Ecological Intelligence (12 page)

W
hen Hitler, prior to World War II, declared in that famous quote, “I am Germany,” he clearly identified himself as being the all-good, all-seeing, all-powerful, all-knowing führer and father of Germany. In that moment of supreme grandiosity, he confirmed that he had risen above any need to acknowledge his own flawed humanity—his dark side. And so, what he could not tolerate in himself was projected and acted out in the form of a xenophobic storm aimed at Jews, Gypsies, anyone non-Aryan and, in the long run, anyone not like him.He believed this to be in the interests of his country, and many other people believed it too. He certainly did not believe that he was evil.

We need to remember that power and paranoia go hand in hand. Power is an archetype geared for dominance and the earliest signs of having identified with it is an intolerance of criticism. Our projections are always emotionally charged, and when we are stuck in them what usually happens is that we begin to perceive the world in terms of ideals and absolutes. Unaware that we are doing it, we become blind not only to the objective nature of the other, particularly those onto whom our own shadow issues are targeted, but, like Dr. Jekyll, they cause us to hold unrealistic expectations of ourselves.

Projections are at the heart of fanatical thinking, and they play right into the hands of powerful biological strategies of personal survival—be nice to the in-group, be cool, if not nasty, to the out-group. It is easy to point fingers and to ask questions about evil demagogues. It is not that easy to face up to our own complacency, ignorance, or indifference to the suffering of others. I think we need to be very careful about defining the role of others along an axis of evil. It is very easy to speak about another country’s weapons of destruction and our weapons for peace, of our principles versus the fanaticism of the other, of our needs versus someone else’s greed.

The shadow is archetypal. It is huge, emotionally charged, and, as we have seen, potentially destructive. But it can also be creative, albeit in an unfocused sort of way. It is essential therefore that we become a lot more aware of it. Our task is to acknowledge the beast, at the same time learning how to harness its vitality, its emotion, and its raw power with an intelligence that knows how to say yes and no to it. It must not be underestimated, says Lyall Watson, but it should not be given any more credit than it deserves, either. “Together we become formidable,” he says, or as Jung wrote, “we become whole.” “How can I be substantial,” Jung asked, “if I fail to cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also, if I am to be whole; and in as much as I become conscious of my shadow, I also remember that I am a human being like any other.” Putting it another way, he once asked: “But what if I should discover that the very enemy is within me, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved…what then?” It is in this light that we should not be surprised to discover that the shadow of our Judeo-Christian-Abrahamic teachings is both long and dark and that its negative impact on the natural world has been profound. For everything that is valuable about the teachings of these great religions, it is nevertheless essential that we do not shy away from examining that shadow. By facing up to it, we may discover that something in us is beginning to shed its skin.

I
n April 1970, a landmark symposium was held in Claremont, California. Entitled “The Theology of Survival,” it was a challenge to the teachings of conventional theology, more especially its contribution to the environmental crises of our time. Analyst Edward Whitmont, in his book
Psyche and Substance
, summed up the proceedings thus:

It was generally agreed that the traditional Christian attitudes of the Old and New Testaments, namely, the rejection of the pagan belief in the divinity of nature and the consequent designation of man as the center, with all nature subservient to him, had significantly contributed to overpopulation, air and water pollution, and other ecological threats. By emphasizing the value of nature only as it contributes to man’s welfare, traditional theologies had tended to create an absolute gulf between man and nature.

We have paid a huge psychological price for the rejection of our socalled pagan beliefs—a price that can be readily translated as a loss of soul. As entomologist, sociobiologist, and Pulitzer-winning author E. O. Wilson says, this rejection “has caused the spirits our ancestors knew intimately to flee the rocks and the trees and then the distant mountains. They are now in the stars, where their final extinction is possible but improbable.”

We cannot escape our Western cultural roots and neither should we, for we are steeped in its values. In other words, it is not my intention to encourage a return to paganism, animism, or to the ancient doctrines of pantheism, which is the worship of many gods. Instead, I support the attitude of the Kalahari bushmen who remind us that all the animals say
one
thing—we are inseparable. However, I want to honor the legend of Pan, for that legend will not go away.

P
an was the pagan god of the woods and fields. A wild, irrational deity with the horns and hooves of a goat, he was believed to evoke sudden fear in solitary travelers in the wilderness, hence the origin of the word
panic
. And yet, in spite of his frightful qualities, Pan was also seen in a playful and positive light. He loved to play the pipes, also called the panpipes, and the nymphs who inhabited trees, streams, and caves were said to be his partners in dance. The embodiment of the eternal spirit of youth, he eventually came to be regarded as the representative of paganism and the personification of all Nature.

The name Pan literally means “all,” and because pantheism was a doctrine that denied the existence of God as a personality in favor of God as an expression of Nature, it is easy to see why it was to become the enemy of a monotheistic Judeo-Christian church that was anxious to replace it with the teachings of an invisible, masculine God and in whose image we alone, the human animal, are made.

As the story goes, it is said that at the time of Christ’s birth, a mysterious voice was heard in the Greek Isles announcing that the great Pan was dead. The battle lines between the teachings of those who believed in the soul of Nature and those who believed in the spirit of an invisible, monotheistic God, had not only been drawn, but a victory for the latter proclaimed.

And then came the Nicene Creed. A little over a thousand years ago, in the year 869, in the ancient city of Constantinople the all-male principals of the Holy Catholic Church finalized what we know today as the Nicene Creed—the formal and final statement of the chief tenets of Christian belief as adopted by a previous Council in the city of Nicaea eighty-two years previously. On that day, at that meeting in Constantinople, says psychologist and writer James Hillman, soul finally lost its dominion. “Our notion of a tripartite cosmos of spirit, soul and body, devolved into a dualism of spirit (or mind) and body (or matter).” Soul as an image of depth, darkness, warmth, moistness, and animation, in short—creativity and femininity—was displaced, or rather, incorporated into the more masculine-orientated notion of spirit. Hillman continues, “What the Constantinople Council did to soul, rejecting this image, only culminated a long process beginning with Paul, the Saint, of substituting and disguising, and, forever after, confusing soul with spirit.”

Spirit and soul are not the same. Like the rows of thorns on the ziziphus, they anticipate each other. They are complementary opposites. Spirit is cool, pointed, and soaring. It gives us wings. Soul is Earthbound and warm. It gives us roots. It loves the Earth and everything that comes out of it. Soul knows about the shadow. And as any-one involved in healing will tell you, the wounds of the spirit are most often healed by soul.

I
n the psyche as it is in the world “out there,” what we subdue, deny, and dominate comes back to us—if we let it. If we don’t, it comes back at us. It is evident, in spite of the Nicene Creed and the long history of attempts to negate the pagan belief in animal deities, the image and influence of animals in the human psyche refuse to go away. As biblical scholar Louis Charbonneau-Lassay wrote,

Our unconscious bond with animals might explain why the fantastic stories of animals, birds and trees brought back to the West by the first great world travelers of the second half of the Middle Ages were so rapidly taken over by the Western symbolists to represent the gifts of God and even Christ himself.

It may also explain the shared and troubled visions of the seventh-century Hebrew prophet Ezekiel and the evangelist Saint John, both of whom saw the coming to life of four animals in the mysterious crown of Christ:

And the first beast was like a lion and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had the face of a man and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle. And they were saying holy, holy, holy—which was and is and is to come.

Is it any wonder that these visionaries were troubled? Is it any wonder that we have established societies to prevent cruelty to these creatures—these second-class citizens of human society? And is it too much to suppose that the core of the modern feminist as well as the environmental movements of our day are the inevitable psychological rebellion against the long-standing negation and oppression of soul?

W
hen the great myth of Pan is reviewed, it should become clear that the pagan god of the wild did not die at all. Instead, he went underground. His hiding place, for the past two thousand years, has been in the shadowy depths of the human psyche. Psychologically, the death of Pan can be interpreted as the repression of the instinctive, spontaneous, raw, or wild parts of the psyche that occurred with the rise of a monotheistic consciousness. Great Pan did not really die, however, for nothing in the psyche dies. Like molecular particles, which can be changed but not destroyed, ideas can be repressed, yes, but extinguished…no.

It is well known, in analytical work, that that which we reject we project, and in this light, says social scientist and naturalist Herbert Schroeder, it is no wonder that the horned and hoofed image of Pan was so easily incorporated into the Christian mythology of Satan. This tells us that when a natural archetype such as Pan is repressed, it becomes part of our shadow, only to reappear in a negative form outside of us, as the great enemy, a source of danger, suffering, and evil. In the case of Pan, however, the inner psychic struggle between instinct and consciousness, between our biology and what we might become, was then projected beyond the concept of Satan to the outer world of soul and Nature—the playing fields of Pan. What ensued has been an ongoing, archetypal battle between Light and Darkness, with wild nature, including the wild parts of ourselves, cast in the role of Darkness, a phenomenon to be conquered, civilized, and subdued.

The history of colonialism bears testimony to this claim, an example of which is the 1492 “discovery” of America by Columbus, the same year that Jews, by royal edict, were evicted from Spain. Barry Lopez writes “a process was set in motion that would lead to the incredible sixteenth-century atrocities by the conquistadors against the natives of the New World.” It was against those who lived close to Nature and to the animals. These atrocities were not confined to the Americas, by the way, but to almost every country where indigenous people were deemed by those who colonized them to be heathen, pagan, and in need of conversion to
their
way of thinking and to
their
notions of Nature and of God.

And what about the notion of Man as the apex of creation? A clue as to the perpetuation of this inflated belief can be found in the twenty-eighth verse of the first chapter of Genesis: be fruitful and multiply and replenish the Earth and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the face of the Earth.

At great cost, not only to ourselves but to the environment, we have taken this admonition all too literally. Looked at critically, it can be seen as an admonition for survival, and not without profound biological undertones either. It tells us that the enemy is out there, that we are the in-group, the champions, the blessed, and the inheritors of the Earth. It has played right into our genetically driven needs for territory, rank, status, security, esteem, attachment, and belonging—us versus them. Inevitably, it has reinforced the inf lated belief that human beings are at the cutting edge of creation. But it has done more. It has defined the other as different, to be subdued, and there-fore less than us. We have tended to regard the importance of “every living thing that moveth upon the Earth” not according to the intrinsic worth of all living things, but according to how useful they are to us. We have forgotten not only the meaning we derive from them, but, more importantly, the profound inf luence they have in our lives as soul makers.

If there was indeed a voice from the Greek Isles announcing that the great Pan was dead, how different is it from that of the eighteenth-century philosopher Nietzsche (1844–1900) who, in his book
Joyous
Wisdom
, shockingly announced “God is dead!” What did he mean and, in the light of an ecological intelligence, what—if anything—is its significance? Could it be that the voice of Pan is being heard once more, this time in the psyche of the human animal, telling us that the animals are within us, that every living thing is an expression of God and that we are the keepers of our zoo? For me, analyst Edward Edinger answers this question beautifully: “God has fallen out of heaven, and into the psyche of man. Each individual is now obliged to find his or her own unique relation to the numinosum.” In other words, each individual must find his or her own relationship to the religious experience. Then there is writer Thomas Elsner, who sees the “death of God” as the beginning of individuation in Jung’s sense of the word, and also the beginning of a process of transformation and a renewal of the God image itself. The “death of God” then, is the shedding of a skin.

I
t is time to shed our prejudices against things that are wild, untamed, or unconverted—more especially our animal nature. Historically, almost every animal—from the fabulous beasts, the phoenix, sphinx and centaur, to birds, sea creatures, insects, and domestic animals—has, in some way, struck a chord in the human psyche. How can we forget them? They are on our family crests and they are in our dreams. More than forty constellations in the southern night sky are named after them, and every other sports team has its animal totem.