Craig Chalquist, PhD
Expanded from a panel presentation at Sustainable Societies Conference II:
Visions for a Viable Future: In a Time of COVID & Climate Calamity
Graduate Theological Union, March 19th, 2021
Abstract:
For the past two decades, terrapsychology has traced how features of the natural world reappear in our moods, attitudes, symptoms, and even dreams. Terrapsychological Inquiry arose from these explorations as an Earth-honoring qualitative research methodology in use since 2003 and steadily evolved since then. T. I. offers an approach that heals and reenchants our relations with ourselves, each other, and the world around us, a world filled not merely with objects or backgrounds but living presences we can access from within. This chapter ends with a speculative sketch to demonstrate how T. I. might approach a pandemic as a topic of deep inquiry.
Word count: 5842
Keywords: terrapsychology, terrapsychological inquiry, ecopsychology, archetypal, Pan mythology
To begin with a condensed version of a tale probably of Indian origin:
A seasoned wizard asked his apprentice to fetch water for their workshop, then left. The apprentice decided to speed things up by enchanting a broom to bring pails of water. But as the workshop flooded, the apprentice realized he did not know how to turn off the spell. At length, the wizard returned and broke the spell, finally stopping the flood.
The physical sciences have proven highly effective at studying the outsides of things. They have done this by emphasizing quantifiability, objectivity, and causality as called for by Galileo, who valued quantities over qualities. They have provided the vaccines we now take for COVID-19. Scientific research has shown us the relationship between habitat destruction and human interference with displaced animals and revealed how viruses can jump species. Studies also suggest that bats, who entered the fossil record 50 million years ago and are immune to pathogens that can harm us, have passed viruses to animals involved in the wildlife trade.
The COVID-19 pandemic is a direct result of how we objectify and market animals whose living spaces we encroach upon. Paradoxically, the scientific tools with which we study this are also responsible for the tools of industry and development which now threaten the entire biosphere, some of which is flooding as the oceans continue to rise. Unchecked fossil fuel technology threatens all life on overheating Earth.
Disregarding the subjective/qualitative factor brings about what we might call the Sorcerer’s Apprentice Problem: efficient tools running out of control because they require a mature consciousness to wield them safely. Reducing the subjective to external factors like language or neurology, to thinglikeness, only sends subjectivity into unconsciousness. The notion that human consciousness can be studied like a thing is itself a subjective bias, a Zeusian fantasy of godlike distance and control. Many calls for “evidence-based” social science research do not question who decides what constitutes evidence and for what agenda, resulting in ethical malformations like a former torturer of dogs for psychological research rebranding himself a founder of Positive Psychology.
Such unconscious Zeusian distancing is one reason scientific attempts to create the Good Society tend to end up in authoritarian hands. Only the emotionally immature seek power over others, and they will seize whatever tools are made available. They take over whatever is within reach because they can.
By contrast, qualitative and mixed-method research address the sorcery problem by deliberately welcoming back the subjective, the very factor physical science has traditionally sought to eliminate. What we disparage as personal bias operates behind our backs mainly when we ignore it; when we enlist our subjectivity as a valued resource, it enlarges what we can perceive. Instead of trying to stand back from what we study, drawing mainly upon our intellect while doing so, we bring in our entire organism, intellectual, affective, somatic, intuitive, relational.
We can also open ourselves to the idea that however useful it is to study the outsides of things, we learn even more about the depths of human experience by aligning our inquiries with the equally rigorous disciplines of the humanities. Methods of inquiry on that side of the house include symbol-tending, interpretation, theme and motif exploration, historical reflection, nature writing, poetry, art and craftsmanship, philosophical query, and storytelling for social and environmental justice. We might even peek at what our imaginings and dreams offer. Instead of confining ourselves to simplistic models of cause and effect, we can move holistically, pattern-wise, thinking and intuiting in the round, much as the natural world does.
Although no single method of inquiry or research methodology will magically cure a pandemic or set us on the road to the Good Society, one is available for honoring subjectivity, checking out biases, and taking the presence of nature, place, and Earth seriously. It was also designed to assume from the start our psychological embeddedness in the world instead of implicitly splitting mind from nature and then trying to chart or measure how they are connected to begin with.
This methodology began with what might be called learning to speak Earth.
In 2000, a group of graduate students of depth psychology discovered that their dreams revealed hidden ecological damage to the places where we dreamed. The night before I visited San Luis Obispo, for example, I dreamed of a section of town with the word CONTAMINATED hovering over it in red letters. Once I arrived, I discovered safety warning signs near the polluted mission reek, invasive species entering Morro Bay, a ruptured sewer system in the city, and a ninety-year underground oil spill requiring Avila Beach to be rebuilt.
Furthermore, we could easily trace specific anxieties, mood swings, body states, and relational conflicts to these sources of unearthed trauma in the land. Strengths, too: the clean-running force of an unblocked stream nearby reflected in the vitality of our writing and communication, for example.
We began to see why people have sought mountaintops for peak experiences, valleys for going deep, oceans for mystical insight, fertile fields for making love. These parallels, symbolic like the language of dreams and myths, transcend simple causality to announce truths metaphoric, holistic, and thematic.
Consider a few more examples:
A student realizing that the writing style of her master’s thesis—half concentrated and anecdotal and half linear and expansive—closely paralleled civic history and development in the city she was studying.
The numbers 911 decanted from the New York Lottery on September 11, 2001.
Spring Street, originally named “Primavera” (First View), site of these and many other Los Angeles firsts: first multistory building, first public school, first tall hotel housing the first mechanical elevator, first nightclub, first place motion picture contracts were signed, first City Hall, first city jail, first brewery, first beer garden...as though the street itself contained some invisible but persistent personality trait of “firstness.”
The repeating “Kings” in Memphis, Tennessee, a city named after Egypt’s royal capital: B.B. King, Martin Luther King Jr. (who died there), Elvis “the King” Presley, the Royal Court of Carnival, Johnny Cash (“king of country”), King Curtis...
Matthew Cochran’s discovery of petroglyphs resembling jets and bombs inscribed long ago at what is now a gunnery range in Three Rivers, New Mexico. Local tales describe Three Rivers as the house of the mythic Thunderbird.
Inadvertent “continuities” in London, where the Public Cleansing Department was unknowingly built on the site of an old public privy, where Whittington Hospital stands over the healing wells at Barnet, and where a sauna on Endell Street echoes an ancient bath. Road courses and curves often correspond to ancient Roman counterparts unmapped, invisible, and discovered only later. (For more, see Peter Ackroyd’s book London: The Biography.)
Do animals “speak” an unconscious symbolic language, as when a grizzly bear enters a hospital emergency room around the time a local conservationist describes his species as entering the “emergency room” phase of its existence? Did the family of skunks invading a black tie party in San Francisco parody the human doings there? Does more than chance operate when gangs of rodents immobilize smog-spewing automobiles by chewing up their electrical connections, or when jellyfish block nuclear power station intake vents?
Inwardly, a molting dream monster named “Babushka” chases a dreamer out of a building; outwardly, the polluted Russian River floods communities out of their homes and towns a month or so after the dream (Chalquist 2010).
Although these examples are contemporary, the tradition of the world as symbolically intelligible reaches far back in time:
Indigenous animism. The indigenous perception of nature as enspirited or ensouled is attested to around the world. It also appears in many religious traditions, including Taoism, Shintoism, Hinduism, Mahayana Buddhism, and Orisha. This perception was repressed with the rise of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, both of which are invested in seeing nature, land, and elements as non-sentient resources devoid of presence, spirit, or soul.
“World Soul” image in Platonism, Neoplatonism, and later. In the Timaeus, Plato refers to the sensible world as a living creature truly endowed with a soul (2020 25). This World Soul (Anima Mundi) also appears in Neoplatonic and Stoic philosophy. Versions of it show up under many names in mythologies around the world.
Folk traditions of nature spirits. The Greeks and Romans regarded each stream, field, village, and mountain as inhabited by its resident genius loci; the Roman lares occupied the hearth and other parts of the household. Every pre-industrial society honors such spirits: Hyter Sprites, Black Shucks, Yarthings, Doire well guardians, dryads in trees, naiads in springs, kobolds following orders, trolls in caves and under bridges, oreads in heights and rocks, and mermaids, nereids, Oceanids, and sirens in the sea.
Alchemy. Experiments with the transmutation of metals and minerals reach back to ancient Egypt, where artisans in the House of Life workshops of the temples crafted sacred statuary (Grimes). Alchemy was less an attempt to make vulgar gold from lead than a wisdom tradition also found in India and China. Although many of the most notable alchemists in this long tradition were also scientists by our present definitions—Jabir al-Hayyan and Sir Isaac Newton, for example—they sought a hermeneutic by which they could receive natural wisdom.
The Book of Nature. The world as a vast book enjoys a long theological heritage in the West. Physiologus, Hugh of St. Victor, Maximus the Confessor, Hildegard of Bingen, Jonathan Edwards, and Nicholas of Cusa, among others, held the world to be composed in a divine symbolic language (Sherman 2020). Likewise, the Qur’an describes “signs” by which nature can be read.
African American nature spirituality. From the days of slavery, black singers, poets, storytellers, and agriculturalists left vivid accounts—some recorded in blues songs—of how intimately ensouled the land was for them (Ruffin 2010) in spite of being forced to tend it as slaves. Gardens they made to feed themselves reminded them of lost Eden; benevolent storms hid runaways from pursuers. This tradition of nature presence continued in the work of D. E. B. DuBois, who compared the city of Atlanta with the mythic figure of Atalanta, and Alice Walker, who wrote of her relationship of reciprocity with wildflowers and deer, among other creatures.
Transcendentalism. In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson published his essay Nature, in which he described winds, waters, forests, and other aspects of the earthly world as internal influences as well as signals open to interpretation. This helped inaugurate the philosophy of American Transcendentalism. For Henry David Thoreau, “The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere” (2020 78).
Romanticism and Naturphilosophie. In the late 18th century in Europe, artists, philosophers, musicians, and poets like Schelling, Coleridge, Shelley, Yeats, and Keats pushed back against destructive industry backed by materialist scientism. Calling for the primacy of passion and unchained creativity, they sought the wisdom in nature and its folklore, accessible through imagination and sensuous appreciation.
Goethean science. Although Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is known primarily as a polymath and playwright, he experimented with a phenomenological approach to understanding plants as more than their parts. They were whole organisms approachable through a “gentle empiricism” of appreciative observation, a set of imagination-based skills he also applied to understanding animals and even architecture.
Nature-honoring early psychologists. From the beginning, promoters of the field of psychology have tried to present it as confined to the natural science model. In spite of this, a number of foundational psychologists not only retained deep connections to the world of nature, but found ways to write about it. Gustav Fechner, for example, is known in textbooks as the father of physiological psychology, but he was also a nature spiritualist who wrote under a pseudonym. William James was an avid hiker who translated Fechner and left experimental psychology for philosophy, where he could publish what he wanted on consciousness. Wilhelm Wundt achieved acclaim for founding the world’s first psychological laboratory, but he also insisted that psychology study the unity of inner and outer experience, embody emotion, and promote humanitarianism and community. Christine Ladd-Franklin was a botanist and feminist. Margaret Floy Washburn studied animal consciousness and, controversially, dared to compare it to that of humans.
Depth psychology. From its inception in the work of Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung, Toni Wolff, and other theorist-practitioners, depth psychology “sees through” symptoms, fantasies, and dreams to underlying symbolic and archetypal structures. Depth psychology views consciousness as rooted in a primary presence of fantasy, image, and myth that permeates every aspect of human experience. This deep presence must be understood through its own mythopoetic language. Depth psychologists like Jane Hollister Wheelwright, Meredith Sabina, and Betsy Perluss have taken that inquiry outside.
Gestalt psychology. Not to be confused with the Gestalt Therapy of Fritz and Laura Perls, the Gestaltists (Wertheimer, Koffka, and Kohler) replaced an atomistic model of consciousness with a field theory of interactive impressions and possibilities, thereby paralleling depth psychology’s view of psyche as a kind of interior democracy. Social scientist Kurt Lewin, coiner of “action research,” mapped how features in one’s environment possess psychological values.
Ecofeminism. The study of how patriarchy equates women with nature, an essentialist position used to dominate both. Ecofeminists call instead for just and egalitarian varieties of community and power-sharing and an end to the institutionalized split between nature and culture. Stephanie Lahar, Susan Griffin, and Val Plumwood locate subjectivity throughout the natural world, not just in human heads.
Deep ecology. In the 1970s, philosopher and environmentalist Arne Naess criticized mainstream ecology and conservation for focusing on surface issues of land and resource management while leaving unquestioned collective norms and attitudes behind the destruction of entire ecosystems. Naess coined “deep ecology” as a call for a philosophy and set of practices and values emphasizing biocentrism: the idea that everything has inherent worth and a right to exist (Devall and Sessions 2007, 67).
Ecopsychology and Ecotherapy. According to Theodore Roszak, all psychologies were once ecopsychologies (Roszak, Gomes, and Kanner 1995) that held human and more-than-human health and well-being together. This is why the industrialized decline of ecosystems degraded health all around, ours and everyone else’s. Efforts at healing and restoration must include environmental justice and restoration. Ecotherapy, an applied arm of ecopsychology, is an umbrella term for what a mountain of research has confirmed: that reconnecting even in simple ways with plants, animals, and the elements boosts mental and physical health (Buzzell and Chalquist 2009).
Somatic studies. All terrapsychological research originates with the body, the center of our lifeworld. Rae Johnson’s Elemental Movement is a practice and theory model for heightening awareness of the flesh through engaging as metaphors the five elements (earth, air, fire, water, ether) of traditional alchemy. This includes an emphasis on social justice (2017): not only how oppression shapes the body, but how resistance to injustice can be embodied effectively and creatively, bringing the body too into its own varieties of voice.
Landscape art and design. The ancient Chinese design art of feng shui, the harmonious and beneficial alignment of built structures with the natural features of their geographical locations, finds an echo in Indian vastu shastra, the art of designing homes, temples, and other buildings to be integrated with natural surroundings.
Place-conscious artists. These include sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, landscape designer Lawrence Halprin, and, among activists, the muralists, musicians, dancers, writers, poets, and dramatists who have incorporated international borders into their creative performances to demonstrate the brutal absurdity of splitting families, nations, and natural regions. Efforts like the Sustainable Singapore Movement design homes built to be beautiful as well as ecologically wise.
Animism Reexamined. “Animism” was coined by E. B. Tylor, an armchair anthropologist on a self-appointed mission to eradicate superstition. If things speak, he believed, that could only indicate superstitious magical thinking. Ever since, Animism is often dismissed as a type of psychological projection, as if the world depended upon us for its responsive vitality instead of the other way around, as with indigenous worldviews, panpsychism (everything has qualities of consciousness), panexperientialism (everything is capable of some level of experience), and hylozoism (everything is alive). Familiar names who have taken seriously this idea include Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, Plotinus, Plato, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Thales, Empedocles, Epicurus, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Margaret Cavendish, Leibniz, Spinoza, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Teilhard de Chardin, Alfred North Whitehead, William James, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, Paul Carus, Ernst Haeckel, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Morton Prince, Owen Barfield, William Montague, and, more recently, Rupert Sheldrake, Charles Hartshorne, David Ray Griffin, Christian de Quincey, Freya Mathews, David Abram, Stephanie Kaza, Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, and David Skrbina.
Animistic scientists include Johannes Kepler, Pierre-Louis Maupertuis, Sir Isaac Newton, Nicolas Copernicus, Vladimir Vernadsky, Joseph Priestley, William Herschel, Gustav Fechner, Ernst Mach, Emil du Bois-Reymond, Thomas Edison, Sir Arthur Eddington, Sir Julian Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, Sir James Jeans, Sir Charles Scott Sherrington, W.E. Agar, C.H. Waddington, A. Cochran, Freeman Dyson, Gregory Bateson, Wolfgang Pauli, Sewall Wright, Bernhard Rensch, Stuart Hameroff, David Bohm, Stephan Harding, Derek McCormack, and Alan Latham. Like Fechner, Kepler perceived Earth as ensouled (anima terrae), with grass and trees for hair, sulfur for excrement, and rainwater and springs for sweat and urine; flooding meant that the planetary soul was ill (Pauli 1994, 235).
Terrapsychological Inquiry: An Earth-Honoring Methodology
Terrapsychological Inquiry (T. I.) grew out of the terrapsychological observation that where we live, visit, and work is also who we are.
From the start, T. I. distinguished between the literalized animism of explaining weather, wildfires, floods, storms, or other natural events as caused by an arcane outer force like a spirit and the intersubjective animism of such events landing both inwardly and outwardly as symbolically meaningful, open to interpretation, and full of significance. What we consciously see as nonliving places and things, seas and skies, we unconsciously respond to as animated presence and living symbols and metaphors. Borderlines and borderlands, sludgy bays and constricted moods, personal complexes and apartment complexes seem to resonate together as events in the world symbolize aspects of the human self and those aspects in turn point back to the features of the world that evolved our minds (Chalquist 2023).
The most common argument against this observation (it is not just an idea) is that we project our thoughts, fantasies, etc. onto our surroundings. Clinically understood, however, projection does not animate: it deanimates, emptying and deadening the connection between the projector and the projected-upon. By contrast, intersubjective animism extends the psychoanalytic concept of the transferential field—the complex, mostly unconscious psychological dynamisms, conflicts, postures, and enactments playing out in therapy—to include our relations the rest of the world: shoes, shorelines, mists, mountains. Our perception of these as responsive and ensouled arises in part as an emergent property of the psychological field operative between us and them, a field not reducible to simple causal relations (e.g., a smile causes a rise in mood). We can interpret the things of the world much as we can interpret dream symbols.
Terrapsychological Inquiry provides tools, ideas, and examples for exploring how terrains, places, elements, and natural cycles show up in human psychology, endeavor, and story, including myth and folklore. Understanding what we do and who we are requires understanding where we are, and when (Chalquist 2023). We ask: What emerges when we listen, imagine, and sense our way into the felt intersections of psyche, story, symbol, body, fantasy, mood, memory, and place? How might we delineate and honor these nodes of experience through qualitative and hermeneutic research guided by storytelling, imagery, interpretation, and movement?
From the start, terrapsychological research into the complexities of place, symbol, and inner life moved both outside and inside the academic world. It still does. On the outside, in Boulder, Utah, Matthew Cochran conducts public terrapsychological education groups and dream workshops that focus on the presence or “soul” of place. In San Diego County, Lali Mitchell studied petroglyphs as part of her dissertation work and taught artists to create art in partnership with natural settings (Chalquist 2010). For the TerraPlaces online project, Katrina Davenport taught participants how to record and reflect on the symbolic meanings of flora, fauna, geology, and local stories of the places where they lived, and Annabelle Berrios taught “embodied terrapsychology” at New York Open Center; “the goal of the practices was to transform habitual relationship patterns between people and places—from neglectful to attentive, and from competitive to collaborative—to reveal interdependent perspectives” (Berrios 2019). At Lake Fundudzi in South Africa, psychologist Garret Barnwell has used his clinical background plus interviewing and conversation, ecotherapy, dream work, local folklore, and storytelling to explore the wounds of first people whose lands were all but destroyed by apartheid-period deforestation (Barnwell 2019). I was told that a northwestern Californian tribe uses a version of T. I. to tend dreams about their colonized ancestral lands to rebuild forgotten ecospiritual practices. Holy places teach the dreamers how to pray.
Within academia, graduate student C. K. Olivieri was interested in the safety and kinship felt by LGBTQ citizens finding sanctuary in San Francisco. She relied on T. I. for her dissertation work. A master’s student in Utah noticed parallels between her changes of dream and mood and the shifting ecological integrity of the Great Salt Lake and drew on T. I. to study this. A master’s project traced the presence and evolution of the Phoenix image in Petaluma, California. Another explored the embodied erotics of consciously and sensitively tuning into the presence of a tree living in a San Francisco Bay Area park. An American Indian doctoral student wrote a dissertation on themes shared by the ecologically damaged San Lorenzo River in Santa Cruz and the life struggles of drug addicts living near it (Chalquist 2023).
Because of these and other inquiries inside and outside academia, the methodology evolved beyond an almost exclusive focus on the presence of places however boundaried to explore the deeply felt presence of other aspects of the material world: how weather and climate patterns, insect and animal movements, plants and stones, elements and mountains and bodies of water, and even cities, bridges, neighborhoods, and everyday objects live in us, and how “inner” states reflect these “outer” presences.
Nature, place, weather, climate, air, water, geology, flora, fauna, and biology are not mere stage props to more important human dramas. Rather, they act as full partners whose influences we learn to sense, explore, dialogue with, dance with, be challenged by, and ultimately love. The portal to these human-and-more-than-human relationships is stories: theirs, ours, everyone’s, and how all these intersect and inform one another.
All inquiry rests on certain assumptions that should be made clear. T. I. assumes the following about the world we explore and our place in it:
Our terrain, whether local, planetary, or cosmic, is verifiably real, not a veil of illusion or some purely human construct. This reality preceded us by billions of years, and it will last long after our constructs, concepts, signifiers, discourses, and creeds have vanished into universal night. We know this reality best by participating in it as fully as possible while recognizing our kinship with other living beings.
The intimacy or fit between self and world is an expression of the interdependency of all things. When we think of the world as being composed of separate and independent entities like building blocks, then we really have it backwards. The attempt to rationally reconstruct the world out of a bunch of bits is as nonsensical as trying to understand the significance of a song from the notes upwards. It’s also inconsistent with the finding that supposedly ultimate subatomic particles only exist as particles when fields of force clump them together.
Interiority reaches wider and deeper than sparks and chemicals in brains. Subjectivity is more a dimension or layer of being, as Pythagoras, Thales, Ovid, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Paracelsus, Goethe, Jung, Dewey, Teilhard de Chardin, William James, Bateson, Koestler, Whitehead, Christian de Quincey, and a host of others have either hinted or said plainly.
All life on Earth is deeply situated: We Are Here. Dualisms and splits that raise absolute barriers between self and world, culture and nature, subject and object, spirit and matter, or Us and Them reflect ancient patterns of exploitation running at least as far back as the first monocrop agriculture and the resulting empires, both still with us until we finally outgrow them.
The patterns, images, symbols, and metaphors that characterize deep psychological life correspond to geological, geographical, ecological, meteorological etc. forces. In other words, these forces are always psychological dynamisms too.
We do our work in the light of the following values and priorities, some of which receive more or less emphasis depending on the research project:
Homecoming: the importance of the felt sense of belonging consciously to place, planet, and cosmos. This includes welcoming home those voices, persons, impulses, beings, and even places repressed to the margins of culture and consciousness.
Diversity: respect for and delight in diversity at all levels, including those normally subdivided into “nature” and “culture.”
Agency: the right and privilege of forms and combinations of life, whether human or nonhuman, to flourish and direct themselves according to their own schemas of self-organization.
Ecoliteracy: moving toward a basic awareness of ecology, nature, and environmental science.
Sustainability: living as lightly as we can in the places we inhabit, and replenshing living systems or letting them replenish themselves.
Ecojustice: using our work to highlight and give voice to those oppressed by industries and political systems that damage their environments.
Appreciation: the aesthetic capacity for awe and love of what remains of Earth’s natural integrity. We will not guard and cherish what we do not love and appreciate.
Exploration: willingness to investigate the unknown even without a clear cause: the spontaneous and creative joy of finding out for its own sake.
Collaboration: with all due respect to lone geniuses, recognition that our understanding of the world and our relations with it grows richer with every perspective added by researchers humbly committed to weaving a web of terrapsychological knowledge and practice.
Responsibility: clarity about our obligations to do work that enhances the lives of our participants, their communities, the places we investigate, and the natural world itself. These obligations include alignment with indigenous sovereignty.
Integrality: the commitment to working as a whole researcher, conscious and unconscious, mental and physical, heartful and soulful.
Terrania: a nickname or symbol for the just, sustainable, integral, and delightful world community of abundance, belonging, and truly international culture we will have to construct, network by local network and experiment by community experiment, if we expect to remain on this planet for longer than our extinct protohuman forbears (Chalquist 2023).
In terms of emphasis, T. I. pays special heed to ecological complexes: syndromes of ecological and social wounding and injustice that recur thematically generation after generation in the symptoms, dreams, folklore, relationships, colonization patterns, and even architecture and politics of a place’s occupants. The same forces that destroy and oppress the natural world do the same to us internally. When we begin to address these influences by putting the presence of nature, Earth, and world at the center of psychological exploration, we gain embodied knowledges via story that transmute our alienation into homecoming.
Since 2003, graduate students and instructors have relied on Terrapsychological Inquiry for an ecopsychological, hermeneutic, and ecophenomenological research methodology. It has also been put in practice in storytelling, ceremonies, festivals, and even works of fiction.
How might we reenchant our relationship to nature, place, and Earth? By beginning the inquiry where human subjectivity and outer world meet.
If we apply this humanities-informed interpretive-symbolic sensibility of T. I. to the pandemic, what emerges?
Consulting history and literature first, we find that pandemics and plagues tend to highlight times of collective hubris, especially when the ambitious and unscrupulous are in charge of large political groups. Plagues struck Athens, for example, at high points in her imperial pretentions. In 1346, as wars and crusading continued in Europe, the Black Death struck Caffa, the Genoese slave trade port under attack by the Mongol Golden Horde; trade ships from there delivered the plague into Sicily and northern Italy. The Yersinia pestis bacteria carried by rodents moving into urban areas because of climate shifts in Asia spread easily through European urban centers packed with filth; bathing was considered unchristian.
On the literary side, the plague of Thebes, one example of many, arose with the wrong-footed kingship of Oedipus; only when he departed Thebes did the sickness subside. It’s as though plagues confront us with the stark actuality that the body politic is sick and in need of healing and the restoration of justice.
Events thematically reflect the contours of the places where they occur. Millions of years ago, the Los Angeles Basin rotated gradually upward like a stage, finally surfacing in the Pacific and becoming part of California. Indigenous seekers from all over the future state gathered there to pursue vision quests. Much later, Hollywood arrived. The thematic of messengers (angeles) and stages runs back in time to the land itself.
For plagues and pandemics, Terrapsychological inquiry would search their origin places for other examples of the motif of contagion. Why these places in particular? Why the plague hitting Constantinople so many times? Empirical investigation would identify such literal causes as the business of ports, population pressures, and so on, but a terrapsychological approach would examine ports, lands, places, geology, history, etc. with a symbolic eye, to ask more imaginative questions like, How are these places thematically vulnerable to a plague? To what collective blindness is the plague a response? A former student who grew up in Wuhan, where three rivers merge, wrote,
The meeting of rivers means change and exchange. Humans who chose to settle down at the crossing of rivers thrive on water and wane on water. Rivers bring harvest and birth; rivers also bring flood and death. Rivers bring people, and people bring commerce and prosperity, but rivers also bring away people, for there will be just as many departures as there will be encounters. Of all the poetry that is produced on this land, the number of poems on the theme of departure and farewell is significant (Xuan Wen 2020).
Also found in Wuhan is a legend about the Yellow Crane Tower, named after a mystical red-crowned crane that flew from this world into the next. In the course of two thousand years, the tower has been been destroyed by natural calamities and rebuilt twelve times. These images of convergence, transition, death, departure, and rebirth seem thematically—not causally—relevant to the pandemic outbreak there.
Sometimes a story lurks in word origins. “Pandemic” refers to the wild nature god Pan, who was apt to jump out of the shadows and frighten trespassers in Arcadia: hence the word “panic.” The old tales tell us that when we encroach upon the natural world, at some point Pan, a personification of nature’s untamed unruliness, pushes back.
We ought also to consider the “corona” in “corona virus,” and those disturbing spikes popping up all over the globe of the virus. The corona is an ancient symbol of kingship. In the United States, the previous president considered himself a kind of crowned head; the tragic and wholly predictable result of his brutal narcissism was half a million unnecessary pandemic deaths. We are paying dearly for our failure to prevent the ambitious and immature from getting into positions of authority, and our failure to hold the murderously corrupt accountable. This, of course, is a global catastrophe.
We could consider as well the bat, in fiction and folklore so often associated with the Underworld. Bats are nocturnal and roost in dark places. Perhaps our system of worldwide governance, much of it non-participatory, anti-democratic, and ecocidal, betrays some bats in its belfry.
Terrapsychological Inquiry would need to investigate these sorts of connections to either refine them from speculative intuitions or discard them in favor of more accurate ones. The research would also require a panel of colleagues and, ideally, on-site visits (Chalquist 2023). If we share psychology with places, lands, elements, and other creatures (a key assumption of our field), then what might we perceive when exploring from that perspective?
This kind of imagistic, symbolic, and thematic inquiry gives us permission to find meaning in what looks random to the cyclopean eye of materialist empiricism. It challenges us with a fresh level of relational responsibility: If things speak to us like this, how shall we respond? Will we continue to objectify, distance, and alienate ourselves from what pulses and breathes on every side (including inside us), or will we break the spell at last and feel, in flesh, bone, feeling, and dream, that what we face, whether pandemic, climate change, or whatever the next disaster brings, calls on us to actively care for the world around us as well as within and between us?
References
Barnwell, Garret. September 10th, 2019. Personal communication.
Berrios, Annabelle. October 2nd, 2019. Personal communication.
Buzzell, Linda, and Chalquist, Craig. 2009. Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind. Edited by Linda Buzzell and Craig Chalquist. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.
Chalquist, Craig. 2010. Rebearths: Conversations with a World Ensouled. Edited by Craig Chalquist. Walnut Creek: World Soul Books.
Chalquist, Craig. 2023. Terrapsychological Inquiry: Restorying Our Relationship with Nature, Place, and Planet. 2nd ed. London & New York: Routledge.
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