourselves in have been blowing minds all over the world, triggering paradigm shifts as radical as the transits in the sky. My own worldview has changed many times over since Hand gave that lecture. For me it is no longer a negation of Terra, or a withdrawal of reverence from her in any way, to see her as part of a vaster Mother Force.
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For most of human history, the view of Earth as the beginning point and end point of all things had a physical and religious logic to it. But as the world6. has grown smaller through exploration and technological advancement, our perspective on it has mutated. Those with a reverence to the Divine Feminine may find their allegiance expanding beyond the literal planet. The Earth-as-womb idea suggests that our bodies were born here, and our consciousness got its start here; but that neither is limited to here.
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In a telling piece of synchronicity, the blockbuster hit “Avatar” — a glorious celebration of Nature-loving — debuted around the time of the Copenhagen summit, where the case was made once and for all that if we don’t stop fouling our planetary nest, we are toast.
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“Avatar”’, whose action takes place on some other planet, is a passionate case for reverence for one’s planetary home. The movie’s timing is a manifestation of the Cardinal T-Square now upon us, whose absent vertex is Cancer: sign of the Mother. “Avatar” is an extension of the Gaia idea, but one step farther out along the trajectory we have been considering. The movie proposes that our acknowledgement of Nature’s bounty, and our gratitude for its nurture, need not be equated with and limited to the planet where we were born.
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Bigger reference points are beckoning.
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I imagine that when Ptolemy introduced his gridded globe in the second century, that those who saw it felt similarly beckoned. They were being invited to see the Earth from above. For my generation, a similar revelation dawned when the first NASA photograph of Earth was sent back from space. Seeing it for the first time filled me with a visceral sense of wonder. What would the implications be, in the group psyche, of seeing Earth from afar?
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The moment that photo entered the collective visual lexicon, our planet went through a radical meaning shift. It was no longer merely the solid mass under our feet, as taken-for-granted as the color of our own eyes — which, because we are looking through them all the time, we cannot see. The Earth was now an object; a beautiful, fragile, precious thing.
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These incremental shifts in the ways humans see the Earth are part of an inevitable unfolding of species consciousness. We can see it happening on many levels. On the technological level, the more scientists explore space, the more we will be — literally — seeing Earth from afar. This will be accompanied by a shift on the conceptual level, as our explorations prompt more questions about life on other planets.
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Humanity will not be able to harbor for much longer the same geocentric assumptions that our Terra-worshiping ancestors harbored. A parallel trajectory is doubtless underway on the spiritual level. Among those tuned into the spirit of Gaia, the idea will gain ground — without any reduction in our devotion — that we are now shifting towards the conception of a more abstract sense of Home.
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This is not to suggest that Earth is not our mother. It is to suggest that the whole Universe is.
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Notes
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1 Though trivialized by modern anthropologists as “fertility cults,” these aboriginal cosmologies, with their talismans of huge-bellied, faceless females, did not view Mother Nature as a minor goddess. They saw Her as the ultimate Source and Creatrix of the cosmos. They were devoted to the Earth every bit as reverentially as the Abrahamic religions were devoted to their gods, who showed up much later.
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2 As ecological axioms go, not fouling one’s own nest would seem to be a pretty practical one. Prehistoric humans observed that the other flora and fauna of the Earth did not foul their own nests. They watched how wolves and hares kept their habitats clean, and felt the same desire. They had not yet lost the ability to identify with the other animals, and to benefit from animal instincts. Indeed, they watched the planet itself clean up: through organic decay, cyclical rains, forest fires, and all the other mechanisms through which natural detritus is regenerated into new life. What we now call “recycling” – a concept foreign enough to us moderns to require its own special term — must have once seemed utterly obvious. It must have seemed inseparable from sanity.
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3 Though it is equated in the modern mind with the whole concept of “religion,” the reign of the big-three sky gods (Yahweh, Mohammed and Jehovah) was in fact very brief; and very recent, by contrast with the countless millennia during which “pagans” worshiped the Earth Mother. See Barbara Walker, The Woman’s Ecyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, HarperSanFrancisco 1983.
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4 Also in the 70s Riane Eisler came out with The Chalice and the Blade, which presents a similar view of the prehistoric worldview idea. Rick Tarnas was writing about it, too, linking it –as was transpersonal psychologist Stanislov Graf — to astrological symbolism. Demetra George introduced a similar perspective in her work on the asteroids . And now, in the 2010s, we have the Bioneers and many others, implementing the neo-Nature-worshiping worldview with a new, postmillennial urgency.
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5 This is the macrocosmic parallel of Carl Jung’s theory about how individual human awareness evolves. He proposed that in order to fully develop, we each have to “leave home” – to repudiate the familiar: the forces that nurtured us originally — only to come back home again. at a higher level of awareness.
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6 Consider the word “world.” Though we rarely think about it as such, it is a relative term. To Ptolemy it meant “the known world;” meaning, the Roman Empire and those patches of the globe that classical travelers had written about. To scholars of the European Renaissance, it meant Christendom. What does it mean, to you, modern reader? The planet Earth? The solar system? The unknowable, limitless universe?