[This essay was presented at Roma Goddess Conference, May 22-23, 2021, under the theme of “Goddess & Environment – Save Mother Earth.”]
Francis Bacon
“Nature, you are wrong!”, wrote Francis Bacon (1561-1626) and added:
“You must dominate her, rape her in order to tear up her secrets”.
He was the first to fix the aim of the New Science as Control and Rule over Nature, to legitimize every possible or imaginable manipulation, because: “The salvation of humankind depends on Science and Science is the ensemble of Mechanic arts”.
In his Temporis Partus Masculus, Bacon wrote sentences which made history:
“Here I am, to bring Nature with all her creatures to your service as a slave …
Just follow her, like a hound pursue her, guiding and pushing her wher you want …
You must enter her holes and nooks in the search of truth, without any concern”.
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) with his Leviathan applied to political philosophy the same vision of disgregation and dismemberment, reasoning and rationalizing about the way of freeing exploitation also of human individuals:
“A Nation is an Artificial order of individual parts united by Fear”
Grounding again
Starting during the 1960s, a worldwide movement of “consciousness raising groups” of women began to re-unite.
Reclaiming the difference of the experience of living in a woman’s body, a widespread and pervasive work of demystifying the neutrality of historical, psychological, scientific, religious etc. narrations, set in motion a radical critique of the entire patriarchal apparatus at all its levels of organization and symbolic representation.
Starhawk, The Earth Path, 2004
“For centuries, since the start of the ‘scientific revolution’, Western culture has pursued knowledge by breaking a subject or an object into its component parts and studying those parts … We developed a mechanistic, cause-and-effect model of the universe. Compartmentalization … doesn’t allow us to look at the whole, or at the complex web of relationships and patterns that make up a whole. (But) science itself has moved beyond … and today is likely to describe the world in terms of networks of probabilities and complexities, as interlocking processes and relationships …”
“A witch must not only be familiar with the mystic planes of existence beyond the physical realm; she should also be familiar with the trees and plants and birds and animals of her own backyard, be able to name them, know their uses and habits and what part each plays in the whole …
In fact, everybody should. Our culture is afflicted with a vast disconnection, an abyss of ignorance that becomes apparent whenever an issue involving the natural world arises. As a society we are daily making decisions and setting policies that have enormous repercussions on the natural world. And those policies are being set by officials and approved by a public who are functionally eco-illiterate”.
Every small or great action, Here and Now, gives Form to one of the possible Futures.
(End of the Essay)
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