POSSESSED BY APOLLO:
 LEARNING FROM EMERSON’S PARTIAL ANTHROPOCENTRISM

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s solar perspective on our relations with the natural world.

Craig Chalquist
 Chalquist.com

12/4/21

Nature cures abound. They always have, but today their popularity soars, as does the scientific evidence confirming their power to heal. Search online for “spending time in nature research” and a profusion of studies pops up.

Ecotherapy has been defined as an umbrella term for a variety of health-bringing practices involving reconnection with some aspect of the natural world: plants, animals, landscapes, the elements, forest walks, scenic views out a window.[1] Even minimal exposure to nature heals, mentally and physically. Earth evolved us, so it makes sense that finding ways to be closer to its features and creatures would support and enliven us.

Although ecotherapy interventions have begun replacing psychotropic medications, at least in some cases, these “new” nature reconnection methods drag with them the vestiges of old aims: in this case, poorly regulated capitalism’s tendency to exploit almost anything, beneficial or not. In spite of Howard Clinebell, who coined “ecotherapy” and insisted on conforming to an Ecological Circle whereby we give something back to the plants and animals, places and planet that heal us,[2] “Level 1 ecotherapy” is in essence a nature cure, taking healing without reciprocity.[3] 

Ralph Waldo Emerson foresaw and wrote about the benefits of therapeutically reconnecting with the natural world, in part by understanding ourselves to be integral to it. This paper looks at Emerson’s wavering between humanized nature, with humanity occupying the very center of Creation, and a more spacious ecocentric sense of the world around us as animate, our ancient partner in an ongoing conversation beyond words.

Emersonian Nature

 Emerson defined nature much as most of us now do: the nonhuman material world separate from the inner person: the NOT ME, although he included “art” (craft) as well because of its nature components[4]: growing corn, for example. In his writings, nature tends not to be roads or buildings or anything built; instead, nature is mountains, insects, animals, winds, seas, rains, sun and moon, stars and clouds, forests beyond our homes, what we plant and harvest.

This way of defining nature influenced the development of national parks in the United States. The fantasy of nature as untouched wilderness valued mainly for its beauty to visiting spectators has been thoroughly critiqued, especially by displaced American Indian[5] tribes who once lived in those parks and no longer can.[6] Nature in this spectatorial sense is Other, split from human culture but serviceable to it nevertheless.

This Other not only appears in our thinking about parks, but about nature cures and healing. Buzzell writes:

Level 1 ecotherapy is often based on a traditional Western worldview that values humanity well above the rest of nature. This allows us to adopt a distanced, “objective,” dominator position where “using” other living beings or inanimate “natural resources” for whatever purposes requires no permission or thought for the effects of that usage on the “used.”[7] 

The aspiration behind promoting Level 1 ecotherapy is similar to that of promoting ecotourism: that takers will somehow be transformed into givers by what they receive from the natural world. Evidence for this kind of transformation seems to be lacking; the Gary Snyders who turn from logging to nature advocacy remain rare. For every one of them, thousands go outdoors regularly, year after year, to exploit land, sea, and sky without ever suspending the habit of objectifying them for human use. Agribusiness managers tend not to turn into land-loving farmers, although unregulated market forces increasingly push farmers into agribusiness.

The healing influences of the natural world were not lost on Emerson:

The ancient Greeks had a fable of the giant Antaeus, that when he wrestled with Hercules, he was suffocated in the gripe of the hero, but every time he touched his mother earth, his strength was renewed. The fable explains itself of the body and the mind. Man is the broken giant, and in all his weakness he is invigorated by touching his mother earth, that is, by habits of conversation with nature.[8]

“Conversation” is important. Instead of seeing nature only as an instrument of human healing, Emerson remained open to the idea of Earth as a partner in nonverbal exchange, as we can see in these three characteristic quotations from his voluminous nature writings:

Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected all the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.[9] 

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me and I to them.[10] 

What was it that nature would say? Was there no meaning in the live repose of the valley behind the mill, and which Homer or Shakspeare could not re-form for me in words?[11] 

This conversation matters because behind and within nature lives the presence of God:

…The song of the morning stars was really the first hymn of praise and will be the last; the face of nature, the breath of the hills, the lights of the skies, are to a simple heart the real occasions of devout feeling more than vestries and sermon hearings, and are those natural checks that are ever exerting an insensible influence to hold us back from fanaticism and keep us within sight of the true God.[12] 

This thought helps show why Emerson, a preacher, would find natural history fascinating: properly wielded, it led to knowledge of how the Divine finds expression in the Creation. Long before “integral” became a philosophical term, Emerson wrote about the interdependence of science and spirituality. He also readily accepted the accumulating evidence of Earth’s great geological age, fascinated long before the discovery of fractals by how creatively nature fashioned its elaborate and endlessly creative productions from relatively few basic patterns and primary materials.

Not only through scientific study, then, but through aesthetic appreciation could human beings gain access to God in nature. This, according to Emerson, is what nature was for.

Ego versus Eco: Man in the Center

Can the wheat admire its own tasseled top? or the oak in autumn its crimson foliage, or the rose and the lily their embroidery? I cannot behold the cheering beauty of a country landscape at this season without believing that it was intended that I should derive from it this pleasure. It is for the same reason as the rainbow is beautiful and the sun is bright.[13] 

Over and over, Emerson insists (as did many Christians of his time) that the world was made for “man” (in the gendered language of the day), to whom it serves and ministers. Earth and indeed the cosmos were billions of years old because God—not a bearded father so much as an Infinite Mind—needed time to prepare them for human occupancy.

He who made the eye and the light and clothed the globe with its transparent atmosphere did thereby teach his creature to observe the stars and write their laws. Thereby he opened the heavens to them to reform their religion and to educate the mind.[14]

Noting that human beings are made of the same materials as the rest of the world, Emerson concluded that design parallels like the branchings of veins and rivers and the circulation of blood and oceanic currents meant a kind of human model or framework at the heart of nature itself. This is why

Here and there comes a very decided form like that odd Brentus Anchorago which suggests something very different from man, but in general man is the type by which we measure the insect.[15]

In a sense, Emerson religiously reverses evolution—which he took seriously—by making claims like, “Parts of speech are metaphors because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.”[16] Given that humans emerge from Earth, it might make better sense to put things the other way around: that the “analogies” and parallels between inner and outer, culture and nature, reflect the presence of Earth in us, not the presence of us in Earth, with the human mind instead a sparking, thinking metaphor of the living complexity of nature.

Emerson knew this argument, made by indigenous people he partly admired and partly disparaged as unteachably savage. In spite of the premodern “Book of Nature” motif in which nature and culture co-constitute one another,[17] he alternated between blending the two but, more often, making “man” the measure and purpose of everything. Subscribing to a colonialist-progressivist worldview, his thoughts about language eerily echo Owen Barfield’s,[18] although as part of a more egocentric agenda: “As we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or, all spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols.”[19] But this was not because we “Teutonic” moderns owed our poetry, let alone our consciousness, to ultimately terrestrial sources.

When Emerson saw the chemist, the anatomist, the geologist, or the naturalist at work researching aspects of the natural world, he believed them to be ultimately studying humanity. He seems not to have asked them what they thought about this, and to have remained unaware that no scientist swims with dolphins or examines rock strata to find out more about human beings, even granting the importance of science as a form of human community.

In hindsight we can see how privileging ourselves as a species above all others authorized the ecological devastation all around us, now to the point of threatening our existence on this planet besieged by heavy industry. That level of damage did not exist in Emerson’s time, although forests fell even then to the ax-swinging builders of warships, carriages, and ranches. Nevertheless, Emerson unwittingly promulgated a species egocentricity which we struggle with today, even in fields like depth psychology, where the natural world is often described as a human projection even by theorists like Jung who advised getting outside regularly.[20] 

At the same time, Jung’s work did highlight the reality of possession by reactivated mythic characters and motifs. Just as individual fantasies can turn into obsessions, collective fantasies can show up as rigid psychological structures. When that occurs, the old stories are not only inside us: we are inside them.

The figure of sunlike Apollo, referred to as “Phoebus” in Emerson’s poetry and prose, shines thematically throughout Emerson’s life. In fact, his first name, Ralph, shares etymology with “wolf,” one of the familiars of Apollo Lykaios, Lord of Wolves. (“Waldo,” which he went by, refers to a “ruling power.” The name “Emerson” merges words that mean ruler, whole, universal, labor, and home.) Artemis, or nature personified, was Apollo’s sister. The name of the Transcendentalist magazine Emerson helped found was taken from a sundial.

Considered psychologically, Apollo is an inward stance characterized by emotional distance (the god was called “Far-Shooter”), clear reason, in some cases coldness, ascension, solar illumination, inhibition, and a need for order. Emerson was outside enough planting trees, tending gardens, and taking long observational walks to know of nature’s chaotic and brutal qualities, but he did not emphasize them in his writings.

In many ways, Apollo is a self-reliant individualist among the gods, just as Emerson was among the citizens of Concord. No wonder he got on with the maverick Thoreau, who may have stood in for Apollo’s wild brother Dionysus, or perhaps for unruly Pan.

But, unlike Thoreau, Emerson’s emphasis on self-reliance never descended into outright misanthropy. His humanism remained open to the speech of the Earth and so anticipated depth psychology’s emphasis on image, metaphor, and symbol, an emphasis imported into and transformed by terrapsychology, the study of how the things of the world (natural and built) get into us, and how our “inner” feelings and moods, complexes and dreams accurately and symbolically mirror what goes on outside us.[21] 

Extraverting Emerson’s Strange Sympathies

Although Emerson got the idea of “correspondences” or “strange sympathies”[22] between human and natural life, nature and spirit, higher and lower, celestial and terrestrial from reading Swedenborg, Greek thought, and the Corpus Hermeticum, the idea reaches much farther back in history, even before the alchemists, Neoplatonics, and Stoics, to the ancient religious practices of Egypt.[23] Their word Heka refers not only to a god of universal potency, but to the matrix of ever-present spiritual force that binds everything together in one cosmic relationship. A similar idea occurs in many other cultures around the world; it seems to be archetypal.

Emerson was fascinated by how intimately the movements of clouds, the cycle of seasons, the chirping of insects, the stirring songs of birds found their analogues within the human mind. In “The Relation of Intellect to Natural Science” he wrote:

I had rather have a good symbol of my thought, or a good analogy, than the suffrage of Kant and Plato. If you agree with me, or if Locke, or Montesquieu, or Spinoza agree, I may yet be wrong. But if the elm tree thinks the same thing, if running water, if burning coal; if crystals and alkalies, in their several fashions, say what I say, it must be true.[24] 

The relationship was not literal (e.g., amount of seasonal sunlight empirically correlated to changes of mood), but metaphoric, symbolic, Hermetic, emblematic, analogical:

It is easily seen that there is nothing lucky or capricious in these analogies, but that they are constant, and pervade nature. The motion of the earth round its axis, and round the sun, makes the day, and the year. These are certain amounts of brute light and heat. But is there no intent of an analogy between man’s life and the seasons?[25] 

Not for another five decades would Janet, Silberer, Freud, and Jung write about how symbolism is also the language of the unconscious mind. 

Emerson lamented that his fellow citizens did not take such lessons from nature, including its marvelous powers of self-organization:

We live in a very low state of the world, and pay unwilling tribute to governments founded on force. There is not, among the most religious and instructed men of the most religious and civil nations, a reliance on the moral sentiment and a sufficient belief in the unity of all things, to persuade them that society can be maintained without artificial restraints, as well as the solar system…[26]

Nature understood as a flowing network of analogies or symbols gives evidence of nature as animate and ensouled:

No truth can be more self evident than that the highest state of man, physical, intellectual, and moral, can only coexist with a perfect Theory of Animated Nature.[27] 

Yet if the workings of the natural world mirror our own, as Emerson observed before Jung did, the relationship certainly goes the other way around. In 2000, I coined “terrapsychology” to refer to accumulating observations of how our fantasies, symptoms, and even dreams thematically and precisely echo events in the places where these interior movements occur: clogged freeways and blocked communications, destroyed meadows and depressed moods, healthy streams and flowing creative acts. Since then, colleagues and graduate students have expanded what evolved into Terrapsychological Inquiry to study not only how the things of the world—landscapes and seasons, farms and factories, houses and car keys—get into us, but how fluctuations in our “inner” life accurately reflect conditions all around us. The human psyche grows from the ground up.[28] 

Regarding the natural world as a mirror makes an introverted move from outside in. Terrapsychology complements this with an extraverted move from the inside out, and by doing so opens a dialogue between inner and outer, softening the subject-object split by revealing how each pole informs, speaks to, and infiltrates the other.

We call this “learning to speak Earth.” Following Emerson’s lead, we pay less attention to causal or literal relations, however important—how traffic impacts anxiety, for example—and more to what surfaces symbolically:

Nature is a language and every new fact we learn is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language— not that I may know a new grammar but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.[29]

Ecotherapy and its parent field, ecopsychology, have tended to follow Emerson’s emphasis on human use. As he writes long before “ecotherapy” was coined, “To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone.”[30] Current research overwhelmingly agrees.

In our day, however, even larger concerns threaten: concerns of social and environmental justice, of racism and misogyny, of global catastrophe as Earth overheats and burns. Perhaps Emersonian tools of exploration and wonder can help us move beyond the anthropomorphism which blinds us to our planetary obligations.

Bibliography

Barfield, Owen. The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays. Middletown, Connecticut: Barfield Press UK, 2013.

Buzzell, Linda. “The Many Ecotherapies.” In Ecotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, ed. Jordan, Martin, and Hinds, Joe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Buzzell, Linda, & Chalquist, Craig, eds. Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind. San Francisco: Sierra Club Press/Counterpoint, 2009.

Chalquist, Craig. Terrapsychological Inquiry: Restorying Our Relationship to Nature, Place, and Planet. London and New York: Routledge, 2020.

Clinebell, Howard. Ecotherapy: Healing Ourselves, Healing the Earth. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

Emerson, Ralph, Branch, Michael, and Mohs, Clinton, eds. “The Best Read Naturalist": Nature Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2017. Kindle.

Emerson, Ralph. Emerson’s Essays: The Complete First & Second Series. Independently published, 2020.

Hornung, Eric. The Secret Lore of Egypt: Its Impact on the West. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2001.

Jung, Carl, and Sabini, Meredith, ed. The Earth Has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2002.

Sherman, Jacob. “Reading the Book of Nature after Nature,” in Religions 2020, 11, 205: https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/11/4/205 

Truer, David. “Return the National Parks to the Tribes.” The Atlantic (April 12, 2021). https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/05/return-the-national-parks-to-the-tribes/618395/