The Monk Seal Conspiracy
10. The Sentient Earth
By early afternoon I was back in Pythagorion, and sat at the harbour’s edge whilst Tom fumbled about the Atoll II, preparing to set sail for Kusadasi.
It was somehow difficult to believe that this thriving tourist resort had once been the birthplace of Pythagoras, the father of an ecology so profound and universal that it shames the shallow and Darwinesque conservation philosophies of the 20th century. Long before the birth of this visionary thinker, even, the same civilization that had monk seals and dolphins protected by Poseidon and Apollo also revered the entire Earth as Gaia, ‘the oldest of all the gods’.
The aboriginal tribes who settled in Greece more than 8,000 years ago migrated from Syria and Egypt, carrying with them the primitive seeds of the Gaia religion. Originally hunters and gatherers of wild fruits, they gradually began to cultivate barley and herd the wild flocks of sheep and goats which roamed the rocky mountainsides. Their mother goddess, worshipped in primitive fertility rites, was personified as a plump and bounteous woman, crudely kneaded into clay statuettes. As in many aboriginal societies, Nature was regarded as animistic and capricious, capable of giving or depriving the land of fertility. Chants and prayers to the sky above implored the rain to ‘marry’ the Earth – for without rain their tribal society would soon have crumbled with famine.
Whilst their culture reflected the androgyny of Nature, its empathy was with the Earth’s innate femininity. Their small settlements, made from mud bricks and clay, remained unfortified for centuries, and Greek legend speaks of this as the ‘golden age, when war was not yet’. But by 2500 BC, waves of new immigrants were inflaming jealousy and competition for land, and petty conflicts soon erupted into war. It was the end of an age of innocence and, say historians, the beginning of society’s domination by the male sex.
Paradoxically, however, around 750 BC, or during the age of Homer, the concept of Gaia became more clearly defined, gradually evolving into a vigorous and living religion. Gaia was revered as the mother of all, who gave birth to gods, humans, animals and plants. In Homer’s poems, the Earth is often regarded as both animate and divine, though still not endowed with consciousness. In one Homeric hymn, Gaia is referred to as ‘the all-nourishing power that supports all life in the air and water and on the Earth’.
Over the following centuries belief in the mother Earth was to become more sophisticated, but inexorably, the same dark forces which had created war were also leading to the death of the Earth as a god. Competition and conflict was becoming the driving force of survival and progress. Conquest and ownership of the Earth became equated with power, and its taming and exploitation with wealth and human supremacy. Such progress also demanded more expedient and pliable religious beliefs. Born were more anthropomorphic and obscure gods, who gradually eclipsed Gaia and became almost entirely segregated from the physical Earth. Perhaps for the first time, matter and spirit were being wrenched apart into separate domains, carving out the destiny of civilization which was to become increasingly divorced from the soul of the natural world.
Originally, however, as gods and goddesses multiplied, they merely personified the many natural manifestations of Gaia. Hence Artemis was the goddess of animals, Demeter of grain; Zeus became the god of the weather, light and sky, Dionysus of wine and mystical delirium, Poseidon of the seas, rivers and lakes, Pan of woods and forests. Themis, the daughter of Gaia, became the goddess of justice, representing her mother’s simple natural law. Those who treated Gaia with love and respect would, with natural reciprocity, receive her blessings and benevolence in return. Earth’s soul was endowed with forgiveness and compassion but only up to a certain critical point. Exploitation would wound and imperil the health of the Earth, disrupting her innate balance and her ability to heal herself. The inevitable result would be a plague of ‘natural disasters’ – drought, flood, famine and disease. These were considered to be punishments from the gods.
Temples, shrines and other places of veneration also served as sanctuaries for wildlife; they often encompassed large areas which could not be disturbed or harmed in any way. In a sense, they were the ancient predecessors of today’s national parks, and it was traditional to dedicate the most beautiful and spiritually powerful landscapes to the gods. Certain species were even afforded divine protection. The ‘murder’ of a dolphin was sometimes punished with death and Apollo Delphinos, god of harmony and moral virtues, was worshipped by Cretan sailors in the form of a dolphin.
The most important temple dedicated to Gaia was undoubtedly at Delphi, known as the navel or spiritual centre of the Earth. It was in this wild valley that the resonances of the universe were focussed and the elements Earth, Fire, Air and Water coalesced. The rainbow was symbolic of this balance, and Iris, the goddess of the rainbow, became the messenger of the gods, bridging Heaven and Earth. Because of Delphi’s innate spiritual power, it was believed that here the Earth revealed its secrets and revelations by oracle. The future was read in the nuances of Nature, the whispering sound of the wind through the trees, the formations of the clouds, the flight of wild birds.
The gods could be consulted through the mediation of the entranced Pythia, often a simple country girl who was supposed to utter infallible prophecies through her communication with Gaia and Apollo Delphinos. These prophecies, however, were almost always obscure, and had to be interpreted by qualified priests and mystics. At more primitive oracles, there was no intermediary between worshipper and god. A pilgrim could expect to sleep in an oracle-bearing cave with their ear to the earth and receive the dreams of Gaia. Dreams which foreshadowed the future were thought to percolate up from the underworld, as Gaia also had domain over the ghostly world of the dead. The natural polarities of the Earth were viewed not as forces of antagonism but as the coalescing elements of balance, part of the intricate and interwoven web of existence. Life and death were intimately entwined within the holistic concept of Earth. Gaia gave birth to all, nourished all, and received every being’s soul and body when they died. The dead would embark on their long journey of reincarnation; their bodies would be like seeds planted in the womb of the Earth.
In a similar manifestation to Christian thanksgiving, cereals and fruits were offered in praise of Gaia during harvest time. A form of religious communion also took place, with worshippers consuming a symbolic portion of food and wine during ceremonies. At such times, offerings were also made to the dead, with wine goblets set aside for the ghosts.
By 500 BC, however, the Delphic oracle had become mired in corruption, a victim of its own fame; its priests began to serve only the opportunistic political demands of whichever state wielded the most power. Despite attempts over the following centuries to restore its former glory, Delphi never recovered from its moral decay. Ironically, the wealth that was used to dedicate new temples to Apollo, the god of peace and harmony, had come from plundering distant towns and villages. Obsessed with war and imperialism, these were the very aggressions which were to destroy the once luminous civilization of ancient Greece. But despite the growing decadence of society and religion, both Pythagoras and Plato had a profound influence in transcending the boundaries of the Gaia faith, combining early scientific thought with the spiritual philosophy that the Earth was not only living, but also a sentient and intelligent being.
Pythagoras was born on Samos around 580 BC, and here Gaia was known as ‘the nurturer of children’. According to legend, when the father of Pythagoras consulted an oracle on the island, he was told that his wife would give birth to a son, and that the child, endowed by Nature with exceptional beauty and wisdom, would make a sublime impression upon humanity. When he was born, the legend says, a divine aura illumined the infant in the crib. During his childhood, the island’s wild beauty may well have nurtured Pythagoras’s fledgling empathy with Nature, and influenced his later philosophies. After more than thirty years of travel through Egypt and Babylon, where he studied the secrets of Oriental mysticism, Pythagoras returned to Samos, intent upon founding a philosophical school on the island.
His liberal ideas however soon provoked the wrath of Polycrates, the pirate king of Samos. Realizing that Pythagoras was becoming a threat to his iron-fisted rule on the island, the tyrant secretly plotted his assassination. But hearing of the conspiracy, the philosopher fled to the high mountain of Kerkis above Seitani and hid in a cave, known to this day as the ‘Grotto of Pythagoras’. With help from friends, he eventually fled the island, never to return again. Settling in the small town of Kroton in southern Italy, he finally realized the dream of his philosophical school. Here Pythagoras gradually attained a glowing reputation for wisdom, but he himself stated that only God was wise and that he was merely ‘a lover of wisdom’. He is sometimes credited with being the first to postulate that the world is spherical, ensouled and intelligent. In mathematics, Pythagoras found fascinating proof for the rationality of the universe. Also an accomplished musician, he believed that the world-soul was a blend of harmonic intervals with no distinct divisions. Although dualism was evident throughout Nature, the fusion of opposites held the secret of balance. Only in Oneness was true identification with God possible.
God was equated with love, which pervaded the entire universe. The soul of the individual and that of the Earth and universe were intimately linked. There are even some faint allusions that both Pythagoras and Plato seemed to regard the living beings of the Earth as the eyes and senses of God. This microcosm-macrocosm idea, which seems ever more pertinent today in a world racked by fragmentation, is in fact strikingly similar to the contemporary concept of ‘deep ecology’, which believes in the absolute relativity of existence. But to Pythagoras, this was not merely confined to the material world. He viewed death as a passageway on the continuing journey of the immortal soul, whose re-incarnation would be determined by the values of previous deeds. A devout vegetarian who considered animal sacrifices in the temples to be a sacrilege, he believed that pain inflicted upon Nature would inevitably return to haunt humankind, both spiritually and physically.
Plato, born in 429 BC, was greatly influenced by Pythagorean thought and took the concept of universal ecology even further. ‘Whence can a human body have received its soul, if the body of the world does not possess soul?’ he asked. He described the Earth as ‘a living creature, one and visible, containing within itself all living creatures which are by nature akin to itself’. The Earth, he declared, is ‘endowed with soul and reason’. Yet it was expedience which increasingly began to dictate the exploitation of the land. Wars, economic and social crises, cruelty and injustice, the inequality of wealth provoked by envy and greed – all of these familiar afflictions destroyed the harmony of their society. Democracy, a victim of corruption, soon became tyranny. From the cradle to the death-bed, civilization was mortally ill.
By the time Pilate had crucified Christ, Gaia’s oracles had fallen into a mysterious and brooding silence and Lord Pan, her god of the forests, had perished. Half-man and half-goat, Pan is the only god whose reputed death has been historically recorded. The event, which took place during the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius, was related by the Greek philosopher Plutarch in ‘Why Oracles Are Silent’. An Egyptian sailor, Thamus, whose ship was bound for Italy via the island of Paxos, heard a divine voice calling out his name and telling him to ‘proclaim that the great god Pan is dead’. We are told that a deathly silence fell over the sea and land and that the news was greeted with dreadful cries of lament. The early orthodox Christians reasoned that Pan died at the exact moment of Christ’s crucifixion because his divine martyrdom heralded the extinction of the false gods.
Gradually, Pan as nature-god became identified as the Great Satan whose domain was hell, a transformation which explains the frequent depiction of the devil possessing forked tail, horns and hooves. But in a drawing by the visionary poet and artist William Blake, when God appears to Job in a dream, it is with a cloven hoof like Pan’s. This is because in Job we find definite Gaian sentiments: ‘But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air and they shall tell thee; Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee; and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee. Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this? In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind;’
To the orthodox Christians, however, who believed that animals were soulless, animistic ideas were regarded as heretical and became the focus of systematic persecution. In the mass hysteria which swept across Europe during the middle ages, an estimated nine million peasant women were tortured and burned to death, accused of being witches, forging pacts with the Devil and indulging in supernatural practices. Central to this Christian dogma was the division between body and soul, Earth and God, a dualism which Pythagoras had equated with evil. Nature was being exorcised of her spirit, paving the way for a relentless exploitation of her ‘inert’ body. Can it be mere coincidence that on the neighbouring island of Patmos, visible through the summer haze, the book of Revelations was born? From the mountain peak of that volcanic island, St John the Divine, once a simple Galilean fisherman and Christ’s beloved disciple, on the verge of despair and consumed by a passionate fury, prophesied the diametric forces of Armageddon, the division of the world, and saw the holy city coming down from heaven. Can it be that the visions he witnessed were the Isles of the Blest, inhabited, so Pythagoras and the ancient Greeks believed, by those that had the love of Gaia, and existing perhaps in another domain of her consciousness?
Rather belatedly, even Science, the 20th century’s new religion, has begun to find intriguing evidence of Gaia’s existence. According to Dr Jim Lovelock, apostle of the fledgling ‘Gaia hypothesis’, life on Earth forms part of a global system with ‘formidable powers… able to control temperature, the composition of the air and sea, the pH of the soil and so on’, in order to create the optimum conditions for its own survival.
Although a cautious and distinguished scientist, Lovelock adds one other fascinating observation: ‘This system,’ he says, seems to ‘exhibit the behaviour of a single organism, even a living creature.’
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