About The Course
What if hidden underneath contemporary narratives of progress and domination there was a mythic root system of earth-based wisdom?
How does Jesus, a Galilean healer, with a penchant for nature-based storytelling get mistranslated by empire and coopted by patriarchy?
In this course we will root Jesus back in the mythic and ecological context of the Ancient World, resurrecting him as the continuation of a tradition of lunar kings, rhizomatic harpists, and vegetal magicians with a shared passion for oral storytelling, communal meals, and animist wisdom.
Examining the tradition of dying-resurrecting gods, we will use fungi to think through the idea of gods and heroes as individuals. Just as fungi teach plants how to root into the soil, so do myths teach us how to root into relation with our biological and social ecosystems. Myths seek to express ecological truths with personified elementals, narrativizing a deep understanding of our connection to more-than-human time scales. While disconnected by time and place, Osiris and Dionysus and Orpheus are mushrooms of a shared, below-ground, mythic mycelial system.
Jesus, then, planted back in the mycorrhizal system of Mediterranean mythology and the nature-based traditions of first century Judaism, takes on an environmentally radical role. The wild rabbi teaches us how to use ecological storytelling and sacred food rituals to offer both a critique and a cure for empire. As we reroot these foundational myths in their original ecological and cultural context, we also rewild and retell these narratives with modern science, poetry, philosophy, and ecology, freshly adapting them for our contemporary struggle with climate inaction and ecocide.
While this course will offer five lectures firmly rooted in historical, ecological, and anthropological research, it will open to the unexpected, the interruption, and the side-adventure in the spirit of the collaborative storytelling tradition practice by Galilean magicians. The community we will be building prizes the interrogative over the declamatory. We will risk asking questions that must be “lived” rather than answered. Each lecture will be balanced by a practice and discussion that locates us in our bodies and in our local ecosystems. The participants are encouraged to experiment with these exercises, bringing back surprises and observations to share at the following session.
Course Objectives:
Create a context sensitive mode of ecological myth analysis
Investigate how empire coopts and rewrites the myths of the oppressed
Explore the connection between oral cultures and ecological storytelling
Ask ancient vegetal gods of revolt for lessons on how to dismantle empire
Learn to listen for the “parables” in our own ecosystems
Reroot Jesus in his original religious, social, ecological, and anthropological context
Rewild and retell personal and collective myths with the flora, fauna, and fungi of our particular locations.
Write a communal “compost gospel” including riddles, spores, seeds, and uncertainties from everyone included in the course.
Modules:
Myth, Mycelium, and Messiahs: Vegetal Gods of the Mediterranean
Session 1: Tuesday 19 July, 5.30PM BST/12.30PM EST
Jesus, as a dying and resurrecting god associated with fermentation, comes at the end of a long tradition of vegetal gods in the Middle East. How does Jesus inherit and interrupt this mythic ecosystem? We can view the stories of Osiris, Tammuz, Orpheus, and Dionysus as above ground mushrooms of a shared underground mycelium that predates the ills of patriarchy and domination. How does this mythic earth-based legacy inform the social and ecological context of Jesus?
From Breath to Text: Oral Scripture and the Transition into Alphabetic Abstraction
Session 2: Tuesday 26 July, 5.30PM BST/12.30PM EST
For most of human history storytelling and scripture did not live on the page. Our stories lived in shared breath. Scripture and sacred stories were oral, relational, and adaptive. Oral storytelling encourages resilience and adaptation to shifting social, political, and ecological conditions. In oral cultures and the historical oral traditions, we see narratives that are intimately connected to their environments and concerned with right relationship to land. What happens when we start writing our stories down so that they no longer evolve? What happens when we shift from breath to text, from direct relationship to land to abstracted ideograph? We explore the ramifications of turning Jesus as an oral storyteller into a disembodied word written on a page. What if oral culture’s cultivation of resilient community and adaptability is exactly what we need in an age of ecological peril?
Healer, Magician, Storyteller: Rerooting Jesus in His Galilean Ecosystem
Session 3: Tuesday 2 August, 5.30PM BST/12.30PM EST
The Jesus of the New Testament is far removed from the wandering rabbi that healed and told stories on the Galilean seaside. He has been translated into the very language of the Empire that assassinated him: deracinated from his native tongue, his Judaism, his political context, and, most importantly, from the ecology that intimately informed his teachings. Jesus grew up in a tumultuous time, witness to violence and imperialism and a biodiversity of spiritual practices. How does rerooting Jesus in his ecology, his Judaism, and his Galilean community, give us a glimpse of someone much more environmentally radical?
The Kingdom is a Weed: Parables, Biblical Animism, and Ecological Storytelling
Session 4: Tuesday 9 August, 5.30PM BST/12.30PM EST
Mustard Seeds and fig trees and lilies and birds. Jesus’ primary mode of teaching, parables, were dominated by nature metaphors. The Jewish tradition, within which Jesus was raised, had a profound sense that land was sacred and inhabited by God. The Biblical King David watched the wind moving through trees for messages from God. Elisha saw divinity in a rain cloud the “size of a hand”. Joseph of Egypt “dreamed” with plants in order to predict droughts and crop failures. Second Temple Period Palestine was a richly biodiverse landscape, home to deserts and jungles, lions and leopards, beloved trees and holy mountains and home to a people who honored and depended on plants and animals for their livelihood. It was from these very real kin that Jesus drew his most powerful metaphors and teachings. By reweaving the rabbi back into his web of relations, how can we understand parables as a mode of ecological storytelling? How can we use this mode of storytelling to come into relationship with our own locales?
Rewilding the Beloved: Jesus the Bridegroom, Mary Magdalene, and Gnosticism
Session 5: Tuesday 16 August, 5.30PM BST/12.30PM EST
Who was the Magdalene? Why are women so crucial to the story of Jesus, yet so maligned in the evolution of Christianity as an organized religion? Why does Jesus repeatedly refer to himself as the Bridegroom, recalling the famous biblical lover of The Song of Songs? How can we use ecology to expand our ideas of gendered union? We look to the early Gnostic texts and a long tradition of Magdalene folklore to finally reweave Jesus into embodied, erotic existence. The Gospel of Thomas gifts us with a Jesus that will encourage us to create a personal spiritual practices and narratives, rooted in and inspired by our contemporary ecologies and communities.
Tying our Roots Together
Session 6: Tuesday 23 August, 5.30PM BST/12.30PM EST
This final session will be a space to reflect as a community on the questions, experiences, and stories that have come to light personally and collectively during our time together. We will each share the “parables” we have noticed in our own ecosystems and the beings that make up our own personal kingdom. The gospel we create at the end of this course will be a communal exercise in compost. We will all throw on a handful of seeds, a fingerful of moss, and the questions that lovingly, wildly, refuse to be answered.
Taught by Sophie Strand
Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo-troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories.
Give her a salamander and a stone and she’ll write you a love story.
Sophie was raised by house cats, puff balls, possums, raccoons, and an opinionated, crippled goose. In every neighborhood she’s ever lived in she has been known as “the walker”. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients.
Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine will be published by Inner Traditions in Fall 2022 and is available for pre-order. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions in Spring 2023.
Subscribe for her newsletter at sophiestrand.substack.com.
And follow her work on Instagram: @cosmogyny and at www.sophiestrand.com.
Watch advaya’s live conversations with Sophie Strand to find out more.
What if hidden underneath contemporary narratives of progress and domination there was a mythic root system of earth-based wisdom? How does Jesus, a Galilean healer, with a penchant for nature-based storytelling get mistranslated by empire and coopted by patriarchy? Where do myths emerge from and how can we understand them as a form of inquiry and sensemaking?
We sit down virtually for a conversation about myth-making and science, compost heap-ing, rerooting Jesus and other historical tales and myths, narratives of domination, power and empire.
In this conversation, we talk about ecological storytelling, rerooting ourselves, and becoming supracellular.
We ask: What is ecological storytelling and how is it a key path forward in these times? How do we listen to those around, beneath and above us, how do we “let ourselves be told”? What does it mean to think with our entire web of kin?
We got into the nitty gritty, the small and big, and went off the script a couple of times—internet glitches and a dove crashing into a window included!
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