Why we worshipped trees and mountains
The world as it once was; sacred, untampered, unscathed.
Unlike man, trees worshipped nature by just being. As the sun rose and angled
itself across the sky, they rose too twisting, turning, satellite-like, drinking
its light, breathing it's life and warmth.
Humans in all their civilizational rubble, took millennia to invent satellites — and yet, nature, through sheer will engineered trees as antennas for the sun. Root stabilized and ever-balanced. When’s the last time you saw trees dangling off-kilter for the sun?
Take a rose — beauty beyond artifice. All that beauty and fragrance that couldn’t be dreamt up by housewives in Kabul. Yet to the rose, it is all alchemy. Water from roots, magnesium, potassium, and sheer, unfiltered sunlight. If that isn’t magic, what is?
Or the sunflower — nature’s solar panel long before silicon and circuits… Rising
with the rising sun in a living hymn of heliotropism. Where the rose stayed
grounded, the sunflower rose and reached for light.
Isn’t that technologia? How
different is that then, from magic? From God’s wonder?
Why scour the earth for tent preachers if you could just strap a front row seat
at a flower farm in the middle of a desert? Watch them glorify their sun in
sheer utter elegance. A conduit for the sacred, receiving light in pure,
unfiltered worship. What greater glory is there than to let your God move
through you?
Technology could only mimic — biomimic. Here is wonder: a flower that moves in
praise.
We never truly worshipped trees or mountains for their own sake. We worshipped them because they were conduits — untainted, uncorrupted — vessels through which Nature’s essence flowed. They did not repress, hunger, deceive or strive. They simply were and in their being, they testified to the divine order of things.
Now, behold the scene: a prosperity gospel Pentecostal tent preacher brandishing
a car key as a testament of God’s work...
What God? A God of acquisition, of appetite — of conquest over nature rather
than communion with it. A God of transaction, not reverence.
The sacred transmuted into spectacle, into commodity.
They laboured and fasted for what they desired — yet never grasped value, or
sacrifice, or true glory.
The quiet glory the natural world reveals in its simplicity, they cloaked in
spectacle.
They taught their children to raise their hands — not in reverence of the
divine, but in praise of a material God.
Yet a tree is never told to lift its branches to proclaim the nearness of the
divine. It simply does.
The sacred, the divine, wills it — and it responds. It testifies, in its very
being, without instruction or pretense.
Because man, in his fall, thought he could bend nature to his will —
destabilizing ecosystems, then himself.
For what you do to nature, you do to your God; and what you do to your God, you
do to yourself.
All that treachery, all that destruction of the sacred — for what?
So they could build a concrete Airbnb penthouse en suite? Concrete towers where
sacred groves once stood? And dream of a sacred heaven full of the grooves they
just desecreted?
An empire built on the labour of the sacred overlooking what? Dust, soured water
and thickened air?
Where once the forest stood as a cathedral, now the shopping mall gleams beneath
fluorescent suns for the almighty economic mythology.
Where once the mountain invited awe, now it is strip-mined or rubbies,
flattened, forgotten.
The old gods displaced — their echoes reduced to branding and slogans, their
mysteries repackaged for sale.
And so we build higher and consume faster, ever seeking the warmth of the sacred
— while our hands grow emptier, our hearts more estranged.
For no machine, no possession, no polished emblem can replace what was once
alive in the living world:
a direct, participatory knowing of the sacred woven through all things.
In strange irony, some now seek to reclaim the lost light in absurd rituals —
perineum tanning (by the beard of Zeus and the sacred, do not google).
As if killing the sacred wasn’t enough, we now had to abuse it. Sticking the sun
where it wasn’t meant to shine.
Atrocities in broad daylight.
If they could do that to their God, what could they do to each other?
We mock the sacred even as we thirst for it.
All that hubris — to think we could bend nature to our will.
To believe we are not a part of it.
To exile the sacred — the gods within us — first to the mountains like the
ancient Greeks… then to the heavens by the ancient jews, as God… then God in
threes by the christians.
Then angels. Then the heavenly hosts. Ancestors exiled by the pound until the
world was devoid of spirituality.
And when the sacred returned — or was sent (but really just emerged) — we nailed
one to a tree, in a desert country no less.
Then begged for those same nailed and exiled gods to return again, only to bind
them in synagogues, temples, and mosques.
Arguing endlessly over how three gods could be one. Waging wars to prove it.
Pleading for forgiveness. For glory. From exiled gods.
The sheer, staggering hubris — to ask what our gods can do for us, instead of what we could do for them.
Such is human folly.
Yet — the current is not lost. Not entirely.
The sacred endures — not in the bright allure of spectacle, nor in the noise of
markets and screens — but in the quiet places,
in the forgotten rhythms of earth and sky.
And should we learn again to hear it —
to let it move through us, as it moves through the tree, the flower, the
mountain —
what greater worship could there be?