The Land That Eats Gods

But sometimes it keeps their bones.

I have been thinking a lot about rot.

Not metaphorical rot in the polite, literary sense. Proper rot. The sort that smells. The sort that attracts flies. The sort where something that once stood upright and looked solid has gone soft inside and nobody wants to admit quite how far the decay has travelled.

Because that is how much of the culture around me feels now. Our institutions are falling apart. Health, education, civil service, justice, police, military. You can argue about degrees, causes and politics until the cows come home, but something is not working.

I have watched parts of it happening for most of my life. Years ago, when my son was little, I remember looking at the education system and thinking: if this keeps going, eventually parents are going to have to teach their children themselves.

When mine were small, we taught them to read. We taught them basic maths. That was simply what you did. By the time they reached school, they could already do some of the things school was supposedly there to teach them, and we were told off for it.

“What are we supposed to teach them?”

I remember thinking that was an extraordinarily strange question.

Teach them more.

That used to be the idea.

Patterns emerge long before collapse does, and I am a pattern-recognition person. Once you start seeing the same failures repeating across education, medicine, policing, social services, politics and law, it becomes difficult to keep pretending each problem is isolated.

There are places where the rot has gone very deep. The “grooming” gang scandals were one of those places for me. Children were being horrifically harmed while institutions that were supposed to protect them failed, looked away, protected themselves or worried about the consequences of speaking plainly.

A civilisation can survive incompetence. It can survive corruption. It can survive political stupidity. But when institutions become more concerned with protecting themselves than protecting the vulnerable, something fundamental has begun to decay.

If it were a tree, you would eventually have to admit that the trunk was rotten.

And rotten things compost.

That is the strange consolation.

Rot is not only an ending. Rot is a process.

Things break down. Structures collapse. Flies arrive. Maggots work through what can no longer sustain itself. It is ugly, and it smells, and nobody standing in the middle of decomposition thinks, Oh good, transformation.

But decomposition is transformation.

All I can really hope is that our own cultural decomposition is peaceful. History suggests that this is not always how human beings manage these things.

Still, hope is free.

The compost heap stinks, though. Britain stinks in lots of places. Europe stinks in lots of places. America stinks in lots of places. There is fear fermenting in it. Resentment. Cruelty. Confusion. Institutions clinging to themselves while becoming increasingly hollow.

And into decomposing cultures come new ideas, new people, new religions and new gods.

Or, perhaps more accurately in my worldview, new thought-forms.

Because I am not a theist. I do not particularly believe in gods as external supernatural beings sitting somewhere outside us waiting to intervene.

But I absolutely believe that human beings make gods.

Get enough people together, believing the same thing, repeating the same stories, singing the same songs, performing the same rituals, fearing the same punishments, loving the same symbols, generation after generation, and something begins to accumulate.

An egregore.

A collective thought-form.

Perhaps at a certain size there is very little practical difference between an egregore and a god.

And the land will quite happily eat those too.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés has been teaching me something about this.

Not personally, obviously. I should be so lucky.

Through her work.

She is one of those elders I had been looking for without quite knowing I was looking for them: a storyteller who understands that story is not something inferior to history. Story is one of the ways human beings carry history when the official version has been flattened by institutions, conquerors and respectable people with filing cabinets.

She speaks about Mexico, conquest, Catholicism, old mothers and old gods and Old Goddess Mothers.

Spain invaded Mexico brutally. There is no need to romanticise that. People were killed. Cultures were devastated. Indigenous religions were suppressed. Foreign structures of church, empire, language and hierarchy were imposed.

The conquerors arrived carrying Catholicism, Mary, saints, Christ, empire and their own enormous psychic structures.

But Mexico was not empty.

It already had gods, mothers, rituals, sacred places, stories, memory and land.

And those things did not simply vanish because someone announced that a new religion had arrived.

The old Mother was folded. Translated. Hidden. Renamed. She appeared again wearing different clothes.

Mexico changed beneath Spain, but Spain changed inside Mexico too.

Catholicism in Mexico became something it had not been before Mexico. Mexico became something it had not been before Spain.

Not cleanly. Not peacefully. Not romantically.

But irrevocably.

The conqueror changes the conquered. The conquered changes the conqueror.

And the land works upon them both.

Britain had its own version of this process much earlier.

Christianity arrived carrying stories born somewhere very different from these islands. Prophets. Wilderness. Sinai. Desert. One universal God.

Now, Britain had certainly met foreign gods before. The Romans were quite comfortable carrying a collection around with them. Gods were imported, merged, renamed, identified with local gods and generally expected to share the furniture.

But Christianity brought a different proposition.

One God. One truth. A universal religion.

And that religion came ashore in a landscape of rain, springs, marshes, ancient woods, rivers, burial mounds, sacred groves and local spirits.

So what happens when a God born in desert stories arrives in a country of wells, marshes, ancient woods and rain?

He gets wet.

That is what happens.

He gets muddy.

And eventually the land gets into him.

Christianity did not remain untouched here.

It grew yew trees around itself. It rang bells across valleys. It gathered local saints, local wells, local customs, local feast days and local ghosts. It entered old sacred places and, sometimes, built on top of them.

Walk into an old English church and look around properly.

Not merely at the altar.

Look at the stone.

Leaves. Faces. Beasts. Dragons. Grotesques. Green things emerging from mouths. Strange creatures peering down from corners. Gargoyles hanging over the outside world.

The priest might preach one cosmology.

The craftsperson carving the building appears, at times, to remember another.

And I love those churches.

I am not going there on Sunday. That is the Christians’ day.

But the rest of the week, I am quite happy wandering around them.

I love the bells. I love hearing a peal carry across the English countryside. I love old churchyards. I love the ancient yews. I love the feeling that many of these places were holy before anyone decided exactly which god the holiness belonged to.

Christianity preserved some of those places.

For that, I am grateful.

England changed Christianity.

But Christianity never entirely changed England.

The land does not hold theological councils. It does not publish rebuttals. It does not care which scripture you brought with you.

It absorbs.

Ideas arrive. People arrive. Gods arrive. Empires arrive.

Then weather starts working on them. Generations. Marriage. Death. Children. Language. Humour. Memory. Food. Landscape. Stones. Groves. Hedgerows. Stone Circles.

Some things root. Some hybridise. Some collapse. Some survive only as fragments. Some become so thoroughly local that eventually nobody remembers they were ever foreign.

This is what landscapes do.

People imagine religion is carried intact from one place to another.

It isn’t.

A religion brought into England cannot remain identical to the religion practised elsewhere, because England gets into it.

The rain gets into it. The humour gets into it. The villages get into it. The graveyards get into it. The children born here get into it.

The stories change. The emphasis changes. The symbols acquire new meanings.

The foreign god becomes local.

Or it disappears.

This is where my view diverges sharply from conventional religion.

I don’t believe in their gods in quite the way they do.

But I believe in what people make.

Human beings pour extraordinary amounts of psychic energy into collective structures. Attention. Fear. Prayer. Ritual. Art. Blood. Story. Music. Repetition. Institutions.

Think about the Catholic Church.

Whatever else it is, it is an enormous accumulated thought-form.

Part Christian. Part Roman. Part European. Part local. Part pagan. Part political. Part ancestral.

Men in robes swinging incense while choirs sing into vaulted ceilings beneath carved stone creatures.

I mean, come on.

You cannot tell me humanity has ever been terribly good at staying inside neat religious categories.

And I love some of what Christianity created.

That took me years to admit.

I love the music. I love Christmas carols sung properly, with soprano voices climbing into church rafters. I love bells. I love sacred architecture.

There is beauty there.

There are also ethical ideas that became deeply embedded in our culture and law: the worth of ordinary people, duties towards others, restraint upon power, ideas of mercy, conscience and equality before judgement.

Those things mixed with older customs, Roman inheritance, Germanic law, local practice and centuries of argument.

They fermented.

That may be the word I was looking for.

Or perhaps they rotted down.

The useful material remained.

The rest became compost.

And now new people, religions, customs and collective thought-forms are arriving again.

This frightens some people. Others insist we must never discuss it honestly.

Neither response interests me very much.

Migration changes cultures.

Obviously.

New religions change cultures.

Obviously.

Different value systems sometimes conflict.

Obviously.

People carry gods with them. They carry stories, rules, memories, grievances, rituals and assumptions about family, authority, sex, morality, community and belonging.

Those things enter the psychic ecology of the place.

And they will change Britain.

But Britain will change them too.

That part seems to be forgotten.

Nothing comes ashore unchanged.

Not Rome. Not Christianity. Not modern political ideologies. Not newer religions. Not migrants. Not those of us already here.

A religion brought here cannot remain identical forever to the religion that existed somewhere else.

The land gets into it.

I sometimes want to put that on a banner at Dover.

Bring your gods. Tell me their stories. Build your places of worship. Raise your children. Practise your religion.

But understand where you have arrived.

This is a land that eats gods.

It will work on yours too.

This process is not automatically pleasant.

Thought-forms compete. Values clash. Institutions protect themselves. Existing cultures can behave brutally towards newcomers. Newcomers can behave brutally towards existing cultures.

History is full of both.

Spain and Mexico did not meet over tea and negotiate a mutually enriching cultural exchange.

Conquest is ugly. Assimilation can be ugly. Resistance can be ugly. Syncretism often comes after conflict, not before it.

And institutions, even collapsing ones, cling desperately to themselves.

Humans have a strange habit of trying to preserve structures long after the life has gone out of them.

But nature has no reverence for institutions.

Nature does not care how many committees a dead tree has.

If it is dead, fungi move in. Beetles arrive. The structure breaks. The nutrients return to the soil.

Rot is not moral.

It is process.

And yet nature does not destroy everything.

Bogs preserve strange things.

Sometimes astonishingly well.

Bones remain. Seeds survive. Wood survives. Stories survive. Names survive. Songs survive. Practices survive.

Sometimes one tiny thing survives when the civilisation that created it has vanished.

That fascinates me.

Because perhaps cultures work the same way.

What still has life in it gets carried forward.

What can adapt survives.

What people still need gets renamed and retold.

The rest breaks down.

Perhaps this is why the old wells remain.

Once a goddess. Later a saint. Now perhaps merely a picturesque spring someone visits on a Sunday walk.

But the water still comes out of the ground.

The name changed.

The spring did not.

Does the spring care?

I doubt it.

Governments feel permanent when we are living underneath them.

Religions do too.

Empires certainly do.

Every empire seems to imagine that history has finally reached its proper conclusion.

Then moss grows over it.

The hills watched them arrive.

Rivers have carried other names. Marshes have swallowed roads. Farms disappear. Buildings vanish. Borders shift.

Human certainty is very young compared with landscape.

There is an awful lot of history beneath the moss here.

And that is why I do not particularly fear foreign gods.

I may object to them. I may disagree with their followers. I may fight ideas I believe are cruel, stupid or incompatible with the things I value.

But fear?

No.

We have done this before.

People make gods. Empires carry gods. Priests name gods. Kings weaponise gods. Migrants carry gods. Cultures inherit gods.

Sometimes we kill them.

Sometimes we resurrect them.

Sometimes we rename them.

Sometimes two of them meet and, several generations later, nobody can remember which part belonged to whom.

Eventually every god that comes here has to enter into relationship with this place.

And the place changes it.

A face carved beneath leaves.

A bell carrying over wet fields.

An ancient yew leaning over Christian graves.

A spring bubbling from the earth beneath the name of a saint where perhaps another name once stood.

A marsh slowly swallowing something humans believed would remain forever.

The land does not care what we call our gods.

It has eaten thousands of names already.

And sometimes—

sometimes it keeps their bones.

Silveness