Gratitude to Björk

​Biophilia and Paganism,
Panentheism and Polytheism

See Also "Back to the Garden: The Romantic Impulse in Popular Music"

​Biophilia
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“Welcome to Biophilia: A love for nature in all her manifestations. From the tiniest organism, to the greatest red giant floating in the farthest realm of the universe. With Biophilia comes a restless curiosity, an urge to investigate and discover the illusive places where we meet nature. Where she plays on our senses with colours and forms; perfumes and smells.”

The Biophilia Educational Project is a large-scale pilot project that builds on the participation of academics, scientists, artists, teachers and students at all academic levels. It is based around creativity as a teaching and research tool, where music, technology and the natural sciences are linked together in an innovative way.

The project presents an example of dynamic collaboration between different areas in society, such as the education system, cultural institutions, science and research institutes. It creates a platform for dialogue and debate which encourages both personal and social development, thereby contributing to a sustainable society where new approaches are actively explored.

-- Biophilic Education
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​On Being Pagan
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An Icelandic Pagan?  

I sure hope so, because the world needs diversity and pagans make the whole richer. I think God has a special love of pagans and hopes for more of them. What God likes so much is their spunkiness, their refusal to be pigeonholed by ideologies, their resistance to binaries, their delight in diversity, their acceptance of bodily life, their love of dance, and, above all, their biophilia.

Truth be told I hope that many Christians and Jews and Muslims become pagans, too, even as they - we -- retain allegiance to, and affection for, their chosen traditions.  Even if only for the sake of global climate change, we all need to be paganized or, at least, biophilicized.  

So how about Björk?  In her case the problem is complicated by that fact that celebrities have three selves: the flesh-and-blood self with children and ex-husbands and friends and personal problems; the self they become while performing a song; and their public image, which has a life of its own, partly created by their performances, by the media, and by their publicists.  What I know is that two of her selves have a pagan feel: the second self and the third self.

What is a pagan?  Here is how the Pluralism Project at Harvard puts it: 

"Over the course of human history, deities associated with human, animal, and plant fertility have been worshipped around the world. Some scholars and many Pagans believe that the “root religion” of humanity—the religion from which all other religions eventually evolved—must have been based around fertility and natural cycles, knowledge of which was necessary for survival." 

Let's say, then, that Pagans are people who want to partake of this root religion as they imagine it.  They may also partake of elements of the newer religions: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Daoism, for example; but they will reject the dominating or imperialistic aspects of those religions and they will emphasize a loyalty to life on Earth as a fundamental feature of ethics.  If they trust in a higher power, they will see that power as pointing them toward a love of the Earth, not away from it.  Animals and plants and other living beings may or may not be worshiped, but they will indeed be revered.  As will the spirits and the ancestors.  ​

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Why Be Pagan?

We can be open to the wisdom of the quaking aspen.

Pando Populus is a platform for people who care about big ideas and the Earth. Our aim is to create an ecological civilization. We’ve taken our name from the largest and oldest organism on the planet — a giant quaking aspen tree, spread over more than a hundred acres, thousands of years old, connected by a single root system.Various movements and organizations focus on one aspect or another of ecological concern. We endorse and celebrate their work.

-- Pando Populus

We can be loyal to the earth.

Today’s American Pagans can articulate many other ways their faith has contributed to contemporary society, such as environmental consciousness. Stewardship in Paganism does not rest on the claim of human dominion over the Earth, but on respect for all life as part of an interdependent web of relationships. Devotion to the Earth and to the land on which they live motivates many Pagans, and for them, its pollution is akin to the desecration of a sanctuary. Some Pagans enact human interconnectedness with the land through the cycle of the seasons and the ritual calendar; others seek to form relationships with the other-than-human beings that live around them by growing their own food, learning about the plants and animals of their bioregions, or simply spending time outdoors. Not surprisingly, many are avid environmentalists, actively working on programs to halt the degradation of the environment.

-- Excerpted from The Pluralism Project at Harvard University

We can take delight in diversity.

Contemporary Pagans are committed to diversity and to an understanding that all people—indeed every living thing—should be treated with reverence. Although Pagan communities, like other religious groups in America, sometimes struggle to fully address the needs of practitioners who are sexual minorities, differently abled, economically underprivileged, or members of other historically oppressed groups, conversations about all these topics are actively occurring in the Pagan movement.

-- Excerpted from The Pluralism Project at Harvard University

We can think holistically.

A second contribution Pagans make to the world today is a holistic view. Just as the tides ebb and flow and summer is no more sacred than winter, so it is with life, which includes both growth and decay. Light and darkness are both part of the cycle of the moon and the cycle of nature, each needing the other for completion. Some Pagans would affirm that honoring life and death, age and youth, dark and light undermines the deep divisions, the alienation, and the racism of modern society.

-- Excerpted from The Pluralism Project at Harvard University

We can open ourselves to rituals.

This tolerance for diversity is grounded in ethics. For some Pagans, ethics are based on the cultivation of personal virtues, shaped by a religious community that holds individuals morally accountable. Values such as community harmony, honor, courage, compassion, fairness, and strength are developed through ritual and group practices that emphasize relationship and personal responsibility. 

-- Excerpted from The Pluralism Project at Harvard University

We can be panentheistic.

​If it makes sense to us, we can believe that the universe unfolds inside a Life with consciousness of her own, and we can feel connected to that Life as a healing and nourishing source.  We can say, with Whitehead and process theologians, that everything is happening inside this Life even as She is more than everything that is happening.  We can trust that the Life is a force at work in the world, leading us into new life and beckoning us to by loyal to life itself; and as that inside us and everything else that helps bring new life out of death. It's called panentheism: everything is inside God even as God is more than everything.

-- Jay McDaniel

We can be feminists.

​In the end, Vulnicura plays out its tragedy and pushes beyond its boundaries. "Quicksand" spins beyond the album's frame on a drum and bass beat and the staccato push of a wordless female voice. "Our mother's philosophy, it feels like quicksand," Bjork snappily intones. She reflects upon the isolation of the abandoned woman and opts for something different for herself and her daughter: she turns the solitary "she is broken" of femininity's history into a loving "we," an invocation of the animist universalism she's espoused in songs ranging from "Isobel" to "Pagan Poetry" to the entire Biophilia project. "When we're broken we are whole," she sings, at home in the swirl. She calls for hope, not just for herself, but also for "my continuity, and my daughter's, and her daughter's, and her daughter's." The track abruptly cuts off, suggesting that this reclamation of the feminine heart is unfinished business. But that hope resonates. This sad story extends beyond itself, opening into something new.

-- Ann Powers on Bjork's 'Vulnicura': An Inquiry into Melodrama

We can renew ancient practices

Sometimes the most radical thinking leads to the effort to renew ancient practices long discarded. ​

We can reclaim the wisdom of biophilia.

There have been anthropocentric tendencies in most civilizations.  But none has been as systematic in this regard as that of the modern West.  The dualism of Descartes juxtaposes the human mind to everything else – even the human body. Animals are part of the world that is turned over to science for objective study.  They are not supposed to have any subjectivity.  Although Westerners, for the most part, do not really believe that animals have no subjectivity, our treatment of animals today, as we raise them for food, reflects this dominant theoretical position. Even those who call for avoiding the extinction of animal species typically provide only anthropocentric arguments.
            
Earlier I indicated the importance of reaffirming the marginal Enlightenment view of humanity as the crucial “we.”  This certainly cuts in the right direction on many issues, but it does not touch this one.  As long as serious and influential thought remains completely anthropocentric, the likelihood of real restraint in wiping out other creatures is slight.  This is true even when the consequences are obviously deleterious to us -- as in extreme overfishing of the oceans and damaging of its physical capacity to sustain marine life.

We need to expand the ideal of benevolence to all human beings to biophilia. Children have biophilic tendencies. These can be encouraged, whereas they are now taught to think of them as merely sentimental. A biophilic civilization can be a sustainable one.  

My own judgment is that biophilia needs a further support.  We need to understand life as a force present everywhere including in us.  It is not only what makes us alive, but also what heals many of our sicknesses and injuries. Of course, doctors do much to free it to do its work.  It is the same force that leads to more complex forms of life and finally to love and thought.  It is a force with which we can seek to align ourselves.  Whereas biophilia relates us well to particular living things, it is also important to devote ourselves to the service of this life force.  

I call it “God,” and see it as playing a role even beyond the living world.  But other labels are fine, if they draw forth the gratitude, love, and service of those who use them.  

​-- John Cobb

We can be honest to suffering.

​The metaphor opens up like a river to the sea of all humanity, everywhere.  We may not be besieged by war, but nevertheless we are besieged. We, like the trees, are products of nature. So, too, we are often ravaged by nature's force, by death and loss and illness.  Here is the world: the sudden death of a loved one—one day the world is sunny, the next, all is lost.  If we live long enough and deep enough, at some point in life, we will experience a quaking and breaking of everything we considered solid and sure.  Simply growing up means the quaking and breaking from one stage of development to another, until we reach maturity.  Growing old, with its gradual losses, feels like one felled tree after another.  And in the middle, between youth and old age, the quaking and breaking continues. 

-- Patricia Adams Farmer, The Quaking and Breaking of Everything

We can be a little melodramatic.

​Vulnicura brashly reveals the most intimate and sometimes embarrassing expressions of pain a lover makes when abandoned. But in its elegant, slow unfolding, it also creates a space to observe those outbursts and recoveries. This album is an inquiry into melodrama, and if its songs demand that the listener get uncomfortably close to the viscera of that romantic experience, they do so the better to expose how humans move through pain and finally justify leaving it behind.

Melodrama is a feminine form, the designated space where domestic and erotic stories can turn grandly operatic. We associate it with bodice-ripper novels and Technicolor movies in which beauties wear their anguish openly, without shame; overwrought stories, maybe, but ones that have always filled in the gaps between relentlessly macho tales of crime, politics and war. In recent years, women artists and some empathetic men have reclaimed melodrama in ways that make it both more introspective and more clearly critical of the gender divisions that required its existence in the first place.

This music sounds like the abandonment of ego — not conventional melodrama's self-sacrifice, but something more spiritual and sublime. It is Bjork's way out, and back into, human feeling.

-- Ann Powers on Bjork's 'Vulnicura': An Inquiry into Melodrama

We can be ourselves.

​Finally, most Pagans are pluralistic and individualistic, believing that there are many valid religious paths, and that personal religious experience is the most important source of spiritual knowledge.

Panentheistic Polytheism

Process theologians partake of many sensibilities.  Many are monotheistic, or at least panentheistic.  They believe that the universe is enfolded within a living Unity, with subjectivity of its own, whose very body is the universe itself.   They speak of this living Unity as God. 

Pagan process theologians will be a bit suspicious of this idea.  They are all too familiar with what some call “the myth of monotheism.”  The myth of monotheism is a mindset into which many monotheists fall, which overemphasizes unity at the expense of diversity.  It easily lapses into the idea that, since there is one god, there must also be one book, one ‘normal’ way of being human, one sacred book, and one path to salvation.  Even panentheists can lean in this direction. This is why one of the most beloved passages in Whitehead’s Process and Reality is as follows:

It is as true to say that God is one and the World many, as that the World is one and God many.

True, the passage speaks of God as one.  But it also speaks of God as many.  For the pagan, this very passage is a lure for feeling: that is, a lure to imagine and feel devoted to the manyness of God.  This manyness includes the radical plurality of the universe itself: the many entities and energies.  The many entities are by no means limited to biophysical entities: plants and animals and people with visible bodies.  They can also include other kinds of entities, whose actualities inhabit other regions of the extensive continuum, available to perception through feeling and imagination.  Divine manyness can include gods and goddesses, understood as windows to the divine and agents in their own right.  A process paganism will see all of these entities as divine in a sense, as expressions of the manyness of God, however understood.  It will be a polytheistic panentheism.