Science is often said to be ethically neutral and the good or bad consequences of its application are attributed to those who apply it. The philosopher, Mary Midgley, reminded us that Gaia has influence well beyond science. She said,

“The reason why the notion of this enclosing whole concerns us is that it corrects a large and disastrous blind spot in our contemporary world view. It reminds us that we are not separate, independent autonomous entities. Since the Enlightenment, the deepest moral efforts of our culture have gone to establishing our freedom as individuals. The campaign has produced great results but like all moral campaigns it is one sided and has serious costs when the wider context is forgotten.” [1]

One of these costs is our alienation from the physical world. She went on to say:

“We have carefully excluded everything non-human from our value system and reduced that system to terms of individual self interest. We are mystified – as surely no other set of people would be – about how to recognise the claims of the larger whole that surrounds us – the material world of which we are a part. Our moral and physical vocabulary, carefully tailored to the social contract, leaves no language in which to recognise the environmental crisis.” [2]

Cathrien de Pater, Spiritual Experiences in Nature, Eco-friendliness and Human Well-being. Acta Horticulturae, 2012. Aranyani Knowledge for Nature and Religion, Rhenen, Netherlands

Herbert W. Schroeder, The Spiritual Aspect of Nature: A Perspective from Depth Psychology

So begins the Bible. According to my understanding, this ‘word’ in Greek, is Logos, from which we get logic, relating to reason . . .

Can we logically assume that the ovens of Auschwitz, or the atomic furnace of Hiroshima exist outside of God? Is there a separate Universe for evil, or for ecological devastation?

“The prophets had declared war on mythology: their God was active in history and in current political events rather than in the primordial, scared time of myth. When monotheists turned to mysticism, however, mythology reasserted itself as the chief vehicle of religious experience. There is a linguistic connection between the three words ‘myth’, ‘mysticism’ and ‘mystery’. All are derived from the Greek verb musteion: to close the yes or the mouth. All three words, therefore, are rooted in an experience of darkness and silence. They are not popular words in the West today. The word ‘myth’ for example, is often used as a synonym for a lie: in popular parlance, a myth is something that is not true. A politician or film star will dismiss scurrilous reports of their activities by saying that they are ‘myths’ and scholars will refer to mistaken views of the past as ‘mythical.’ Since the Enlightenment, a ‘mystery’ has been seen as something that needs to be cleared up. It is frequently associated with muddled thinking. In the United States, a detective story is called a ‘mystery’ and it is of the essence of this genre that the problem be solved satisfactorily. We shall see that even religious people came to regard ‘mystery’ as a bad word during the Enlightenment. Similarly ‘mysticism’ is frequently associated with cranks, charlatans or indulgent hippies. Since the West has never been very enthusiastic about mysticism, even during its heyday in other parts of the world, there is little understanding of the intelligence and discipline that is essential to this type of spirituality.”

“He cites the myth of Santa Claus as a supreme example of ideological indoctrination, dismisses Hollywood's love of the Dalai Lama and "all this vague, insipid Buddhist bullshit".

“Lévi-Strauss had no patience for religion, his own included. He believed in rationality.” p.75

“The savage mind was not magical, but logical. Only its objects – animals, plant, inorganic matter – belonged to nature.” p.75

“The Scientific Spirit has bitten so many of us in the nape, and pumped us full of its eggs, the ferocious virus of abstraction.” [5]

“Science fosters the separations, the exile; . . . Science, its root scire, to know has a further root in Greek, schizo (cleft, splinter, separation) and further, Sanscrit chyati (divides). Instead of science, why not séance for these sessions that invoke our common ancestor? Séance is defined by the dictionary as a meeting of a learned society and also a meeting that attempts to connect with the dead. Jung’s expansive vision in hospital took him to the edge of death. Return to life meant divisions, separations: “the grey world with its boxes.” [[6]] But there are other ways out of the box, other ways for the grey world to discover a blue vision.” [7]

“The scientific attitude, which is a crystallisation of the rational attitude, has to be passive in face of the facts if it is to record the facts accurately. The scientist has to be a mirror first. He has to be a mirror second too, because the slightest imaginative bias in his presentation of the facts invalidates his findings and reflect badly on his standing as a scientist.... The result is something resembling mental paralysis. It can be seen in every corner of our life. It shows for instance in the passion for photography. Photography is a method of making a dead accurate image of the world without any act of imagination.” "Myth and Education". Children's Literature in Education 1 (March): 55-70.Hughes, Ted. 1971, 56.

discursive: adjective – 1 moving from subject to subject. 2 - relating to discourse or modes of discourse. 3 - Philosophy, archaic proceeding by argument or reasoning rather than by intuition. DERIVATIVES: discursively adverb. discursiveness noun. ORIGIN: C16: from medieval Latin discursivus, from Latin discurs-, discurrere (see discourse).

Discourse: noun written or spoken communication or debate. a formal written or spoken discussion of a topic. Linguistics a text or conversation. Verb speak or write authoritatively about a topic. engage in conversation. ORIGIN: Middle English (denoting the process of reasoning): from Old French discours, from Latin discursus 'running to and fro' (in medieval Latin 'argument'), from discurrere 'run away'.

“It is like the old-fashioned dynasties of the gods. Christianity deposes Mother Nature and begets, on her prostrate body, Science, which proceeds to destroy Nature, but which in turn, on its half-destroyed mother's body, begets the Computer, a god more powerful than its Father or its Grandfather, who reinstates Nature, its Mother and Grandmother and Great-Grandmother, as the holy of holies, mother of all the gods.” [8]

The nature of evil . . . Saturn/Satan . . . demonisation . . . Axis of Evil . . . Evil Empire . . . . Satan in The White House . . .etc . . .

Genesis 1: 28: And God blessed them and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

The problematic word here, is dominion, which without taking too many liberties, has now the unsavoury association of “. . .to dominate…” “ . . . to have a commanding or controlling influence over. ORIGIN: C17 (earlier (Middle English) as domination): from Latin dominat-, dominari 'rule, govern', from dominus 'lord, master'.

Dominion over every living thing, slaughtering of whales, dolphin, seals, the extinction of species through hunting, and so on. The British would boast over how many lions or elephants they shot in one day. Industrial slaughter of cows, sheep, goats and other species such a fowl – continues in titanic proportions. Only the most radical vegetarians complain.

“ . . . man’s existence is threatened by an irrational domination and exploitation of nature . . . the confinement to and obsession with domination of external nature impedes humankind from fulfilling its complete notion as a spiritual species.” [9]

“The concept of man’s domination over Nature has deep roots in the history of Western thought. Here, one can use the term “Western” with impunity, as there is no parallel aim to subjugate Nature to exploitation in Eastern thought, for example, in Buddhism and Hinduism, though both have been contaminated by ‘modernity’.” [10]

What we are calling the Western experience is the application of intelligence to the scientific investigation of desanctified nature. In order to discover its laws and bring its forces under the control of man we have had to do violence to nature. That is what has brought us to where we are today. Undeniably a prodigious flight of technology has transformed the conditions of life and the whole world has benefited.

However, it has simultaneously brought us to a situation that I shall call anti-demiurgic in the sense that it negates the work of creation by putting earthly men in a position to destroy and annihilate their habitation, the Earth where they originated and from which they draw subsistence. We must face this work of annihilation and death in order to denounce it, like the Sages of ancient Persia who were the first, if not the only ones, to look atrocious Ahriman in the eyes.” [11]

“The basic elements of nature have been robbed of their divinity. The heavenly spheres are no longer gods. The wind and the rain have no divine independence.” [12]

“The white people taught us that nature is dead, but my mother, my aunt, and my grandmother used to tell me that nature is alive.”

“The first man had been created from the substance of a god: he therefore shared the divine nature, in however a limited way. There was no gulf between human beings and the gods. The natural world, men and women and the gods themselves all shared the same nature and derived from the same divine substance. The pagan vision was holistic. The gods were not shut off from the human race in a separate ontological sphere: divinity was not essentially different from humanity. There was no need for a special revelation of the gods or for a divine law to descend to earth from up high.” [13]

“Prophets like Moses preached the lofty religion of Yahweh, but most of the people wanted the older rituals, with their holistic vision of unity among the gods, nature and mankind.” [14]

Use of the word ‘pagan’ - Not the kind of pagan’s that kiss the goats bum . . .pagan tolerance . . . Iceland does not have Catholic influence to seed its poison of sexual guilt wherever it went . .

dominion : ORIGIN: Middle English: via Old French from medieval Latin dominio(n-), from Latin dominium,

“Science and magic were blurred in the Islamic world, according to A. C. Crombie, because the Muslim approach directed the search for natural knowledge into those areas that would yield the most power over nature. Yet I doubt if Muslims emphasized this value more highly than did Christians. As Lynn White has argued in numerous essays, medieval Christians eagerly embraced technologies which aided in the fulfilment of the Biblical commandment to subdue the earth. Alchemy and astrology were no less integral in Christian than in Muslim science.⁽²¹⁾ [15]

The doctrine of the macrocosm is to be found in an important alchemical text, attributed to Raimund Lull, the Testamentum, Michela Pereira:

“That becomes evident from the call, made by nature (who, following the poetic tradition, is personified) upon the alchemist who is asked to keep her 'tools' (instrumenta) well hidden from the impious, who want to violate her secrets and are in fact killing her. At the same time, the alchemist is told that it is necessary to know the secrets of nature to care for her, and consequently the alchemist explicitly recommends to his disciple to act with a 'scientific' attitude (spiritu scientifico).” [16]

"My purpose … has not been to prove the continued influence of alchemy on the development of applied science and technology throughout the Scientific Revolution, but merely to show that here, in these obscure treatises of the thirteenth century, a propagandistic literature of technological development was born. During this innovative period, alchemical writers and their allies produced a literary corpus that was among the earliest in Latin to promote actively the doctrine that art can equal or outdo the products of nature, even if human art is learned by imitating natural processes. Similarly, these alchemical propagandists - or at least the bolder among them - did not shy away from the conclusion that man can even change the order of the natural world by altering the species of those products. This technological dream, however premature, was to have a lasting effect on the direction taken by Western culture." [[17]]

This insight into early alchemical theology, is especially interesting in the light of the present controversy over the effects of genetic engineering.

"All alchemical writings strongly make the point that alchemy accomplishes what Nature leaves imperfect. In other words, left to her own devices, Nature, or human nature, muddles through somehow in a state of inherent conflict and confusion; but the alchemist saw himself (or herself, for there were women alchemists) as the transformer of this natural chaos, the individual who stepped in and interfered with God's noble but imperfect creation in order to accomplish its ultimate evolutionary design. You can see how very advanced a psychological perspective this is for the early Christian mind, because it is, in effect, a gross heresy. Implicit in this belief is the conviction that somehow God depends upon human consciousness for His redemption, rather than the other way around, and that individual effort in some way accomplishes what the divine in unable to do in the manifest world. This great heresy naturally made the Church's ears prick up, because from early Christian times through the Reformation, the Church, and not the individual, held the key to salvation. The alchemists were not unchristian; but they were a very special kind of Christian, and therefore subject to persecution. So they cloaked their doctrines in some very florid and strange symbolism in order to conceal the enormity of the heretical statement they were making. Alchemy presented a world-view in which the individual is no longer a poor sinner, helpless and damned without the succouring arms of Mother Church; he or she is a noble participant in God's creation, and in fact can enhance or transform that creation through individual effort, self-honesty, integrity and moral responsibility.

These are deep and difficult concepts, but I would like you to think about them carefully. You will see, if you reflect for a while on this key issue of transforming nature through individual effort, that this is also the same perspective held by modem psychotherapy, although more overtly religious in its language." [18]

Re-sacralized . . . de-sacralization and re-sacralization . . . but what do we mean by “sacred”?

“SPAIN seems to have been regarded by the other countries of Western Europe as the special abode of superstition, sorcery, and magic, probably because of the notoriety given to the discoveries of the Moorish alchemists, the first scientists in Europe. But with the coming of the Inquisition a marked and natural falling off is noticeable in the prevalence of occult belief, for anything which in the least tended to heresy was repressed in the most rigid manner by that illiberal Institution. In this way much of the folk-lore and peasant belief of Spain, many fascinating legends, and many a curious custom have been lost, never to be recovered. The Brothers, in their zeal for the purity of their Church, banished not only the witch, the sorcerer, and the demon from Spain, but also the innocent fairy, the spirits of wood and wold, and those household familiars which harm no one, but assist the housewife and the dairymaid.” [19]

‘What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men. That is the only aim. Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness.’ [20]

“To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.” [21]

“In the Twentieth Century the glory of the human has become the desolation of the Earth. The desolation of the Earth is becoming the destiny of the human. All human institutions, professions, programs and activities must now be judged primarily by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore or foster a mutually enhancing Earth–human relationship.” [22]

The word Taghut covers a wide range of meanings: it means anything worshipped other than the Real God (Allah), i.e. all the false deities. It may be Satan, devils, idols, stones, sun, stars, angels, human beings e.g. Messengers of Allah, who were falsely worshipped and taken as Taghut. Likewise, saints, graves, rulers, leaders, are falsely worshipped, and wrongly followed . . . [[23]]

'I used to venerate, O what blindness! Images just taken out of the furnaces, gods fashioned on anvils with hammers, elephant's bones, fillets of paper painted with pictures and hung up on aged trees; and if I saw a well-lubricated stone, begrimed with olive oil, I would address it with flattering words, as if there were in it a real presence (uis praesens), and would ask for blessings of a stock that had no sentience. Moreover, I really inflicted the worst insults on the very gods of whose real existence I had persuaded myself, inasmuch as I believed them, to inhabit logs, stones, and bones and other such material objects."

Lactantius, heaping ridicule on the heathen for worshipping many deities of small duties, specifies Terminus as one because he was rough and rude.

"He was the stone which Saturn swallowed thinking it was Jupiter. When Tarquin wished to build the Capitol and found these shrines of many ancient gods, he consulted them by augury whether they would yield to Jupiter. All agree to go save Terminus, who was suffered to remain. Hence the poet calls him the immovable rock of the Capitol. And what can I say of people who worship such stocks and stones (lapides et stipites) save that they are stocks and stones themselves?" (Adversus Gentes, book I., chap. XX.). [25]

"In the edict of Arles in A.D. 452 is the statement: 'if any infidel either lighted torches, or worshipped trees, fountains or stones, or neglected to destroy them, he should be found guilty of sacrilege." [26]

"The Council of Tours in 567 recommended the excommunication of those who persisted in worshipping trees, stones, or fountains." [27]

"The survival of cultures, as well as genes, dictates that each generation must integrate old wisdom with new knowledge. This was the function of myths, ritual initiation rites, and religion, as it still is the function of dreams. Myth provides a people with its unifying metaphor, it narrative sense of owning a place in the story of creation. Religion provides us with a code of behaviour, regulating how we treat each other and the living world around us. The trouble with the present century is that we have not only lost our myth but have forgotten our manners. Too readily we overlook the simple truth that we are here as temporary guests of our Mother, Nature, and that, like spoiled children, we have abused her hospitality. She has made us a beautiful nest and we have fouled it. But her indulgence is not inexhaustible. Already she gives signs of growing restive, implying that we have overstayed out welcome, and she is contemplating means of getting rid of us. If we wish to stay on we must learn to mend our ways. Instead of behaving like hooligans, we need to show some deference and humility. This is the message of Lovelock's Gaia myth. Greater consciousness is the key, but it has to be mythic consciousness, informed with the intuitive wisdom of the dreaming mind as well as the factual knowledge of left-hemispheric consciousness." [28]

REVIEW: William R. Newman: Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, xv+333 pp.

“In Alchemy, there is an injunction to quicken, or revive, the dead, which is illustrated by a dead tree growing verdant again. That is exactly what this wonderful and rare work does in awakening human consciousness to its Divine potential and Ultimate Destiny. Art thus helps Nature to achieve its ideal Perfection. The authors must be congratulated for their insightful words. I wholeheartedly recommend reading it again and again, and again.” — [29]

[1] Midgley, Mary. Science and Poetry. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

[2] Midgley, Mary. Science and Poetry. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.

[3] New Jewish Publication Society Translation, 1985.

[4] Karen Armstrong, A History of God, Heinemann, London, 1993, p.p.244.

[5] (Hughes 1962, 167). (»Introduction«. [Graven Image Exhibition, RWS Galleries]. 3.) Faas, Ted Hughes: the Unaccomodated Universe 166-7.

[6] MDR, p. 275

[7] James Hillman, The Azure Vault, Lecture given at the XVI International Congress on Analytical Psychology, Barcelona, Spain, September 2004

[8] Joanny Moulin: “History and Reason in the Work of Ted Hughes,” History in Literature, ed. Hoda Gindi, Department of English, University of Cairo (Egypt), 1995, pp.67 – 83.

Earth | Moon: A Ted Hughes Website: http://www.earth-moon.org/downloads/crit_moulhist.pdf

[9] Marco Heleno Baretto, On the death of Nature: A psychological Reflection, Spring 75, pp. 261.

[10] Ruskin on corruption and Life, p. 201, Clark, Civilisation.

[11] Henry Corbin, The Question of Comparative Philosophy, Spring, 1980. pp. 16-17

[12] David Goldstein, Jewish Mythology, Hamlyn, London, 1987.

[13] Karen Armstrong, A History of God, Ballantine Books, New York, 1993, p.9.

[14] Karen Armstrong, A History of God, Ballantine Books, New York, 1993, p.9, p.23

[15] Thomas F. Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages,

http://libro.uca.edu/ics/ics8.htm

[16] Michela Pereira, Heavens on Earth. From the Tabula smaragdina to the Alchemical Fifth Essence, Early Science and Medicine, Vol. 5, No. 2, Alchemy and Hermeticism, (2000), p.142.

[17] William Newman, Technology and Alchemical Debate in the Late Middle Ages, Isis 80: 1989, p.443.

[18] Liz, Greene, Dynamics of the Unconscious, Alchemical Symbolism in the Horoscope, p. 259

[19] Lewis Spence, Legends and Romances of Spain, , [1920] [Online]

[20] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 4.

[21] Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.

[22] At the founding meeting of the Earth Community Network in Gaia House, London, May 2003.

[23] [See Tafsir Ibn Kathir, Vol. 1, page 512; and (V.2:51)].

[24] Conybeare, F.C. The Baetul in Damascius, Transactions of the 3rd International Congress for the History of Religions, Oxford, 1908, Volume II, p. 179.

[25] Leland, Charles Godfrey, Etruscan Magic & Occult Remedies,University Books,New York, 1963, p. 63.

[26] Bord, Janet and Colin, The Secret Country, Granada, London, 1980, p.115.

[27] Bord, Janet and Colin, The Secret Country, Granada, London, 1980, p.116. See: Chapter 5, Bord, Paganism Versus Christianity.

[28] Anthony Stevens, Private Myths - Dreams and Dreaming, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1995, p. 252.

[29] Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, author Alchemy: The Secret Art and The Golden Game: Alchemical Engravings of the Seventeenth Century