Page 57 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol IV

1358 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

The use of ritual to control nature is a cross-cultuiral universal. This drawing shows Tohono
O'odham (Papago) of the desert of southern Arizona participating in a rain dance.

the additional sense of “inherent force.” By the seven- erful than humans, but...subordinate to God” (Mer-
teenth century nature as the material world overlapped chant 1980, 10). Nature personified as female contains
with nature as intrinsic form and creative forces. Thus, a good deal of ambiguity, being seen as chaotic and
nature, which refers to a “multiplicity of things and crea- destructive, as innocent and tainted, and as an expres-
tures, may carry an assumption of something common to sion of the divine order. C. S. Lewis argued that this per-
all of them” (Williams 1976, 185). sonification of nature as female has been the most
People also personify and abstract nature.The ancient difficult to overcome, but many environmental histori-
Greek philosophers, taking a stance that was common in ans say the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were
paganism at the time, believed that the natural world is the time when nature was most rigidly confined and its
alive, an all-encompassing animal with both mind and long history of vitalism (a doctrine that the functions of
soul, binding animals (including humans) and plants in an organism are caused by a vital principle distinct
intellectual, psychic, and physical kinship. Plato (428/7– from physicochemical forces) reduced.
348/7 BCE) in his Timaeus conceived of the soul as
female. Lovejoy suggests that the Roman orator Cicero Modern Times
(106–43 BCE) propelled the concept of nature as god- Carolyn Merchant locates “the death of nature” in the rise
dess from the Greeks into the eighteenth century. On the of mechanical philosophy. Such philosophy is associated
other hand, Carolyn Merchant, in The Death of Nature, with the philosophers Francis Bacon (1561–1626) in
traces the tradition from the Neoplatonism (Platonism England and Rene Descartes (1597–1650) in France.
modified in later antiquity to accord with Aristotelian, These men, critical of organic worldviews in which the
post-Aristotelian, and Eastern conceptions) of the Roman world is personified as a forceful, living body, viewed
philosopher Plotinus (204–270 CE) to twelfth-century nature as passive, inert matter that is acted upon by phys-
Christianity, which placed a female nature “as more pow- ical laws that are set in motion by a clockmaker deity.