A new paganism

Fernando Kaskais

May 4

Mit dem Adler ('With the Eagle') (1918) by Paul Klee. Zentrum Paul Klee. Photo by AKG

Now is the time to revitalise our relationship with nature and immerse ourselves in the little wonders of the universe

Ed Simon is the executive director of Belt Media Collaborative and the editor-in-chief for Belt Magazine; a contributing editor for the History News Network; and a staff writer at the literary site The Millions. His books include the anthology The God Beat: What Journalism Says about Faith and Why It Matters (2021), co-edited with Costica Bradatan; Binding the Ghost: Theology, Mystery, and the Transcendence of Literature (2022); and Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology (2022). He lives in Pittsburgh, PA.

I'm writing in the dining room of my family's home in Pittsburgh, a yellow-and-green craftsman house that's a century old, not far from the confluence of the Ohio River in the Allegheny Mountains. Some 270 million years ago, the spot where I'm now sitting would have sat next to the tropical shoals of a warm, globe-spanning, shallow ocean, populated by massive invertebrates and amphibians, the oxygen-rich air giving flight to dragonflies with the wingspans of birds and arachnids of nightmarish proportions. 'To consider the landscapes that once existed is to feel the draw of a temporal wanderlust,' writes the palaeontologist Thomas Halliday in Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds (2022), describing the past as not just 'an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but … a series of worlds, simultaneously fabulous yet familiar.'

The future too, I'll add. Eventually, everything loses its war of attrition with entropy: steel and concrete, glass and iron, all of the monuments of humanity. A half-billion years from now, and with the vagaries of plate tectonics, the place that was once Pittsburgh may again be in the tropics, or the arctic, or under the ocean. Some geologists predict that North America will be part of a future supercontinent, that Europe and Africa, Asia and Australia will all coalesce together as they did when Pangea existed, and then the hillside on which my little house stands will be long gone, buried under layers of strata, or on the floor of a mighty ocean.

Of course, humanity will be long extinct, our most enduring contribution to the geological record a precipitous rise in carbon dioxide and perhaps a narrow band of plastic threaded through the strata. Bertrand Russell, the great philosophical freethinker who forthrightly admitted to trembling at the thought of the heat death of the cosmos, wrote in a 1903 issue of The Independent Review that:

all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness … are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins.

Any genuine accounting that plays the tape forward must admit that, at least on material and empirical grounds, Russell's literal conclusion is broadly correct, but the pessimism is an issue of interpretation. I rather side with Walt Whitman, who a half-century before wrote in his poetry collection Leaves of Grass (1855) that:

The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Their understanding of the literal particulars of the situation regarding our eventual destiny is broadly the same, but how they choose to draw meaning from that reality is different. Russell quivers at our demise, while Whitman merely shrugs and smiles, continuing on for another day.

Whitman has long been my secular gospel. His verse is both steadfastly materialist and cosmically transcendental, a poetry commensurate with being able to look at a city street and imagine it millions of years hence, underneath sweltering tropic skies or frigid arctic nights. A sense of deep time, and the way in which the aeons inevitably erase all our vanities and virtues alike. When it comes to metaphysics, I share with Russell and Whitman a material sense of the Universe's composition, a belief in the immensity of this reality, a sublime and terrifying reality of our relative insignificance. In terms of what I do with that knowledge, I attempt as much as I can to embrace the present hopefulness of Whitman more than the understandable despair of Russell. It's easy to fall into Russell's misery: there is a fundamental bluntness to his contention that is estimably respectable, for he doesn't obscure the particulars of the situation...

morre...

https://aeon.co/essays/why-we-need-a-new-expression-of-the-sacred-a-pagan-theology