Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
The old religious certainties which had been so deeply brought into question with the
break-up of the Catholic Church were now replaced by a new confidence in scientific
materialism, which swept through the Western world like intellectual wildfire, gathering
momentum as more and more phenomena in nature fell under its sway, transforming the
lives of millions of people all over the world. As mechanistic science grew in influence,
the
anima mundi
faded from consciousness, so that now, some 400 years later, we have
the dazzling technologies and scientific theories which are so much part of the cultural
scene in the modern world; but we have lost contact with our deep animistic reveren-
ce for rocks, mountains, streams, rivers, and indeed for the whole of nature as a living
intelligence. Yet if our awareness of the
anima mundi
is indeed an archetypal mode of
perception, it can never be eradicated from the human psyche, even though it is possible
to repress it within individuals or, it seems, within an entire culture. According to an-
thropologist Robert Lawlor, an awareness of the suppression of animistic consciousness
is common to all indigenous tribal people today, who “believe that the spirit of their con-
sciousness and way of life exists like a seed buried in the earth. The waves of European
colonialism that destroyed the civilisations of North America, South America and Aus-
tralia began a five-hundred-year dormancy period of the archaic consciousness. Its po-
tencies disappeared into the earth.”
Psychologists know only too well that what is repressed can haunt consciousness
in the form of pathological behaviour and distorted perceptions. Is it any wonder then
that our repression of
anima mundi
has come back to haunt us in the guise of a global
crisis that is causing such massive destruction of wild nature and of traditional cultures?
Sadly, by separating fact from value and quantity from quality, mechanistic science has
inadvertently played its part in these disasters: the atom bomb, intensive agriculture, the
ozone hole and climate change are examples of unintended but seriously damaging con-
sequences of this overvaluation of the rational mind.
The crisis is at root one of perception; we no longer see the cosmos as alive, nor do
we any longer recognise that we are inseparable from the whole of nature, and from our
Earth as a living being. But there is hope, for as the crisis deepens, the call of
anima
mundi
intensifies. More and more people are waking up to their deep connection to the
intelligence of the cosmos, and are seeking to find ways of living that do not violate
their rediscovered ecological sensibilities. It is as if the
anima mundi
is trying to express
herself in our consciousness in ways which move beyond the dualistic animism of Plato
and the otherworldly dualism of the old Church. In this time of crisis, we need only pay
heed to our thorough embeddedness within the earthly web of life to feel the buried seed
of
anima mundi
begin to stir and blossom in our minds and sensing bodies. As the seed
breaks open, we see the wisdom in letting go of the objectivist assumptions of modern
science, without abandoning the considerable achievements and benefits that it has un-
