Hope you all don’t mind if I jump into this conversation. The issue of ‘story’ is something I’ve been fairly obsessed with for a long time. This is somewhat off-topic but I really would like to address Willem’s assertion that “We have no Story, for us (without an indigenous heritage, blooded or adopted), that has this in-dwelling perspective.”
I just want to point out that there is at least one holdout within civilized culture where people still live within the stories offered up by the nature of ‘place’ and nature generally. That holdout is astrology. Most people misunderstand astrology because they consider it a type of divination, but in fact learning astrology is a matter of fine-tuning one’s empathic relationship to the constellation-people and planet-people (if I may borrow a rewilders’ turn of phrase) of the night sky and learning to feel their personality traits in everyday life.
I have a pet theory that western astrology is an animist leftover that survived the rise of civilization in the middle east because it is the one aspect of animism that can be represented with alphanumeric literacy. All of the constellations correspond to some animal or phenomenon in nature, with the exception of Libra the scales, which got added sometime during antiquity, and Sagittarius the centaur, which recalls some images of the “revolution of symbols” that shortly predate cities. Moreover, the three zodiacal animals that are now domesticated  the ram, the bull, and the goat  exist in astrology in their undomesticated forms. For example, Taurus the Bull draws its characteristics not from what is apparent in a domesticated bull, but from the behavior one would see in an undomesticated bull.
If you’re at all familiar with astrological literature, you’ll find that astrologers are almost unfailingly uniform in their interpretations of the broad outlines of these stories; but the details get screwed up because astrology is wholly dependent upon place  even a tiny change in latitude, or a few minutes’ rotation of the earth, can drastically change the appearance of the heavenly bodies’ configuration. The details play out differently in different places because of this, and the best astrologers can do is make an empathic estimate of the next scene  the story itself gets written by the interaction of place with the wandering stars’ travels through the constellations.
It is also intensely interesting to me that the wandering stars, or planets, are entirely civilized archetypes that travel through the territories, or constellations, of specific animals. With astrology, it is completely impossible to divorce any human story from the personalities of animals  Scorpion, Lion, Ram, Goat, and the others exist in astrology in the same way Coyote exists among indigenous North American cultures. It is as if the collective, civilized unconscious remembers and enshrined this knowledge in such a way as to prevent us from forgetting; to carry us through 12,000 years of civilization with something still intact from our pre-civilized cultural ancestors. Astrology offers not just a story, but a practically unbreakable framework for creating stories of place that are culturally meaningful for those of us who come from western civilization, in whatever place we might find ourselves. In my own opinion it is crucially important to keep the story of civilization intact and evolve out of it, and then keep that story intact, rather than discard it and clothe ourselves with something else, lest our cultural descendants forget in the same way we have forgotten. By its nature, astrology protects the entire story from paleolithic through early empires, all the way through to collapse, and sketches the broad outlines of future stories waiting to be revealed.
Personally, my studies in astrology are unquestionably animist, and the whole point is to discover the stories  or more accurately, the ongoing story  the sky has to tell. From its position, it has seen and will forever see absolutely everything that happens on the Earth and it knows every story, including all the ones yet to be discovered.
I don’t really understand the notion that having been born into civilization means we have no indigenous heritage. I guess because I see the world through an astrological lens, and consider this a miraculous gift from pre-civilized, pre-western, animist culture, I feel very strongly that the paleolithic middle east is my cultural heritage. And this feeling is greatly bolstered by the animist interpretation of Genesis  indeed, of the whole bible  that I have been piecing together for a few years now. We are cultural descendants of those from whom western civilization first erupted and I personally feel very strong ties to those people. Scorpio feels the same to me as it has since the first person noticed what he feels like. That is a very strong, shared cultural experience. The story of western civilization’s break with nature, the rise and fall of civilization, and humans’ return to a state of grace looks an awful lot like an in-dwelling story to me… it is our experience, as the heirs to the cultural gold of those who came just before civilization  in the forms of astrology & the bible  it doesn’t make sense to me to disregard these things and try to make something up from scratch.
Well that was very long-winded. Hopefully my points didn’t get lost among all those words.
â€â€paula
