In Search of Ecopaganism 4

Western culture has been interested in 'the Noble Savage' about as long as it has been interested in Paganism, from what is considered to be the start of the Modern Era, about 1500, which is when it also started being interested in the Druid, who is just the domestic brand of Noble Savage. All, of course-- Pagans, Druids, and Savages-- were often demonized during the Modern Era. Preceding them, in the Medieval Era, was the figure of the Wild Man, who was demonized then, but gradually was extended more and more sympathetic treatment, perhaps because a developing, urbanizing Europe was moving further from the Christian terror of wild Nature and its mythic inhabitants, which gained appeal in contrast to the discontents of civilization. The Witch, however, has only recently been accorded similar sympathy (Glinda of the Wizard of Oz!), because wild, natural women started fighting back and reclaiming the Witch and her paganism.

With Europe's voyages of exploration, starting as well at the start of the Modern era, many savage peoples were discovered around the world, who of course had to be converted to Christianity. And so the fear and hatred of heathen savages was extended toward them, and the legendary Wild Man of Europe was replaced by real wild men in out-landish places.

The first of these savages to be encountered were in the Americas. And England, the 'motherland' of our modern American culture, was competing with Spain and France for control of what came to be the United States and Canada, and though it was a close thing between England and France in the race for westward expansion across the North American continent, it was England, as well as her offspring the United States, who ended up the winners, and so the present (mainly) Anglophone nations, the U.S. and Canada, have a long history and heritage of the native peoples whose lands they ended up controlling. And this is important because it was in the U.S. and England that Neopaganism developed in the 1960s and 70s, and the Injun heritage was one stream of it though few now know of this, and it was ecological.

But in Northern Europe as well, there was interest in these and other savages, not just for colonial empire-building, but culturally, as a symbol. Particularly by the Romantic Era (from the late 1700s), the figure of the Noble Savage was a strong alternative ideal to that of Civilized Man. North American tribes and leaders that best fit this ideal became romanticized. Particularly as civilized man became more industrialized and urbanized, the icon of the simple, virtuous primitive, which had been around since Classical times-- that is, the earliest days of Western Civilization-- grew in its appeal as a Romantic 'Other'. Travelers, crusading journalists, and writers of literature in North America presented accounts of domestic Noble Savages, accurate, or valorizing, and especially in fiction, romanticized.

As a boy in the 1950s and 60s, I was heir to this heritage, mostly in children's literature and television programming, and later in movies and library books. And, as I have felt obliged to provide this introduction first, I will actually next time deliver the promised shtook on my experience of the Injun heritage. I will return to the Mythos before too long, I think, but first I need to work-up this Ecopagan matter I've been thinking about for a while. In the meanwhile, the Mythos material waits for you in the archives if you must not be deprived of it.