The Myth of the
Ancient Europeans as Wise Stewards
Followers of the modern Earth religions, such as Neo-Druidism, often invest the ancients—including the ancient Indo-European peoples—with the attribute of enlightened stewardship of the natural environment. Often a general degradation of this attribute is laid on the influence of Christianity, with its all-too-real doctrine of human dominion over the Earth and its creatures. But, for those Pagans interested in learning from the wisdom teachings of pre-Christian cultures, it is important to be able to look at the reality of ancient land stewardship among European cultures, good and bad.
The unfortunate overarching reality is that human beings in general have tended to overexploitation upon entering new ecosystems or discovering new natural resources. Paleontology has revealed a sobering and nearly universal truth about early humans: in almost every case, upon entering a new continent, people have hunted almost all the large mammals (and even large birds) to extinction in remarkably short order. Certain animals with attributes lending themselves to husbandry have been spared at times (especially with the dawn of agriculture), but the sad fact remains that human beings—having few serious predators to control their own numbers—have all too often shown little ability to foresee the effects of their actions on their own resources, animal or otherwise. Deforestation has been a similar legacy of human settlement in all too many places.
Neo-Pagans have tended to focus—with justification—on the ways in which ancient peoples have encoded and reinforced the demanding cycles of agriculture and animal husbandry in mythology, calendar customs, and religious rituals. This connection with the living Land on a sacred level is both attractive and healing for people in technological cultures who feel divorced from the essential vitality of the earth. However, in addition to emulating these truly worthy attributes of ancient cultures, we can…and should…be conscious of the lessons to be learned from the more destructive and irrational behaviors of our forebears. At the very least, we can learn from this consideration that human beings in all ages have embodied some of the same negative characteristics that technological Man has and come to understand that they are not just modern problems, but deeply human problems.
In his recent book, Collapse, biologist/geographer Jared Diamond spends considerable time on the demise of the Norse colonies in North America (“Vinland”) and Greenland. He contrasts the failure of these early Christian era Indo-Europeans (barely removed from the Pagan era and still living in a society embodying what is often termed a “Heroic” ethos, such as is extolled in Pagan myth and legend) with the success in the same territories of their fellow immigrants, the Inuit peoples.
To judge solely by passages in the Norse sagas of Iceland, one would assume that the Vikings entered new lands with deference to the local spirits (“landwights”) and, by extension, with an implied humility toward the power of the new environment over human enterprise. Diamond’s book, however, shows us a reality removed from this idealized picture—a reality modern polytheists would do well to consider. Though much of the failure of the Norse colonies can be laid at the feet of increasing economic demands posed by the expansion of institutional Christianity, Diamond’s picture is of a society-wide arrogance, an unwillingness to bend custom to the realities of environment. In particular, he is able to demonstrate that the Norse had exposure to successful hunting and fishing techniques employed by the Inuits, but seemingly willfully refrained from employing them. The Inuits, Diamond stresses, were not native to Greenland and its fauna any more than were the Norse. Culturally, however, they proved to be operating in a manner less centered on human institutions (such as a religious or political elite) and—perhaps out of long experience with demanding environments—more responsive to the demands of the Land.
Diamond’s book explores many successes and failures down through the ages and around the globe, from the enigma of Easter Island to modern Montana. It is a fascinating cautionary tale about the interlocking causes of social collapse. For modern ancestral-focused Pagans, it is a clear-eyed look at the past and a must read. In our practice of Neo-Druidism, harmony with the Land is a central mystery, to be reinforced in ritual, and the collapse of ancient cultures who found themselves at odds with their surroundings provides a lesson as to why this is not just spiritually uplifting, but ultimately a matter of survival.
Todd Covert - October 2006