May we recall an ancient understanding of the world, and may the remembering guide us into these uncertain times.
Historical Background
Fifteen thousand years ago, in what is now France, someone went into a cave and painted a human man with a tail and antlers. We don’t know for sure who this was meant to be, but this early depiction of a horned god is believed to represent the animal nature of both man and deity. The horned god became the god of mountains, forests, and, of course, animals. He showed up as Pan in Greek myths and Cernunnos in the Celtic world, and eventually morphed into the Green Man, hidden away in a Christian Europe.
Ten thousand years before that cave wall was painted, maybe 22,000 BCE or earlier, someone crafted a four-inch statue of a naked woman with large breasts and hips. When she was found in the early 1900s, she was named the Venus of Willendorf. Like the horned man, we can’t know exactly who she was meant to represent, but theories include a mother goddess, emphasizing the importance of the fertility of women. Throughout pre-Christian history, the mother goddess was honored as that fertility plus as a representation of the relationship between humans and the abundance of the land.
Mother goddesses weren’t always soft and nurturing. They were often fierce, with power over life and death. The Irish Morrigan was terrifying and mysterious. She is often, perhaps mistakenly, considered solely a war goddess, but that overlooks her control over both death and sexuality, the creation of new life. The Morrigan reveals the inherent unity of life and death, life-taking in order to give anew.
Many goddesses were triple goddesses. Their three aspects, maiden, mother, crone, were cyclical and tied to both the solar agricultural cycle and the lunar cycle. The ancient Celts probably didn’t start with maiden, though. It is believed they started with the darkness, the death, and from death came birth and then fruitfulness. Thus Samhain, now associated with Halloween, which marks the beginning of the dark half of the year, is thought to be the beginning of their solar year.
If you’re thinking these horned gods and mother goddesses sound primal and savage, the product of a time when we humans just didn’t know the way things worked, that’s the thinking of your modern mind. The powers of nature they represent, creative and destructive energy, the forces of the land, are still present, and, despite what science and religion keep telling us, are still terrifying and mysterious if we remember our animal nature. And, thanks to our forgetting of that, becoming even more terrifying as we head into an uncertain future.
Demystification of Nature
So, when did we begin to forget? Perhaps in the fourth century BCE, when Aristotle started explaining away the gods of Olympus with a study of natural phenomena based on logic and reason. Although it would take six hundred years before Constantine became Rome’s first Christian emperor, the old gods were losing their power. During those six centuries Archimedes was working out geometry, Apollonius was calculating curves, and Ptolemy figured out colors as refraction of light. When Greek science faltered at the end of the Roman Empire, mathematics and astronomy were still flourishing in India’s Golden Age, continuing the progress.
The algorisms that haunt social media users today were first described in the ninth century. By 1300 we had eyeglasses. The Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth century accelerated the rationalization of the natural sciences and then came Galileo and Newton and others demystifying nature until it felt like we are in charge in this industrial world we know. And we scoffed at the myths of the old gods and never realized we were creating a new myth, that nature was predictable and controlled and certain, and not at all terrifying or mysterious.
Climate Crisis
We’ve also embraced the myth of unlimited human possibility. We’ve worked our way around or through the limits the Earth set on species growth and resource use. We don’t use the same words, but we’ve subscribed to the idea that Mother Earth is a gentle, ever-giving provider and not the fierce goddess of death and life that the Celts recognized and respected. We’ve forgotten that the power of her giving comes from her taking.
And so we find ourselves in a climate crisis. Maybe if we were still scared of nature, we would have hesitated back in 1896 when global warming due to human causes was first calculated. Maybe we would have listened in 1938 when it was argued that warming due to greenhouse gases was already underway. Or in 1956 when models of atmospheric feedback loops raised the possibility of abrupt climate change. How about in 1965, when, at a meeting on the causes of climate change, discussion turned to the chaotic nature of a shifting climate?
In his book, The Uninhabitable Earth, journalist David Wallace-Wells describes the menace of climate change as mercurial, as in, like Mercury, the Roman trickster god. There were many tricksters among the old gods. The Celts had Lugh. Loki comes from the Norse pantheon. In North America, coyote. The archetypal tricksters break the rules of social and natural order. They disrupt normal life and leave us to re-establish it on a new basis. Tricksters are unpredictable, like our current weather patterns.
Wallace-Wells also invokes the shapeshifters when describing the climate. I’m reminded of Cerridwen, the Welsh mother-crone goddess, and the legend of the bard Taliesin. To brew a potion of infinite wisdom and power for her son, Cerridwen filled a cauldron with a concoction of herbs that had to be stirred continuously for a year and a day. Cerridwen put a stable boy called Gwion Bach to the task of stirring.
On the very last day, when the potion was finally ready, three drops of the potion flew onto Gwion Bach’s thumb, and they scalded him so that he instinctually licked it. Immediately the boy was filled with wisdom, including knowing he was about to be in big trouble, so he ran from Ceridwen and started shapeshifting.
First Gwion Bach changed into a hare, and Cerridwen became a greyhound. Then he ran to the river and took on the form of a fish; she chased him as an otter. Then he threw himself into the sky in the shape of a bird, and she pursued as a hawk.
Finally, Gwion Bach flew over a heap of wheat grain and, shapeshifting again, threw himself into the middle of it, but Cerridwen became a fat, black hen who gobbled up all the grain. Nine months later she gave birth to the beautiful baby boy who would be known as Taliesin, the greatest of Welsh poets.
The shape-shifting Cerridwen represents the terrible power of the mother in her pursuit of Gwion Bach, the unpredictable creative potential of nature, and the transformation that can happen when we surrender to the frightening void for a while. In the same year David Wallace-Wells published “The Uninhabitable Earth,” Welsh poet Sophie McKeand’s piece “I am Taliesin” was published by The Dark Mountain Project, a collective of creatives exploring the stories we tell and proposing new ones for this time of crisis. McKeand writes of shapeshifters like Cerridwen: “The ability to embrace elements of this archetype is something we all retain – we have just forgotten how. Perhaps now is the time – during this period of upheaval and change, with the great behemoth of capitalism rampaging across the globe – to begin remembering the power of poetry, of the spoken word, of shapeshifting and metaphor that can radically transform our psyches, and as such, our lives.”
There is human fear woven into the old metaphors. What terrified me most in the Wallace-Wells book was, “…consider the possibility that, [in ravaging it] we have only provoked [the natural world], engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us.” Wallace-Wells invokes the fierce mystery of the mother goddess, nature fueled by greenhouse gases as the warring Morrigan, who will take life before she gives it again, a horned god to remind us that we humans are animal.
The Resurrection of Nature
I’m not saying we should be setting science aside and start worshipping the horned gods and mother goddesses again. But I don’t believe we should put all our faith in science, either. We seem to lack the science and the political will to reverse climate change, and even if we halted our carbon emissions completely today, we can’t escape the effects of what we’ve already done. We’ve passed out of what is considered the goldilocks range of temperatures for human evolution. That’s not to say we shouldn’t try to make changes and I doubt we’ll give up. Humans are nothing if not innovative and adaptable. But, no matter what, we are heading into uncertainty.
More from Wallace-Wells says: “Just how completely the world below our feet will become unknown to us is not yet clear, and how we register its transformation remains an open question. One legacy of the environmentalist creed that long prized the natural world as an otherworldly retreat is that we see its degradation as a sequestered story, unfolding separately from our own modern lives…”
How do we resurrect nature as a power over our lives, uncertain about it as we were before science told us we had everything under control?
Will it be reborn with names like Cerridwen, Pan, the Morrigan, Cernunnos? Not for most of us. But I think we’ll see, more and more, that the characteristics of the archetypal old gods show up in our storytelling, in our worship, in our day-to-day being in the world. And we need them to.
Over two thousand years we’ve gradually shifted towards a knowing of the natural world as understandable, predictable, certain. We get frustrated with meteorologists who can’t accurately forecast the path of superstorms, and we stopped trusting the scientists because they can’t know for sure when the seas will rise. But the superstorms will keep coming and the seas will rise, and the coastlines will change. The cycles of nature that gave rise to the stories of the old gods are shifting.
We will have to write new stories. I believe that, in order adapt, we will have to reanimate the natural world, to resurrect not the gods but the fear, the awe, the respect for nature that those old gods represented. And we will have to come together around these new stories, around the hearth, the altar, to be together, this great circle of humanity, in the mystery of an unknown world.