Re-gendering Sacred Nature: From Mother Earth to the Lord of the Wild

Abstract

Nature as a mother-figure is an enduring imaginary in Western epistemology, epitomised in the modern pagan Earth-Goddess. However, recent eco-criticism rejects this imagery of nature as female and as motherly, arguing that it absolves humanity of responsibility for the damage we inflict on the natural world. But a masculine nature is also seen as flawed, associated with personal domination and emotional repression. The threat and disturbance traditionally associated with masculinity seem to have no place in eme≤rging epistemologies of nature.

This paper challenges the notion that masculinity is inherently toxic to nature, and brings to attention the Horned God, a central deity of modern paganism, as a figure of masculine sacred nature alternative to the Earth-Goddess. As the Goddess’s counterpart, the Horned God is a vehicle for exploring what masculinity looks like for modern pagans from his emergence in the 1930s until present day. This paper further argues that the Horned God, although possessed of masculine traits, is not confined by the definition of masculinity prevalent under patriarchy as “characterised by violence, exploitation, a reverence for the scientific absolute, and a systematic ‘rape’ of nature” (Swaim and Koen), but is instead a hybrid figure that challenges the notion of both masculinity and nature as categories within binary systems. The paper applies Timothy Morton’s ideas on Queer Ecology and Dark Ecology to discuss the Horned God as a figure who embodies fluidity, disturbance, decay and death — elements that have gone underrepresented in popular environmentalist literature.