Back to Eden
The yearning for re-enchantment
The New Mindscape #7–3.
Avatar is a very religious film. It shows the contrast between an enchanted world — the animist world of the Na’vi — and the disenchanted, materialist world of the human corporation. It dramatises the clash between these two ontologies or operating systems.[1]
Now, why is this film one of the most popular films ever produced? The reason is that it says something about people’s spiritual sensitivity and spiritual imagination. It’s not only because of the action in the film — there are so many other good action films. When we watch this film, we usually take the side of the Na’vi, who are the good people. We don’t identify with the humans or the Corporation. We love the Na’vi, and want to be like the Na’vi.
In essence, this film is talking about our own dreams, spiritual imagination, and struggles inside our own mindscapes when we live in a disenchanted, materialist world. We are somehow dissatisfied with that. Instead, we yearn for something else — a kind of enchantment, a deep and sacred connection with the world around us.
Although Avatar is a recent film, it reflects an old theme in Western mythology. It goes all the way back to the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were living in bliss. They were so close to God — the world of pure nature. They were there, in a blissful, divine garden. Then, they fell into sin, and were expelled from the garden due to their eating of the fruit of the tree of human knowledge — human concepts, ideas and desires. Then, the life of suffering began. They had to become farmers, build their own life, toil and work so hard. Isn’t that similar to the story of Avatar? The idea that we once lived in a state of spiritual purity, then, owing to an egotistical quest for knowledge, we ate of the tree of knowledge and were kicked out of paradise, and fell into the world of material needs, suffering and sin.
There is a comparable idea in Daoist thought, in the contrasting notions of xiantian 先天 (pre-natal) and houtian 后天 (post-natal) in which, in the process of life, through our egotistical desires and impure acts, we gradually drift away from our essential, spiritual xiantian nature — the uncarved block — a drift into turbidity and decline which leads unto death. In a sense, Daoism also has the idea of going back to the Daoist ‘Eden’ — the world of the Immortal fairies or the world before birth — the world in which we are truly who we are, connected to our divine essence.
In both the Biblical and Daoist accounts, there is the idea that somehow, in our quest for material knowledge and civilization, we have lost our true selves. The idea is that our true self or soul is somehow connected to Dao or to God, to the world of the uncarved block, that hasn’t been polluted or corrupted — carved up by all these greedy and complex human ideas.
The theme comes again in the 18th-century European Enlightenment, in the image of the “noble savage,” made famous by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. When Europeans went out exploring the Earth, they encountered and conquered tribes which they considered savage and uncivilized, and plundered their lands, just as the humans are doing to the Navis in Avatar. Most thinkers considered that this was the proof of the superior civilization of the Europeans, and justified forcing them to abandon their way of life to adopt European culture.[2]
But Rousseau disagreed; he concluded that material civilisation had corrupted us, made us clever, crafty, dishonest, and inhumane [3]. Therefore, we should forget the man-made culture. Instead, we should go back to primitive simplicity — just to be like these tribal people, wild and pure. Rousseau and others felt that these “savages” living simple lives had something in them, a purity, an authenticity, a humble simplicity which we, as modern people, have lost. So we have an inner conflict, the guilt of the civilized man, who pushes forward in the quest for power and knowledge, but wonders if he is losing his soul in the process, and feels guilty about it.
The Na’vi are comparable to Adam and Eve in the garden, before the original sin. The people in the Corporation are human sinners, who have become disconnected from the garden, from the divine reality, from God, or from Dao. They cut themselves off, and have become very greedy. In a sense, Avatar is telling the same story again. This story is about an attempt to go back to Eden — we fell out of the garden and are dreaming of going back.
The story in Avatar is inspired by real-life conflicts between mining companies and tribal societies in the forests of the Amazon in Brazil, Peru and Venezuela. The culture of the Navi is loosely inspired by anthropological accounts of these tribal societies’ beliefs, and the film is inspired by the conflicts between modern mining companies and the indigenous people of the Amazon.
This clash presented in Avatar, is, to be sure, extreme. The Navis are idealized, humans are demonized. The resolution of the conflict, with the Navis simply booting the humans out, is unrealistic. Although Avatar does a good job at presenting a stark contrast between materialist and animist operating systems, which can help us to clarify the differences between them, it really says nothing about how to solve the conflict or reconcile the two. Are the material and spiritual dimensions of life so fundamentally opposed to each other? Is there no way to enjoy the fruits of material civilization while maintaining our spiritual essence? Are there not many people, movements and governments who are working ceaselessly to end global warming, to fight against disease and poverty, to protect indigenous people, to seek for spiritual solutions? Does this not show that humans are capable of upholding a spiritual worldview in the midst of an advanced material civilization?
One of the main themes of Avatar is thus the clash between spiritual and materialist worldviews. The clash between the humans and Navis reflects our own inner conflict, the conflict between our material desires and our spiritual aspirations, and that is one reason why the film has been so popular. It is a conflict that we experience in our own hearts and minds as individuals, and a conflict that we see in so many social issues today, whether it’s global warming, the rights of indigenous people, the protection of nature, and so on.
The clash between the spiritual and the material is an old theme in religious history. There is an old prophecy of the Zoroastrian religion of Iran, from two or three thousand years ago, which says that the development of humanity will go through three stages.[4]
The first stage is one of undifferentiation, like the primordial chaos 混沌 of Daoism, in which there is no clear distinction between the material and the spiritual. This corresponds to most primal and archaic human societies, in which the entire culture is enchanted and suffused with the sacred. Then, in the second stage, there is a struggle between duality, between the spiritual and the material. This began at what many scholars have called the “Axial Age”, around 700–200 BC, when in different parts of the world, prophets, wise men and philosophers — Zoroaster, Buddha, Socrates, Laozi, Confucius — all appeared and taught about transcendent spiritual principles, about the spiritual reality and life of the individual, and strongly contrasted a spiritual orientation with a life of material desires [5]. Since then, many religious traditions have advocated leaving this world, going into a monastery, into a cave, in order to leave the material world and live a purely spiritual life. But in the third stage of the Zoroastrian prophecy, a new unity is attained, the spiritual and the material are integrated at a higher level.
Many people hope for such a unity at a higher level. Some scholars say that we are entering a new “axial age”, a new phase of spiritual and religious transformation [6]. Perhaps this new phase will represent a search for a higher unity, as in the third stage of the Zoroastrian vision. Today, we have lost the balance between our spiritual and material lives. We know that we can’t continue in a society dominated by the uncontrolled pursuit of wealth and power, but we know that we can’t become Navis, nor do we really want to. We know that an extreme pursuit of spiritual worlds, ignoring material reality, would be dangerous as well. So how do we find a balance?
[1] Bron Taylor, 2010. Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future. Berkeley: University of California Press. See here for introductory chapter on the “religion and politics of Avatar.”
[2] Cro, Stelio. The noble savage: Allegory of freedom. Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, 1990.
[3] Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origins of Inequality among Men, 1755. Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co, 1992.
Zhang, Q. (2016). Primitive Freedom and Human Dignity in Daoism: A Comparison with Rousseau. In: Human Dignity in Classical Chinese Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-70920-5_6
[4] Cohn, Norman. Cosmos, chaos, and the world to come: the ancient roots of apocalyptic faith. Yale University Press, 2001.
[5] Jaspers, Karl. “The Axial Age of Human History.” Commentary 6 (1948): 430.
[6] Du Toit, Cornel W. “Human uniqueness on the brink of a new axial age: From separation to reintegration of humans and nature.” HTS: Theological Studies 72, no. 4 (2016): 1–9.
This essay and the New Mindscape Medium series are brought to you by the University of Hong Kong’s Common Core Curriculum Course CCHU9014 Spirituality, Religion and Social Change, with the support of the Asian Religious Connections research cluster of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
