Wheres and Whats

One of the big motives for the contemporary NeoPagan movement as a whole, especially in the US and Britain, is reunion with Nature.  Over and over, I hear words of reverence and love for the natural world, its plants and animals, the earth and the sea and the sky, the weather and the stars above them.  This makes sense, of course - ecological consciousness is one of the major threads of NeoPaganism.

It also makes me think the vast majority of my fellow-travellers are city slickers, though.  Pure, unspoiled Nature is a thing of beauty, to be sure, and should be protected - but we can't live there anymore.  We're not wild humans, and most of us haven't been for 11,000 years.  Less, in the case of the Native Americans and a few other groups like the San, but even they had agriculture and carefully groomed herds of buffalo, or tamed cattle and regular grazing routes.  Even the Native Australians weren't truly wild humans, although perhaps they came the closest to preserving that strain.  No, we're domesticated, just as surely as our dogs and our cattle and our wheat are, and we can't live in the wild.

Which is, I think, one of the reasons there aren't many gods that represent truly wild Nature, and the ones that do tend to be rather dangerous ones from the perspective of the culture that honored them.  Seth comes to mind, and he wasn't so much Nature as the desert and its nomads - not wild people, either, but perhaps less thoroughly domesticated as Egypt was.  Pan was marginal, quite literally - he wandered not the truly wild areas but the liminal spaces where the edges of civilization met the edges of the wilderness.  Oceanic gods and goddesses tended to be portrayed as not the closest friends of humanity, and often in momentary or periodic conflict with those that were - think of Poseidon versus Athena, or Yamm versus Ba'al.

The earliest gods are often the ones most clearly concerned with urban humanity, such as it was at the time.  Inanna in particular is all about civilization, bringing the me, the tangible and intangible things that made civilization possible, to humanity.  The Great Mother goddesses of Syria and Asia Minor wear crowns that echo the tops of their city walls.  The gods of the outdoors are overwhelmingly gods of agriculture and weather, not of the unspoiled wild.  In fact, those places were cared for by smaller spirits - dryads, naiads, and the like.  They had their devotees, even shrines, but not temples.

I'm not going to argue against the Nature-focus of my fellow Pagans; I think it's a good thing, especially the reverence for Gaia as a whole.  But I think it does get in the way of building community in the larger sense, especially among polytheists (whether hard or soft).  In particular, it seems to get in the way of pushes towards permanent shrines and temples; an awful lot of Pagans are quite insistent about worship properly being outdoors.  Perhaps we could be looking towards Shinto for ways of reconciling Nature-reverence with more complex and permanent community praxis; it seems to work out well for them, at least at home.