“3. Sacred Waters, Sacred Earth: Contemporary Paganism inside Extinction Rebellion; A Relational Analysis of Protest Death Rituals” in “Extinction and Religion”
Contemporary Paganism inside Extinction Rebellion: A Relational Analysis of Protest Death Rituals
INTRODUCTION
In this chapter, I address the interface between religion and extinction by looking at protest rituals in extinction activism and their connections with Contemporary Paganism as a post-Christian new religious movement. My focus here on protest death rituals arises from the way Extinction Rebellion (XR) rituals use images that symbolize death to “talk” about extinction. In this guise, protest death rituals become a modality for exploring extinction at the boundaries of death, particularly because extinction, like climate change, is simply too vast to represent. By examining XR’s eco-protest rituals and representations in connection to one of its key countercultural roots, Contemporary Paganism, I address questions about religion and the valuation of nature and the planet while offering a theoretical model of relational analysis for investigating ritual. I show that the use of death rituals and funeral rhetoric in XR engages protesters and their audience with a complex symbolism intersecting a wide array of themes at the boundary of death, such as illness, healing, vulnerability, murder or the culpability for murder, suicide, sacrifice, and the absence of memorialization. This investigation will shed light not only on the Contemporary Pagan and Christian heritages in XR but also on the possibility of ritual to challenge, provoke, and empower us to contemplate and hopefully avoid extinction.
The dramatic arrival on the British and global eco-protest scene of the highly ritualistic and performative XR movement in 2018 was amplified by the preceding period of dormancy inside the climate movement that followed the 2015 Paris Climate Accords. Although XR looked in many ways like a repackaging of the older climate movement—the one that emerged in Britain in 20051—much had changed. The colors on its mast had been changed from pale blues and greens to deep reds and black. The annual Day of Climate Action became the daily climate action. Its old poster animal, the polar bear, had been retired and exchanged for a new poster animal, the human: human skulls, human bodies floating in water, unborn humans drowned in oil.
Eco-Paganism, a key subculture in Contemporary Paganism, is dispersed inside the XR movement; a core Eco-Pagan methodology developed during the 1990s road protests2—nonviolent direct action (NVDA)—is now at the heart of XR. Moreover, as (I would argue) a post-Christian movement, Contemporary Paganism is in a dynamic relationship with Christian theology and praxis.3 This is shown in several ways—in the intricate syncretic links within the contemporary Green Christian movement,4 as well as in the common roots of the nineteenth-century Romantic movement and twentieth-century Celtic revival.5 It is thus no wonder that we find at the more mystical end of the Green Christian spectrum, such as the Forest Church movement, a tangible Contemporary Pagan material culture made up of worshiping in nature, summoning or meditating on the elements during rituals, hosting rituals near waters and involving bodies of water, or connecting to the Earth by walking barefoot.6
XR’s roots can be traced back to the British and transatlantic 1960s counterculture, the antinuclear protests of the 1970s and 1980s, and the road protests of the 1990s. When I first started investigating the climate movement in 2008, I had found an “open plan” Green spirituality and Celtic and Indigenous material culture that had visible influences from Contemporary Paganism; protest actions were organized according to the elements (earth, air, fire, water), Celtic-inspired dragons were being crafted and processed inside protest camps, and activists danced for the Bolivian fertility goddess, Pachamama.7 Building on scholarly work on British Contemporary Paganism,8 I offer here a discussion of Contemporary Paganism inside the XR movement in the United Kingdom, both as an inherited ethos through the historical roots of eco-protest culture and as a contemporary influence on eco-protest rituals in relation to two core ritualized cosmological categories: sacred waters and sacred Earth. This chapter draws on empirical studies, scholarly findings, and my own theoretical model for examining ritual to investigate public protest rituals gathered during my recent ethnographic work inside XR (2019–2022).
Contemporary Pagans’ beliefs and practices about death are often portrayed in comparative scholarship as being in contrast with Christian, post-Christian, and Western attitudes, whereby Pagans accept death and decay as ordinary and natural while not necessarily ruling out the hope of life continuing in some form after death.9 Yet such beliefs would clearly clash with the symbolism of what I call here protest death rituals. This tension leads to a cascade of questions: How are protest death rituals used in XR, and what can they tell us about extinction? Moreover, what can they tell us about religion in a post-Christian society? What exactly is the relationship between funeral rites and Contemporary Pagan and Christian/post-Christian attitudes toward death and extinction? Can funeral rites help the protesters and their audience and media contemplate extinction?
I begin by proposing a relational analysis approach to ritual and a discussion of death rituals. I follow this with a scholarly examination of XR’s dual Contemporary Pagan and Christian inheritance, which will provide a basis for discussing wider cultural attitudes in Britain and beyond toward the sacredness of bodies of water and of the Earth.
WHAT CAN RITUAL TELL US? A RELATIONAL ANALYSIS OF RITUAL
An examination of ritual can offer us a unique perspective of the influences and directions inside the XR movement. Ritual can be investigated as a “type of communication” that enables experiments with alternative outcomes and power dynamics.10˝ My approach for analyzing rituals, as well as other performative and representational actions in my field of research, combines a biosemiotics approach to stories—which includes the ritual story—with relational identity theory.11 First, biosemiotic and ecosemiotic approaches to culture understand stories and rituals to be intricately connected with the landscape,12 given that place itself is produced by stories and in turn generates stories. Second, relational identity theorists postulate that our identity consists of the sum of our relationships,13 with those key central relationships with caregivers shaping later relationships through different identity repertoires. However, I have argued that our surroundings, nature, and the landscape—waters, fields, cities, skyscapes—are also part of our relational identity. We form relationships with our home, our garden, our immediate landscape, or the sky in a very material fashion; these are places of refuge, rest, comfort. Moreover, we also form relationships with imagined places and remembered places through story and rituals. Therefore, an ecological approach to relational identity should consider how stories and in particular rituals enable the extension of our identities by forging new relationships with both real and imagined places and landscapes.14
My model proposes that discourses about invoked and evoked landscapes or skyscapes—be these stories, prayers, or rituals—construct relational identities and can be understood as narratives of empowerment. These narratives can be viewed, from the perspective of biosemiotics and relationality, as modalities to establish a place-identity connection, whether these landscapes are imagined or real, invoked or evoked. The cosmological elements in stories and rituals about the Earth and sky shape our relational identities and power relations, acting as narratives of empowerment that define and redefine our place and relationships with what surrounds us. We thus examine the relationships inside the ritual space—the relationships with other humans, nonhumans, real and imagined places and landscapes—while asking the following questions: What do these relationships reveal for the key actants in the story—the officiant, celebrant, or those represented inside the ritual space? What do the relationships represented inside the ritual space imply for the nonactants in the ritual—the onlookers, the audience, the congregation? When we investigate the relationships described by the semiotics of ritual space, we can find that rituals can be surprisingly similar and thus easily understandable or translatable in a post-Christian society. For example, I found that climate activists used coal or a symbol for fossil fuels, such as black molasses, in many of their ritual and performative spaces. In one XR protest I observed, held in North Somerset in 2019, activists poured black oil on a globe situated in front of a poster that said “12 years to Mass Extinction.” I interpreted this placing of a negative charge inside the center of the performative or ritual space as a challenge to authority; by polluting the central space or at times altar, activists engaged in reclaiming this center and redressing their own (traditionally) marginal, countercultural status. Their marginal status is linked to the early beginnings of the Green movement. Although on one hand, the climate movement is a self-identified middle-class movement, thus enjoying a privileged status, the hippies in Britain have been marginalized, ridiculed, and vilified since the 1960s and even earlier and surprisingly continue to be ridiculed in “mainstream” circles.15
Ritual offers a delineated space where such an analysis can be (more easily) done, yet we can investigate any discourse for the relationships it displays and their implications for actants and nonactants. Given that one of the XR rituals I will discuss is a protest ritual at the Bath Spa “sacred” spring, I would like to first discuss the meaning of sacred spring if we apply the model of analysis I propose here. First, sacred springs in our secular society can be investigated in connection with a multitude of concepts, including religion, ethnicity, natural heritage, pilgrimage, belonging, ecological values, globalization, local economies, tourism, health industries, and so on. For example, in my native Romania, Techirghiol Lake, whose Turkish name—meaning “striped lake”—was connected with Marian veneration during the Ottoman Empire,16 is considered to have healing properties even today and supports a quasimystical health and cosmetic industry. In contrast, the Bath Spa spring, the United Kingdom’s only thermal spring, makes an important case study for examining secularization in Britain given that in the United Kingdom, important bodies of water progressively lost their official status as holy or healing waters after the nineteenth century, owing to increasing secularization. As I will show here, Contemporary Pagans in the United Kingdom have reclaimed certain bodies of water as sacred—such as the Chalice Well in Glastonbury—but the Bath Spa springs are not as easily accessible, as they are contained by a museum. Thermae Bath Spa, the health spa in Bath that also makes use of the thermal springs, represents the equivalent relic for the healing discourses of the Bath springs. In the United Kingdom, these waters are not presented as miraculous or healing but are connected to discourses of physical, mental, and emotional well-being.
To understand how the word sacred is used in relation to the Bath springs, we can engage in a relational analysis by considering how their status is constructed in conjunction with actant and nonactant relationships. For example, the Bath Spa springs are presented as sacred in promotional online material produced by Thermae Bath Spa: “Where the Cross Bath now stands, the Celts revered their goddess Sul, in whose honor the Romans named their spa town Aquae Sulis. The Cross Spring is now recognized as an official sacred site.”17 In a contrasting example, a website for the equivalent of a health spa at Techirghiol Lake notes that the “spa treatments [were] considered to be miraculous and unique in Europe, [their] key factor is the mud from Techirghiol Lake, a result of the fauna and flora of the lake.”18 What is immediately apparent about these contrasting examples of promotional materials about sacred waters from the United Kingdom and Romania is that the relationships that justify the sacredness of the waters are different: in the United Kingdom, the Romans and the Celts are an invocation of the powerful and represent the authority of heritage. Interestingly, in Romania—which has been in this millennium (mostly) an enthusiastic supporter and beneficiary of the European Union—“Europe” represents this connection with power and credibility. In both cases, the sacred is constructed by connecting the waters with particular people who used the waters—people who can be trusted because of their past and present power. This reflects the more general trends toward secularization and the passing of important “sacred” places into a sense of shared heritage.19
Before going any further and attempting to investigate protest death rituals in the XR movement, I would like to examine death rituals. Death rituals are different from other types of rituals, and this becomes clear when we employ the relational analysis I discussed earlier. Before we look at how these protest rituals are used, we need to first understand why death rituals are used inside the XR movement.
WHAT CAN DEATH RITUALS TELL US ABOUT EXTINCTION?
Death rituals can be a key to understanding societal or community attitudes toward the Earth. For example, scholars claim that Contemporary Pagans see death as part of a seasonal life cycle, which has implications for climate change and its disruption of the seasonal order of the Pagan ritualized year. For Contemporary Pagans, death correlates with the winter season, and it is honored or celebrated as part of that life cycle and anticipation of the coming spring.20 In contrast, in the context of the Christian tradition, death is part of a complex eschatological belief system, with the apocalypse being the closest contemplation of extinction in Western cosmology and a potentially dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy.21 For example, Val Plumwood traces the Christian apocalyptic “master story” back to Plato and his dualistic “philosophy of death”22 as she warns, “If we are to survive into a liveable future, we must take into our own hands the power to create, restore and explore different stories, with new main characters, better plots, and at least the possibility of some happy endings.”23 Thus, the use of what I call here protest death rituals in XR in the context of vigils, coffin processions, or die-ins needs to be investigated on the backdrop of Western, and thus Christian and post-Christian, rhetoric relating to death and attitudes toward death.
Figure 3.1. February 2020 Green Christian Protest, London. Photo by the author.
Figure 3.1 comes from a protest funeral ritual held in February 2020 by the Christian Climate Action network outside the Church of England General Synod. The protesters, Rebel Christians or XR Christians, gathered in the morning wearing funeral clothes and processing four small children’s coffins, three white and one black, to the ritual space outside the Synod. Asking the Church to disinvest from fossil fuels, the protesters sang heartfelt hymns, brought flower offerings, and knelt down in front of the coffins, which represented the children who died because of climate change and future children whose lives will be cut short due to the crisis. A small wicker cross inside the central ritual space was the only Christian symbol, while XR Christian symbols—the hourglass and the cross—were visible on the main protest banner.
Death rituals are often discussed by scholars as rites of passage in the context of rituals concerned with birth, initiation, marriage, and death, rituals that mark the transition and journey to new identities.24 The context of extinction presses us to scrutinize death rituals as a discourse in their own right.25 My contention is that death rituals are not just rites of passage and that it is limiting to see them as just another type of ritual on that journey from birth to the grave. As both Eastern and Western European folklore show us,26 death is not just an event in one’s life; it is always there and thus cannot be completely unexpected, even when someone “unexpectedly” dies. Hence, in his ethnographic study of the Romanian funeral, Simion Florea Marian shows that the rituals that herald death are on a continuum with other death rites and display a complex repertoire that can include signs of death in dreams, like losing one’s teeth or having a nosebleed, personal and household objects breaking down unexpectedly, animals, like cats or birds, behaving in strange ways, and so on.27 Therefore, death rituals can be understood to belong to a temporal axis that begins with the anticipation of death or premonitions of death (like the banshee in Irish folklore, whose presence is always anticipated) and is followed by death itself, funerary rites, and finally long-term memorialization rituals after the dead person is buried. Of course, death rituals, including mourning and remembering the dead, are not only a part of “human” culture.28 Animals—elephants, dolphins, chimpanzees—mourn and remember their dead. Thus, death rituals are different from other kinds of rites, including so-called rites of passage. For humans, they maintain a constant boundary between life and death and between this realm and the other. This timeline on which death rituals can be placed can depict the relationship between the departed and the living, both for the individual and the community, for life on Earth and life beyond it.
Romanian funeral rites are worth examining, given how they provide a classic example of how death rites are structured in many European cultures and preserve important elements of Roman rites,29 which would have influenced Western attitudes to death and the treatment of the dead body.30 First, once the person dies, they are ritualistically washed, which begins the process of getting them ready for their journey.31 In parts of Romania, the pot that was used to wash the body is buried alongside the body so that the soul, which first “runs around the body,” can wash as well.32 The women who wash the body cannot touch food until they wash themselves nine times. The dead body is not just a body but, as I show elsewhere,33 since this entity now becomes mortu’ (the dead one), it is an ambivalent, transitory being, sometimes cautiously mentioned as it or one, that is capable of harm (i.e., it can contagiously attract others to join it in death if they are not careful and do not guard themselves by observing ritual interactions with it) while still representing the beloved. Mortu’ is dressed in new, beautiful clothes that are sometimes changed if the face of the dead person looks sad and unhappy. As it even was in Neolithic burials, the body is adorned with important objects for their journey to the other world; in the case of Romanian rites, these include money (to pay for the crossing), a comb, and a hat. Mortu’ is then watched by the family for the duration of the wake, sometimes lasting three days. During this time, mortu’ is ritually “washed” with the light of candles by being surrounded both morning and night with a candle. Eventually, once all the Christian prayers for the dead have been said by the priest, mortu’ is taken outside with a flag or a tree and processed to the place where they will be buried. Here, they are then ritualistically “cried,” and like in many other cultures, the wailing is sometimes staged with the help of professional wailers. Although mortu’ is a potentially harmful being against whom the living must be guarded (“Never turn your back to it!”), it is also called by the name of the deceased, as the wailers will sometimes ask the dead person to wake up, “speak to us,” or “say a few words.”34
Remembering what the deceased person did and how they were when they were alive and recalling others who have died are the main activities during the wake. Women who are sat around mortu’ will ask, “If where you go you will find my children, tell them I miss them.”35 In the center of the ritual space, the body is surrounded by candles and light, while the mourners sitting around the coffin wear dark or black clothes. During the last hours before the funeral, Mortu’s centrality is accentuated when it is adorned with jewelry or more makeup, such as red powder on their face and lips, indicating a transition of the body into a puppetlike state, which precedes the final separation. After the funeral, the deceased will be remembered ritualistically forty days after the burial and then one, three, five, and seven years after death, as well as on all the holy days around the year designated for remembering the dead. During the first forty days, there are numerous water rituals to look after the soul of the departed.36 Young women take water to the house of the deceased, counting up to eighty buckets and finally blessing the water with frankincense. It was customary for wells to be dedicated to the dead so that travelers drinking from these would bless their souls.37 A cup of water is left hanging on the door with a towel for forty days so that the soul, which visits all the places that were important to the deceased in his or her life, can come back at the end of each day and drink. Death rituals can be elaborate narratives; they are performances in which water/blessed water/sacred water—from the first washing of the body to the final water offerings to the soul—plays a key part. The purification through water implied by these rituals sets the deceased apart, intensifying their separation from the community of the living.
As opposed to other types of rituals—marriage rites, for example—death rituals are not what I call narratives or rituals of empowerment.38 While most rituals can be said to have as a central concern empowering the celebrant—be this the priest, groom, bride, and so on—this is not the case with death rituals. In contrast, death rituals might be seen as the most “selfless” of rituals, as they are focused on expressing grief rather than dealing with the anxiety of living—although, as we can see with the ambivalent status of mortu’, that anxiety of living and elements from various empowerment narratives do seep through. For example, anxiety is apparent in the concern with avoiding the potentially contaminating or contagious power of mortu’ by maintaining boundaries between it and the living. Yet the identity of the person performing the ritual, who is covered in black, is obscured or cut off, so that the deceased becomes the most vibrant, lifelike, or beautiful thing in the ritual space; young women, for example, would be dressed as brides and adorned with flowers and jewels. The funeral’s staged ritual space allows the mourner to appreciate the soon-to-be departed for one last time. For the most part, death rituals are not about self-empowerment but are decentering, as they celebrate somebody other than the person enacting the ritual (whom we can think of as the officiant) or even another living person occupying the center stage in the ritual (whom we can understand as the celebrant). As such, death rituals are the least celebrant- or officiant-centric rites; they are self-denying rituals. Certainly, we can think of the dead person occupying the place of the celebrant, and this is quite clear with death rituals for young people, who, in many European death rites, are treated as brides or grooms and are sometimes either married (to God or to trees) or prepared for their marriage in the other world as a means of protecting the community from their potential desire to choose another living person to join them in death.39 However, we can also recognize that this important role of the celebrant appears to be either absent or reversed in the case of a funeral, which is a ritual not of celebration but of lamentation. This decentered aspect makes death rituals particularly useful for XR activists seeking ecological rituals, given the symmetrical possibility of challenging anthropocentric relationships. So, just as the dead body is decorated and adorned, we see coffins in the climate protests that are adorned with images of the other-than-human species threatened by extinction, such as insects and birds. The main purpose is to shine a light on what will soon be forever lost and enable the audience to see it, grieve it, and remember it.
This account of death rituals leads to a key point vis-à-vis extinction: although death rituals mark a separation, this separation is not an end but an integration through memorialization of the deceased inside the family of ancestors or a community of the living and the dead. In contrast, the extinction that XR activists struggle to portray is not a “natural” end of a cycle, like death, but it is caused by violence, greed, and indifference and is self-inflicted; as such, it can be seen to share more territory with rituals and narratives concerned with suicide and sacrifice. Thus, protest death rituals need to employ both the poignant rhetoric of loss found in funerary rites and the themes at the boundary of death, such as murder, suicide, and sacrifice, to help us contemplate extinction. For example, in die-in rituals, when XR protesters voluntarily fall or collapse to the ground and lie there motionless in complete silence, the audience is reminded that with extinction, nobody is left behind to mourn and remember. To represent murder in a post-Christian society, the crucifixion is of course a powerful and pivotal symbol of destruction of the sacred. Conversely, sacrifice itself is understood by some as a form of suicide—this time not of an individual but as a self-destructive attitude of the entire community.40 Suicide has added Christian resonance, since, in some traditions, it is seen as a mortal sin that prevents a transition to the other world.
XR’S OVERLAPPING ECO-PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN INHERITANCE
To better understand the dynamics at play in cultural or artistic responses to death and extinction, it is important to examine what I call XR’s overlapping Contemporary Paganism and Christian inheritance. This is important because Christianity and Paganism have different attitudes toward death and, by extension, the neighboring connotative field—suicide, extinction, murder, sacrifice, and so on. It would be reductive to look at these traditions’ respective theologies or rites of passage; instead, I aim to offer an analysis of Contemporary Paganism on the backdrop of ethnographic, literary, and historical accounts. In 2009, while doing ethnographic research at the Kingsnorth climate camp in Kent in the United Kingdom, I interviewed Contemporary Pagans at the protest camp. My interviews were in-depth and unstructured, as I asked the participants to tell me about coming to and being at the protest camp in relation to their religious or spiritual beliefs and practices. As an example of the complex narratives of identity Contemporary Pagans constructed in these interviews, consider this excerpt from an interview with a middle-aged man I call Kevin:
I discovered deity through meditation. I think that each person creates their own deity, projects their own image upon deity. . . . I spent all my life being connected to nature. It’s been here forever so [how] can we own it? So, it seems we are all connected, we are part of it, yet we separate, we divide, our ego is the reason why we have all these problems. We have a task to do which is to look after all of creation. I don’t own or control anything, everything belongs to God. In order to be a Christian, you need to let Jesus live through you, or to be a Buddhist you let Buddha live through you. You are only a Druid if you have respect for all of life, all of the creation, for all of the beauty and abundance of nature. Having respect means going beyond our comfort zones in order to look after it, protect it. I am surprised at how few Druids there are in a place like this. I was born a Druid if that makes sense, and I hang around with Christians and Buddhists and others. (Climate Camp, Kingsnorth, Kent, 2009)
The interviews reveal both the complex, emergent nature of identity and the hybrid nature of individual religious identities that scholars of religion have long pointed to.41 As I discussed in my book on Environmental Christians,42 Contemporary Paganism as a reified scholarly category is as monolithic a category as Christianity or any other religious tradition. As we can see from Kevin’s account, Contemporary Pagans in Britain make use of plural religious and cultural references, have been exposed to a nonconfessional religious studies education, and can easily share in a deeply inculcated Christian discourse of stewardship, with Kevin even saying that we have to look after “creation.”
Similarly, XR can be understood first and foremost as a British-born movement, and as such, it needs to be seen against the backdrop of Britain’s countercultural repertoire and landscape. In Britain, from the point of view of broad trends,43 Contemporary Paganism is growing while Christianity is declining, and both are currently influential in their pulverized forms and material dimensions (i.e., place organization, dress, makeup, media, food, vernacular) through a myriad of cultural and countercultural influences. Pagan and New Age ideas in Britain are on showcase during major festivals like Glastonbury and, particularly post-COVID-19, online via a growing number of channels. The XR movement has clear roots in the transatlantic 1960s countercultural movements; communes and free festivals had a similar mix of civil disobedience, “artivism”—or artistic activism—cooperative ethos, and communalism and anticipated a future world in deep crisis that the communes could withstand.44 Moreover the “protestival,” a favored type of protest action in XR, is also rooted in the 1960s counterculture and has been central to movements of artistic social reform and the alter-globalization movements that have begun to develop since the 1980s. The 1960s transatlantic counterculture represents an important root for Eco-Paganism,45 among other radical environmental networks inside the alternative milieu. Hence, although key Paganism scholars tend to use it as an umbrella designation and include Eco-Paganism with other forms of contemporary Paganism (e.g., Wicca, Druidism, Shamanism, Heathenism, Goddess spirituality) or as a part of a broader lexicon,46 Andy Letcher locates Eco-Pagans within their own subculture of radical environmentalism and Goddess spirituality.47 As such, Eco-Paganism itself becomes more clearly visible as a distinctive subculture or religious movement that emerged in the context of the religious change that dominated the 1960s.48
Letcher’s ethnographic work on Eco-Paganism in the 1990s road-protest movement offers some important coordinates in the context of British eco-protest culture.49 Importantly, Letcher shows that the Pagan road protests of the 1990s were influential in propelling radical environmentalism and its methodology of NVDA into the (greater) public consciousness. This new heroic type of environmental activism is millenarian and Tolkienesque,50 as there is a strong narrative of the protest as “the last pitched battle of some ancient tribe against the relentless advance of modernity.”51 Millenarianism is of course an important Christian root that has implication for extinction, since it promises a resurrection. The movement had a long-lasting influence on Pagan theology, with the “thealogies” of such prominent Pagans as Starhawk and Carol Christ forged into Goddess Spirituality in the context of the antinuclear and antiroad protests.52 Starhawk, an influential Pagan witch and activist, explained at the beginning of the millennium: “A deepening earth-based spirituality led me into environmental and antinuclear activism, out of the sense that if the earth is sacred, we should prevent idiots from destroying her and us. Throughout the eighties and nineties, I engaged in many nonviolent direct actions on the issues of nuclear power and weapons, and later on militarism, intervention in Central America, the clearcutting of redwood forests, AIDs, and other issues. I was part of a collective of nonviolence trainers and also helped to organize many of the actions.”53
Green Christians share significant similarities and cultural territory with Eco-Pagans. As I show in my own ethnographic work on Green Christianity in Britain, the opposition toward modernity (with common roots in the Romantic movement) and the adherence to a back-to-nature discourse are also present in Christian models of a pastoral reimagination of the Early Church. This is evident both at a level of discourse and of material culture—for example, at Greenbelt, the annual British arts and performance Christian festival (1974–present). Here, the landscaped gardens of the festival fields have names such as the Mount or the Grove, and in 2014, there was even a sermon on the Mount, though this was discontinued in later editions of the festivals due to health and safety concerns over climbing the landscaped hill.54 In Britain, this identification with the Early Church has long roots and many political implications. Hence, the town of Glastonbury has been a center of pilgrimage in Britain since the thirteenth century precisely because it was claimed to represent the Early Church established by Joseph of Arimathea, the man who took Jesus down from the cross and arrived in Glastonbury two years after the crucifixion.55 The claim that Glastonbury represented a direct link with the Holy Land and the Early Church became a local and national symbol of resistance against other Christian dioceses and Rome itself, particularly around the sixteenth-century Reformation. The town of Glastonbury, with its plural symbolism as “Ancient Avalon, New Jerusalem, Heart Chakra of Planet Earth,”56 represents a clear example of the shared territory and diachronic continuity between Christian and Pagan discourses (as well as New Age influences), their opposing Earth-versus-Sky orientations notwithstanding.57 This allows us to see Contemporary Paganism in relation to national and place identity and in continuity with what can be understood as the identity-reclaiming processes that were made evident during the English Reformation.
Although the nineteenth-century Romantic movement had already rejected modernity through its nature writings,58 it is particularly post-1960s that back-to-nature discourses become visible in Britain in more than just poetry. Hence, Sharif Gemie and I have argued that early festivals in Britain drew on a Christian vernacular and the antimaterialism of a simple Eden imagery to reframe festivals as a return to a sacred nature.59 Recent work on Green Orthodoxy in Romania suggests that despite the lack of political opportunity, the cultural isolation, and the restrictions on freedom of expression during the country’s communist regime, Christian discourses offered an intuitive path to Green concerns, even in the absence of a vocabulary to express this as a countercultural reformulation.60 Conversely, Contemporary Paganism in Britain is the result of the political and religious freedom that enabled a radical reformulation. Thus, it can be claimed that Contemporary Paganism in Britain has links or roots in the Christian Reformation, whereby Contemporary Paganism is also a part of the reclaiming of local identities and the rejection of “outside” or “distant” power structures.
This slightly different origin story for British Eco-Pagans shows that they share more territory with Christianity than with early Wicca and even other contemporaneous North European Paganisms that emerged post-1960s (i.e., Icelandic), which were understood as a Norse, rather than Celtic, revival.61 Thus, the alternative counterculture that emerged in the 1960s, after the hippie trail or journey to India and the East of the 1950s, had a deeply rooted, dynamic, and reciprocal relationship with Christianity in Britain.62 Gemie and I assert that we can discern in this British alternative hippie culture of the late 1960s and 1970s much stronger Christian undertones and a religiously inflected language of Christian antimaterialism that led to the establishment of the early festivals as alternative spiritual pilgrimages at a time of growing secularization. Importantly, the festivals during this time allowed for an encounter between hippies and Christian clergy, who also recognize and affirm their shared Christian values.63 As such, it can be argued that Eco-Pagans themselves share more cultural territory with Christians than with fellow Contemporary Pagans—such as Wiccans—particularly when we consider other common roots in the nineteenth-century Romantic tradition and the Celtic revival. The same can be said of Green Christians, like the Forest Church movement and other “post-material religionists.”64 The links between Eco-Paganism and the Christian tradition are further deepened by a major literary influence for Paganism and Eco-Paganism in particular—this being J. R. R. Tolkien’s fiction65—given that Tolkien was raised and remained a devout Roman Catholic. Letcher shows how this powerful Tolkienesque aesthetic and millenarian “final battle for Middle Earth” narrative simply became a live stage at Eco-Pagan protest camps, where protesters were blocking the advance of tree-felling machinery:
A long ribbon of trees had been cleared to make way for the oncoming road, the area now fenced off as a security compound. Noisy generators powered bright arc-lights that lit up an activity of security guards in fluorescent jackets, standing vigilantly in the mud and debris. In stark contrast, on the other side of the fence and stretching up the opposite side of the valley, obstructing the oncoming road, an array of candles and lanterns had been hung crookedly among the treetops. Treehouses and aerial walkways could just be discerned in the gloom, with people murmuring and moving among them, their faces painted with symbols and “celtic” spirals. The sound of a tune played on a tin whistle floated down from the canopy. It was, for an observer on the ground, and however cliched, a scene like that from a fairy tale. I felt at the time that I was witnessing something more Tolkienesque than real, the last pitched battle of some ancient tribe against the relentless advance of modernity.66
We can recognize in XR a dual, overlapping Eco-Pagan and Christian inheritance that helps situate XR protest rituals inside a broader cosmology, material culture, and emotional matrix.67 We can clearly recognize the elements of a Christian affective repertoire—the heroic sacrifice and vulnerability that come with getting attested. We can also identify elements from the Eco-Pagan, eco-protest material culture that are affectively steeped in Christian pilgrimage praxis through practices of deprivation, for example. Although Contemporary Paganism is a post-Christian movement and hence Christian influences and countercultural reformulations are to be expected, my argument is that post-1960s Eco-Paganism in Britain is distinct in affective ways and should be viewed as a hybrid New Christian movement. We can see this by looking at its discourses, material culture, and emotional landscape and in particular its sacrificial and heroic character, which is qualitatively different from earlier British movements (e.g., Wicca) or even concomitant movements (e.g., Nordic Paganism).
ECO-PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY IN RELATION TO SACRED WATERS AND SACRED EARTH
The link between Eco-Paganism and Christianity in Britain can be illuminated further by examining their relations with sacred waters and sacred Earth on the backdrop of wider trends of religion and secularization in Europe. Attitudes toward nature are intricately connected—meaning both influencing but also facing opposition—with religious attitudes, past and present.68 The process of secularization in Europe in the modern and postmodern eras is often understood to be concomitant with what German philosopher Max Weber (1864–1920) called entzauberung (disenchantment or a loss of nature’s enchantment). We can see this quite clearly in the status of sacred waters in Britain. In the United Kingdom, the nineteenth-century status of such previously venerated waters (both in Roman times and subsequently via the belief in the healing properties of the waters) as the Bath waters in England declined progressively, these springs being currently only of historical interest.69 Thus, this city had an important tradition of balneotherapy (water therapy) that advertised the waters as having unique healing properties, a tradition that (albeit controversially) still survives in Eastern Europe.70 In the United Kingdom, balneotherapy was eventually replaced with hydrotherapy, which does not consider the waters to have any unique healing or curative properties but aims to help rehabilitation through mechanical processes alone. For example, the former Royal Bath Mineral Hospital, first opened in 1742, presently includes a museum where one can see how various ailments were treated there in the past, when patients came to “take the waters.” The only institution that provides access to Bath Spa’s thermal waters presently is Thermae Bath, a deluxe spa offering health and beauty treatments. Thermae’s advertising material talks about the history of the springs, including the fact that the Cross Spring in Bath was considered sacred by the Celts, who worshiped the goddess Sul, in whose honor the Romans called this antique city Aquae Sulis. This reflects the more general trend toward the “heritagization” of religion, which includes the passing of important sacred places into a sense of shared patrimonium.71
Contemporary Paganism is perceived as a movement of resistance against secularization and disenchantment,72 and we can extend that to this trend of heritagization, whereby the recognition of important sites is purely historical or connected to a national identity rather than inherently sacred. With new religious movements and alternative spiritualities arriving on the British and global scene in the twentieth century, some springs regained their “healing” status; such is the case with the Chalice Well spring in Glastonbury, considered sacred by Contemporary Pagans. Although Contemporary Pagans reach out to pre-Christian traditions, such as Druidism, it is important to note that beliefs in the protective spirits of places and waters, those genii loci from pre-Christian times, have survived for many centuries in folk vernacular, even when these beliefs were not in agreement with official or institutional Christian beliefs. The convergence I have talked about between Eco-Paganism and Christianity is thus not that surprising if we consider that vernacular or folk Christianity in Europe preserved some Pagan customs and attitudes toward nature. Thus, the pre-Christian customs of tree worship,73 or revering sacred and healing waters, continued under different guises through associations with Christian figures, particularly in the context of Marian veneration, in the case of European healing waters.74 Many of the healing waters of Europe continue to be associated with Mary, as is the case with the Lady of Sanctuary in Lourdes, France, which remains a thriving pilgrimage center to this day. Moreover, pilgrimages often involved practices of body deprivation that are very similar to those deprivations endured as actions of resistance (i.e., not eating, not washing, being cold, sleeping outside, etc.) by those involved in the radical eco-protest culture. It is these affective and material realities of deprivation and sacrifice in the eco-protest culture that can be investigated for their links to Christianity. XR activists often orient their protest actions toward waters, even if these are just fountains in an urban environment, which gains new meaning when we juxtapose these two types of experiences—Christian pilgrimage to sacred sites and waters on one hand and eco-protest actions oriented toward waters on the other.
The valuation of sacred waters and the sacred Earth is further linked to the local and global dimensions in the Green movement and the increasing emphasis on the importance of “thinking globally and acting locally” in many Green initiatives.75 The alternative globalization movements of the last four to five decades have often addressed the local-global dynamic through festivals and protestivals that have glocal relevance; they share global trends but are oriented toward localities.76 The emphasis on locality and bioregions is also obvious in XR, which resembles the organization of the 2005 local-global Transition Towns movement in terms of its emphasis on local regeneration groups. We can credit Eco-Pagans for their leading role in striking a local-global harmony though their construction of Gaia.77 Through their leading role inside the antiroad movement, their concern with resisting modernity, and the valuation of “local” environments, Eco-Pagans made it clear that they opposed globalization, yet at the same time, they were able to “connect” with both local (sacred waters like the Chalice well in Glastonbury) and global (the Earth) environments. My contention is that in this construction of Gaia as one encompassing divine entity, Eco-Pagans were able to draw on a Christian monistic model of divinity and relationality, just as Green Christians themselves were.78
One important question here concerns the relevance of the word sacred in this field. What relationships does it tend to describe? As I indicated at the beginning of the chapter in regard to the recognition of Bath waters as sacred in various local publications, we need to pay attention to the relationships described by this term or engage in a relational analysis of the text in order to discern its dynamic (not static) meaning. The fact that the waters were considered sacred by the Celts points to a recognition of their historical significance, and this has monetary value, since it attracts visitors to the town of Bath. However, a recognition of their sacred status simply lacks the “numinous,” mysterious, or mystical quality that early scholars of religion attempted to identify when they discussed this category of the sacred.79 Kate Rigby, in her own chapter in this book, talks about the official recognition of the Bath waters as a sacred site in connection with a revival of interest among Contemporary Pagans in these waters. Rigby shows that the waters are once again being revered by Contemporary Pagans, since for them, their ecospiritual experience is interlinked with ecopolitical praxis, and thus the quest for personal healing is interwoven with a collective responsibility for healing the waters. Rigby provides the example of Margaret Marion Stewart, a devotee of Celtic goddess spirituality whose work led to the recognition of one of the main geothermal springs, the Cross Bath, as a sacred site.80
Although Rigby’s example appears to indicate a postsecular change of attitude toward the Bath waters and even a change of flow (or a double flow) in the healing attributes that circulate from the waters and toward the waters, I would like to suggest that such a revival or re-enchantment is not happening. A revival might mean that the waters are capable once again of producing new miraculous stories by inspiring activists and demonstrating a special kind of agency. Contemporary Pagans, with their “capital” in Glastonbury, do not connect with middle-class, gentrified Bath in the same manner, and the rivalry between Bath and Glastonbury has a long history that goes back to the thirteenth century, with the Glastonbury Abbey “frantically trying to assert its autonomy from the bishop of Bath and Wells.”81 I will discuss the protest ritual that took place inside the Roman Baths, or what was considered the sacred spring in Roman Britain, later in this chapter, but I would like to emphasize here that while it may be possible for Contemporary Pagans to visit and connect with the sacred sites in Glastonbury (like the Chalice Well), Bath’s waters are completely encased in the museum site and commercialized; there is simply no possibility of approaching these without paying for it or being surrounded by kids on a school trip or tourists listening to a tour guide.
The biosemiotic categories of sacred waters and sacred Earth represent rather magical processes—processes of stories that make places and places that make stories. While waters are visible and can easily “make stories” and “be storied,” the Earth as a totality arrives in human consciousness particularly after the iconography of the planet developed after the 1969 moon landing. The image of the planet is “storied” by the 1960s transatlantic counterculture and the 1970s Earth movement. It is chiefly art and iconography of the goddess as a Gaia, the Earth, often appearing as a pregnant woman or in reference with the Greek Goddess, that develops a consciousness of the sacred Earth—with such influential public sites as the Whole Earth festival, which began in 1969 in the United States. It is important to note that while this Earth consciousness was taking root in Western Europe, countries in Eastern Europe were also experiencing a back-to-nature movement,82 though they lacked an explicit environmental art and a proper vocabulary to express these concerns for nature.83 Contemporary Paganism’s role in the construction of the Sacred Earth and Gaia consciousness in the West simply through representing the Earth as sacred in their artworks cannot be overstated; it is through the graphic representations of the Earth that the Earth can be seen and storied. In figure 3.2, a Pagan poster from 2008 entitled “Gaia and the Spirit of Activism,” we can observe a representation of the planet as if transposed on a classic Christian icon, with the halo and the mystical, saintly hand gestures symbolizing divine blessing and authority.
When considering how Eco-Pagans connect or relate with sacred waters and sacred Earth, we can more clearly see the continuum between vernacular forms of Christianity and Contemporary Paganism. The notion of sacred waters, which was widespread in Europe and declined vertiginously after the nineteenth century, may have been rekindled by (some) Eco-Pagans (i.e., the Chalice well is considered to be a sacred spring), but only a contextual analysis can reveal the dynamic meanings of this term. While Eco-Pagans can be credited for the construction of the sacred Earth, this model of relating to the planet as one divine entity contributes to my general argument for understanding Eco-Paganism as a Neo-Christian movement. Furthermore, my contention has been that one ought to be cautious when examining the meaning of sacred waters in 2019 Bath and even Glastonbury in light of contemporary processes of heritagization and secularization. To what degree are these waters truly considered healing, miraculous, and powerful? Are they merely recognized for their historical significance, and for what purpose? (i.e., the Chalice well is considered to be a sacred spring), but only a contextual analysis can reveal the dynamic meanings of this term. While Eco-Pagans can be credited for the construction of the sacred Earth, this model of relating to the planet as one divine entity contributes to my general argument for understanding Eco-Paganism as a Neo-Christian movement. Furthermore, my contention has been that one ought to be cautious when examining the meaning of sacred waters in 2019 Bath and even Glastonbury in light of contemporary processes of heritagization and secularization. To what degree are these waters truly considered healing, miraculous, and powerful? Are they merely recognized for their historical significance, and for what purpose? If the former is the case, then we can talk about a revival of their sacred qualities—which I argue we might equate with a sort of present fecundity, endowing them with a special agency in being able to generate or inspire new healing stories and thus create new relationships. If the latter is true, we are only talking about old stories; albeit important, these are stories from the past.
Figure 3.2. A Pagan poster (Pantheacon, 2008). Courtesy of the Bath Archive for Contemporary Religious Affairs (BACRA).
PROTEST DEATH RITUALS AND EXTINCTION
Given the abundance of opportunities to study XR public rituals, my data is diverse and extensive; it covers more than fifty protest actions lasting anywhere from a few hours to a few days, ten extended interviews with XR activists between twenty-one and sixty-five years old, XR online material and databases (Basecamp), weekly meetings with XR Rebels in Bath (2019–2020), literary and cultural activities, social media communications (Facebook), choir singing groups, yoga in the park, cooking for communal meals, workshops, and lectures. For my discussion in the present chapter, I draw mainly on participant observation during public rituals, among which I will consider examples from an XR protest ritual at Bath Spa sacred spring in 2019, an Earth pilgrimage from Cardiff to London in 2019, and a series of cultural events, entitled Letters to the Earth (2019), organized by XR’s Regenerative Culture networks. Additionally, I draw on an online series of workshops organized during the COVID-19 lockdowns by a Green Christian UK charity called Radical Presence. My proposed model of analysis84 draws on biosemiotics and relational identity approaches85 to consider the instrumental function of ritual and other discourses in the construction of empowered identities.
As I showed at the beginning of this chapter, death rituals encompass a huge repertoire of affective performances that are concerned not only with death itself but with a whole human existence, both invisibly and visibly connected with death—the anticipation of death (in illness), premonitions of death, funerary rites, memorialization after the death of a beloved. These rituals may reflect many themes that are found in the vicinity of death (suicide, murder, sacrifice, illness) and a Christian point of view of resurrection and healing (e.g., the story of Lazarus). Illness and healing are, as I have shown, a major attribute of sacred waters and a key concern in ritual, be it in their ability to actually cure or purify and create a boundary between life and death, as my examples of funeral rites showed. As the COVID-19 crisis has made a lot more obvious for us modern people who grew up without such major health emergencies, death, illness, and healing can eclipse all other activities, particularly when there are no available cures. Certainly, pre-COVID-19, these concerns might have appeared rather distant in our modern world,86 yet religious traditions and contemporary spirituality are fundamentally preoccupied with death, illness, and healing, and vice versa. Illness and healing are contexts in which religion and spirituality gain major importance.87
Death rituals are for the most part reverent treatments of death, with some exceptions, such as the pre-Christian relics in some localized funerary rites that make fun of the dead body, treating it like a puppet and frightening unassuming visitors.88 Thus, funerary symbolism can easily evoke elements of grief and loss, but the rite itself implies a process of memorialization, which becomes impossible with extinction. Thus, XR death rituals explore extinction by working with the rich symbolism in death rituals in an artistic way, not just as the art that one would find in a gallery or museum but as a new type of engaged “radical art” that provokes the onlooker and aims to stimulate a civic response.89 This can be done through art and performance by surprising the audience with the removal or addition of elements that are found in this vast semiotic field representing death rituals. For example, a key embodied XR ritual, the die-in, represents the more morbid version of the sit-in, which involves sitting down and thus refusing to be moved by police. Yet during a die-in, everyone is on the ground and there are no mourners; the only people standing are the audience, the onlookers who see this spectacle through the lens of the future and thus are not able to intervene.
Figure 3.3. Fountain Ritual Red Brigade 2019, Bath Spa, UK. Photo by the author.
The color red, which symbolizes the blood of the species that have been and will be lost, is complementary to the funeral black in XR.90 The XR Red Brigade (XR activists dressed in red gowns whose street-theater activism has become iconic for the movement; see fig. 3.3) attempts to perform this collective and irreversible kind of death alongside a funerary material culture in XR that is made up of coffins, flowers, wreaths, and black clothes. Striking images—a lonely human handprint on a black canvas, for example—remind the onlooker of humanity as a species whose future hangs in the balance. Although activists are naturally concerned about the extinction of all these other disappearing species, with XR, an emphasis on human extinction becomes central to rituals and art. For example, an image of the human skull may be printed in a pattern of bees and insects as a symbol of our interdependent relationships, yet there is also an emphasis on human extinction, possibly as a means of addressing the unengaged public. Human extinction juxtaposed with the extinction of other species can also be understood as a radical art tactic through which human extinction, as the natural consequence of other species’ extinction, is the sort of bang at the end of the performance.
The protest ritual at the Bath spring involved activists infiltrating the museum and floating in the pool of water that once was the sacred heart of the baths. The ritual is of particular interest because, as I showed in the previous section, these waters have lost their traditional healing status. Instead, their sacred status is now part of their heritagization—a trusted brand, a way of adding to the status and reputation of the waters, and a promise of physical, mental, and emotional well-being added to the mix. My data suggests that the XR activists conducting this protest ritual inside the Roman Baths in Bath Spa (2019) did not think that these waters were indeed sacred in this magical and healing sense of the word.91 I interviewed the person who organized the protest action, and she was not a Contemporary Pagan, nor was she religious, yet she told me that she had a degree in religious studies and “loved ritual.” As I pointed out in my introduction, the celebration of the elements—earth, air, fire, water—is a taxonomic category in the Green and climate movement, with numerous actions following these patterns. For example, in an early climate protest action aimed at closing the Kingsnorth power station in Kent (2009), protesters descended on the power station in four groups representing the elements; a fire dragon led the procession. The dragon, called Kingsnorth, “had eaten too much coal and had gotten sick,” and he was made better by the procession, laughter, and conversation with the children at the protest camp.92 A humorous tone often permeates protest rituals as part of a countercultural strategy of distinguishing eco-protest culture from the buttoned-up mainstream culture the former is attempting to provoke and challenge, since eco-protest ritual, like art and performative actions in this field, will seek to challenge the nonactant/audience/onlooker. The floating bodies of XR activists in the sacred pool and the other activists forming a protective circle around them illustrate how symbols of death—in this case a floating body holding a flower—are used to portray extinction. Yet this is not a reverent representation of death but a portrayal of climate change, rising seas, and flooding.
One final step in this chapter is to ask how XR activists can be understood to relate to the Earth, considering this repertoire of illness, healing, death, and extinction. An important symbol in the semiotics of ritual space at climate protests is coal. Coal and fossil fuels are associated with illness, pollution, and degradation. Coal and oil were present very early in my research data,93 with coal often being placed at the center of a ritual space (i.e., on the altar), which is of course an unexpected and provoking object to see in the middle of a traditionally pristine space.94 I argued that coal was used as a negative charge in a traditional model of sacred space in order to articulate a different power dynamic, whereby the center of sacred space was no longer pristine and powerful but equally contaminated or polluted. In contrast, the marginal become powerful.
Often, symbols of regeneration and healing, such as apples and living plants, are part of climate protest rituals. When cut flowers are used, they are often a symbol of death and funerals. In one ritual, Green Christian protesters prayed around a charcoal-colored effigy of a power station (2009), yet they also placed a red apple on top of the effigy as a symbol of creation and regeneration. The Christian activists were going to read the power station its last rites, which is reminiscent of the Christian Sacrament of the Sick that is offered to the ill and dying, but there was opposition to doing that, as some members felt it would be disrespectful or sacrilegious.95 Yet, when looking at prayers as narratives of empowerment in a Green Christian context,96 we see that they reflect a transformed cosmology, with community and creativity leading to salvation (as opposed to pursuing empowerment by relating to the sky/God/the heavens or by accessing the vertical axis of power that permeates the Western cultural tradition). And we see this represented spatially in a “de-evolution” of the Green Christian altar, which is increasingly set directly on the ground, rather than on a table; the altar has become the ground, or the ground the altar. Like Contemporary Pagans, Green Christians set altars that are decorated with cones, stones, sticks, and other such natural objects, literally changing the content of the altar with nature itself. During Radical Presence 2020, an online workshop on climate activism that took place amid the COVID-19 lockdown, one Green Christian explained her new interest in the Forest Church movement thus:
If we worship in a way that reminds us that we are creatures of the Earth, you know, the way out of Adam, then we will be sort of better connected with the Earth. We will see our health and our well-being as part of the Earth. The pandemic is teaching us to worship in a different way, how to express longing for God by reaching out to God as people of the Earth as through ritual. And there were a couple of groups that talked about Forest Church . . . being a model for the future. So that’s something. That’s something to think about as a way of emerging from this.
My data suggests that during public events, XR activists do not tend to talk about the Earth as sacred or with any particular reverence associated with sacredness, though Pagan songs invite those present to “remember that you’re walking on sacred ground.” During a Letters to the Earth event put together by the XR Regenerative Culture networks, activists addressed the Earth and expressed their feelings toward it, but these interventions were quite removed from the reverence of the Deep Ecology rituals of Joanna Macy and other earlier ritualists.97 Hence, activists who addressed the Earth were often addressing humans in statements that were self-referential and sounded more like confessions to those present: “I’m sorry as humans that we had the nerve to call this destruction part of nature,” or “I’m sorry, I’m sorry that as humans, we’ve been using you as a credit card with no spending limits.” If sacredness is/was associated with power and healing properties, it follows that illness would be somewhat difficult to reconcile with the sacred nature of these waters and that of the Earth. Yet, the illness of the Earth—oftentimes represented through artistic means (i.e., the planet is feverish)—was described by climate activists through personal statements: “It’s possible to understand you’re ill, but it’s impossible to live with you being ill, all the time, every second of every day.” The illness and healing/regeneration dimension that is present in some Green Christian climate rituals is not evident in XR public protest death rituals.
CONCLUSION
Rituals of death, illness, and healing are often repurposed and explored by activists to represent extinction, pollution, and regeneration. Through their use of radical artistic methods, death rituals provide the opportunity to contemplate extinction without the possibility of salvation and memorialization. The content of XR rituals is varied, but some rituals may display a story arc that is characteristic of a certain mode of empowerment, which I have found in my research with Green Christian activists and defined as empowerment through vulnerability.98 Although I have shown that XR protest rituals do not really focus on healing, we still find here a Christian-inspired countercultural model of repositioning the performer and the audience through the actant’s vulnerability and representations of fragility and illness—the Earth globe has been encaged (in a greenhouse), or wrapped in lace, or tarnished with molasses. Similarly, the act of being arrested and carried away by police can also be investigated as a form of empowerment through vulnerability. The dichotomous nature of the construction of such narratives of empowerment by representations of fragility and vulnerability (i.e., die-ins) illuminates an important connection between Contemporary Paganism and Christianity. I suggested that it is particularly this common emotional and relational landscape that indicates a continuity (rather than a countercultural reformulation) between Christianity and Eco-Paganism. Thus, we can regard Eco-Paganism as distinct from other types of Contemporary Paganism and understand it as a New Christian movement. This Christian heritage helps XR communicate with a (post)Christian audience. During a die-in, it is the audience who is made to reflect on their responsibility as upright (standing-up) humans. Similarly, although XR activists are being arrested, it is the onlookers who are given the opportunity to feel uncomfortable as they reflect on their role as oppressors.
So, what can XR’s rituals tell us about religion or about how we should understand religion in an age of extinctions? Although I argued in my discussion of the Bath Spa XR protest action that we should not search for traditional models of sacredness (i.e., associated with healing through miraculous powers or properties) in XR protest rituals, I am not suggesting that sacredness is altogether lost to us Anthropocene humans. I argue that we need to reconceptualize our models of sacredness if we are to understand contemporary ritualized behavior in the context of mass extinction(s). My own notion of the sacred here, which I arrived at by engaging in a relational analysis of ritual space, is that it should be understood as a fecund generatrix of new stories, new relationships, and new identities. This can help us distinguish between sites and landscapes that have this property in the present tense and those that have now become relics. Our endangered Earth and its polluted waters appear to have lost their voice and inherent power to generate beautiful, sacred stories. Yet it is activists who are using their bodies and their voices to stand in and tell the story of the Earth with letters, prayers, art, street theater, silent cries, and floating bodies. XR activists draw on a Christian affective repertoire to communicate extinction. Relating to the Earth and its waters may enable the creation of a planetary identity among activists and—it is hoped, before it is too late—their audiences.99
MARIA NITA is a Lecturer in Religious Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the Open University. Her research interests encompass cultural theoretical approaches to religion and climate activism, with a particular focus on rituals and protest actions. She is author of Praying and Campaigning with Environmental Christians: Green Religion and the Climate Movement.
NOTES
1. Maria Nita, Praying and Campaigning with Environmental Christians: Green Religion and the Climate Movement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
2. Andy Letcher, “‘If You Go Down to the Woods Today . . .’: Spirituality and the Eco-Protest Lifestyle,” Ecotheology: Journal of Religion, Nature and the Environment 7, no. 1 (2002): 81–87; Letcher, “‘Gaia Told Me to Do It’: Resistance and the Idea of Nature within Contemporary British Eco-Paganism,” Ecotheology: Journal of Religion, Nature and the Environment 8, no. 1 (2003): 61–84.
3. Please see John. P. Newport, The New Age Movement and the Biblical Worldview: Conflict and Dialogue (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans), 274–278.
4. I have claimed that despite the heterogenous Green Christian praxis from a great variety of networks, such as the transatlantic Creation Spirituality or Green Christian in the United Kingdom, we can identify common hubs (e.g., the Greenbelt festival in the United Kingdom) and a shared vignettes of material culture, which suggests that we are talking about a movement. See Nita, Praying and Campaigning.
5. Nita and Gemie Sharif, “Counterculture, Local Authorities and British Christianity at the Windsor and Watchfield Free Festivals (1972–5),” Twentieth Century British History 31, no. 1 (2020): 51–78; Nita, “Christian Discourses and Cultural Change: The Greenbelt Art and Performance Festival as an Alternative Community for Green and Liberal Christians,” Implicit Religion 21, no. 1 (2018): 44–69.
6. Nita, “Christian Discourses.”
7. Nita, Praying and Campaigning.
8. Letcher, “If You Go Down”; Graham Harvey, Listening People, Speaking Earth: Contemporary Paganism (London: Hurst, 1997).
9. Harvey, Listening People.
10. Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Victor Turner, Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (London: Aldin Transaction, 1969); Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
11. Nita, “Sky vs. Earthly Empowerment: From Angels and Superheroes to Humans and Community in the Marvel Universe and Green Christian Cosmology,” Journal of Religion and Popular Culture 31, no. 3 (2019): 236–249.
12. Yi-fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Almo Farina and Andrea Belgrano, “The Eco-field Hypothesis: Toward a Cognitive Landscape,” Landscape Ecology 21, no. 1 (2006): 5–17; Kati Lindström, Kalevi Kull, and Hannes Palang, “Landscape Semiotics: Contribution to Culture Theory,” in Estonian Approaches to Culture Theory, ed. Valter Lang and Kull, 110–132 (Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 2014); Serpil Oppermann, “From Ecological Postmodernism to Material Ecocriticism: Creative Materiality and Narrative Agency,” in Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella Iovino and Oppermann, 21–37 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).
13. Susan M. Andersen and Serena Chen, “The Relational Self: An Interpersonal Social-Cognitive Theory,” Psychological Review 109, no. 4 (2002): 619–645; Daniel L. Shapiro, “Relational Identity Theory: A Systematic Approach for Transforming the Emotional Dimension of Conflict,” American Psychologist 65, no. 7 (2010): 634–645; Helena Lopes and Teresa Calapez, “The Relational Dimension of Identity—Theoretical and Empirical Exploration,” Review of Social Economy 70, no. 1 (2012): 81.
14. Nita, “Sky vs. Earthly Empowerment.”
15. Nita and Gemie, “Counterculture”; Nita, “Where Are Extinction Rebellion’s Cultural Roots?,” Contemporary Religion in Historical Perspective (blog), Open University, 2019, accessed May 24, 2022, http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/religious-studies/?p=980.
16. Nita, “‘Inside Story’: Participatory Storytelling and Imagination in Eco-pedagogical Contexts,” in Storytelling for Sustainability in Higher Education: An Educator’s Handbook, ed. Petra Molthan-Hill et al., 154–167 (London: Routledge, 2020).
17. “Britain’s original natural thermal spa,” Thermae Bath Spa, accessed June 1, 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20211027123629/https://www.thermaebathspa.com/news-info/about-the-spa/spa-history/.
18. “About Us,” Sanatoriul Balnear şi de Recuperare Techirghiol, accessed June 1, 2019, https://sbtghiol.ro/en/acasa/about-us/.
19. Marion Bowman and Tiina Sepp, “Caminoisation and Cathedrals: Replication and the Heritagisation of Religion,” Religion 49, no. 1 (2019).
20. Harvey, Listening People.
21. Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London: Routledge, 1997); Anne Primavesi, Gaia’s Gift (London: Routledge, 2003); Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
22. Plumwood, Feminism, 69–103.
23. Plumwood, Feminism, 196.
24. Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); John Bowker and Jean Holm, eds., Rites of Passage (London: Pinder, 1994).
25. Nita, “Humour, Concealment and Death Mindfulness in Romanian Funerals,” Contemporary Religion in Historical Perspective (blog), Open University, 2018, accessed May 24, 2022, http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/religious-studies/?p=676.
26. Patricia Lysaght, The Banshee: The Irish Supernatural Messenger (Dublin: O’Brian, 1986); Simion Florea Marian, Înmormântarea la Romani (Bucharest: Grai şi Suflet, 1995).
27. Marian, Înmormântarea, 8.
28. Margo DeMello, ed., Mourning Animals: Rituals and Practices Surrounding Animal Death (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2016); Pauline Delahaye, “Ritual Mimicry: A Path to Concept Comprehension,” Biosemiotics 12, no. 1 (2019): 175–188.
29. Marina Cap-Bun, “Attitudes towards Death in Romanian Culture and Civilization,” Philologica Jassyensia 8, no. 2 (2012): 151–157.
30. Philippe Ariès, “Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present,” trans. Patricia Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).
31. Marian, Înmormântarea, 36.
32. Marian, Înmormântarea, 36.
33. Nita, “Humour, Concealment and Death Mindfulness.”
34. Marian, Înmormântarea.
35. Marian, Înmormântarea, 77.
36. Marian, Înmormântarea, 254.
37. Marian, Înmormântarea, 256.
38. Nita, “Sky vs. Earthly Empowerment.”
39. Marian, Înmormântarea, 46–47, 68.
40. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (1988; repr., London: Continuum, 2005); James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1960), 366.
41. Bowman, “Vernacular Religion, Contemporary Spirituality and Emergent Identities: Lessons from Lauri Honko,” Approaching Religion 4, no. 1 (2014): 101–113.
42. Nita, Praying and Campaigning, 166–167.
43. “How Religion Has Changed in England and Wales,” Office for National Statistics, June 4, 2015, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/religion/articles/howreligionhaschangedinenglandandwales/2015-06-04.
44. Timothy Miller, The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999).
45. George McKay, Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties (London: Verso, 1996).
46. Harvey, Listening People; Ronald Hutton, Pagan Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
47. Letcher, “If You Go Down.”
48. Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945 (1994, repr., Oxford: Blackwell, 2004).
49. Letcher, “If You Go Down.”
50. In the 1960s, people began to profess historical belief and spiritual attachment to Tolkien’s fiction, while a second wave of Tolkien spirituality, with a strong focus on Elven spirituality, started after the release of Peter Jackson’s films. The Tië eldaliéva, the Elven Path, use The Silmarillion as their sacred text and believe it to hold spiritual truths.
51. Letcher, “If You Go Down,” 64.
52. Greenham Commons was a key British protest site for the development of Goddess spirituality.
53. Starhawk, Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2003), 4.
54. Nita, “Christian Discourses.”
55. Adam Stout, Glastonbury Holy Thorn: Story of a Legend (Glastonbury: Green & Pleasant, 2020).
56. Bowman, “Ancient Avalon, New Jerusalem, Heart Chakra of Planet Earth: The Local and the Global in Glastonbury,” Numen International Review for the History of Religions 52, no. 2 (2005): 157–190.
57. Nita, “Sky vs. Earthly Empowerment.”
58. J. Andrew Hubbell, “A Question of Nature: Byron and Wordsworth,” The Wordsworth Circle 41, no. 1 (2010): 14–18.
59. Nita and Gemie, “Counterculture.”
60. Maria A. Asavei, Art, Religion and Resistance in (Post-)Communist Romania: Nostalgia for Paradise Lost (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2020).
61. See Hutton, Pagan Britain; Stefanie von Schnurbein, Norse Revival: Transformations of Germanic Neopaganism (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
62. Gemie and Brian Ireland, The Hippie Trail: A History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); Nita and Gemie, “Counterculture.”
63. Nita and Gemie, “Counterculture.”
64. Mika Lassander, “From Security to Self-Expression, the Emergent Value Pattern and the Changing Role of Religion” (unpublished PhD thesis, Milton Keynes, Open University, 2010).
65. Markus A. Davidsen, “The Spiritual Milieu Based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s Literary Mythology,” in Handbook of Hyper-real Religions, ed. Adam Possamai (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
66. Letcher, “If You Go Down,” 62.
67. Douglas Davies discusses understanding religion in relation to a specific emotional matrix. See Davies, Emotion, Identity, and Religion: Hope, Reciprocity, and Otherness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). An examination of this emotional matrix can provide further information about religious and cultural syncretism.
68. Lynn White Jr., “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” Science 155 (1967): 1203–1207; Plumwood, Feminism; Primavesi, Gaia’s Gift.
69. Bowman, “‘The Need for Healing’: A Case Study in Bath,” in Health and Religion, ed. Bowman, 96–97 (Enfield Lock: Hisarlik, 2009).
70. Nita, “Balneoterapia în Europa,” Techirghiol IV, no. 12 (October 2018), https://sbtghiol.ro/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/techirghiol12-site.pdf, 2018.
71. Bowman and Sepp, “Caminoisation and Cathedrals”; Simon Coleman and Marion Bowman, eds., “Religion in Cathedrals: Pilgrimage, Place, Heritage, and the Politics of Replication,” special issue, Religion 49 (1): 74–98.
72. Harvey, Listening People.
73. Stout, Glastonbury Holy Thorn, 18–19.
74. Nita, “Balneoterapia in Europa.”
75. Eric Helleiner, “Think Globally, Transact Locally: Green Political Economy and the Local Currency Movement,” Global Society: Journal of Interdisciplinary International Relations 14, no. 1 (2000): 35–51.
76. Graham St. John, “Protestival: Global Days of Action and Carnivalized Politics in the Present,” Social Movement Studies Journal 7, no. 2 (2008): 167–190.
77. Letcher, Gaia.
78. Nita, Praying and Campaigning, 205–225.
79. Rudolf Otto, Mysticism East and West: A Comparative Analysis of the Nature of Mysticism (New York: Macmillan, 1932); Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. W. R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959).
80. Rigby’s chapter in this volume, “Oceanic Extinctions and the Dread of the Deep.”
81. Stout, Glastonbury Holy Thorn, 14.
82. Asavei, Art, Religion and Resistance.
83. The niches of alternative cultures that opposed the mainstream in Eastern Europe and the alternative texts and artwork that developed in Eastern Bloc countries before 1989 had limited circulation in the public domain.
84. Nita, “Sky vs. Earthly Empowerment.”
85. Andersen and Chen, “The Relational Self”; Shapiro, “Relational Identity Theory”; Lopes and Calapez, “The Relational Dimension of Identity.”
86. Ariès, Western.
87. Nita, “Spirituality in Health Studies: Competing Spiritualities and the Elevated Status of Mindfulness,” Religion and Health 58, no. 1 (2019): 1605–1618, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10943-019-00773-2.
88. Nita, “Humour, Concealment and Death Mindfulness.”
89. Agnes Czajka and Aine O’Brien, eds., Art, Migration and the Production of Radical Democratic Citizenship (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2021).
90. Red and black are of course anarchist colors, but that association seems accidental.
91. In contrast, in Romania beliefs, the healing properties of the waters continue to thrive in the context of a contested therapy: balneotherapy, a water therapy based on the chemical properties of certain springs and lakes.
92. Nita, Praying and Campaigning.
93. A function of rituals involving coal is to educate and offer a public pedagogy on climate change and carbon literacy (and to further an understanding of—and acceptance of responsibility for—the effect of carbon emissions on the global climate system). For example, the public may be confronted by a sack of twenty kilograms of coal and told that this would be the equivalent of carbon dumped into the atmosphere by one passenger flight.
94. Nita, “‘An Altar inside a Circle’: A Relational Model for Investigating Green Christians’ Experiments with Sacred Space,” in Material Religion: The Stuff of the Sacred, ed. Timothy Hutchings and Jo McKenzie, 133–151 (London: Routledge, 2018).
95. Green Christians often distinguished between their own Christian rituals and Pagan-inspired ones that had to do with invoking the elements—for example, as serious/in spirit/in truth versus play. See Nita, Praying and Campaigning.
96. Nita, “Sky vs. Earthly Empowerment.”
97. See, for example, Joanna R. Macy, “The Council of All Beings,” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, ed. Bron Taylor, 425–429 (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2005).
98. Nita, “Christian Discourses.”
99. Nita, Praying and Campaigning, 240.
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.