For by far the greatest portion of modern human history, we lived in bands, nomadic or at least seasonally migrant, hunting and gathering for sustenance, as intimately linked to the earth as the deer and the wolves. For the last 30,000 years or more, humans have practiced what we call modern culture, with the complexity of art, technology and language which is characteristic of all the known historical cultures of the planet. Until 10,000 years ago or less, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was universal, as was the practice of tribal shamanism and a spiritual consciousness of our place on the Earth.
Modern paganism traces back to those belief systems. To many people this time, the time of modern pre-agricultural humans, the palaeolithic as anthropologists label it, seems remote, yet there are groups who practiced a palaeolithic lifestyle into recent decades. The consciousness of these people is still with is in many ways, though much obscured by the millenia of imperialism, centuries of industrialization and the wanton destruction of many traditional cultures which has accelerated especially since the last World War.
But modern humans evolved in palaeolithic hunter-gatherer societies for the great majority of their time on Earth. Our bodies evolved to consume the plants and animals found all around us, on whichever continent we lived, and our minds and psyches were formed around the campfires in tribal societies where each human had value, where extensive social support systems buttressed our lives, where we lived with an understanding of our place on the Earth and our relationship to the other creatures and living energies of the planet.
We have some evidence of the consciousness of those earliest palaeolithic times. Cave paintings, rock paintings, artistic works and craft items from around the world show us the importance of the spirits of the Earth to the lives of our ancestors. From the moose-hunting cultures of Siberia to the African rock painters (whose probable descendents are the San people of southern African desert areas), we see the interconnectedness of humans with what we today call “nature” in a way that is lost to the urbanized, chemically-dependent and socially atomized citizen of today’s nation-states.
We also can see that the Earth remains with us. The same species of animals and plants are there, and we need only take a few steps off the sidewalks of our civilization to be among the trees and creatures known so well to our ancestors. Our disconnectedness is one of mind...for we eat food grown in the soil of the Earth, breathe the same atmosphere inhaled and exhaled by our ancestors and hear the voices of the same birds calling from their perches. We might say that we have been told a big lie, told it so often that it seems obvious to us, yet it is false. The lie is that our lives depend on the political, economic and social forces who exercise power; that is to say, we owe our existence to society, to the imperial society which has usurped most of our lives.
Just as surely as the Medieval European peasant owed fealty to an aristocrat, we today are held in peonage to a system of centralized power and exploitation. We must thank a boss for giving us a job, we must depend on industrially-produced consumer products for our survival, we must support a system of power which maintains those producers in control... But the birds sing on, the worms crawl through the soil, the deer dance in the woods. Why are we so alienated from this ancient life that is still being lived all around us?
Historians make much of the transition to agriculture, but it was the later transition to a state (imperial) society which actually constituted the greater transformation of our lives. The earliest farmers continued to recognize the importance of the Earth spirits, and the tribal cultivators lived similarly in harmony with their fellows and with the Earth, a harmony broken in both respects by the forced allegiance to state and empire which would pit army against army and affix to the land a “title” of ownership which integrated it not with the local hunter or cultivator, but with the rich, the powerful, those who would rape the Earth for profit, from Babylon to California.
We have rediscovered the connection that once existed between all humans and the Earth upon which we have all lived. The spirits of tree and creature, wind and sea, rock and fire still speak with us. A life lived in harmony with them is still possible. As I learned from anthropologists that there were no “primitive” mentalities, that all cultures were inherently logical and coherent, I learned from being among members of surviving traditional cultures that their worldview was as valid and moreso than that of the metropoles, and I followed this logic to realize that there was more to these cultures than a knowledge of how to hunt deer and plant seeds. Their spiritual perspectives, their cognitive lives, their social realities and their cultural evolution were the paths we should be following instead of the endless seeking after new technologies, new styles and new paradigms.
Coyote and other spirit guides still speak to us. The Earth still yields her secrets to the seeker. The human animal may continue to evolve and survive in the context of this consciousness. That is what it means to be a neo-pagan today, to attempt a return to shamanism, to try to get in tune with the Earth. While for many of us in today’s society this journey may have begun as no more than an attempt to grow our own marijuana or to go camping somewhere where the scenery was nice, for those of us who have managed to notice and take seriously the voices and influences emanating from the Earth, a return to sanity and to the true course of human history and prehistory has occurred.
I am one of these travellers. I have walked this path for tens of thousands of years, and I have found my way out of the morass and back onto the path again. I hope many of you will do the same. The information on these pages is designed to help you by providing information and leads, and to help me by forcing me to consolidate and reconfirm my thoughts and beliefs as I attempt to clarify and explain to you the visitors.
Please share what information you may feel like sharing. And don’t hesitate to ask questions. I will help anyone I am able to help, and I will gratefully accept whatever assistance you may profer. May the stars guide your footsteps.
