From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Sun Jul 28 2002 - 21:56:30 MDT
Wicca, Esotericism and Living
Nature: Assessing Wicca as
Nature Religion
by Jo Pearson
The Open University
This article was first presented as a paper at the recent
International Association for the History of Religion
(IAHR) XVIII Quinquennial Congress, held in Durban in
August 2000. The theme of the congress was 'History of
Religions: Origins and Visions'.
For the first time, the IAHR congress included a series of
sessions on
Nature Religion, organised by Bron Taylor and also
including papers by
Graham Harvey, Tim Jensen, Bron Taylor, and Michael
York.
ABSTRACT
'Living Nature', whereby "Nature is seen, known, and
experienced as essentially alive in all its parts, often
inhabited and traversed by a light or hidden fire
circulating through it", is one of the four fundamental
characteristics of the Western Esoteric Tradition
identified by Antoine Faivre (1994:11), and delineates a
certain Hermetic view of the world. In this paper we
consider Alexandrian and Gardnerian Wicca (as
practiced in the UK) as a current manifestation of the
Western Esoteric Tradition, outlining Wicca's magical
heritage and indicating the affinities between Wicca and
esotericism. We then proceed to an investigation of the
application of central esoteric doctrines concerning
nature in contemporary Wicca, in order to assess Wicca
as nature religion.
During the 1970s, environmentalism itself
became a kind of religion, significant in that
it points, according to Seyyed Nasr, 'to the
need in the souls of human beings for the
religious understanding of nature eclipsed in
the West by modern science and neglected
until quite recently by the mainstream
religions' (1996: 194-5). This turning of
environmentalism into religion has affected
not only traditional religions but also the
development of Wicca and Paganism, and
so-called 'nature religions'. 'Nature Religion'
is a relatively recent academic construct
under which a variety of religions have been
grouped including, for example, Paganism,
eco-spirituality, and indigenous religions. It
is also popular with Wiccans --103 out of
the 120 (86%) Wiccans represented in my
1995 survey told me that they regarded their
religion as 'nature religion'.
Yet at present, 'nature religion' is a contested
designation, and is, like Wicca and
Paganism, an emerging field of study. The
current academic use of the term 'nature
religion' stems most often from Catherine
Albanese's usage in her book Nature
Religion in America (1990), in which nature
religion is defined as beliefs, behaviours and
values which make nature a 'symbolic
centre'. Whilst recognising the value of the
construct in bringing to light the diversity of
religious practices which do take nature as a
symbolic referent, Albanese's term has been
criticised as too broad to be of practical use.
Bron Taylor suggests instead that we use
phrases such as 'the natural dimension of
religion', or 'nature influenced religion' to
distinguish those religions which see nature
as important but not sacred, and keep 'nature
religion' exclusively for reference to
religions which regard nature as sacred.
But what exactly do we mean by this
phrase, 'nature as sacred'? What is 'nature as
symbolic centre'? The questions so far seem
to miss a whole dimension of the religious
understanding of nature, and to dismiss the
difference in perception between nature
(small 'n') and Nature (capitalised); or, as
Seyyed Nasr would have it, fail to grasp that
'nexus between the order of nature as
ordinarily understood and the Divine
Nature, Infinite and Eternal, that
encompasses the order of nature and is yet
ubiquitous at every point of cosmic
manifestation' (1996: 104).
Wiccans do regard nature as sacred, as we
shall see later in this paper. However, their
response to nature is often confused,
revealing both intimacy and distance as they
shape nature with the Wheel of the Year,
sacred circles and ritual to suit their own
needs for relationship with the earth. The
nature/culture duality thus persists in nature
religion, reflecting a turn to nature as a
source of revitalisation, attempting to re-
engage with a nature from which
participants feel estranged, to re-enchant the
natural world which has been exploited and
dominated. Since Wicca is not a salvation
religion, it does not reject the world or the
everyday reality of living in the world, but
seeks rather to enhance life on earth. Earthly
existence is not regarded as fundamentally
sinful or binding, with a need for salvation
or escape. But how much one takes this as a
need to defend and protect the earth is open
to question.
Whilst Wicca claims an almost primordial
relationship with nature and markets itself
as 'green religion', the disjunction between
sign and signified remains very real. Nature,
as Nasr reminds us, 'is not only a symbol of
spiritual realities but is those realities not by
a reduction of the spiritual essences to
material forms but by an inner identity
among those who share the primordial
perspective between the symbol and the
symbolized. Hence, in such worlds nature
herself is the supreme cathedral. Her order is
the Divine Order and her laws divine laws
without there being in any sense a
naturalism or animism in the pejorative
sense of those terms ' (1996: 21). Do
Wiccan attitudes and practices concerning
Nature, then, reflect this perspective, a
perspective reflected in esoteric influences
or, as Wouter Hanegraaff has suggested
with reference to the New Age, does Wicca
'produce merely shallow caricatures of
profound teachings'? (1998: 31).
The Categorisation of Wicca
As a brief aside, it might be worth touching
on the ways in which Wicca is categorised
at this point in the paper. Wicca occupies a
somewhat ambiguous position vis à vis
contemporary religiosity, yet it has appeared
to be easily assimilable to the so-called
'sociology of the occult', the New Age
Movement, and NRMs, as well as new
designations such as 'revived religion' and
'nature religion', which may in time prove to
be more applicable as terms of
categorisation. There are forms of witchcraft
which claim to predate the emergence of
Wicca in England, most notably Traditional
and Hereditary witchcraft. However, since
there is no evidence to support these claims,
we follow Ronald Hutton's assertion that
Wicca is the classic, earliest known form of
modern witchcraft (Hutton 1999).
Concentrating on the combined
Alexandrian/Gardnerian version of Wicca as
it has emerged in the UK in the 1990s, I
have assessed Wicca as a form of esoteric
spirituality, which I regard as an appropriate
category for this specific type. In particular,
I engaged with the field of western
esotericism as delineated by Antoine Faivre
and, following him, Wouter Hanegraaff. It
is as a means of taking this research further
that this paper seeks to question the
application of esoteric doctrines on nature
within this specific branch of Wicca.
Academic Understandings of Esotericism
Antoine Faivre, the foremost scholar in the
field of western esotericism, defines
esotericism as a form of thought expressed
through exemplifying currents, rather than a
specific genre (1994: 4). Faivre identifies
six components of esotericism, which he has
identified from the corpus of writings
attributed to Hermes Trismegistus:
correspondences, living nature, imagination
and meditations, experience of
transmutation, the praxis of concordance,
and transmission (ibid.: 10-15). Of these,
the first four are essential to a definition of a
tradition as esoteric whilst the latter two
Faivre considers to be 'relative' elements,
frequently occurring in combination with
the four fundamental characteristics but
unnecessary to the categorisation of a
practice as esoteric (1994: 14). Due to the
constraints of time, this paper will engage
only with the four fundamental
characteristics, which contain esoteric
doctrines concerning nature. Indeed, we
should remember that the division of these
characteristics into four is artificial, merely
an academic device; rather, they need to be
read as one.
Real and symbolic correspondences are
believed to exist throughout all parts of the
universe, both visible and invisible: '[t]hese
correspondences, considered more or less
veiled at first sight, are intended to be read
and deciphered. The entire universe is a
huge theater [sic] of mirrors, an ensemble of
hieroglyphs to be decoded. Everything is a
sign; everything conceals and exudes
mystery; every object hides a secret' (Faivre
1994: 10). The fifth characteristic, the
praxis of the concordance, is understood as
a 'consistent tendency to try to establish
common denominators between two
different traditions or even more, among all
traditions, in the hope of obtaining an
illumination, a gnosis, of superior quality'
(Faivre 1994: 14). This characteristic is
taken to its extreme in the discourse of the
perennialists who postulate the existence of
a primordial tradition which overarches all
other religious or esoteric traditions of
humanity. This philosophia perennis
became the 'Tradition', constituted by a
chain of mythical or historical
representatives including Moses, Zoroaster,
Hermes Trimegistus, Orpheus, the Sibyls,
Pythagoras and Plato. The sixth
characteristic is transmission, which refers
to the possibility or necessity of teaching
being transmitted from master to disciple
following a pre-established channel.
Inherent in this characteristic is the
insistence that 'a person cannot initiate
himself any way he chooses but must go
through the hands of an initiator', and that
both the initiator and the initiate must be
attached to an authentic tradition (Faivre
1994: 14-15). But, Faivre warns, the
presence of correspondences alone does not
necessarily indicate esotericism, for
doctrines of correspondence can be found in
many philosophical and religious currents.
The notion of correspondences was also, of
course, popular in fin de siècle writings, for
example, Baudelaire's sonnet,
'Correspondences' which, 'reassigns to the
poet his ancient role of vates, of soothsayer,
who by his intuition of the concrete, of
immediately perceived things, is led to the
idea of these things, to the intricate system
of "correspondences"' (Fowlie 1990: 29).
Freeman (1999: 139) points out that Arthur
Symons, in London: A Book of Aspects
(1909), works along similar lines, 'picking
his way through what Baudelaire termed
'des forêts de symboles' in order to perceive
deeper truths'. In accordance with the theory
of correspondences, the cosmos is regarded
as complex, plural and hierarchical, and
nature, or living nature, thus occupies an
essential place within it: 'Nature is seen,
known, and experienced as essentially alive
in all its parts, often inhabited and traversed
by a light or hidden fire circulating through
it' (ibid.: 11). This spiritual force permeating
nature is exemplified in the Renaissance
understanding of magia naturalis, a
'complex notion at the crossroads of magic
and science' by which both knowledge of
the networks of sympathies and antipathies
that link the things of Nature and the
concrete operation of this knowledge is
indicated.
It is the imaginative faculty in humans that
allows the use of intermediaries such as
symbols and images 'to develop a gnosis, to
penetrate the hieroglyphs of Nature, to put
the theory of correspondences into active
practice and to uncover, to see, and to know
the mediating entities between Nature and
the divine world' (ibid.: 12). The
imagination is therefore regarded as far
more than mere fantasy-it is the 'organ of
the soul, thanks to which humanity can
establish a cognitive and visionary
relationship with an intermediary world',
what Henry Corbin called the mundus
imaginalis. The eventual consequence of
working with the first three characteristics is
the experience of transmutation. The
alchemical term 'transmutation' is used to
define the initiatory path of development by
which 'the esotericist gains insight into the
hidden mysteries of cosmos, self and God'
(Hanegraaff 1995: 112). As transmutation
implies a change in the very substance of a
thing or person (As opposed to mere
'transformation', which implies a change
more or less limited to outward appearance),
there is, according to Faivre, no separation
between knowledge (gnosis) and inner
experience, or between intellectual activity
and active imagination (1994: 13).
The Importance of Historical Continuity
The six characteristics, according to Faivre,
are not doctrinal but serve rather as
receptacles into which various types of
experiences are distributed. Although the six
components can be positioned unequally,
the first four must all be simultaneously
present in order for something to be
considered esoteric. Yet this alone is not
enough. According to Hanegraaff (1995:
121), it is also crucial that we demonstrate
how the original contents and associations
of esotericism that originated in the
Renaissance are reinterpreted. Following
and developing Faivre's work, Hanegraaff
defines an esoteric tradition as an 'historical
continuity in which individuals and/or
groups are demonstrably influenced in their
life and thinking by the esoteric ideas
formulated earlier, which they use and
develop according to the specific demands
and cultural context of their own period'
(1995: 118). Hanegraaff outlines the
historical perspective of esotericism as a
'container concept encompassing a complex
of interrelated currents and traditions from
the early modern period up to the present
day, the historical origin and foundation of
which lies in the syncretistic phenomenon of
Renaissance hermeticism' (1999: 4). He
goes on to trace this esotericism through the
later developments of alchemy,
Paracelsianism, Rosicrucianism, kabbalah,
Theosophical and Illuminist currents, and
'various occultist and related developments
during the 19th and 20th century' (ibid.: 4)
many of which, I have argued, are the direct
precursors of Wicca. So how has
contemporary Wicca, after Hanegraaff
(1995: 118), used and developed the esoteric
ideas formulated earlier according to the
specific demands and cultural context of
their own period? And how did Wicca come
to be regarded as Nature Religion in the first
place?
How did Wicca come to be regarded
as Nature Religion?
Perhaps the most obvious answer to this
question lies in Wicca's associations with
contemporary Paganism. 'Pagan' has often
been taken to refer to 'country-dweller', an
interpretation which seems to have
developed mainly with the Romantic
literature of the 19th century and Victorian
urban growth. However, as Robin Lane Fox
and Pierre Chuvin have pointed out, most
town-dwellers were in fact pagan at the time
the term 'pagan' was coined. Thabit ibn
Qurra, a Sabian from Harran (835-901CE)
praised ancient paganism to the Caliph of
Baghdad with the following words, which
clearly have nothing to do with a rustic
existence:
Who else have civilised the world, and built
the cities, if not the nobles and kings of
Paganism? They have filled the earth with
settled forms of government, and with
wisdom, which is the highest good. Without
Paganism the world would be empty and
miserable (Scott 1985: 105).
Furthermore, Freeman (1999: 11) stresses
that 'the majority of major Victorian poets
and artists confronted the modern city with
a marked lack of enthusiasm-it was a filthy
and dehumanising environment and poor
soil for their sensitive plants'. He cites
Browning's willingness to provide
representations of Renaissance urbanisation
whilst largely avoiding the Victorian
conurbation, and the artistic radicals of the
1860s (such as Swinburne, Rossetti and
William Morris) who forsook their own time
for a largely imaginary past.
According to the Census of 1851, the
English urban population outnumbered the
rural for the first time. Between 1821 and
1841, the population of London rose by
20%, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield
increased by 40%, while Bradford rose by
an incredible 65% (Williams 1975: 188). As
Nick Freeman has pointed out, 'no London
memoirist from the Victorian period (or
indeed, ever since) can resist lamenting the
disappearance of the 'countryside' in and
around the city' (1999: 13). The growing
interest in the environment, and the urge to
leave behind the towns and cities and enter
once more into communion with 'nature' as
'the countryside' encouraged popular usage
of the term 'pagan' as one who dwells in the
rustic areas. Ronald Hutton, overstating the
case somewhat, suggests that the growth of
urban areas during the Victorian era caused
'an almost hysterical celebration of rural
England' from the 1870s onwards. Pan as
great god of nature became one of the most
prevalent ancient images to be drawn upon.
We might cite as examples Arthur Machen's
1894 novel The Great God Pan, and Saki's
The Music on the Hill (1911), both of which
feature Pan as a central figure, whilst
Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the
Willows (1907), and J. M. Barrie's Peter
Pan made Pan accessible to children.
Russell (1990: 137) interprets Pan, god of
wild nature, as a deliberately chosen symbol
of opposition to Christianity among
occultists, due to Christian associations of
Pan's characteristics (cloven hooves, horns)
with their image of the Devil. Certainly this
is true of the infamous Aleister Crowley,
whose Hymn to Pan provoked storms of
outrage when it was read out at his funeral
in 1947. At the same time, enthusiasm for
Gaia as Mother Nature and Mother Earth
was such that by 1900, 'the poetic vision of
the English, when contemplating the rural
world, was dominated as never before by
the great goddess and the horned god'
(Hutton 1996: 9), and the great goddess
(Isis, Astarte, Diana, Hecate, Demeter) and
the horned god (Herne, Pan, Cernunnos)
have remained deities of central importance
within today's Wicca and Paganism.
That there is little evidence for the kind of
mass appeal Hutton describes does not
detract from the engagement of poets and
authors with the country/city opposition, and
this certainly influenced the development of
Wicca. However, we should not forget that
it is the very growth of the city which
accounts for what is primarily urban Wicca,
at the same time as it provides a focus for
discontent and an opposition to idealised
nature. We can see in Wicca a nostalgia for
something never known, and might do well
to question the role of imaginative fiction in
turning people on to nature. In an urbanised
life, does Tolkein's description of the woods
of Lothlórien in The Fellowship of the Ring
(1954), for instance, provide a more real
experience of the magic of a woodland than
a walk in the real woods? It is, I think, a
valid question but not one I intend to answer
at the present time.
In terms of recent decades, Vivianne
Crowley has outlined a change in emphasis
within Wicca from nature veneration to
nature preservation in her chapter 'Wicca as
Nature Religion' in Nature Religion Today.
Crowley asserts the centrality of the
veneration of nature, which is 'considered to
be ensouled, alive, 'divine' The divine [being
seen] as a 'force' or 'energy' and as manifest
in the world of nature' (1998: 170). She
further points out that the processes of
nature-'conception, birth, mating,
parenthood, maturation, death'-are portrayed
in the seasonal myth cycle known as the
Wheel of the Year; thus, '[t]hemes and
symbols drawn from nature are central to
Wiccan belief and practice' (ibid.: 170).
Initially, we are told, Gardner's Wicca was
described as a fertility cult rather than as
'nature religion' but, as the opening
declamation of this paper shows, direct links
existed between the Wiccan perception of
the goddess and the world of nature. The
late Doreen Valiente, Gardner's one-time
High Priestess and collaborator, pointed out
that Wicca is concerned, not so much with
literal fertility as with vitality, and with
finding one's harmony with Nature. 'What
witches seek for in celebrating these
seasonal festivals is a sense of oneness with
Nature ... People today need this because
they are aware of the tendency of modern
life to cut them off from their kinship with
the world of living Nature ... They want to
get back to Nature, and be human beings
again' (in Crowley 1998: 173-5).
This cutting off from nature as a part of
modern life has certainly had its part to play
in attracting people to Wicca in the last 30
years, largely as a result of environmental
awareness. 'A nature religion implies a
nature to worship', claims Crowley, and 'in
the 1970s environmental pollution became
the rallying cause. Nature was on the
agenda' (1998: 176). With this influx of
environmentally aware people, the ethos of
Wicca began to evolve from nature
veneration to nature preservation: 'Wicca
had moved out of the darkness, the occult
world of witchery, to occupy the moral high
ground-environmentalism' (ibid: 177).
But going behind environmentalism, back to
this need to feel again that contact with
nature which, according to Valiente, makes
us 'human beings', how does Wicca interact
with nature? Both Crowley and Valiente
point to the most obvious interaction, that of
ritual, and particularly those rituals which
make up the mythic cycle of the Wheel of
the Year. Certainly, the Wheel of the Year
with its eight sabbats reflects the turning
cycle of nature, but to what extent does the
Wheel turn the seasons instead of the
seasons turning the Wheel? There are some
Wiccans who celebrate Imbolc, for example,
only once the first snowdrops have
appeared; but chaotic nature has her own
timing, and is not regarded as conducive to
modern life and its responsibilities. The
practicalities of getting a group of people
together thus takes precedence over nature's
timing of the seasons, and in order to
facilitate Wicca a grid of external
references-the eight-spoked Wheel of the
Year-is dropped onto nature. Thus, Wicca
imposes correspondences rather than
allowing correspondences to emerge from
living nature and then reading them back
into it, and these correspondences become
merely standardised lists, memorised
information rather than any true gnosis
gleaned from the hieroglyphs of nature
through imagination and meditation.
Such formalisation may provide a means to
increased intimacy with nature for some
practitioners, but it surely operates as a
distancing mechanism for many others, and
it certainly removes from Wicca the
influence of its esoteric heritage. If
figurative language and ritual are used
always to point to something beyond human
experience-if a walk in the woods always
necessitates a glimpse of dryads and
nymphs, if rituals always necessitate a
yearning towards the divine-does this then
risk removing the awe and wonder from
nature herself? The Wiccan circle, it is
claimed, exists as a space 'between the
worlds', between the divine realm and the
human. An over-emphasis on that which lies
beyond, that which is above, i.e. the divine,
may therefore miss the means by which that
beyond might be approached, decoded, and
known (in the sense of gnosis), i.e. through
nature, through that which is below. Too
much 'heaven' and not enough 'earth'
encompasses far more than a superficial
response to the environmental crises
affecting both us and nature. As Nasr goes
to some lengths to point out:
There is need to rediscover those laws and
principles governing human ethics as well
as the cosmos, to bring out the
interconnectedness between man and nature
in the light of the Divine, an interaction not
based on sentimentality or even ethical
concern related to the realm of action
alone, but one founded upon a knowledge
whose forgetting has now brought human
beings to the edge of the precipice of
annihilation of both the natural order and
themselves (1996: 223).
Activism, it seems, is not enough -- Wicca
needs to go deeper and have a knowledge
base of the natural order to which it so often
only pays lip service. So, to paraphrase
Hanegraaff's question posed earlier in this
paper, does Wicca produce merely a shallow
caricature of profound teachings? How is
living Nature actually manifest in Wiccan
understanding and practice?
How does Nature manifest itself
in Wiccan understanding?
The veneration of nature in Wicca, the
concern for the earth as deity, and the
pantheism of seeing the divine in all of
nature has led Wiccans to maintain an
attitude of reverence for the wild, untamed
countryside on the one hand, and of sadness
or revulsion at human estrangement from
this ideal, living in towns and cities away
from the land, on the other.
For some Wiccans, veneration of nature and
identification as 'Wiccan' and/or 'Pagan'
manifests as a romantic attachment to the
countryside, a dream of living away from
the towns and nurturing a closer relationship
with nature. For a few, direct action against
the destruction of the environment-at road
protests, proposed building sites,
Manchester Airport's second runway, or
simply to protect an old tree-is the favoured
means of expressing their concern for nature
and their belief that nature is divine,
ensouled, or, at the very least, alive. Others,
however, see nature as all-inclusive,
regarding all that we do as 'natural' for we,
as humans, are also part of nature. However,
it remains a fact that most Pagans live in
urban areas, and very few depend directly
upon the land for their living: as Jeffrey
Russell (1991: 171) pointed out, 'most are
urban, as is usually true of those who love
nature (the farmers are too busy fighting it)'.
Wiccan use of nature imagery appears to be
on a cosmological scale rather than located
in a particular environment. There appears
to be a resistance to putting boundaries
around nature, yet at the same time British
Wiccans try to link themselves with the
energy of the land at quite a local level.
However, this only goes so far-few seem to
involve themselves with road protests and
other areas of environmental activism, and
Wicca is thus not heavily represented at
environmental protests. A Wiccan view was
expressed by a priestess in her early 30s,
who told me:
I do resent the occasional implication that
unless you've spent time up a tree to protect
it, you are not a true Witch Craft is one
thing, eco-activism is another I do not think
they automatically go hand in hand
(Hweorfa, 15th October 1998).
Dalua, a Norwegian Gardnerian/
Alexandrian High Priest, told me (personal
comment, October 1998), 'I personally
prefer not to go as far as, for example,
Starhawk has done, making the Craft into
some sort of action group for political,
environmental or humanitarian purposes (in
most cases we have good choices outside of
the Craft)'. Environmentalism as a part of
Wiccan spirituality, then, is not high on the
agenda. It seems to be regarded as quite
distinct from religion.
However, the portrayal of nature in Pagan
and Wiccan rituals is often nothing more
than imagery-of idealised nature, or of
cosmological nature. This romantic ideal on
the part of urban Wiccans has little in
common with the reality of living on the
land, where nature is anything but romantic.
The Pagan/Wiccan ideal of nature thus often
seems to stem from a genuine desire to be in
harmony with nature and, to an extent, to
preserve nature, whilst at the same time the
cosmology suggests that nature is but a
reflection of a greater divine reality. This is
in keeping with the Hermetic maxim 'As
above, so below', yet the impact of
environmental awareness and activism begs
the question as to whether Wiccan attitudes
towards nature are relevant to the esoteric
concept of 'living nature', or whether they
are merely a religious rendering of secular
concerns. In any case, the concept of 'nature'
is itself diffuse and fractured, and it may be
for this reason that Wiccan attitudes to
nature as sacred incorporates nature as the
universe/cosmos, nature as deity, and also
human as part of nature. The refusal to place
boundaries around a constructed 'nature'
necessarily leaves the observer with the
impression of a confused and ill thought-out
response to the natural world.
Conclusion
To return to the role of imaginative fiction
which I mentioned earlier, I would like to
read you a passage from a book called Lolly
Willowes, or The Loving Huntsman by
Sylvia Townsend-Warner, published in
1926. In this book, Lolly has moved to
Great Mop. She is a witch, not a Wiccan,
since Wicca per se did not exist at this time
(although Margaret Murray's book The
Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921)
certainly did, and Townsend- Warner may
well have read this). Lolly doesn't attend the
sabbats because they are not sophisticated
enough, they don't give her what she needs,
and instead she goes to the essence of
witchcraft which, for her, is nature. In this
passage, she has been joined in Great Mop
by her nephew, Titus. It is a rather long
passage, but I make no apologies for that: I
think the whole passage is relevant and
helps to illustrate the points I have made in
this paper.
When they went for walks together he
would sometimes fall silent, turning his
head from side to side to browse the warm
scent of a clover field. Once, as they stood
on the ridge that guarded the valley from
the south-east, he said: 'I should like to
stroke it'-and he waved his hand towards
the pattern of rounded hills embossed with
rounded beech-woods. She felt a cold
shiver at his words, and turned away her
eyes from the landscape that she loved so
jealously. Titus could never have spoken so
if he had not loved it too. Love it as he
might, with all the deep Willowes love for
country sights and smells, love he never so
intimately and soberly, his love must be a
horror to her. It was different in kind from
hers. It was comfortable, it was portable, it
was a reasonable, appreciative appetite, a
possessive and masculine love. It almost
estranged her from Great Mop that he
should be able to love it so well, and
express his love so easily. He loved the
countryside as though it were a body.
She had not loved it so. For days at a time
she had been unconscious of its outward
aspect, for long before she saw it she had
loved it and blessed it. With no earnest but
a name, a few lines and letters on a map,
and a spray of beech-leaves, she had trusted
the place and staked everything on her trust.
She had struggled to come, but there had
been no such struggle for Titus. It was as
easy for him to quit Bloomsbury for the
Chilterns as for a cat to jump from a hard
chair to a soft. Now, after a little scrabbling
and exploration,he was curled up in the
green lap and purring over the landscape.
The green lap was comfortable. He meant
to stay in it, for he knew where he was well
off. It was so comfortable that he could
afford to wax loving, praise its kindly
slopes, stretch out a discriminating paw and
pat it. But Great Mop was no more to him
than any other likable country lap. He liked
it because he was in possession. His
comfort apart, it was a place like any other
place.
Laura hated him for daring to love it so. She
hated him for daring to love it at all. Most
of all she hated him for daring to impose
his kind of love on her. Since he had come
to Great Mop she had not been allowed to
love in her own way. Commenting, pointing
out, appreciating, Titus tweaked her senses
one after another as if they were so many
bell-ropes. He was a good judge of country
things; little escaped him, he understood the
points of a landscape as James his father
had understood the points of a horse. This
was not her way. She was ashamed at
paying the countryside these horse-coping
compliments. Day by day the spirit of the
place withdrew itself further from her. The
woods judged her by her company, and
hushed their talk as she passed by with
Titus. Silence heard them coming, and fled
out of the fields, the hills locked up their
thoughts, and became so many grassy
mounds to be walked up and walked down.
She was being boycotted, and she knew it.
Presently she would not know it anymore.
For her too, Great Mop would be a place
like any other place, a pastoral landscape
where an aunt walked out with her nephew.
(Townsend-Warner, [1926], 2000: 159-
162).
Now, I do not intend to suggest that there is
a male/female divide in responses to nature,
though for all I know that may be the case.
Neither do I want to suggest that all
Wiccans respond to nature in the way that
Titus does. Rather, the passage highlights
two different responses to nature, perhaps
one to nature with a small 'n', and one to
Nature with a capital 'N'. Undoubtedly,
some Wiccans respond to nature as Titus
does, and some do not. It is a vexing but
nevertheless exciting fact that Wiccan
covens and practitioners are extremely
different from each other, and therefore
generalisations are not easy to either
discover or to sustain. Yet, in studying
particular forms of Wicca, we cannot help
but take note of those questions which do
not appear to be being asked, of those areas
which seem to be taken for granted. Nature,
I would argue, is one of these areas. As I
have suggested, the Wiccan response to
Nature is often ill thought-out and confused,
and as academics we must ask those
questions which are not always necessarily
welcome. In this paper, I have asked far
more questions that I have provided
answers. In so doing, I hope to have opened
up another area for debate, and to perhaps
answer some of my own questions where
time and space allows, in published form.
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{PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=Virtual"}
Jo Pearson has a PhD in Religious Studies from
Lancaster University, UK, and is Research
Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at
The Open University, UK. She is co-editor (with
Professors Richard Roberts and Geoffrey Samuel)
of Nature Religion Today: Paganism in the
Modern World (Edinburgh UP, 1998), and is
particularly interested in the continual
development of Wicca and in the relationship
between religion and magic. She is currently
working on Wicca: Witchcraft in Britain, to be
published by Routledge, and completing A
Popular Dictionary of Paganism for Curzon Press.
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