This is a reminder that the deadline for submitting proposals for the conference in the Université Catholique de Louvain is approaching (September 30th). It will take place in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, on February 27th and 28th 2025, and it will deal with:
Thinking relationships between natural environment and religions in the ancient Mediterranean.
Call for Papers
Historians of Antiquity have long studied ancient deities and the cults paid to them. But they often did so without seeking to systematically link them to this nature Lucretius, and then Judeo-Christian thinkers and modern natural sciences made independent from the divine. Environmental history has in turn established itself an independent field of research for almost half a century, and is now an essential subject in the scientific panorama. This is well-illustrated by the abundance of studies, conferences and publications on the matter. Environmental issues encourage collective awareness about today’s major ecological problems and the human footprint on nature. Or at least Lucretius would have called it nature, though we tend to use – with a few consistent nuances – the term “environment”. Climate change thus gives rise not only to scientific, economic and political debates, but also to intense artistic, cultural, literary, even spiritual and religious productions. All of them constantly question humankind’s relationship with its environment.
On the one hand, nature – coined by the Enlightenment with a capital letter – opposed humankind to everything that did not belong to it. On the other hand, the notion of environment restores a complex and permanent link between humankind and “everything that surrounds it”. It therefore encompasses animals, plants and inanimate subjects of the natural sciences, but also issues as diverse as town planning, agriculture, epidemics, landscape, domesticated animals and plants, or environmental crises. Studying its history means questioning its multiple and complex interactions with human societies. But it also implies facing the difficulty of defining it and of differentiating it from the older (and also complex) category of “nature” – whose meaning and boundaries change when it translates the natura of the Romans, or the φύσις of the Greeks.
Scholars working on Antiquity did not fail to take an early interest in the reconstruction of ancient landscapes and in questioning the organisation of anthropised ecosystems. Archaeological sciences paved the way for this new field. Then historians and anthropologists explored it as well, at the crossroads of physical geography, economic history, ecology (as a science) or cultural anthropology . Like the naturalists of the 18th century, the first historians working on ancient environment measured, inventoried, mapped and quantified the effects of human activities on this long-anthropised environment . Others have since questioned the reciprocal, trying to explain the great turning points in human history through the subtle effects environment had on it . Meanwhile, many specialists have studied the nature and magnitude of ancient “natural” disasters and questioned their management by ancient societies . Others attempted to put our own contemporary questions about these threats into perspective . The history and anthropology of these notions of environment or nature have questioned ancient conceptions on the subject .
But so far little space has been given to the analysis of interactions between environment, humakind and the divine. Some scholars working on other historical periods were interested in the sacralisation of nature and the way its observation inspired the sacred . But the examination of the inherent relationship between environment and religion – which Lucretius denounced – remains little explored. Perhaps because long-standing university research in religious sciences is often carried out by researchers distinct from those who allowed the emergence of environmental studies. Or because Western researchers are too imbued with Cartesian thinking and Judeo-Christian culture to consider environment in a way that is not only about science and technology. And thus do not always see the point of “hurrying back unto the old religion”, to rephrase Lucretius’s statement. Or even as a reaction to the Eurocentric theses steeped in colonialism and developed by the first historians of religions. According to them, cults rendered to nature and its remarkable elements were only primitive and savage, doomed to evolve through the stages of polytheism, until the decisive breakthrough of Judeo-Christian monotheism . Whatever these multiple reasons, specialists in ancient religions have still given little attention to these questions, and environmental specialists have often made them a blind spot in their emerging field of study.
Environment and religion are, however, not as distinct and distant as they seem. Even contemporary Western societies are not exempt from overlaps between these two notions they have nevertheless theorised separately. Encyclical Laudato Si’, published by Pope Francis in 2015, saw Catholicism fully take up environmental issues . The waves of drought that hit Europe in 2023 gave rise to processions in Spain, asking God to bring back rain . And the “neo-shamanic” practices, which are developing in particular in South America, offer Western tourists the opportunity to reconnect, through a supposedly ancient and authentic spirituality, with a personified or even deified nature, whose defence is less an ecological problem than a sacred duty . These modern mixtures occasionally draw on ancient references, summoning figures like Gaia, the Pacha Mama, or a “Mother Nature” with divine contours .
In ancient Mediterranean societies neither environment nor religion were thought of as precisely defined, strictly limited and therefore distinct fields. Consequently, overlaps were even more numerous, despite Lucretius’ complaints. Religion often appeared as a mode of indirect action on natural environment. For example via prayers and offerings aimed at avoiding or limiting natural disasters by appeasing the deities supposed to be their masters. But also, and more simply, to guarantee the good growth of the products of the land – and this through the celebration of regular festivals, held each year to protect this or that stage of the germination, growth and maturation of cereals . Conversely, what we call natural environment seems to have played a major role in the structuring of myths , in the choice of locations and structures of certain sanctuaries , or in philosophical reflection on the nature of the gods . These few examples do not claim to exhaust the question of the overlaps between religious beliefs and rites on the one hand and environmental perception and action on the other hand. The quotation from Lucretius in the excerpt resonates as an acknowledgement, by the philosopher, of the little audience his thesis on nature received at the time: the Epicurean vision of the universe being independent from the constant intervention of the gods, and governed solely by the laws of necessity, was an exception. Ancient societies, either Greek, Roman or Mediterranean in general, believed on the contrary mainly in the immanence of the gods and in their constant acting on environment. Thus environment and its powerful masters had to do with myths, cults and religion in general .
This symposium aims precisely to question the extent of these links between the natural and the divine, to explore some varied examples borrowed from different societies of the ancient Mediterranean, and to outline a heuristic typology allowing a better understanding of the emic categories at work in ancient worlds – beyond our etic categories of “religion” and “environment”.
Three main axes of reflection and exploration will be proposed. Each will focus on an aspect of these relationships between natural environment and religion, and will consider it in both directions: environment and religion being both subject and object of the established relationship. Contributions may come from different disciplines associated with ancient studies: history, archaeology, anthropology, literature, art history, etc.
Axis 1: INTERPRETING natural environment through religion, or APPREHENDING religion through natural environment
Natural environment is often understood by ancient societies as a mode of expression and action of divine powers. Gods sometimes manifest their anger by sending droughts, earthquakes and storms, or conversely abundant harvests, seismic respites and favourable floods . Certain natural spaces were also perceived as shaped by divine action – because of their geological, hydrological particularities, etc . Conversely, deities are almost always thought of as associated with a “natural” element they govern, from which they borrow characteristics or even “personality” . This first axis will question this ancient reading of the environmental by the religious (and vice versa), to offer examples, specify the contexts and modalities but also the limits.
Axis 2: ACTING on natural environment through recourse to religion, or ACTING on the divine through recourse to the natural
Ancient societies were aware of the limitations of their technical capacities to act on their environment. Thus, they willingly relied on the gods, whose power was deemed superior or even absolute in this field . The cults paid to them therefore became, in the minds of the Ancients, methods of indirect action on the natural environment. Reciprocally, the ritual practices intended for these deities, from civic cults to magics, involved places and ritual objects, offerings (animals or plants, either domestic or wild ones) from the natural environment. Those were chosen according to modalities which often took into account the affinities of the divinity with this or that element of “nature” . This axis and its examples will question the specificities, differences or similarities of the modalities of religious action on the environment, and their reciprocals.
Axis 3: UNDERSTANDING natural environment through the gods, or THEORISING the gods through the observation of nature
Ancient societies’ reflection on environment was not limited to the prodromes of modern sciences and technical thought. It also went through myths. Many examples of which have clear links with the natural environment, from cosmogonic stories explaining the creation of the universe through divine genealogy, to etiological myths explaining the origin and symbolism of an animal or plant, and its association with a deity . Conversely, philosophical reflection on the divine raised the question of the connection between the gods and natural environment. The range is wide, from the Epicurean approach which made the world an “accident”, to the Aristotelian concept of “unmoved mover” . The elements of this axis raise the question of the degree of separation, or overlapping, of the notions of divine and “nature”, in philosophy, in myths and in ancient mentalities.
The extended version can be downloaded at :
https://www.academia.edu/
