Lawrence of Etruria

Near the end of his life, the British novelist D.H. Lawrence traveled with his friend Earl Brewster to Tuscany to tour tombs and ruins of the ancient Etruscan civilization. The resulting book, Etruscan Places, published posthumously in 1932, is largely a rumination on the state of Italy under Benito Mussolini’s fascist government, which Lawrence compares unfavorably to the Etruscan culture as depicted in elaborate frescos found within the ancient tombs. However, Lawrence also makes several observations about the Etruscan religion, as he conceptualizes it, which reveal an intriguing sensibility on his part that could be described as Gaean, as it definitely reflects the ideas about Gaean Spirituality discussed in previous posts.

In the second chapter, “Tarquinia,” Lawrence displays a receptivity to the belief in a near-universal prehistoric nature religion, even suggesting that it predated the concept of discrete divinities.

There was never an Etruscan nation: only, in historical times, a great league of tribes or nations using the Etruscan language and the Etruscan script—at least officially—and uniting in their religious feeling and observances…. It is probably to a great extent the language of the old aboriginals of southern Etruria, just as the religion is in all probability basically aboriginal, belonging to some vast old religion of the prehistoric world. From the shadow of the prehistoric world emerge dying religions that have not yet invented gods or goddesses, but live by the mystery of the elemental powers in the Universe, the complex vitalities of what we feebly call Nature (p.43).

In the next chapter, “The Painted Tombs of Tarquinia,” Lawrence picks up the thread again, describing the Etruscan religion as one that saw the Planet Earth as a unified living organism, existing in an animistic universe. People and other animals, while discrete entities, are part of the larger system—not separate from it. Lawrence clearly admires the idea of the living world, Gaea, though he wouldn’t have called it that.

To the Etruscan all was alive; the whole universe lived; and the business of man was himself to live amid it all. He had to draw life into himself, out of the wandering huge vitalities of the world. The cosmos was alive, like a vast creature. The whole thing breathed and stirred. Evaporation went up like breath from the nostrils of a whale, steaming up. The sky received it in its blue bosom, breathed it in and pondered on it and transmuted it, before breathing it out again. Inside the earth were fires like the heat in the hot red liver of a beast. Out of the fissures of the earth came breaths of other breathings, vapours direct from the living physical underneath, exhalations carrying inspiration. The whole thing was alive, and had a great soul, or anima: and in spite of one great soul, there were myriad roving, lesser souls; every man, every creature and tree and lake and mountain and stream, was animate, had its own peculiar consciousness. And has it to-day. The cosmos was one, and its anima was one; but it was made up of creatures. And the greatest creature was earth, with its soul of inner fire (p.89).

The fourth chapter describes how classical civilization moved away from and suppressed the Gaean consciousness, replacing the original ecofeminist understanding of the cosmos with a patriarchal, mechanistic system. An integral part of this new system, Lawrence contends, is the concept of hell—a sort of “anti-nature”—which was alien to the Etruscan way of thinking.

The old religion of the profound attempt of man to harmonize himself with nature, and hold his own and come to flower in the great seething of life, changed with the Greeks and Romans into a desire to resist nature, to produce a mental cunning and a mechanical force that would outwit Nature and chain her down completely, completely, till at last there should be nothing free in nature at all, all should be controlled, domesticated, put to man’s meaner uses. Curiously enough, with the idea of the triumph over nature arose the idea of a gloomy Hades, a hell and purgatory. To the peoples of the great natural religions the after-life was a continuing of the wonder-journey of life. To the peoples of the Idea the after-life is hell, or purgatory, or nothingness, and paradise is an inadequate fiction (p.131).

Here we see the same basic ideas later expounded on by late 20th-century Neo-Pagan writers such as Oberon & Morning Glory Zell and Anodea Judith, so the roots of Gaean Spirituality clearly go deeper than the counterculture movement of the 1970s. D.H. Lawrence was responding to the same need for a radically different conception of the cosmos in the 1920s that would inspire the later Pagan resurgence.