[This essay was presented at Roma Goddess Conference, May 22-23, 2021, under the theme of “Goddess & Environment – Save Mother Earth.”]
From the V to the XV century, Early and Late Middle Ages
It took another millennium to the slow but crucial transformations that finally erased what was left of the numinous alliance between female centered vision and natural forces.
Through forced Christianization, imposed from high by the courts, cathedrals, castles, and cities on people living and working in the countries and mountainous zones, the male anthropomorphic divine erection gave up progressively with all connections with Nature, now narrated and reduced to His creation. The Creation became more and more Transcendent and Incorporeal – but Masculine nonetheless, as Divine/God is uncreated, not generated by matter and blood, and Mind alone is pure and creative. Until a New Man living in walled cities was born with arms and goods, as Athena from the head of Zeus. It happened during Humanism and the triumphal Re-naissance.
Resistance was fierce and never-ending, lay, and ecclesiastic authorities had to endure a war without quarter to control the peasant revolts often guided by women, to restrain the female order. This process lasted for centuries, had to overcome the strong endurance of “paganism” all around the fortified mansions and walled towns. It had to confront with the central role of women in the agricultural world, thanks to their millennial knowledge of plants, herbs, and body anatomy, handed down orally, generation after generation along a lineage starting from the gatherers and hunters of the Paleolithic. Women still treated illnesses and accompanied the passages between the world of the living and of the dead: they were now called prophetesses, seers, enchantresses, singers, sometimes appreciated court counselors.
A paradigmatic ending of this long strife which invested all aspects of life and prepared industrialization is to be found in the Enclosures Acts emanated between 1700 and 1810 that concluded a process of progressive elimination of open fields, common wastes and of the communitarian style of life of million peoples, a process which had begun in the XIII century.
The metaphor of Mother Earth went on and on. Even in the XVI century, she continued to be represented as a living organism, nature/earth was still called Alma Mater, the Anima Mundi was imagined as feminine, the Microcosm laws reflected the Macrocosm ones.
How Descriptions contain Instructions
Carolyn Merchant in The Death of Nature underlines the invisible power of metaphors and of unconscious presuppositions, that is what we automatically or traditionally think to be true, and often results stronger than the mere matter of facts.
She reconstructs the change in metaphor that occurred after Renaissance, particularly between the XVI and XVII centuries, inviting to recognize and fully understand the normative importance of descriptive statements, in this case on nature.
The Renaissance image of the Nurturing Earth still brought within ethic rules and limitations: as long as the earth was considered a living sensitive and maternal organism, every destruction or withdrawal had to be limited and blamed.
With the mounting success of the Scientific Revolution in mechanization and rationalization, in the growing new technologies aimed to produce goods of every kind, a new image of an unrestrained overwhelming and Disordered Nature broke through, gaining ground. It was time for the new industrious men, safe beyond the walls of cities and minds, to gain Power over nature.
“Two new ideas, mechanism – nature as a collection of inanimate parts – and the rule and mastery over nature became central concepts in the Modern World.”
From Mother Nature to nature as inanimate machine
The change in perception and representation (imaginary) from Nature as a living Organism to nature as an inanimate Machine introduced/reflected many philosophical and practical consequences:
– a dramatic erasing of feminine principles
– the subjection of nature to the new machines, an enthrallment to measurements, a promise of free exploitation, unrestrained commercialism, industrialization, marketing.
– the “monstrification” of the herbalists, seers, healers as WITCHES.
The Witches (Green 1510) The Magician becomes a Manipulator
As the witches were burning, the devastation of nature began to be depicted.
In synchronicity, during the Burning Times – the most atrociuos event in the history of humankind – another devastation, more “egalitarian” for it involved lands, animals, humans without difference of sex or age, was spreading around planet Earth: the colonization of other continents, the long Kurgan wave of the Modern Age.
While millenarian forests were cut in Europe to build ships, colonization spread everywhere, pillaging of wealth beyond imagination from native peoples began to be brought to Europe and Africans kidnapped and trasported as slaves, while poors and landless Europeans were transformed in nude uprooted bodies which began to be trained to follow the order of the machines.
The mechanistic view of nature/Earth/cosmos as a set of inanimate parts spread in philosophical, political and nascent scientific thinking alike. Illustrious examples were Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Isaac Newto, Tomas Hobbes.
The masculine language of The Bible, widely available thanks to the invention of print, became the main and most diffuse religious text and supported the enterprise: the rovers were the missionaries of God.
(To be continued)