God And The
Good Earth
By George Monbiot
23 March, 2005
The
Guardian
Easter
is one of those occasions on which human beings entertain a number of
contradictory ideas. Christians celebrate a pagan fertility cult, while
non-believers make their biannual journey to church. People whose lives
are dominated by godless consumption give something up for Lent. A society
governed by science engages in the ritual sacrifice and homeopathic
magic - eggs and chicks and rabbits - required to induce the earth to
bear fruit.
Why? Well, having
read this you might fairly accuse me of drawing wide inferences from
limited data, but the work of a soil geologist at the University of
Oregon offers such a fascinating possible explanation of some of these
contradictions that I cannot resist indulging in speculation.
Professor Greg Retallack has spent much of the past few years taking
soil samples from the sites of the temples of ancient Greece. He has
stumbled on a remarkable phenomenon. There is a strong link, challenged
by only a few exceptions, between the identity of the god worshipped
at a particular temple and the temple's location. Where Artemis or Apollo
were celebrated, the soil was of a kind called a lithic xerept, where
montane scrub suitable only for nomadic herders grows. Nomads living
on soils called xeralfs, by contrast, worshipped Hera and Hermes. Subsistence
farmers cultivating soils called rendolls built temples to Demeter and
Dionysus, while fluvent soils capable of supporting large farms lie
beneath shrines to Hestia, Hephaestus and Ares. The gods of ancient
Greece, Professor Retallack suggests, "came not from an imaginary
poetic city on Mt Olympus, but personify ancient local lifestyles".
The ancients were worshipping their own means of subsistence.
The Abrahamic religions
- Judaism, Christianity and Islam - were constructed by recently settled
nomads. These are people who were likely to have been making use of
soils such as lithic xerepts and xeralfs. Nomads, being without permanent
homes, characteristically have no local deities: most of them worship
a single God of the heavens. The Turkana of northern Kenya use the same
word - Akuj - to mean both sky and God. The Mongols, Turks and Tartars
all worshipped Tengri, God of the Blue Sky.
In the first books
of the Bible, the nomads are God's children, the city people his outcasts.
The first city the Bible mentions was built by Cain, a tiller of the
ground (and therefore an inhabitant of more fertile soils), who was
cursed by God after murdering his nomad brother. The defining ecological
image of the Pentateuch is that of the nomad Abraham, gazing down upon
the plains, where the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah are burning.
Thereafter, God's
relationship to the city becomes more equivocal. In Kings I we discover
that the ark of the covenant is housed in "the city of David, which
is Zion". By Nehemiah's time, Jerusalem has become "the holy
city". But to Ezekiel it is a place of "lewdness" and
"whoredoms". "Woe to the bloody city! I will even make
the pile for fire great ... that the scum of it may be consumed."
This tension survives into the New Testament. In the sermon on the mount,
Jesus speaks of his flock as a city on a hill. But even then the wilderness
- the uncultivated pasture of the nomads - remained the realm of terrestrial
purity, the haunt of John the Baptist and the retreat of Christ.
What happened between
the time of Abraham and the time of Christ was that the nomads, having
seized the fertile soils where the farmers dwelt, settled down. While
they still looked back with longing upon the lives of their ancestors,
their theology shifted to match their circumstances.
With this shift
came something new: a belief in progress. The philosopher John Gray
has pointed out that, while pagans typically see history as a cyclical
process, Judaism, Christianity and Islam all claim to be working towards
a denouement: "salvation is the culmination of history". The
followers of these religions see life not as an endless cycle of hubris
and nemesis, but as a journey towards a moment of transformation.
If you are constantly
subject to the whims of the environment, as hunters and gatherers, nomads
and primitive farmers are, an awareness of the cyclical nature of history
is forced upon you. Your fortunes change with the seasons, the patterns
of rainfall, the happenstances of ecology. Glut is followed by famine,
followed by glut, followed by famine. Nomas, the Greek word from which
nomad comes, means "the search for pasture". The name recognises
the fragility of the people's existence.
A belief in progress,
by contrast, is surely possible only after you have developed secure
means of storing crops for long periods, and a diversified - and therefore
more robust - economy. It is possible, in other words, only if you live
on rendoll or fluvent soils, and build cities there.
The myth of the
Fall is the story of hunters and gatherers exceeding their ecological
limits. They were forced out of Eden and into cultivation (Cain) and
nomadism (Abel). But having conquered the fertile lands and developed
an advanced agricultural economy, the former nomads who worshipped a
single God were able, as technology improved, gradually to release themselves
from some of the constraints of nature.
It is surely this
release which permitted them to believe that the cycle of history need
no longer apply: that the human story could instead be cumulative and
progressive. From there it is a short step to the belief that history
is moving towards a fixed point, when humans enjoy total victory over
the material world, as the dead rise and live forever. If the myth of
the Fall is the story of our subjection to biological realities, the
myth of eternal life is the story of our escape from them. The first
myth invokes the second. The gun on the wall in act one must be used
in act three.
Is it difficult
to see why this doctrine should be attractive to people still subject
to the gruelling realities of nature? The Christian God would cure disease
and even death, calm storms, summon food out of thin air. With a handful
of literate evangelists, the fantasy of material abandonment was able
to conquer the world.
My untested hypothesis
is as follows. The peculiarities of the Abrahamic religions - their
astonishing success in colonising the world and their dangerous notion
of progress (inherited by secular society) - result from a marriage
between the universal God of the nomads and the conditions which permitted
cities to develop. The dominant beliefs of the past 2,000 years are
the result of an ancient migration from soils such as xerepts and xeralfs
to soils such as fluvents and rendolls.
At Easter, the Christian
belief in a permanent resurrection is mixed up with the pagan belief
in a perpetual cycle of temporary resurrection and death. In church
we worship the Christian notion of progress, which has filtered into
every aspect of our lives. But, amid the cracking of Easter eggs and
the murmur of prayer, there can still be heard the small, faint voice
which reminds us that our ecological hubris must eventually be greeted
by nemesis.
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