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this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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chapotraphouse
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I would very much like it if a revival of nature worship occurred as a religious movement. With climate change the way it is I believe it would be quite successful. There is however far too much potential for the kind of burning man crowd to take it over and turn it into cringe instead of a proper folk-ey working class thing.
For a revival of nature worship, we would first have to be sure that pre-christian and pre-roman societies did actually practice anything of the sort, which we are not.
On top of that, I'm not sure that a religious movement is necessary or desirable for nature advocacy or preservation.
american natives were tremendously successful in reshaping the landscape and environment to suit their needs and hold nature in deep esteem. land as kin is totally sufficient. a peer relationship, in other words.
We do know it occurred in Indo-European societies, but it was not born of love of nature but close dependence on it.
Shinto religion is an example of humans still doing a form of nature worship in my mind. Assigning spirits to everything and worshipping those spirits and the "balance" of them is in its way the worship of a natural system. It's very very against the destruction of ecosystems and nature because it's incredibly harmful to the spirits, so while nature might not itself be the thing being worshipped by Shintoism the spirits created by nature require the protection of nature in order to exist. It's somewhat close.
Ok so it's not based in europe but does it matter? Humans can worship nature elsewhere so you could essentially create such a religion for the european context instead.
Nature religion depends upon a view of nature as uncontrollable and superior to humans. We've learned how to control it. Not 100% but enough we can make rocks into fertile soil and bring back dead forests. We can't relate to nature the same way earlier societies could.
Astroturfing the creation of this religion was a minor plot element in The Ministry for the Future
Nature worship isn't really a thing if it's anything like how anthropologists interpret indigenous spiritual beliefs. It's more like an acknowledgement of the universe and the forces shaping it being much larger than we are and recognizing that we're all a part of it as well in life and in death.