Fertility Cult (Part 1)

...the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer.

- Thomas Merton

Nothing was lost on Hebrews living three and a half millenia ago, most notably, that in a world that is made up of life, fertility was at its root.

Today in the west between 75% and 85% of the population lives in urban areas, depending on the continent. Because of where they live, these seem to be ignorant of the fact that without biology, nothing else exists. Urban areas are in the end places where biology has been stamped out; the only daily lived reality that is available to the masses there are contrived, human-created ones.

However, throughout the growing season on farms and in the surrounding wild regions of these continents the fertility rituals of the plants and animals that live in them continues to take place. And in truth, without this pageant life would cease to exist, both for the animals and plants that populate them, but for humans in urban areas as well. This is not only a basic fact of life, it is the basic fact of life.

The first chapter of the Hebrew scriptures, the book of Bereishit (aka Genesis), not only recognizes, but celebrates this gush of fertility. In fact, that is all that it does. It does not propose to do anything else. Modern, urbanized Christians impose all sorts of alternate readings on it, focusing instead on timelines, or days, hung up on the order of some ungodly nonsense. They impose what are literally insane understandings of the world that were never intended by the original Hebrew writers who were pastoralists, living in the open, and simply happy to be alive. These primitive stories simply celebrated that. These first-peoples were aware of, a part of, and deeply dependent on biology and as such and in particular, fertility. Their entire society was structured upon it. Conversely, modern western people are alientated from it and as such either are ignorant of it, or in denial of it, or embarrassed by it. Consequently, fertility has become a source of perversion, reduced to the machinations of human sexuality that are cut off from the very biological underpinnings of what brings people to life in the first place, and what Hebrew scripture itself is designed to both celebrate, as well as to guard against.