The Original Heresy: Homesickness, Civilization, and Transcendental Religion (part 1)
The Great Homesickness
“You, the great homesickness I could never shake off …”
— Rilke
I have a confession to make. It’s something I don’t talk about much, especially in the company of other Pagans. For a long time, I did not feel at home here … I mean … on this earth. For much of my life, I had this feeling that my real home was elsewhere.
Don’t worry. I’m not going to start talking about aliens. What I’m talking about is a feeling of disconnection, a feeling that my real life was waiting for me somewhere else. I learned there is a German word for this feeling: weltschmerz. It’s the feeling that reality can never satisfy one’s hopes. In his novel, Free Fall in Crimson, John MacDonald describes Weltschmerz as "homesickness for a place you have never seen".
I don’t think this is an uncommon feeling. I think it’s very common to feel pulled in two directions: toward the here-and-now and toward … somewhere else. There is something in us which calls us to reach for the stars, to strive, to stretch, to go beyond—to, in the words of poet Galway Kinnell, ”come up against the ends of the earth, and climb over.” And there is also something in us which calls us back to earth, to plant our feet, to sink our roots into the ground.
And I suspect this dynamic has shaped a lot of human history.
The poet Robert Graves is known among contemporary Pagans as the inspiration for the Triple Goddess, one of the most well-known Neo-Pagan symbols. Graves was a conflicted man, especially in his relationships with women, so it’s not surprising that his muse would have multiple faces. Graves once expressed the divided nature of human being in this poem:
Poised in air between earth and paradise,
Paradise and earth, confess which pull
Do you find the stronger? Is it of homesickness
Or of passion? Would you be rather loyal or wise?
How are these choices reconcilable?— Robert Graves, “An East Wind”
The poem contrasts homesickness and passion, loyalty and wisdom. It’s not clear which of these attributes Graves meant to associate with heaven (paradise) and which with earth. For me, it was “heaven” that I associated with homesickness and loyalty, and earth that I associated with passion and wisdom. But the poem is ambiguous, and the ambiguity is probably intentional. We are left to wonder: Which is our home? Heaven or earth? To which do we owe loyalty? Which promises passion? And which wisdom?
When I first started writing online, it was with the hope that I might answer these questions raised by Graves’ poem, and that I might somehow reconcile this division within myself.
Egyptian Stele of Qadesh depicting Resheph, Qudshu, and Min.
To symbolize this dynamic, I chose as the header for my blog an image from the Egyptian Stele of Qadesh. The stele (a monumental slab) depicts three deities: Min, an Egyptian ithyphallic fertility god (left), Resheph, a Canaanite desert god (right), and between them Qudshu/Qedesh, an Egyptian goddess of sexuality and war[1]. The goddess is seen offering symbols of death and rebirth, lotus flowers and a snake, to each. The figures are positioned in such a way that the goddess functions as a fulcrum between the gods, who symbolize life and death.
The image captured for me the sense of being poised between two competing impulses and struggling to reconcile them, like a lover caught between two suitors: immanence and transcendence, earth and heaven.
The Transcendental Impulse
The worst things we ever did
was put God in the sky
— Chelan Harkin, Susceptible to Light (2020)
No doubt, the feeling of disconnection I felt most of my life was fostered by the religion I was raised in. Whether owing to the specific form of Christianity which predominated in my family of origin[2], or to the idiosyncrasies of my personality which caused me to interpret that religion in a specific way, I developed a deep desire to escape: to escape the demands of my body, to escape the messiness of matter, to escape this world.
For decades, scholars and laypeople alike have laid the blame for our dualistic view of nature and our transcendental conception of divinity at the feet of Christianity. The historian Lynn White formalized this argument in 1967 in his (what was then) provocative article, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis”, in which he argued that the environmental crisis was, at its root, a religious problem, specifically a Christian problem.
“Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen. … Man shares, in great measure, God’s transcendence of nature. Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism[s] and Asia’s religions (except, perhaps, Zorastrianism), not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.”
— Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (1967)
Not coincidentally, that same year, a community began to coalesce around the word (Neo-)”Pagan” with the founding of three separate Pagan organizations: Feraferia, the Church of All Worlds, and the New Reformed Order of the Golden Dawn[3]. The Church of All Worlds, which would play an especially significant role in shaping what it meant to be a Pagan in the modern world, explicitly adopted White’s thesis as an article of faith.
The charge against Christianity is not without basis. The 1st century CE Christian apostle Paul arguably had as much or even more influence on the form Christianity would take than did Jesus. Paul’s experience of his own divided nature was expressed poignantly in his letter to the Romans:
I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. … For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
— Epistle to the Romans
Paul’s words capture perfectly the feeling of internal division which pervaded my own experience of being Christian, not surprisingly, since his idiosyncratic experience of innermost division would eventually become Christian dogma.[4]
But the transcendental impulse did not begin with Christianity. Paul’s interpretation of Christianity grew out of his education in Pharisaic Judaism, which was a product of the 6th century BCE Babylonian exile, which had transformed the parochial polytheistic religion of the Hebrews into a transcendental monotheistic one.[5]
Another influence were the Neo-Platonic philosophers, who also adopted a dualistic view of nature, consisting of perfect forms and imperfect substance. Plato and his successors were, in turn, influenced by the religion of the Orphics. The Orphics first appeared in Greece around the 5th century BCE, centuries before Paul. They saw the body as evil and the soul as divine, and believed ascetic practices would release their souls from their bodies. They were preoccupied with individualized salvation to a degree that was novel in the ancient world. And while Yahweh was being elevated to transcendental status in Israel, the same process was happening to Zeus across the Mediterranean in the Hellenic world.
Children of Heaven or Earth?
It was customary among the Orphics to bury their dead with small “tablets”—actually paper-thin metal leaves—sometimes made of gold and inscribed with messages. The messages often contained instructions to the deceased person on how to safely navigate the underworld.
Petelia Gold Tablet giving instructions to deceased Orphic initiate on how to avoid reincarnation.
One well-preserved example, called the Petelia Gold Tablet, dates from the 3rd century BCE. It advises the deceased to avoid the first spring of water they encounter, the spring of forgetfulness, and to approach instead the second spring, the spring of memory. There, the deceased was instructed to recite the following to the underworld guardians:
“I am the child of Earth and starry Heaven; but my race is heavenly.”
— Petelia Gold Tablet, 3rd c. BCE
This, it is promised, will ensure the deceased passage to the place where the blessed heroes rest. Without this ritual, the deceased would be doomed to be reincarnated perpetually. The feeling of internal division is clear here, as is the believer’s preference for heaven over earth.
Over the years, I have given a lot of thought to my funeral: what readings I would like read, what songs I would like played or sung, and of course, how I want my body to be disposed. There are quite a few more options nowadays than there used to be, though it’s still difficult to go against the grain of the funeral industrial complex. There are environmental impacts to consider, of course. Embalming is both unnecessary and environmentally harmful. Burial is definitely preferable to the alternatives, like cremation and various high-tech solutions.
Though practical concerns and social responsibility weigh heavy on my mind, behind all that there is something deeply symbolic, almost visceral, at work. It’s for this reason that cremation still appeals to a part of me, in spite of the environmental impact. Though, it’s not cremation in an industrial oven that I imagine, but being burned on an open-air pyre. Of course, this is not a practical choice in today’s world, so I probably won’t be going that way, regardless of my romantic notions.
Nevertheless, the appeal of fire is almost as strong as, sometimes stronger than, the appeal of the earth, where I would decompose and grow into something else. Underlying this dilemma, I think, are competing visions of human nature. “From dust we come, and to dust we return,” we are told. But what kind of dust? The dust of the earth, life-giving humus—which shares its etymological origin with the word “human”? Or star dust, the stuff of cosmic ovens? Are we children of earth or of heaven?
From Earth Spirits to Sky Gods
Both the appearance of the Orphics and the return of the Israelite elites from Babylonian exile fell in the middle of what some scholars call the “Axial Age”, a centuries-long period of religious and philosophical transformation throughout the civilized world in the mid-first millennium BCE.
“If there is … some common underlying impulse in all these ‘axial’ movements, it might be called the strain toward transcendence… a kind of standing back and looking beyond—a kind of critical, reflective questioning of the actual and a new vision of what lies beyond.”
— Benjamin Schwartz, “The Age of Transcendence”
In a word, religions in the Axial Age became more “otherworldly”. Of course, pre-Axial religions had their other worlds—the world of the dead or the world of spirits—but in those cases, the space between the other worlds and the earth was perceived to be “thin” and permeable. With the advent of the Axial religions, heaven and God became radically “other”, while this world and everything in it became fallen, degenerate, or illusory. Meanwhile, the space between the two could only be bridged from one side of the divide: by God or by his (male) human representatives.
Religious and philosophical thought also took an inward turn, becoming more “reflexive” (thinking about thinking) and self-conscious, which entailed a turning away from the external, more-than-human world.
The timing of this shift in religious thought is not coincidental. Anarchist anthropologist, David Graeber, has noted that it coincided with the invention of coinage—one of the critical technologies of civilization. And Shmuel Eisenstadt explains, in The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (2012), that the Axial Age corresponded with “the disintegration of the tribal communities and of construction of new collectivities and institutional complexes.” This seemingly innocuous scholarly phrasing conceals a great deal: the dislocation of rural peoples to fuel the growth of cities and the accelerating division of labor and accumulation of capital to fuel the growth of a class of religious and political elites. The rise of the transcendental religions was in response to the cognitive dissonance created by these upheavals, and it reflected the interests of those elites who benefited from those upheavals.
Anarcho-communist professor of psychology and history, Bruce Lerro, explains the connection between the increasing division of labor in civilized societies and the rise of transcendental religions in his book, From Earth Spirits to Sky Gods[6]. As mental labor became separated from physical labor, mental labor and those who performed it were elevated and physical labor and those who performed it were denigrated. As this happened in the social realm, a corresponding process occurred on the sacred realm: abstract thought became elevated and matter became denigrated. “Thinking without doing in the social world, which is what upper classes do, becomes consciousness without matter in the Creation Myths,” explains Lerro, “The belief that consciousness, the mind and meaning-making can be decontextualized from matter and imagined to exist as superior to it is the basis of Axial Age religion.”
Elites controlled the means of official meaning-making, and they used transcendental religion to legitimize their position and privilege, projecting the hierarchical social structure onto the sacred realm. No account of the evolution of transcendental religion would be complete, though, without also explaining why non-elites would embrace this projection. Lerro explains how civilization alienated people from direct access to nature, and transcendental religion functioned as “a sedative for the disenchantment of the world”, compensating for the alienating effects of civilization.
The Wall
Artist’s depiction of Jericho, the oldest city in the world, circa 9,000 BCE; rendered famous by the Biblical account of the fall of its walls
It’s tempting to imagine that this feeling of internal division is a quintessential part of being human, that we have always felt a pull toward the transcendental. But rather than a function of being human, I suspect that it is a function of being human in civilization.[7]
By “civilization”, I mean the process which began with city-states, like Sumer and Babylon, Athens and Rome, Tenochtitlán and Iztapalapa, Florence and Istanbul. The city, at that time, was defined by the wall. The wall separated the citizens of the city from both wild/undomesticated nature[8] and from the wild/undomesticated (read “barbarian”) peoples. But the wall also existed to keep people in. The majority of people living in early cities lived in some degree of bondage, ranging from forced resettlement to debt bondage to outright slavery.
The wall was an agent of alienation. First of all, it physically separated people from the land. In the cities, most people’s work was at least one step removed from the actual obtaining of their food from the earth. The wall and the system of oppression it represented also separated people from the products of their labor through degrees of exploitation. The wall also separated people from their communities (both human and more-than-human) from whom they had been forcibly relocated. And the wall separated people from their gods and their ancestors, who were inextricably tied to both the land and to their communities, and replaced them with the gods of the city and the political hierarchy, drawing attention away from the earth and to the heavens.
For millennia, the vast majority of people lived outside the reach of civilization. Until the 17th century, at least one-third of the globe still was not assimilated. But gradually, civilization extended its influence beyond its walls—through conquest, through enclosure, through sprawl. And when human beings discovered how to harness the sunlight stored in fossil fuels, civilization began to grow into its current globalized form. As of 2007, more than half of the world lives in cities. But civilization is no longer limited to cities. It extends into those simulacra of nature we call the suburbs, and into the rural land colonized by industrial monoculture farming and other extractive industries[9]. Civilization is now nearly ubiquitous.
As civilization expanded, the walls were transformed from a way of keeping the wild out, to a way of keeping it in. Now, we fence nature in (i.e., in parks), rather than fencing it out. And rather than walling out the barbarians, those who civilization has failed to assimilate, they are now incarcerated en masse in prisons. The walls, which were the defining characteristic of civilization, have now been transformed into the invisible, yet inescapable, property line—which nevertheless operates in the same way to separate us from the common land and from each other.
Civilization alienates us from everything that grounds us—the earth and our communities (both human and other-than). In the place of direct communion with place and persons, civilization substitutes experiences mediated through technology (what John Michael Greer calls “prosthetics”) and through structures of power. So pervasive is this process, so subtle and subliminal are its workings today, that it has become nearly impossible to give a name to our sense of unfulfillment, except that of mental illness. As a result, as we mature, we develop a nagging feeling that something is awry, that something is wrong with the world itself.
This is the original heresy: the belief that the earth is not our home, that our real life is somewhere else—whether we imagine that to be heaven after we die or in a future technotopia or in a virtual reality populated by uploaded consciousnesses and AI. We have embraced this heresy in order to make sense of our feelings of disconnection and discontent. But the problem is not the earth, and it’s not us either. It’s civilization: that constellation of stories and systems which function to separate us from what makes us human.
There is no escaping civilization nowadays. There is no frontier, no pure wilderness, to which we might flee. And yet, there are spaces—which we can either find or else carve out for ourselves—in which we can cultivate an unmediated experience of the living world. There are cracks in the concrete facade of civilization. Finding and growing these cracks is perhaps what it means to be pagan today.
Lovers find secret places
inside this violent world
where they make transactions
with beauty.
Reason says, “Nonsense.
I have walked and measured the walls here.
There are no places like that.”
Love says, “There are.”— Rumi
To be continued …
Notes
This similarity—both in structure and symbol—of this triad to another divine triad in Egyptian mythology—Osiris, Isis, and Set—is probably not accidental. The ancient Egyptians were unabashedly syncretic.
It’s also possible to see a lot of immanence in the Christian mythos. What is the incarnation, after all, but a descent into matter, earth, the flesh? What is the Eucharist, but a reminder of the holiness of the flesh?
Religious studies scholar Sarah Pike dates the origins of contemporary Paganism to 1967, the year that Frederick Adams incorporated Feraferia and the New Reformed Order of the Golden Dawn was founded. That same year, the Church of All Worlds filed for incorporation as the first Pagan “church”.
via Augustine and the Second Council of Orange (CE 529).
The monotheistic and aniconic (anti-images) religion described in the Christian Old Testament/Jewish Tanakh represented just one of several competing religious movements (“Yahwehisms”). The polytheistic religion decried by the Biblical writers was likely more “popular” (contra “elite”) and more widespread than the monotheism of the authors. Monotheism/aniconism was also a very late development, originating in the late pre-exilic period (late 7th c. BCE) and not being formalized until the post-exilic period (late 6th c. BCE). The Bible/Tanakh is best understood as a compilation of revisionist propaganda of several competing (and sometimes contradictory) religious elites. See Mark Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts (2001); Mark Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (2002), William Dever, Did God Have a Wife: Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel (2005); and Susan Ackerman: Under Every Green Tree: Popular Religion in Sixth Century Judah (1992).
From Earth Spirits to Sky Gods: From Stone Age Magic to Iron Age Religion: A Materialistic Approach (manuscript, 7th rev., 1998), later published as From Earth Spirits to Sky Gods: The Socioecological Origins of Monotheism, Individualism, and Hyper-Abstract Reasoning, From the Stone Age to the Axial Iron Age (2000).
Many anarcho-primitivists equate the advent of agriculture with the rise of cities and civilization. However, according to anarchist anthropologist James Scott, there was a gap of four millennia between the first domestication of plants and animals and the rise of the first city-states. During that time, people combined hunting and gathering with some degree of horticulture. This suggests that the critical factor was not the tilling of land, per se, but the specific form that agriculture took under civilization, i.e., intensive, monoculture cultivation designed to produce easily taxable crops (mostly grains). See James Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (2017)
According to the Alliance for Wild Ethics (founded by ecologist David Abram) “wild” refers to that which is beyond human control: “Wildness is the earthy, untamed, undomesticated state of things— open-ended, improvisational, moving according to its own boisterous logic. That which is wild is not really out of control; it is simply out of our control. Wildness is not a state of disorder, but a condition whose order is not imposed from outside. Wild land follows its own order, its own Tao, its own inherent way in the world.”
Speaking of the modern megacity, Paul Kingsnorth* explains: “Once a structure of this size and complexity has been created, it must be maintained. In the case of a modern city, this means that the surrounding lands, and then the lands further afield, must be colonised to supply it and its inhabitants, their whims and desires and needs. Like a black hole, a city sucks into its orbit everything around it … a city, unlike a village, can never be self-sufficient. A giant city is a kind of micro-empire: it cannot exist without enclosing and harvesting lands and peoples elsewhere to provide for its own growth.” (“The Great Wen”)
*Over a period of a few years, Paul Kingsnorth’s political orientation has shifted from Green anarchism to proto-fascism. While it is impossible to draw a bright line marking when this occurred, I cannot unequivocally endorse Kingsnorth’s writing after the spring of 2020. COVID and his conversion to orthodox Christianity appear to have accelerated his slide to the right. See here for more on this.
JOHN HALSTEAD
John Halstead is the author of Another End of the World is Possible, in which he explores what it would really mean for our relationship with the natural world if we were to admit that we are doomed. John is a native of the southern Laurentian bioregion and lives in Northwest Indiana, near Chicago. He is a co-founder of 350 Indiana-Calumet, which worked to organize resistance to the fossil fuel industry in the Region. John was the principal facilitator of “A Pagan Community Statement on the Environment.” He strives to live up to the challenge posed by the Statement through his writing and activism. John has written for numerous online platforms, including Patheos, Huffington Post, and Gods & Radicals. He is Editor-at-Large of NaturalisticPaganism.com. John also edited the anthology, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans and authored Neo-Paganism: Historical Inspiration & Contemporary Creativity. He is also a Shaper of the Earthseed community, more about which can be found at GodisChange.org.