Why We Worshipped Trees and Mountains

The world as it once was: sacred, untampered, unscathed.

Unlike man, trees worshipped nature simply by being. As the sun rose and angled across the sky, they rose too — twisting, turning, satellite-like, drinking its light, breathing life and warmth.

Humans, in all their civilizational rubble, took millennia to invent satellites — and yet nature, through sheer will, engineered tree-antennas. Root-stabilized, ever-balanced. When is the last time you saw a tree dangling off-kilter in pursuit of the sun?

The Rose and the Sunflower

Take the rose — beauty beyond artifice. All that fragrance and form, beyond anything imagined by perfumers or poets. And yet to the rose, it is simply alchemy: water from roots, magnesium, potassium, and pure, unfiltered sunlight. If that is not magic, what is?

Or the sunflower — nature’s solar panel long before silicon and circuits. Rising with the sun in a living hymn of heliotropism. Where the rose remains grounded, the sunflower rises, reaching, optimizing for light.

Isn’t that technologia? How different is this from magic? From divine wonder?

Why search for tent preachers and magicians when one could take a seat at a flower farm and watch such glory unfold — conduits of the sacred, receiving light in pure, unfiltered worship. What greater glory is there than to let the divine move through you?

Technologia can only mimic — biomimic. Here is wonder: a flower that moves in praise.

The True Reason We Worshipped

We never truly worshipped trees or mountains for their own sake. We revered them as 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, testified to the divine order of things.

The Modern Spectacle

Now, behold the scene: a prosperity gospel Pentecostal preacher beneath a tent, brandishing a car key as proof of God’s work.

But what God is this?

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, sacrifice, or true glory. The quiet glory the natural world reveals in 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.

The Fall of Man

Because man, in his fall, believed 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 — for what? A concrete Airbnb penthouse en suite? Concrete towers where sacred groves once stood? An empire built on the labor of the sacred, overlooking what — dust, soured water, thickened air?

Where once the forest stood as a cathedral, now the shopping mall gleams beneath fluorescent suns, for the almighty economy.

Where once the mountain invited awe, now it is strip-mined, flattened, forgotten. The old gods displaced — their echoes reduced to branding and slogans, their mysteries repackaged for sale.

The Hunger for the Sacred

And so we build higher and consume faster — ever seeking the warmth of the sacred — while our hands grow emptier, our hearts more estranged.

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 abuse it. Shining the sun where it was not meant to shine. Atrocities in broad daylight.

If they could do this to their god — what could they do to each other? We mock the sacred even as we thirst for it.

For it is always thus: The child not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. The soul, alienated from the sacred, lashes out in ever stranger ways.

The Exile of the Sacred

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... then to the heavens, as God... then God in threes...

Then angels. Then heavenly hosts. Ancestors exiled by the pound, until the world was emptied of spirit.

And when the sacred returned — or was sent — 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, mosques.

Arguing endlessly over how three gods are one. Waging wars to prove it.

Pleading for forgiveness. For glory. From exiled gods.

The Folly and the Return

The sheer, staggering hubris — to ask what our gods might do for us, instead of what we might do for them.

Such is human folly.

Yet — the current is not lost. Not entirely.

Even now, the trees turn quietly toward the sun. The rivers run their ancient courses. The rose unfolds in silent praise.

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.

It waits — not to be bought, but to be remembered.

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?

If you want, I can also show you how to write a short "Choosing the Path Back" section like your Choosing the Right Rendering Strategy — just to give the reader some gentle invitation toward practice and reflection. Want me to mock that up too?