The Separation of Human from Nature; Man from Women
Following our latest blog post “Going Back in Time to Find the Root of Our Current Crisis”, we will, in a series of posts, shed light on The Journey of Separation that is a root cause of our current crisis. The following deep-dive centers around the separation of human from nature; man from women.
Around 500 years ago (the 15th and 16th century) the climate changed quite dramatically during what has been referred to as the Little Ice Age. Whilst climatologists debate the exact dates of the Little Ice Age and local conditions vary significantly, it seems that Europe experienced 80 years (approximately from 1460–1540) of heavy storms, harsh long winters, and cooler summers. This climate change significantly impacted living conditions and the ability to grow food, as rivers and canals (key transportation networks at that time) froze over and crops failed. Famines swept across large parts of the continent leaving people starving, sick, and malnourished — epidemics spread like wildfire. This caused social tensions people started to become scared, frustrated, and increasingly wary of the forces of nature.
During The Middle Ages there was a pervasive dogma of Christianity portraying God as separate from nature; above and beyond, His Creation — and The Church, made good use of the growing fears and mounting social tensions. Those who are afraid are easier to influence and control. In searching for a culprit for the tension and starvation, the Church began to frame the forces of nature as the workings of the Devil. And many women were seen as more in tune with the wisdom of nature — its healing properties, plant remedies, herbal medicines, cycles, and insights — those who practiced this connection to nature were framed as witches in close liaison with the Devil.
In 1485, Pope Innocent VIII ordered an official ‘witch hunt’, which lasted nearly 300 years. This was perceived as the only method to cleanse society of evil — to exterminate women who worshipped the ways of nature. Mass hysteria ensued, coinciding with the Church Reformation and the Thirty Year’s War. Europe experienced a time of great upheaval, out of which emerged a heightened sense of separation from nature. The Middle Ages, with its embedded cultural norms, gave way to a new worldview: God and Man were viewed as divorced from Nature and Woman.
Protestantism, Rationalism, and Empiricism were all on the rise and the Scientific Revolution was born. Great minds — Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, and many others — led the scientific and philosophic developments of the age, which helped solidify new societal views about man’s relationship with nature.
From the Scientific Revolution onwards, nature was commodified into forestry, fishery, agriculture, and mining. Meanwhile, women (as they were said to embody and ritualize nature) were positioned as unruly and wild, therefore lacking in rational-analytic capability and in need of control and domination. During the witch trials starting in 1485 and lasting almost 3 centuries, millions of women were tortured and interrogated and hundreds of thousands were killed and burned in front of children, neighbors, and friends to set an example that being in tune with nature was no different from working with the Devil.
This widening separation and near complete severance of connection to our natural environment and our feminine essence caused us to turn our back on hundreds of thousands of years of deep integration with nature’s ways and equality between the genders. Within a matter of decades, both women and nature came to be seen as wild and devilish, in need of control. This was the beginning of the prioritization of masculine traits over feminine traits.
The period of the Scientific Revolution made great strides in material progress and scientific insight that we benefit greatly from today, yet this dis-connection from nature — our natural habitat — and domination of the feminine creates an imbalance in us as a collective and as individuals. A deep, deep wound, so to speak, that manifests as a psychic trauma within our species. This collective trauma and imbalance is the underlying cause of increasing fear, anxiety, egotism, individualism, and consumerism today — as well as the a separation of the inner from the outer, as we will explore in the next blog post.
- Giles Hutchins and Laura Storm
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Sources:
- Appleby, 1980
