Gaia: Goddess of our Time?

Whole Earth from the moon, Apollo mission 1968

"If we stand back from this pageant, and try to see a pattern in the progression of human history and the evolution of consciousness, we might seek help from the philosopher Owen Barfield. In his book Saving the Appearances, Barfield distinguishes three stages in this pattern which he calls ‘Original Participation,’ ‘Withdrawal of Participation’ and ‘Final Participation.’ The first, earliest, stage is the goddess-oriented, hunting, gathering and agricultural phase of human evolution, which enacts what he calls ‘original participation,’ and which he defines as ‘the sense that there stands behind the phenomena and on the other side of them from man, a represented which is of the same nature as man.’ (11) What this means is that nature and humanity did not stand in opposition and did not, therefore, have to be apprehended by different modes of cognition. In the goddess myths all creation shared in the sacredness of the source because all creatures were the children of the Mother, created from the same substance, and all related to each other in a non-hierarchical way. There followed the second stage of the pattern, initiated by the myths of the god whose transcendent divinity orders from beyond creation, by the breath, the word, or the moulding of the clay. This could be characterized by the long process of collective withdrawal of numinosity, or immanent divinity, from nature, and the dissolution of the human bond with nature - setting the outer and the inner world free from each other, so that each could be explored separately. This polarizes humanity and nature - nature becomes an other, an object without soul or spirit - an ‘it’ - as ‘it’ has been for the last three thousand years. Now, he says, is the time for what he calls ‘final participation,’ which recreates the old participative relation to nature, but in an entirely new way: through the Imagination. This involves a dual relation to nature, one in which our contemporary experience of nature as separate from us is honoured but transformed by a conscious act of participation in which our essential identity with nature is experienced at a new level. This would be, in the language of the image, the Sacred Marriage of Goddess and God which brings forth the Child, the new imaginative whole. So the world becomes again a Thou, but a Thou within a poetic vision, honoured through choice and love.
It seems possible to make sense of the resurgence of ‘Gaia’ through this pattern. For when Gaia was the Great Mother Earth and clothed in numinosity, humanity was her child, and participated in her immanent divinity. This was the last of ‘original participation.’ After the long process of opposing and, in this century, despoiling nature, it may be that our images are moving us towards the creation of a new mythology, ‘the mythology of this unifed Earth as of one harmonious being.’ ‘Gaia’ as a metaphor, still bearing the memory of the Goddess yet inspiring us through the imagination, may yet be returning us to the sacredness of Earth who ‘gives life and takes life away.’ This is the ‘final participation’ of which Barfield speaks, as configured in the words of a modern poet, in an anthology entitled Return of the Great Goddess: ‘...for Thou, Gaia, Art I’. (12)"

Jules Cashford GAIA: AN IMAGE FOR OUR TIME? Article for Caduceus, 1997.
http://www.julescashford.com/