Skycult & Earthcult

on the urgent need for balance

A framing I increasingly think with is the idea of two different realms of thought, or metaphorical frameworks for understanding human civilisation: Earthcult and Skycult. They come from the rogue feminist and professor of art Camille Paglia, and her exploration of the interplay between nature and culture in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. You will recognize them from the Carthesian split made in western culture between mind/body, culture/nature, man/woman and so forth. 

Skycult symbolises order, rationality, transcendence, and the imposition of structure over chaos. It is associated with masculinity and the pursuit of reason, ideals and universal truths. Skycult represents humanity's attempts to rise above nature through abstract thought, art, and spirituality. Paglia associates Skycult with the Greek god Apollo: “Civilization is an attempt to codify, rationalize, and transcend the terror of nature, whose most threatening aspects are darkness, dirt, and death. All artifacts of civilization are products of the Apollonian mind, which aspires to the sky.”

Earthcult represents the primal, chaotic, and cyclical aspects of nature, connected to femininity, fertility, and the forces of life and death. Earthcult celebrates the Earth, the body and its instincts. Paglia associates Earthcult with Dionysos. “Earth-cults celebrate the generative but engulfing powers of nature. They are anti-civilizational, for they glorify what is at odds with human control and reason: the chaos of the senses, the moist, rank fecundity of life.”

This archetypal division is useful to catch sight of how Skycult manifests all over the place. It has mesmerised western culture since the beginning. We live in Skycult, and its expressions are becoming more extreme, more glaring. Like the grand plans of building cities in the desert, despite the lack of fundamental things like water. Saudiarabian plans to build The Line, a city 200 meters wide, 500 meters tall and 170 KILOMETERS long is an example smelling of SciFi. The endgame of Skycult shows up in an almost amusingly explicit phallic shape in Elon Musks spacecrafts, channelling the ambition to physically colonise space. Where else to go in the pursuit of progress? 

Screenshot from spacex.com.

From spacex.com: “Because life will be multiplanetary, and will be made possible by the farsighted strides we take today.”

The ivory towers of academia are generally filled with Skycult devotees. Reaching away from the chaotic, messy life close to Earth, they strive for objective colonisation of it through thought, making models that describe life - human and more-than-human - in universally applicable terms. Analysing, deconstructing, attempting control through the mind. The greater focus on climate change compared to the treatment of the living world (skycultishly labelled “biodiversity”) is typical. We have just lived through conferences around both issues: the 29th of the Convention on climate change (COP29) and the 16th of the Convention on biodiversity (COP16). It seems about twice as important to talk about climate change, perhaps less because it is happening in the sky (or perceived as such), as how it is approachable in units: parts per million, tonnes of carbon dioxide, billions of dollars in compensation and so forth.* You can recognise Skycult by this willingness to break down the world into measurable pieces, as well as its refusal to acknowledge limits and disregard context. Applied on solutions to climate change, for example: capturing and storing atmospheric carbon in the Earth's crust (regardless of the amounts of energy needed); shifting the energy system to electricity (regardless of the amounts of metals needed); expecting increased awareness and willingness of people to care for climate change as a problem (regardless of how their living conditions change).  

The baffled and tangibly disappointed reactions to the US election of Trump as the next president is another expression of Skycult. Society wasn't supposed to move in this direction, was it? We were heading for progress, defined by liberal values of freedom, independence, reason and equality. Why would people in the free world vote for a strongman with authoritarian leanings? This is just one sign of how Skycult is now shaking and showing up in increasingly explicit forms. As it is falling apart, it is tightening its grip. A system will always try to secure its survival.

Labelling these dimensions as cults is drastic in a typically paglian fashion. Obviously, they are not shaped in the same way we generally think of a cult - no charismatic leaders are consciously manipulating and exploiting its members, for example. However, the cult framing clarifies how dogmatic these cultural narratives can be, the level of commitment they demand and how they shape our thoughts and actions. That it is unconscious and we think of it as “just the way it is” makes it more insidious. The beliefs we hold about the world shapes how we perceive and correspondingly act in it, further reinforcing our beliefs. “Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth” as Marcus Aurelius put it. The cult of the objective perspective of the world as consisting of separate inanimate objects, possible to analyse and control from a distance, has now become dangerous. Perceiving the world as dead is killing it. The mechanistic, distanced worldview embedded in Skycult, fueled by the ancient sunlight of fossil energy, has accelerated the conversion of living beings into dead matter.

Now, the Earth itself has had enough. She is tired, and cannot allow this imbalance any longer. She sends elemental reminders of her existence, her primacy regardless of our ideas. Where Skycult separates us from “nature” and tries to grasp the world by taking it apart in little pieces, Earth sends fire and water to remind us of the vanity in disregarding the reality of interbeingness. We live in this Earth, not on it as some distant observers or engineers. There is no separation between what we call climate and “biodiversity”. When we take down the forests, floods sweep us away. When we convert forests into plantations, beetles devour the trees. When we use ancient energy recklessly, glaciers melt and seas become acidic. When we think we know better than others, we get authoritarian leaders. Skycult sucks at dealing with such complexity; and since the world is complex, it is woefully inadequate as a framework. 

I once asked an audience what they thought was the role of humans in the world. A poor soul, brave enough to answer, said: “we are the ones who take responsibility”. As soon as those words are uttered, the extent to which we are collectively failing at just that, becomes palpable. It sounds… silly, given what we know about the Antropocene. After all, aren’t fungi way more responsible? They build soil. We erode soil.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes, as Marcel Proust put it. We need to learn to see Skycult, its workings and failings, to be able to consciously give it less weight and balance it by building Earthcult. A living world, complex and unpredictable, cannot be successfully approached by control and dominance. It has to be lived in, participated with, loved and respected. Earthcult means finding our place in the living whole, honouring relationships with the elements and other beings, understanding that there are limits to what we should do. It also means recognising and honouring the innate order of nature and align with it. I don’t agree with Paglias view of Earth/nature as dark and chaotic. This perception in itself smells like Skycult to me. Through history, human cultures have celebrated and paid attention to cosmic orderly processes like the sunrise or the solstices. These set the conditions for life, whether we understand it or not. Eartcult demands humility; a word derived from humus. Soil. Earth. 

Sometimes humans are thought of as the connectors of Earth and Sky. I believe it is time we grow up, and show up as being capable of doing that: re-balance towards Earthcult and integrate the learnings we have received through our deep dive in Skycult. That would be taking responsibility. Progress of a different kind.

Now sun is setting from a short november day, and I am going to see to my duck Älva, who hatched her ducklings a few days ago, just when winter set in. Tough conditions to get you first babies. But two of them are still around! Life prevails.

Muscovy duck Älva with her first born, supported by heat derived through Skycult.

*Charles Eisensteins Climate - a new story is an excellent book on this theme.

Joshua Schreis The Emerald is a treasure trove of earthy spiritualism, I especially recommend the episode Oh, Justice for inconvenient reminders of what Earthcult may mean.

And obviously anything by Robin Wall Kimmerer!