The existence of the environmental crisis is evident in the response of the world’s people to the building of dams in Southeast Asia by opposing legislation, to the rejection of chemically or genetically enhanced food produce in favor of organic food choices, and more. In the opinion of many environmental thinkers, such as Aldo Leopold and Lynn White Jr., the environmental crisis was spurred by the lack of respect and consideration of the natural world held by humans, and because of this, humans have suffered with the environment. In response, neo-Paganism, environmental groups, and more green-conscious sects of major religions have arisen. Though their approaches are very different, their goal is the same: to create a bond between man and his surroundings through a conscious effort to protect them for the benefit of the biodiverse community. At the core of this goal is that people must act in order to achieve this happy harmony. The harmony proposed is considered to be of a transpersonal and spiritual nature, inspired by Pagan elements of “re-creating ways of relating to the Earth and all its inhabitants which express human relationships with all that exists.”1 The avenue for doing this is in participating in meaningful, magical rituals that strive to help people become more conscious of the relationship between their bodies and the physical universe, and thereby improving their relationship with the self. “Respect for Nature, being ‘green’, is no longer just part of the philosophy; the eco-magic of Pagan ritual can be activated towards environmental, social and spiritual change.”2 So, attention to the environment can be spiritually fulfilling; but, to attain this fulfillment, one must be active in their goal via the participation of certain rituals.

The same concepts have been viewed in non-Pagan groups, such as the green sisters of a Catholic order in New Jersey. This Dominican order focuses their spirituality upon the appreciation of God through deep and celebrated respect of nature. They participate in liturgical dance, meditation, prayer, and gardening.3 For them, gardening is a method through which a person may actively participate in understanding and experiencing the spirit in nature, and co-create with nature rather than attempt to dominate the creative dependency man has on the Earth.4 Janet Kalven of the Grailville Farm said of the order, “We had a liturgical approach to rural life…we had the idea that you understood the symbolism of the Grapevine more if you had actually pruned a grapevine.”5 Similar to Pagan ritual, this perspective of gardening indicates the need to physically interact with nature in order to understand it and experience it in a way that leads to a metaphysical conclusion about the purpose of human, in relation to his surroundings. The purpose of this project is to propose gardening as a contemporary method for spiritual fulfillment, arguing that attention to nature through agricultural means is legitimate based upon the historical recognition of the sanctity of nature in ancient agricultural religions, and that the ritualization of mundane tasks allows for a less empty participation in the creative process of growing, within and without. First, it is necessary to define what is meant by ritual when pertaining to gardening. Farmer John Burroughs defines ritual as “…an activity of the body engaged in working on the natural world, while the natural world, in turn, ‘works on’ the transformation of the self”6 In the context of gardening, this definition encompasses the idea of the physical and mental, or spiritual, being influenced by one another, and celebrating the harmony between the individual and nature. When considering this definition, it must be noted that the transformation of the self should result in a positive development of the individual in regards to 1) the relationship with the natural environment, being a receptive to the needs of the land rather than being dominating, and 2) the relationship with the self, tending to the mind or spirit as one would their garden.

Roy Rappaport, an anthropologist most celebrated for his contributions to ecological anthropology and the study of ritual, outlines several features of rituals in his book Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Most important is the concept that when one participates in a ritual, one is signifying a readiness to commit to the message of that ritual. Rituals are often impacted with symbols and meaning, and they demand full and explicit participation for successful transmittance of these messages.7 Typically, these messages help to outline and establish the expected conventional behavior for one to live a moral life within the understanding of a certain liturgy. One either accepts this social order, participating in the presented liturgical order, or one does not; the purpose of physical rituals is to publicly display an adherence to this social order, whether or not this adherence reflects the actual state of belief in this system.8 According to Eric Rothenbuhler, researcher of media anthropology, states that, “Participation in ritual is the willful subjugation of will; it is the thoughtful acceptance of an imposed order of thoughts.”9 This belies room for ambiguity of belief in the binary for choosing to participate in the ritual order or not: one may choose to participate, subjecting oneself to the social order without actual belief in the system. However, this participation is no less valuable or effective because the person has voluntarily chosen to submit to the performance of the ritual. All acts of ritual inherently propose a public display of acceptance through physical action because physical action is clearer and ‘performatively stronger’: Muslim prostration clearly displays the subordination to the will of Allah in prayer through the physical gesture of lowering and bending oneself toward the ground before their spiritual master.10 By performing this gesture repeatedly, one reinforces their acceptance of the ritual and its meaning to the public and to the self. Two kinds of meanings can be gleaned from these rituals: canonical messages that are timeless and generally-applied to the universal order, and self-referential messages, those that are individualized by each recipient of the message.11 So, in gardening, a canonical message for the gardening ritual of sacrificing time could be that tending to a garden and the harmonious connection between man and nature takes a copious amount of effort, and the self-referential message could be that tending to the garden for an hour each day this week would greatly benefit the growth of a tomato plant while also helping to de-stress during a busy week. The several meanings of rituals are condensed into a singular gesture, representing a multitude of possible expressions. It is for the participating individual to receive and understand these messages within the context of his beliefs and experiences.12

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REFERENCES

¹Graham Harvey, Contemporary Paganism: Listening People, Speaking Earth, (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 1.

²Graham Harvey and Charlotte Hardman, Paganism Today, (Thorsons: San Francisco, CA, 1995), xv.

³Sarah McFarland Taylor, Green sisters: a spiritual ecology, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2007), 22.

⁴Those at the Sanctuario Sister Farm in Texas, a member of the farm said that it “inspirits the work of transforming human relationships with Earth and among ourselves, by moving from dominance, to co-creative partnerships, drawing on insights from wisdom traditions, nature, the new science and women’s ways.” Green Sisters, 33, 43-44.

⁵Green Sisters, 37.

⁶Rebecca Kneale Gould, At home in nature: modern homesteading and spiritual practice in America. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 121. John Burroughs was an American essayist during the conservation movement who became a homesteader.

⁷Roy Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 111, 116, 122, 139, …

⁸Rappaport, 52, 53, 116, 122, 123, 132; reinforced by Eric W. Rothenbuhler, Ritual communication: From everyday conversation to mediated ceremony. (Thousand Oaks, CA US: Sage Publications, Inc, 1998), 8, 62, 129.

⁹Rothenbuhler, 129.

¹⁰Rappaport, 143. May want to define “performative”- Jane Butler

¹¹Rappaport, 53. Rothenbuhler refers to these as the forwardness and backwardness of ritual: a ritual moves backward in time, noting the meaning of the tradition that shaped a culture, while also moving forward to perpetuate the realization of this meaning in the immediate future, 63.

¹²This being said, it is recognizable that individuation of ritual may result in non-normative behavior, although the goal of ritual is to prevent this.