Avatar (Pt. II): Heeding the Call of the Elders

In the remarkable BBC documentary "From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brother’s Warning," the reclusive Kogi tribe, considered to be the last surviving pre-Columbian civilization, emerge from their secluded home in the Sierra Nevada mountains of northern Columbia to deliver a sobering message to the rest of the world: the Great Mother is dying and we, the industrialized nations of the world are killing her. The Kogi, who consider themselves the guardians, not the masters of nature delivered this message because they claim they can not save the Great Mother, only we can.

The Kogi understand that the world is a living, spiritual organism, a view that is nearly incomprehensible to most “modern” citizens. Nature, for most of us, is not a living entity, but a lifeless mass of resources to be exploited. However, it is precisely this kind of thinking, this unique western consciousness that must be overcome if life on this planet is to continue.

James Cameron’s "Avatar" also delivers this message to us. The viewing audience is exposed to both kinds of consciousness, though we are meant to identify with the Na’vi, the indigenous population of the planet Pandora who are the spiritual counterpart to the Kogi. We watch in horror as the Na’vi’s home is destroyed due to nothing more than greed. Cameron’s environmental message is clear and some might complain that it lacks subtlety. While that may be true, the message is also wrapped in symbolic imagery that works on an unconscious level, thus making it more profound than any warning from the secular, scientific establishment.

Some have rightly noted that "Avatar" is a call to re-awaken the goddess. Indeed, the struggle in the film does not just speak to colonialism and genocide, but to a victory of the long repressed feminine over a brutal patriarchal consciousness. Many in the west are unaware that before the story of Genesis, there was actually several thousand years of goddess worship and it is the symbolism of the Great Goddess that permeates "Avatar."

In the goddess traditions, the earth is seen as the body of the goddess and as such is a living, breathing, conscious entity. All beings, plant and animal, including the human animal, are the children of the goddess and as such, we are all interconnected in her divine matrix. In fact, etymologically ‘matrix’, ‘matter’ and ‘mother’ all share a common root. The Na’vi are capable of literally connecting themselves with both plant and animal and it is clear that their creator is a goddess, not a god. The Na’vi themselves are catlike and this too is no coincidence. Hundreds, if not thousands, of figurines have been excavated that depict a number of the goddesses of the ancient past sitting on thrones guarded by lions; making her the supreme matriarch of the lion’s pride.

The Na’vi live in an enormous, towering tree. Historically the tree was nearly always associated with the goddess. Traces of this can even be found in the Old Testament in references to the asherah, which referred to both the Goddess Asherah and the pole/tree which represented her. In the film, it is discovered that the root network of the great tree is actually more of a neural network making it not just a home, but a living mind. The modern version of this is James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis (Gaia is another name of the Great Goddess) which argues that the earth is an integrated, interconnected, living organism.

The home of the Na’vi can also be interpreted as the World Tree, the axis mundi, the world axis, the symbolic center of the cosmos and the connection between heaven and earth. It is a link between transcendent and ordinary consciousness. In shamanic traditions, which we are told includes the Na’vi whose chief shaman is a female, the shaman journeys to the upper realms by climbing the world tree. The tree is not just where the Na’vi live but it is their sacred center. It is their Jerusalem, their Mecca.

We have lost this sacred connection to the world depicted by the Na’vi. For more than two thousand years the feminine and humanity’s relationship to nature has been repressed. In the Old Testament, woman, Eve, is blamed for the fall of humankind and the tree of the goddess is full of forbidden fruit. If one knows their ancient history, which many Christians do not, it is clear the Bible is a historical document that tells of the systematic destruction and repression of the goddess culture. While there is much wisdom in the Bible, it is also one of the most genocidal books ever produced. It has been the justification for some of the greatest atrocities the world has ever known. For example, the American expansion west, which resulted in the massacre of over 12 million indigenous people, was largely understood in Biblical terms. America was the new Promised Land and the natives were just a different version of the goddess worshipping Canaanites who were to be utterly destroyed. More than once the destruction of a holy site has been justified by either god or greed and our disregard for the sacred space of others is clear in both history and in "Avatar."

It is telling that the planet of the Na’vi is called Pandora, clearly not their name for their home planet but one assigned by its earthly marauders. In Greek, Pandora means “all giving” which is how goddess cultures viewed the earth and their deity. However, patriarchal society demonized Pandora, making her responsible for the suffering and passions of humankind. As Anne Baring and Jules Cashford explain in their "The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image", the early Church fathers drew upon the myth of Pandora while formulating their theological understanding of Eve and the fall of humankind.

Christian theology developed a near contempt for the material world and the feminine. It was the spirit, now viewed in purely masculine terms which took precedence and as such the earth and woman were both to be dominated by man - a very different concept than acting as nature’s guardians. The earth was viewed as lacking spirit and the early church fathers actually debated on whether or not women had souls. The devaluing of nature continued with the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes who viewed it as nothing more than lifeless, senseless matter to be used as we saw fit, completely severing any connection to mind and matter or of the earth to spirit. It is this thinking, the result of over two thousand years of repression of the feminine that has gotten us to the environmental crisis we now face.

In the film, the destruction of the Na’vi’s habitat is reminiscent of the terrorist attacks on 9/11, in large part because their home is a skyscraper of a tree. The message is clear though, we, in our greed and materialism are committing an atrocity every bit as great, and even more so, than what we endured over eight years ago. Indeed, there is a parallel because symbolically, the Twin Towers were also an axis mundi, though what is sacred to us, the center of our cosmos, is not nature, but trade.

At the end of the film, the patriarchal military leader is defeated not by the story’s hero, but by his Na’vi wife. The psychologist Carl Jung would interpret this as the hero’s anima, the Latin word for soul, which Jung used to identify the feminine aspect of the male. And this, I think, is the other message of Avatar. Not only is it, as I wrote previously, a call to awaken our compassion, but it is also a call to awaken and reclaim the feminine. Perhaps "Avatar" is not just a thrilling cinematic experience, but a stirring in the collective unconscious. It is a dreamscape that compensates for the patriarchal imbalance of the modern psyche and prophecies the return of the goddess. It may be that this is the only way we can heed the Kogi’s warning and save our Mother Earth and reclaim our souls.