In the 1990s, Oberon Zell’s essay “Theagenesis: The Birth of the Goddess” was revisited by another prominent member of his Church of All Worlds known as Anodea Judith. Her piece, “The Gaean Conspiracy,” expands upon Zell’s theory that the Planet Earth is a unified biological organism. It proposes that the next step in human evolution is to assist the planetary deity Gaea in achieving consciousness. Curiously, Judith ignores the normally negative connotations of the term conspiracy, defining it in a more neutral way as people working together to achieve a common goal. She notes it derives from a Latin term meaning ‘to breathe together,’ which links it to words such as inspiration and respiration, so perhaps this quirk arises from her background as a yoga instructor. She also points out the connection to the Latin word for spirit, adding a mystical dimension to her definition. Like both Zell and Carl Sagan before her, Judith calls for a realignment of humanity’s social, economic, scientific, religious, and political systems to bring them into accord with the natural systems of the living planet.
Judith opens her essay by drawing a parallel between Zell’s treatise on Gaean Spirituality and the more scientific theory known as the Gaia Hypothesis, put forward in the 1970s by chemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis (who had previously been married to Sagan). She notes Lovelock’s observation that Earth seems to maintain a remarkable homeostasis over time in terms of the atmosphere’s oxygen content, ocean salinity, and global temperature, attributing this effect to the action of the planet’s biosphere. She stresses, however, that Gaea is more than just the biosphere: “Just as a living redwood tree is 97% inanimate matter, just as a snail includes its shell, so Gaea is a total organism, comprising Her crust, Her flowing mantle, and Her radioactive metallic core.” (Judith capitalizes Gaea’s personal pronouns owing to her perceived divinity.) Since this dynamic homeostasis suggests that Earth’s regulatory systems resist entropy, Judith deduces that Gaea must be moving toward greater organization and complexity—i.e., a “self-reflexive” state of consciousness.
Judith admits that Lovelock’s implication that Gaea demonstrates a purpose-driven intelligence has been roundly criticized by the scientific community, but she builds a case that this “biological superorganism” is still evolving in that direction. Drawing on the ideas of French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, she argues that the process of cephalization, an evolutionary progression toward more complex brains, leads inevitably to noögenesis—the emergence of the mind. This is, she asserts, “the basic evolutionary pattern in biological organisms.” Naturally, the maintenance of the body’s autonomic systems is not dependent on a conscious mind. It is only when the organism faces undue stress that intelligence becomes necessary to survival. And it is at this tipping point, Judith believes, that Gaea now finds herself due to the effects of human activity on the global environment.
Judith digresses into a brief description of the related idea of the noösphere, popularized by Teilhard in his 1955 book, Le Phénomène Humain. Like the atmosphere or the biosphere, the noösphere is that part of Earth’s systems comprising thought, intelligence, and reason. She describes it as an “organ of consciousness” that “can be thought of as Gaea’s cerebral cortex” and is made up primarily of the neural networks of humans and animals, including the mechanical synapses of humanity’s ever-expanding communications technology. Even non-sentient animals, she claims, are part of this system: “as we watch movies and documentaries about them, we bring them into our consciousness.” But despite all the increasing activity in the noösphere, she suggests, Gaea remains, essentially, asleep. During this discussion, Judith also introduces the intriguing concept of “Gaean time,” a frame of reference based on the assumed total lifespan of the Earth, some 15 billion years. She sets the emergence of the noösphere at approximately one million years ago, when hominids learned to harness fire. Thus, it is the equivalent of two days old in terms of a human lifespan, and by the same token, our worldwide communications media have existed for mere seconds. In this way Judith illustrates the rapidity with which Gaea is developing self-awareness, comparing it to the amount of time it takes a sleeping person to awaken.
By way of example, Judith suggests we consider the state of affairs a few centuries ago, when Europeans could be embroiled in war without the people in the Americas even knowing about it. As the noösphere developed, people around the world came to be aware of international events, but with a significant time lag. This buffer between traumatic events and humanity’s full awareness of them was gradually whittled away by technological advancement. Furthermore, the information itself became increasingly rich and detailed, growing from the written word to include sound, images, and color. The development of the World Wide Web since Judith wrote her essay would seem to bear out her contention. Now, with live-video social media, people on opposite sides of the globe can converse face-to-face as if they were standing next to each other. The noösphere is indeed evolving, and rapidly.
Like Zell, Judith contends also that a significant leap forward for Gaea’s awakening occurred when NASA began releasing photographs of the planet taken from space. As these images entered humanity’s consciousness, she says, it was as if Gaea were seeing herself in the mirror for the first time. The resultant global consciousness-raising spurred many people to view the world in more holistic terms, and further inspired people like Judith and Zell to see all the interacting processes of the Planet Earth as parts of a larger divine system—Gaea as goddess. When all of humanity joins them in this realization, she believes, Gaea’s sense of identity as a global being will emerge. She calls this awakening an “omega point,” a term taken from Teilhard. Those of us who have already tuned into this cosmic truth, she asserts, “are privileged to have a ringside seat” to observe the process, but also have a duty to help speed the awakening and to prevent humanity’s greed and short-sightedness from hindering it.
Judith next tackles the seeming contradiction in the idea that the human race, an integral part of Gaea’s emerging consciousness, would largely work against the natural order, upset the biosphere’s carefully maintained equilibrium, and turn a blind eye toward the goddess’s struggle for self-awareness. Does this mean that Gaea suffers from self-destructive tendencies? Or is humanity “a failed experiment” and due for extinction? Judith concludes that Gaea, in her groggy, semi-conscious state, is reacting with the sort of maladaptive behavior exhibited by people suffering from unacknowledged, untreated mental or emotional trauma—a kind of planetary self-harm. This behavior is compulsive and even obsessive, so long as the underlying psychic wound remains unhealed, and it prevents the individual from achieving self-actualization. The specific wound that Judith believes underlies this psychosis is the alienation of humanity from its primordial nature-based spirituality, a condition exacerbated by Cartesian dualism. As a result, she argues, the noösphere has been warped into what American historian Theodore Roszak dubbed the ‘neurosisphere.’
Again echoing Zell, Judith traces the origin of this psychic wound back to the replacement of a prehistoric universal goddess worship with the patriarchal monotheist religions that continue to dominate much of human culture. Interestingly, she notes that while this 6,000-year period seems long to us, in Gaean time it is a matter of moments. Thus, the damage is not irreparable, assuming the human race can manage a course-correction and move away from mechanistic cultural models to return to more Earth-based values. She warns: “As we are separated from Mother Nature, we are simultaneously separated from our own nature. Our self-destruction is her destruction. As the face of our planet breaks out in biospheric acne, our social systems break down, our economic systems decline, our political systems wage war, and our immune systems fail. Our despair is Her despair. Her pain is our doom.”
However, Judith does not abandon hope. She sees the possibility for positive action and makes specific recommendations. She urges her readers to reconnect with the natural world by visiting the wilderness or other unspoiled places in a mindful manner, seeking to dismantle the barriers that separate us from other aspects of Gaea. Included among those other aspects, of course, are people we may consider our enemies, and she challenges us to dissolve the illusion of separateness there also. In this way, we can all work to heal the myriad psychic wounds that hold humanity back from achieving its potential. She also advocates for a form of Gaean evangelism to promote the awareness of the emerging global consciousness, in addition to political activism and support for environmental organizations. Finally, on a more personal level, she suggests that we conduct rituals to open ourselves up to the Gaean consciousness and to help us approach all Gaea’s children with compassion and appreciation.
In closing, Judith acknowledges that the process of effecting a global change in consciousness will extend beyond any single human lifetime, which makes it a difficult commitment for many people. But this is an example of the cathedral problem: as medieval cathedrals could take centuries to construct, those who did most of the work would not live to see its completion; nevertheless, the work had to be done, or the goal would never be reached. We all do what we can and trust to future generations to carry on after we’re gone. Only in this way could Anodea Judith’s Gaean Conspiracy achieve its goal—to “awaken our Mother and thank her for the miraculous gift of life she gives us.”
A version of Judith’s essay can be found on the Church of All Worlds website.
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