The Now and Future Thing

For me, the Pagan past has faded in its allure.

We live now in the Age of Ecology, a time of cultural innovation, and we use rather than depend-on the Old, inspired by the ecological Urge in the great work to invent and make an ecological world.

We're living in a new age, when all values and acts must be reevaluated in terms of the master-value Ecology. So be open to the New (while keeping your sensible wits about you) and recreate the model of the world using your own inner Will to Ecology, and your own creative Eco-Self, to become a walking Eco-mensch, a light to others and a force for change.

Dragon to Drygand

Gary Snyder foresaw folktale and myth imagery from the Nature-religion cultural traditions of the past 10,000 years, combined with the wisdom of modern ecological science, as the basis for a higher Synthesis of world poetry and myth, the basis for a new age, or as I would say it, an ecological culture-civilization. This belief could be named Snyderism (isms!), or, in Eormensch, 'Snytraeden' (OEng snyttru= wisdom, cleverness, prudence, sagacity, intelligence). Or Deep Ecology.

The Serpent, or Dragon, traditionally has represented the raw chaotic bioenergies and elemental vital forces. It could be dangerous-- a destructive monster to be slain by gods or men, but it was also seen as possessing a primordial daimonic wisdom, and could be beneficial to humans. It embodied the indefatigable will of organisms to survive-- to kill, to feed, to breed-- and also this will writ large as the wild titanic movements and catastrophes of Nature, for good or ill to Mankind.

The Drygand is a development of the Dragon in a Snyderian direction. If the Dragon was wild urge, the Drygand is tamed to focused purpose. If the Dragon is raw energies and forces, in the Drygand these are seethed and brewed into something new and necessary-- Life consciously fighting for all Life, an addition to the spontaneous order that evolves from the self-striving of all organisms into a balanced harmonious superorganism, the Biosphere, necessary because humankind does not fit into this spontaneous order, this Superorganism, and has become the dangerous destructive monster.

So where, particularly in the Western world, the Dragon often merited slaying to return good order, Man, in this Age of Ecocatastrophe, is revealed as the dangerous destructive monster, and if Mankind merits slaying, it might perhaps instead be tamed so as to fit into the good order of ecological balance and harmony. And the Hero is the Drygand-- Life fighting for all Life-- whether within the deep human psyche, or out in the wide Biosphere. A culture-inversion that creates a new world.