The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are.

“Song of the Open Road,” Whitman

On a recent summer day in a well-known urban park, I came across a pamphlet abandoned on a bench entitled “This Was Your Life!”, which narrates, across twenty graphic panels, a standard-issue white male suburbanite dying and entering the Christian afterlife. Whisked from his coffin to stand before God, the hero is made to review his many sins: telling dirty jokes, looking at women, thinking about sports during church service, and other damnable offenses. His sins having been recounted, the man receives his judgment, and is summarily “cast into the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:15). A subsequent set of panels illustrates how one can live a righteous life and enter “into the joy of thy Lord,” which sure looks a lot better than perdition.

Among the many fascinating aspects of this artifact is its depiction of God, who appears multiple times as a massive, radiant, faceless humanoid seated atop a heavenly throne. When the sinner first arrives, he joins a throng of tiny, insignificant fellow souls to stand before this imposing God figure, the panel being captioned with Revelation 20:12:

And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.

The Good Lord was not always so stringent, nor so personified. In Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, the author mentions the general historical trend of feminized yet impersonal earth goddesses evolving into the masculinized, humanized sky gods which have become ubiquitous, from antiquity’s Zeus and Odin to today’s Yahweh. While “primitive” religions begin by worshiping the earth as a non-anthropomorphized mother figure, a qualitative shift occurs when, as Fromm writes, “man transforms the product of his own hand into a god,” worshiping idols of clay or metal. Later on in this broad historical narrative comes the decisive step at which “man gives his gods the form of human beings,” at which point the divine power overwhelmingly is depicted as male.

Fromm notes the theological differences contingent on this transition. The feminine origin of worship is associated with the universality of maternal love and the equality between the earth’s children. The feminized earth does not render judgment or give preference – it is silent, and its love is unconditional. The masculinization of the divine comes with rules, laws, and a demand for obedience. Fatherly love is judgmental and oriented towards selecting an heir – as Fromm notes, “the development of patriarchal society goes together with the development of private property.” Such a god is exclusionary, forbidding or superceding the worship of other gods, and its power is absolute. Dissent is punished, compliance is rewarded.

While this description of theo-cultural evolution is overly general, highly speculative, and burdened with intellectual baggage from Freudian and anthropological traditions, it touches on an unavoidable critique of institutional religions: somehow, we went from worshiping the sun and the stars to the Pope and his priests. We can even read the Fall from paradise in Genesis 2 as depicting the abandonment of the bountiful, inhuman, feminine Garden of hunter-gatherers in favor of the fickle, anthropomorphized, masculine Yahweh of an agricultural society.

The masculinized religions available to us today have deep historical associations with violence, exclusion, and domination. From the genocide of the Canaanites to the ravages of colonization; from Lord Ram’s victory over the Lankans to Modi’s pogroms against Muslims; and from Muhammed’s ordained conquests to the Ottoman’s extermination of Armenians, post-agrarian religion has long been intertwined with state violence.

Since the Enlightenment, criticism of these darker aspects of dominant religions has multiplied. In our contemporary moment of heightened suspicion of power structures of all kinds, the bloody legacy of these religions has turned many away from inherited church affiliations. But as we advance deeper into a post-God collective mythology, a worthy substitute has failed to appear. The Enlightenment cult of rationality has metastasized into a blind subservience to technology, with many viewing a trans-humanist techno-utopia as the new manifestation of heaven on earth. Superficially different but structurally similar is the search for mythology in political ideology. Particularly on the left, politics often gains the fetishized status once reserved for the divine, with the emancipatory teleology of revolution providing a new cosmology.

None of these options are sufficient. Science and politics fail in fundamental ways to serve the role of religion. Firstly, they do not address death – they are purely material worldviews which provide no existential comfort, beyond some weak semblance of a “greater whole” arising from an intellectual or political project. Secondly, they inevitably fall into the same trap as masculine religions of supporting oppressive power structures. The theoretical neutrality and spirit of open debate of these Enlightened ideologies often descends into hero-worship of intellectuals or politicians. Principles are abandoned as followers flock to a transcendent cause, desperate to satisfy their existential needs with earthly idols.

How could it be otherwise, when we still worship the works of our own hands? The only way out is to abandon the anthropocentric, drop our false idols, and restore the original core of religion: worship the earth. For the earth itself is responding to our violence against it, without needing to mask itself behind a humanoid form. The sun itself killed hundreds of pilgrims during this year’s hajj in Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s largest exporters of oil. California, home of the tech lords on their silicon thrones, is burning to the ground. Through floods, droughts, storms, and more, the earth demands not narrative, but mere respect. Worship precedes mythology, and our only chance at averting the end of the world is to excavate some vintage paganism which might point towards a sustainable relationship between ourselves and the greater whole.

One of John Steinbeck’s early novels, To A God Unknown (1933), explores the potential of neo-pagan ideation in the industrial era. The novel opens with protagonist Joseph Wayne receiving the blessing of his dying father to abandon the ancestral Vermont farm and seek a new beginning in California, where he receives a bountiful homestead from the government and soon convinces his three brothers to join him. Early on in the novel, Joseph receives a letter confirming his father’s death. As he stands beside a great oak tree on his land, Steinbeck writes:

His eyes lighted with recognition and welcome, for his father’s strong and simple being… had entered the tree.

While Joseph is not the eldest son, it was he who received his father’s blessing to go west, and so just as “his father had merged with the land,” Joseph “spoke with the sanction of the grass, the soil, the beasts wild and domesticated.” He is a druidic figure, channeling his father’s spirit to tame a wild land.

The oak tree is not the only locus of natural magic in the book. Joseph discovers a glade hidden in a pine forest on a hill above his farm, in which stands a mossy boulder and a spring. Joseph looked at the glade “as a whole. He saw no single thing in it,” awed by an unspoken power. His brother Thomas is scared, but Joseph reassures him: “This is ancient – and holy… There’s something strong and sweet and good in there… maybe sometime when we have need, we’ll go back again – and be fed.” The oak tree and the glade never perform any explicitly supernatural acts, but their silent power defines the plot.

This reverence exemplifies a pre-mythic cosmology. Like Fromm’s depiction of a feminine-coded earth worship, Joseph’s reverence for these entities does not view them as pointing to a greater power, but rather being sacred in themselves. As with the transcendentalists and certain Buddhist strains before them, the immanent does not signify transcendence, but rather is itself transcendent.

Of course, a similar sentiment lingers throughout institutional religion, such as in Galileo’s invocation of the “Book of Nature” as expressing divine will just as much as the textual gospels. The crucial difference is that the Book of Nature remains an instantiation of God’s will, rather than a divinity in and of itself, since Christian doctrine views anything material as inherently inferior to, and descending from, an immaterial divine will. A closer parallel is Spinoza’s mystical pantheism, in which God is exactly Nature, a totality without teleology.

An insightful critique of the co-optation of nature-worship by institutional religion can be found in the poetry of Fernando Pessoa, a modernist echo of Spinoza’s vision. As he writes in The Keeper of Sheep (1925),

But if God is the flowers and trees
And hills and sun and moon,
Then why should I call him God?
I’ll call him flowers and trees and hills and sun and moon.

Why imagine a greater being when the earth itself deserves your worship? Why demean the beauty of what is before you by viewing it only as a signifier for what is beyond?

This reverence for the thing-in-itself and refusal to view anything as a signifier of anything else runs through the volume. In a later poem, Pessoa describes a revelation:

I saw that there is no Nature,
That Nature doesn’t exist,
That there are hills, valleys and plains,
That there are trees, flowers and grass,
That there are rivers and stones,
But that there is no whole to which all this belongs,
That a true and real ensemble
Is a disease of our own ideas.

Nature is parts without a whole.
This is perhaps the mystery they speak of.

This specificity is another feature of pre-mythic worship. In To A God Unknown, Joseph does not view the oak tree or the glade as constituents of a greater power, either God or Nature – their power is self-contained and references nothing external.

Even my usage of the word “worship” is in direct opposition to the primitivist religion expounded by Pessoa. In a poem extolling the sun, Pessoa describes the unifying beauty of our home star, the universal experience that as one gazes upon it,

They partially return…
To the true and primitive Man
Who saw the sun come up and did not yet worship it.
For that is what’s natural – more natural
Than worshiping the sun, then God,
And then everything else that doesn’t exist.

Though the sun itself is real, worshiping it requires conceptualizing it as cosmic, as a signifier of power rather than a thing-in-itself whose true nature is a mere ball of fire which happens to cross our sky. Even worshiping the sun and the earth is too much for Pessoa, since it paves the way for worshiping fictitious concepts (all concepts, of course, being fictitious). This extremist primitivism is satisfied only if we enjoy and respect nature without conceptualizing, categorizing, narrativizing, or worshiping it. As Pessoa says elsewhere,

What matters is to know how to see,
To know how to see without thinking.

The danger in worship is its implied subservience to the object of worship. Worship mediated through human intermediaries inevitably empowers those intermediaries over their worshippers. Though Pessoa remains suspicious of worshiping the earth, Steinbeck viewed nature-worship as being less susceptible to abuse. Around halfway through To A God Unknown, Juanito, a worker employed by Joseph on his homestead, murders Joseph’s brother Benjy when Juanito finds Benjy attempting to seduce his wife. Juanito and Joseph meet at the glade, where Juanito asks Joseph to kill him to avenge his brother’s murder. In this sacred place, Joseph refuses, saying “You did what your nature demanded.” Thus forgiving Juanito, Joseph goes even farther in his negation, saying, “I have no power to punish.” Here, Joseph embodies a crucial difference between the earth and God: the earth does not judge. It is silent and passive, universal and giving.

Such non-judgment threatens the power structure of institutional religion. Joseph’s brother Burton, a devout Christian, begins to notice Joseph’s pagan worship of the oak tree and is terrified of his belief that the tree contains their father’s spirit. This comes to a head when Burton sees Joseph about to let his first-born child sit in the branches of the tree, and demands he stop his pagan practices. Joseph refuses, and responds to Burton’s accusation that he’s denying Christ with the line,

I’m denying no Christ. I’m doing a simple thing that pleases me.

Unsatisfied, Burton leaves the farm. Soon after, Joseph discovers that Burton killed the oak tree by cutting into its base before leaving. Without the protection of the tree, the farm’s prosperity unravels. An unending drought brings ruin. Joseph takes his wife to the glade, where she playfully climbs on the moss-covered rock, slips, and dies on impact. Thinking on something his wife had told him about Greek history, Joseph laments,

before Christ, before Christ! Dear earth, dear land! … The forces gather and center and become one and strong. Even I will join the center.

This rather explicitly references the pagan motif, as Joseph muses on what came before Christ and directly addresses his lamentations to the earth. As when he first saw the glade, he thinks of the greater whole, of the wordless, unifying power which the glade carries within it.

A similar meditation on what preceded the corruption of personified religion animates Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short story, “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.” In the story, an emotionally turbulent man dreams of shooting himself, following which an angel carries him through the cosmos to arrive at another planet. He is surprised to see that the planet is an identical copy of Earth, except that it is “unstained by the Fall, inhabited by people who had not sinned.” The narrator finds that “their knowledge was higher and deeper than the knowledge we derive from our science” because “they knew how to live without science.” These sinless humans love the earth without narrativizing it, and the narrator, amazed at such wisdom, “worshipped them without words.” The inhabitants sing songs of praise for the earth and “had no places of worship,” but rather a “living union with the Universe at large.”

Dostoevsky’s fantasy of a prelapsarian world reflects the cravings induced by his romantic tendencies clashing against his existentialist realism, but the story takes a characteristically dark turn. The dreaming protagonist ends up “corrupting them all,” introducing lying, jealousy, and cruelty. Thus following, “soon, very soon the first blood was shed… and they began to separate and to shun one another.” As their sins proliferate, they “built temples, and began offering up prayers to their own idea, their own ‘desire.’” They come to believe that “Science will give us wisdom. Wisdom will reveal to us the laws,” and so become prideful. Dostoevsky intermingles the mistaken worship of God and Science, viewing both merely as vehicles for egocentrism and division. The virtuous world having descended into the sin of our own, the narrator “loved the earth they had polluted even more than when it had been a paradise,” because he pitied and loved the sorrowful creatures which now inhabited it. The introduction of sin and personified religion makes the world’s residents flawed, tragic heroes, rather than the alien beings of pure peace at the beginning of the story.

Awaking from his dream, the narrator becomes a preacher of the truth he has seen, declaring that he “cannot believe that evil is the normal condition among men.” The universal truth is “to love your neighbor as yourself,” and nothing more. What is fascinating is that the utopian society which inspired this preaching was able to adhere to this maxim only as long as its members also loved nature as they did themselves. Division between humans is concomitant with division between humans and nature, which in turn is associated with humans worshiping “their own ideas” rather than the world which sustains them.

This framing of religion as instantiating a separation from the earth and its ensuing violence parallels the idea of Jacques Lacan that subjecthood originates from maternal separation. Judith Butler discusses this idea in Gender Trouble (1990) while referencing the psychoanalytic theory of Julia Kristeva, noting how Kristeva agrees with Lacan that the taboo against incest forces separation from the mother and thus the creation of individuated subjectivity. Kristeva’s analysis then associates representative language with this individuation, meaning that, as Butler writes, “poetic language thus always indicates a return to the maternal terrain.” This offers some divergence from the earth-as-mother analogy, since the emergence of masculine religions is associated with poetic holy texts. That being said, the actual text of the Abrahamic religions indicates a much more gender-critical divinity than their cultural-political practice (see, for instance, how the Kabbalah tradition of Jewish mysticism uses a close reading of the Torah to find an androgynous Yahweh uniting the male and female aspects).

Towards the end of To A God Unknown, Joseph and brother Thomas journey from their farm to the coast in desperate search of a way to survive the drought. There, they meet a man who ritually sacrifices animals every day at the exact moment that the sun drops below the horizon of the Pacific. Trying to explain himself to Joseph, the man says

I have made up reasons, but they aren’t true. I have said to myself, ‘The sun is life. I give life to life’ – ‘I make a symbol of the sun’s death.’ When I made these reasons I knew they weren’t true.

To which Joseph replies,

These were words to clothe a naked thing, and the thing is ridiculous in clothes.

Thus the two understand each other, both seeking something beyond words which only the silent earth can provide. Returning to his land while Thomas drives the cattle north in search of water, Joseph speaks with a priest about the earth suffering from the drought. Noticing his pagan inclinations, the priest asks to pray for Joseph’s soul. Joseph is furious:

“My soul? To Hell with my soul! I tell you the land is dying. Pray for the land!”
The priest looked into his glaring eyes and felt the frantic fluid of his emotion. “The principal business of God has to do with men,” he said.

Unsatisfied, Joseph leaves, and the scene closes with the priest being thankful that Joseph has no message to spread, lest he become another “Christ here in the West.” Recognizing his connection to the land, Joseph makes his way to the grove, where he climbs atop the rock and slits his wrists. As he lies dying, rain begins to fall, and the drought ends in a torrential storm.

In his book Mythologies (1957), Roland Barthes develops a theory of how contemporary mythologies form. Beginning with the semiotics concept of teasing apart the signifier from the signified, he explains myths as being meta-signs, that is, a semiotic system in which the signified is itself a signifier-signified pair. He focuses on the example of a magazine cover in which a saluting black soldier is the signifier, with the signified being certain concepts of Frenchness and the French empire. Taken as a whole, the black-soldier-empire connection serves as the signifier of a second-order sign, in which the very association between the black soldier and French militarism signifies a deeper notion: that Frenchness is a pan-ethnic imperial identity, that French racial universality is inextricable from militarism, etc. This second-order sign is the myth: the first-order association between symbol and concept becomes a signifier for a deeper sign, an association between a symbol-concept pair and a metanarrative.

Barthes argues that such modern myths are constructed intentionally, serving to naturalize hegemonic narratives of power and reality. By rendering an association into myth, it is removed from the discourse – that France is a multi-ethnic, race-blind empire is no longer up for debate; rather, it is the mythic background upon which discourse is allowed to develop. This analysis reveals the artificial nature of our modernist mythologies and suggests avenues of deconstruction and contestation. By identifying the imaginary sleight-of-hand involved, we can take a more critical and active role in defining the myths which pervade our culture.

Of course, we are operating within a similar but mutated mythology from that which confronted Barthes. The post-colonial empires are now mythologized not through the state, but through the market. Similarly, our mythology of utopian progress no longer relies on state-led infrastructure and development projects, but rather private production of digital artifacts and media. Still, we are meant to worship production, consumption, and self-actualization through self-entrepreneurship. The underlying myth remains the same: that God is dead, Science is supreme, and the way that the average person can respect science is by consuming technological commodities. The Market is the new inscrutable hand of fate, and the economists our new priests, whose judgment and decision-making is beyond question.

These new mythologies share far more than they would like to admit with institutional religion. The Market is still a masculinized judge who determines who lives and dies, who prospers and suffers, who rules and who toils. Its priests, in the form of the capitalist barons and their culture-influencing knowledge workers (economists, journalists, pundits, etc.), are still overwhelmingly men who receive their mandate to rule from their ability to interpret the will of our deity, the Market. The Market, Consumption, and Production are naturalized through our cultural mythologies to be beyond question.

So we seek divinity in corporations, and they are eager to oblige. The earth is dying as a result of overproduction, but the Market shall deliver us. Species will be saved from extinction by editing their genes. Skyscraper farms will feed us as we deplete the soil. The heating planet will be cooled by blocking the sun. No problem is too hard for the industrialist myth-makers – as long as there remains both an endless supply of raw materials, the slave labor to extract them, and the imperial core to consume them.

Neither numbers nor politics nor trinkets can take the place of religion. These myths are inherently insufficient. They seek greater meaning by situating our mortal bodies in human-made power structures, by worshiping human leaders and their far-sighted ideas. But nothing made by humans is fit for worship. Everything thought of, or made by, another person is open to criticism, analysis, debate – it can never rise to the transcendent, because the creator and the follower are equals.

Barthes’ observation that myths serve to naturalize power structures raises the question of what exactly should be mythologized, that is, what deserves to be naturalized. What else could it be but what is already naturalized: nature itself? As Whitman says in the epigraph of this essay, the earth is sufficient. We will not produce or consume our way out of the end of the world. We must fundamentally reimagine our relationship to the earth, the species within it, and the people who share it. We must be reverent without worshiping humans, their images, or their works, lest we succumb to the perennial error of naturalizing oppressive systems.

We are starved for myth and desperate for meaning, but both institutional religion and modernist creeds are insufficient. We need new myths for a dying world. Perhaps if we can recover the awe and oneness of being alive, without sinking into anthropocentric stories co-opted by power, we can concurrently chart a liberating mythology and a sustainable way of life for the apocalypse age.