The most eerie forest I have ever spent time in was on the edge of Dartmoor. It was an entirely man made creation, perfectly spaced trees planted in uniform rows. Intended for harvest. It was a monoculture of Pine and whilst there was a scattering of animal life it felt very alien and empty. It was not hostile so much as devoid of meaning. A friend and I camped there and in an act of rebellion felled a single tree. Such forests are a blight upon our lands in my opinion. A managed woodland of course is something our more recent ancestors would know and appreciate. Coppicing and firewood management being necessary skills that would have made most woodland close to people and open to their use not truly tangled wild places. These monoculture plantings though are eerie in their man made geometric perfection. Whilst these trees sprout from the land they seem almost at odds when compared to more natural mixed deciduous broadleaf forests that have historically covered England.
Near this forest exists a Bronze age stone circle. Dartmoor itself is a rugged piece of land that is scarred by human settlement. The high moors can be foreboding places when the weather turns and beautiful places of solitude at others. Spending time out here alone as a young man is something that pulled me away from my atheistic worldview. The moor is a funny place and whilst hiking and exploring it I encountered unusual feelings and energies, certainly around the aforementioned stone circle. This kind of experience forged a degree of openness that connects one to nature in a more powerful way. This is not just a trivial thing either, that sense of wonder and awe at the beauty of the natural world is not in fact often shared by many. Years later in a European city I remember a friend blabbing on about some problems he was having but I could not bring myself to give a shit because the beauty of the reds and pinks in the sky of the setting summer sun was a more profound experience. In my mind it is this openness to the natural world that leads many into religious experiences. (If they were never brought up in a faith). My hypothesis is that most people who come to think of themselves as a pagan of any kind start often with a kind of primitive animism out of a connection or experience of nature. Sometimes it goes no further.
The vitalist is a pagan in the same way Bowden characterized his own paganism.
My view is the following…that creation and destruction go together. That love is fury. That whatever occurred and whatever occurs we don’t have to apologize. We step over what exists.
He goes on to describe how his beliefs mirror thinking he attributes to Heraclitus:
He believed that everything is a form of energy, a fire that exists in all forms of organic and inorganic matter, that thought and the sentience of nature is what we are. Nature has become sentient in us. Which means we must incarnate natural law as a principle of being, it’s called Becoming in my philosophy.
This is a kind of raw animist esque pagan set of ideas. Energy is what surrounds us, it is contained within us and harnessable. The Great Men of history tap into it and are elevated as they themselves express that most basic fundamental of natural law: domination. Be it martial, political, or artistic. Every Great Man in his own sphere has charged forth with energy and towards a form of conflict that unleashes something, be that Bach in a composition or Nelson at Trafalgar. This notion that nature itself as a primordial force has evolved into us, we indeed have evolved past nature and are able to act outside of it in dramatic ways like suicide. To the small minded, narrow man, this is just a form of Might Makes Right and they dismiss it in a quest for universalist ethical standards. Standing opposed to that is the true universalist energy and power of natural law as we can embody it. Often times the starting point is a rebellion against a kind of relativism but really it is the relativism that elevates equality that was despise and rally against. There is a hidden desire for total domination and subjugation that lurks masked in the minds of many. For many it is the importance of THEIR ideas to triumph over another, they never stop to ask whether the Afghan is suitable to comprehend it, whether certain people are capable of stepping over.
Inequality is the constant in the universe. The herbivore versus the carnivore is encoded genetically and yet we are the omnivore who has choice. It is only our madness and a misunderstanding of natural law that sees the rise of humans who attempt to keep vegan diet dogs or cats. Baby’s first rhetorical argument often ends up being the smug smirk of the sickly vegan claiming something is a “Naturalistic Fallacy” as if it is a trump card in a game of chance. There is no naturalistic fallacy there is the law that we can follow or break. Free choice. To the more religious this makes sense. It is only the fumbling intellectuals straddling the middle that flounder when encountering nature in all its horror and glory. One day a man sides with the herbivore, the next he is the supreme carnivore. Is it better to save a doe or feed a wolf? Some South American tribal women have been observed to care for orphaned baby primates, why were they orphaned? Because meat was on the menu.
The luxury of our age is that we have enacted almost complete control over nature and the natural world. We interact with it as leisure not as necessity. In America we still have some actual serious weather threats on a regular basis but in many parts of Europe nature is even more tamed and controlled. A product of the old world and our domination of it, we have feared the dark forests and places outside of our control. The Kings of old England would require their lords to kill wolves. The wolf was killed off, nature was defeated. The luxury of today is that in places across the West of the US people are re-introducing wolves. This is a contentious issue, to the rural ranchers and residents the wolf represents a threat to be culled and contained. There is no room for romantic ideals in that world, only subjugation of nature is permitted. The city dwellers of course think of the romance of the wolf and the idea of the wild appeals. Are the city dwellers more ‘based’ because they want to rewild what remains of the world? People both hate and yearn for danger. This a paradox present for all to consider. The more we eliminate threat and risk as Men are wont to do the safer a world we make for the inevitable longhouses of female gynocentric rule. The wilderness should be wild, danger should be present. It is required for us and yet in many elements of what overcoming looks like it amounts to turning dark and dangerous woods into green rolling hills and coppiced woodland where wolves and bears have long been eliminated. As the joke goes…Inside of you lurk two wolves.
Raw experiences of nature and danger reveal something to us and they always have. It is why so many associate religious experiences with the natural world. It is the natural world and its unpredictability that we have often sought refuge from in the powers of our God or Gods. That people were closer to life and death in the past is a given. In our post-Borlaug world real famine is a risk only for those subject to Israel’s wrath. The Fates are still present and weave away but we sense them less because most of us just are more insulated from the natural world in anyway. Where once most of us were of peasant farming stock our ancestors mostly moved to the cities and became the tools of the industrialists. That irony rears its head once again in that many places in America now are more forested than they were in the 1800s. Where once the fires of industry demanded charcoal or building materials the forests run wild and still we are cursed with relatively shoddy wood for buildings. Nature has reclaimed much of what we once subjugated and put to work, today a lot of nature is treated as a museum by those who only wish to look and never to touch. A place to pass in and out of, where leaving a trace of any kind is seen as sacrilegious, nature is both elevated and diminished by this approach in the same way our souls are. In manipulating our natural world we, as nature sentient, are not just a part of it but we literally control it. Selective breeding of animals and plants means we have altered so much already. We are the makers and manipulators, what the forest has given us we have taken and tamed, and in other ways chopped it down. Can you truly understand the forest if you never use its gifts?
Nature is not something apart and separate from us, it is manifest in us. This understanding of natural law is implicitly a small p pagan worldview. Inequality exists in nature and is often what we nurture in our own interactions with nature. We breed domesticated animals to reinforce inequality of nature and so that it benefits us and our needs. The wishy washy neo-pagan sentiments of “working with nature” are often corrupted twaddle that ignore the hierarchy of all things and the control required for it. The knowledge of plants and the care to cultivate them are necessary but it is forever tempered by the destruction. The elimination of the weeds that encroach or the tree’s branches that need trimming lest too much shade ruin a crop. Harmony in nature does not imply peace or the absence of struggle. Harmony in nature in fact is the existence of domination and subjugation, an eternal battle and cycle of suffering and victory.