Climate Chaos and Forgotten Agreements

July Letter From The Forests of Arduinna

It’s been a really intense few weeks since returning from my trip to Greece.

Something I didn’t mention in the journals was that my husband’s mother, my mother-in-law, was in the hospital. We’d learned of this two nights before leaving Athens, and we weren’t “supposed” to know. She’d forbidden everyone from telling us, as she didn’t want her son to worry or to try to cut short his desperately-needed break. Despite her interdiction, however, someone had let him know.

I don’t really understand this way of looking at things. Sure, it makes sense that she might try to protect him from worry, especially because there wasn’t anything he could easily do about the situation. She’d been on a trip to Austria when her heart gave out, and so even if we’d taken the next possible plane back to Luxembourg, we’d still need to drive to Austria to see her and wouldn’t have been able to get there until our trip would have ended anyway. And she was released, and returned home, so anything we would have done would have been superfluous.

Still. I told my husband never to do to me what she did to him. “Let me decide if I’ll worry.”

Unfortunately, things got worse for her, and a few days after we’d returned, my husband had to call an ambulance for her. Têtu woman that she is, she wanted to delay their arrival until after finished watching a crime show, and then the first thing she asked of the doctors upon arriving was whether or not she’d still be able to go on a planned river trip down the Danube in a few weeks.

She’s okay now. She’s got a pacemaker, and apparently intends to return to the gym with me in a few weeks, and is already acting as if nothing had happened.

My poor husband, though. That entire first week, every spare second of his time was taken up with making arrangements for her health and return, while I tried to recover from what turned out to be a rather frustrating respiratory infection. (Not Covid, no: I still have never gotten it, while all the highly-vaccinated people around me have gotten it multiple times.)¹ So, I was ill, and she was in the hospital, and he had to take care of everything while also working full time.

All’s better though, just in time for another wave of extreme heat and really strange weather.

Two nights ago, when the house had finally cooled down enough that I could think clearly, I found myself watching a video report about all the current climate chaos. I try not to watch these things generally, since it’s already quite clear this is just going to be our “everyday” for the foreseeable future. Yet, I watched it anyway, and noticed a really surprising emotional I’m almost embarrassed to admit experiencing: deep calm.

Watching the smoke from burning forests choke the air of cities, watching rain-swollen rivers swallow buildings and sweep cars out to sea: these aren’t pretty sights, of course, and I take no delight in human suffering. At the same though, unbidden from my lips, I whispered aloud, “the gods remember our agreements, even if we don’t.”

The matter of “agreements” got me thinking to the much-discussed, proto-industrialised human sacrifice regime of the Aztecs. Yes, much of what it thought about it is overblown, but past the propaganda, the Aztecs most certainly did quite a lot of human sacrifice.

“Aztec human sacrifice” is usually the immediate counter, especially by Christians, to any attempt to even discuss animist cosmologies and the relationship of ritual to the maintenance of good relations with nature. It’s quite like hearing someone mention the word “gulag” when you talk about Marx or the word “eco-fascist” when you suggest nuclear power plants and solar panels won’t stop environmental destruction.

The general understanding regarding Aztec human sacrifice was that it was being done to appease certain gods. In their cosmology, our world was the 5th world the gods had made. The previous four had been destroyed, and this current one was considered quite unstable. In order to prevent another destruction, humans needed to sacrifice in order to encourage the gods themselves to sacrifice on behalf of humans.

The Aztec empire was the dominant empire in Mesoamerica, but the Aztecs weren’t the only people there. All around them were other peoples who believed something quite different about what the gods required, and often their conclusions didn’t include human sacrifice.

Recently in a podcast interview along with Felix Marquardt, Martin Shaw said something along the lines of, “new Christians shouldn’t be expected to explain the past crimes of Christianity.” I would generally agree with this if were applied to all religious ideas, but it’s of course not. And anyway, at some point one really does need to reckon with the really dark and violent side of things, whether that’s mass slaughter in the name of Christ or mass human sacrifice to keep Huitzilopochtli on the side of the empire.

I see no difference between those two things, by the way. Aztec state religion had quite a bit in common with monotheism, though it was explicitly monist and pantheist, with polytheist features. Everything was created by a divine one (through its emanations), including humans, and the ultimate goal of the Aztec state was to ensure the creator force didn’t destroy us all in fire.

Anyway, what’s the real difference between slaughtering people on a battlefield or capturing them and later slaughtering them on a zigguarat? The difference seems mostly aesthetic.

That being said, there’s a thing you eventually learn about gods once you’ve encountered enough of them. Some of them really don’t want humans around anywhere. As I’ve said a few times before, “there are gods who don’t care how this ends, only that it does.” Or, as my departed friend Judith O’Grady once wrote:

People can be destructively crazy without reference to the Gods at all and, in a universe filled with innumerable Gods, there are surely Gods who are not very interested in the betterment of Their people, as well as those who don't like people at all, and those who enjoy causing trouble without reference to the outcome.

You can offer blood to some gods. Most won’t take it, and you’ll find yourself having a deeply miserable time of everything afterwards. Some will, though it might not necessarily be their preference. And for a few, yeah: they’ll take it, and expect more, and more, and more.

Here we might remember also that a nation-state is also a kind of god. When the Nazis ritually slaughtered people in their industrialized killing camps, they were certainly making offerings to something. Every child who’ll pick up a shiny little metal ball while playing in a Ukrainian field, mistaking a cluster bomblet as a toy, will be a sacrifice to someone. The miner buried under megatons of stone, the victim in a mass shooting, the person slowly starved to death, or poisoned, or suffocated by heat or smoke from forest fires, killed by lab-grown plagues or industrially-produced carcinogens: they’re all offerings, too.

You can feed some gods blood, and in return they’ll give you power. The Crusades and the witch burnings strengthened the Christian order, just as the still-beating hearts sliced from chests atop altars strengthened the Aztec one. And when those orders met and fought, it’s quite clear the gods of blood sided with the order who could promise them an even more reliable torrent of offerings.

But there are many, many, many other agreements humans make with the gods, and many, many, many other gods who’d like nothing to do with slaughter in their name. Unfortunately, it is those agreements with those gods which have been forgotten, while the ones of Capital, and Industry, and Technology, the gods of “the machine,” gluttonously consume everything left that makes us human.

Other Notes

RITONA/Gods&Radicals Press is having a sale on all print and digital books, including mine. This is a great time go pick these up. Use code SUMMER.

Speaking of sales, you can get 20% off an annual subscription to From The Forests of Arduinna until 1 September, as well. I’ll be raising my subscription rates after that point, but this doesn’t affect anyone who has already subscribed. But if you have been thinking of becoming a subscriber, you can do it even more cheaply now than usual, and beat the rate increase also.

1. I did get the Johnson & Johnson one-shot vaccine (rather than the mRNA ones), during a short loophole during which it would suffice for the Covid digital passport regime. I did so quite reluctantly, and only because I was tired of being forbidden from going to the gym. Those were dark days, indeed.