I may have mentioned recently that I am struggling a little bit with the whole … binary/agrarian imported-mix-and-match-pantheon-of-your-choice Neo-Paganism thing.
It has been bugging me for a really long time, honestly, not just the male-female fertility thing, but honestly … all of it.
Let me see if I can break it down without going full TL;DR on you.
It occurred to me recently that in the Old Testament (yes, I have studied the Bible a bit, if only to weaponize it), the pre-monotheism Israelites would adopt the gods of whatever locality they were traveling or relocating to, instead of continuing to worship the same gods, and although no explanation was given for that, I intuitively understood that they did it because the spirits or gods are connected to the land and not the people. The spirit of a healing well stays put at their healing well, they don’t go buggering off to some other healing well.
It would be like me showing up at your house with some friends – totally unannounced – and saying, “I want to spend some time with these friends, but I want to do it in your house. Just ignore us, we’re good,” and expecting you to be okay with it. You don’t worship Goddess A at Goddess B’s healing well, it’s rude. It’s also quite preposterous.
So the spirits of the land stay put, of course they do. They are associated with whatever feature they embody or protect or imbue with power, so they hang out there doing what they do and all is well.
So fast rewind 25,000 or so years, when the first humans set foot in the Americas. No humans evolved here. Modern humans came out of Africa and migrated from there, period. So there were literally no humans in the Americas until around 25,000 years ago, when some people came here in boats, and lived mostly on the western shorelines, and some of them found their way to Florida, but they never made it to the interior. These people, based on tool evidence mainly, probably ended up in the Amazon basin.
Sometime between 16,000-13,000 BCE, people from the Bering Land Bridge, where they had been living for 4000-5000 years and is now called Beringia, followed the migrating game animals that they hunted when the ice sheet opened into the Americas, and were the first humans in the interior of the Americas – and they couldn’t go back because the land bridge sunk under the rising water of the ice melt after the Ice Age..
13,000 years ago. After hundreds of millions of years with no humans at all, suddenly, humans.
In all the ages of this land, there was never a human living here who didn’t migrate here from somewhere else. Ever.
But it seems like these people got it, that you made a relationship with the spirits of the land where you were at any given time, and didn’t try to drag your old spirits along behind you. The Beringeans became the First Nations people in the US and Canada, and these folks are pretty savvy about the sacred relationship between the land and the people. And for thousands of years, they flourished here.
And then the White dominators came, bringing genocide and slavery and other treacheries, making no attempt whatsoever to have any kind of relationship at all to the spirits of this land, but bringing with them their terrible One God (to rule them all, One God to find them, One God to bring them all and in the darkness bind them – hey, if the shoe fits), and their entitlement and their superiority and their arrogance.
And they dominated. And some of them prospered at the expense of nearly everyone else. They just took all the land and killed anybody that wouldn’t get out of the way. Neat.
And fast forward to now, when so many of us suffer from depression, anxiety, emptiness, and spiritual sickness. Not only did our European ancestors ignore the spirits of this land, they disrespected them, obliterated them, and did their damndest, and I do mean damndest, to brainwash every other human into believing their culture was ignorant, backward, sinful, and doomed. And they did one hell of a job, congratulations, straight White cis-male people everywhere.
We have tried for centuries to live in a place while ignoring/destroying the native spirits of the place, and our hearts and souls are suffering badly because of it.
I am not advocating adopting Native American spirit ways – those are not our traditions, and we have already stolen so much from them. No, I’m saying, open up to the spirits of the land where you are and develop a relationship. Worship? Probably not, more like mutual respect, honor, cooperation, and co-creation. I also do not mean that you can only find spirits of the land in the woods. They are all over. They are in cities. They are on the highways. They are in fields, in small towns, in lakes and rivers, under bridges and on top of sky scrapers. Everywhere.
Listen, and then allow yourself to tell the stories that you are absorbing. Most spirits speak softly and in a frequency range we humans can’t hear with our ears. You have to listen with your whole body, and translate the information with your Third Ear, which is also your Third Eye. And then get your artsy-fart on, and see what happens. I started writing songs recently, and these stories are pouring out of me like a waterfall. It is time for us to be in relationship to the Spirits of the Land we live on, not some spirits half a planet away that our ancestors tried to drag over here. Honor the spirits where you are. Love the one you’re with. See what happens. This is where the magic is.