In the Spirit of the Earth: Rethinking History and Time

by Professor Calvin Luther Martin

This meditation by an award winning historian calls for a new way oflooking at the natural world and our place in it, while boldly challenging theassumptions that underlie the way we teach and think about both history andtime. Calvin Luther Martin's In the Spirit of the Earth is a provocativeaccount of how the hunter-gatherer image of nature was lost--with devastatingconsequences for the environment and the human spirit. According to Martin, our current ideas about nature emerged during neolithictimes, as humans began to domesticate animals and farm the land. In thehunter-gatherer mind, animals and plants were spiritual beings and the earth areliable provider. But in neolithic innovations Martin finds the roots of ourown curiously alienated relationship with other living things and with theearth itself. This alienation is revealed not only in our artifice--thetechnology that moves us further and further away from nature--but even in theway we speak about the world. It is revealed most dramatically, perhaps, inthe horrific destruction we have visited on animals and landscapes. Martin sees the shift to agricultural economies as a change in spiritual imagination. This new approach to food getting meant a new understanding ofourselves and the world--a new, powerful image of the self relative to plantsand animals. It led to food surpluses, a population boom, the appearance ofcities and ceremonial centers, and the emergence of priestly classes and rulingelites--in short, to all the achievements, follies, and horrors of"civilization." Martin argues that history--his own discipline--and human centered historicalconsciousness lie at the heart of this ultimately destructive ideology. Notions of order and progress, of a chosen people and linear time, fuel oursense that the world is ours to improve, exploit, and even destroy. We need torediscover the wisdom and sanity of less presumptuous ideas of nature--aprocess that demands a much larger narrative than historians have been writingand telling. Without calling for a return to hunting and gathering, Martinasks if some of what we lost--or left behind--in the distant past might bereclaimed and used again. To make peace with the earth. To make peace withourselves. "Many will respond with that oft heard reply, But we cannot go back!To which I respond, But we never left--never left our true, real context, thatis. Homo is still here on this planet earth, abiding in our most fundamentaland necessary nature by its fundamental and necessary terms. We left all ofthat only, really, in our fevered imagination. It all began as an act ofimagination, an illusory image--most fundamentally, an image of fear--and so thecorrective process must likewise begin with an image. Let us re-learn, as hunter-gatherers knew to the core of their being, that this place and itsprocesses (even in our death) always takes care of us--that Homo's citizenship,and errand, rest not with any creed or state, but with 'that star's substancefrom which he had arisen.'"--from In the Spirit of the Earth

Genres: Nonfiction, Nature

176 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1992

Reviews

[James McKenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Martin dives into the psyche of the Pleistocene. Not something you can do lightly. I finished this quite a while ago and it informs my thinking in what has become a major topic for me. Sacredness must have been fundamental to stone age hunter gatherers. Not an easy read and one you may take issue with. An excellent book.

[Todd · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very well written book, written in a way that speaks to a profound topic - the human condition. Highly recommended to anyone who believes in more than what society would have them believe. If you love the earth and recognize your connection to the earth and all life you will enjoy this book and walk away feeling refreshed.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

An eye-opening way for viewing history from a different perspective. This book really made me think about previously-held ideas.

[Cindy Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

I struggled a bit with this book, but I attribute that to my own lack of concentration in following the author's direction.

The subtitle of "Rethinking History and Time" is very apt, since this is a thesis about human interaction with nature spanning from hunter-gatherer relationships to the current nature-as-adversity economy. Even the phrase "interaction with nature" is giving me away as a modern, since the author gives us a picture of the hunter-gatherers as not "interacting" with nature, but being nature.
The changes in human relationship with nature over time as we changed from foraging to agriculture, mirrored the change from mythology to theology, as the level of abstraction increased.

What I really wanted to know from this book is can we change our understanding and integration with the rest of the Earth. In chapter 5, he writes, "Even so, it strikes me that we now stand on the threshold of a major paradigm shift. The basic knowledge of biospheric communion is well in hand, and the alarms have been sounded over and over for civilization's profligate and destructive ways ... Things seem in place for a massive structural change." Thus, I feel somewhat hopeful.

[Lauren Tennet · Rating 5 out of 5]

More words from a Mind of the Earth. Like David Abram, who has spoken primarily on language and its implications in divorcing humans from our place and senses, this book considers history, namely what the creation of history has done to Neolithic Homo Sapiens’ relationship to our world and to time. A quenching, encouraging, calmly revelatory book.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

A somewhat flawed, polemical work arguing that psychological-cosmological transformations in the imagination occuring during the transition from the hunter-gatherer paleolithic age to the agriculture-based neolithic lay at the core of our rupture from proper relations with the earth and the development of an alienated, destructive technological civilization.

Martin attempts to describe the hunter-gatherer mind and spirit world, and argues that an immanent spirit-world in which we can't really speak of "humans" distinct from the rest of nature was abandoned for a different imagining of our situation, based on linear history and human power and dominion over creation, and in which the spirits of the animals and earth are removed and placed into (first) celestial pantheons of gods and then (second) monotheistic myths of a vengeful Lord and His chosen people.

The argument gets repetitive. And I got the feeling Martin is writing the early drafts, stumbling towards a profound critique that would have been better if worked-over a bit longer. Martin hazards that it was fear (of the mutable course of nature, of survival) that motivated the neolithic transformation, but can't explain why such fear would suddenly develop after so many tens of thousands of years of hunter-gatherer life. I thought immense climatic changes might account for this, but Martin doesn't touch on this.

An interesting bibliographic essay at the end, suggesting and appreciating works - beginning with poetry, Snyder, Olds, Bringhurst - that led Martin down this path.