Everyone has seen these images of an almost naked dancer contorting on the ground among sex toys, in a supposedly carnal contact with the earth and the plants, in front of an audience all smiles. The defenders of good morals let out loud cries. Is this the kind of thing you want to show children? Should public subsidies go to these groups of artists? Scandal, scandal, scandal everywhere. The environmental mayor of Lyon had to explain himself. He justified himself by asserting that the municipal right voted for the subsidy. Isn’t it funny that the Republicans have now transformed themselves into guarantors of public morals? This party no longer has seats, but it does have its seats. Beyond the lapping of indignation, this episode will have made it possible to discover the existence of a new ecological manifesto. In the marvelous world of intersectionality, we knew ecofeminism, ecohiking and ecogastronomy: here is ecosexuality, a kind of carnal union with nature supposed to challenge the established order.
What is interesting in this doctrine is not its vague claims or its subsidized provocations, it is that it is the missing link that we have been waiting for for a long time, and to which a bright future is certainly promised. Because we could not, in our regions, remain durably in the state where we were after fifty years of dechristianization, after one hundred and fifty years of secularism, after the disappearance of the symbols, rituals, liturgies, which punctuated our lives and our deaths. The desacralization of everything, we felt, could not fulfill the deep aspirations of each of us, and of our societies. It was necessary that to the old beliefs, to the worn rites, to the discredited metaphysics come to be substituted with us, in France, another answer.
Malraux’s now banal formula, “The 21st century will be religious or it won’t be”, seemed to hold true everywhere, except at home. The Islamist outbreak ravaging Africa, the evangelist boilings permeating the speeches of American presidents, the Hindu revival nourishing a new war of religions in India: all this, despite its consequences on our soil (the attacks), hardly prospered in society. French. It is perhaps that these religious inflammations do not conform very much with our old skepticism.
Between Woodstock and Panoramix
France, the eldest daughter of the Church, seemed a bit hopelessly orphaned, and only half-heartedly looked for surrogate parents: the magic of politics having vanished, people turned to astrology (a newspaper without a horoscope is a lost diary), esotericism, superstitions. Finally ecosexuality came. It revives in the depths of our minds memories that we thought were extinguished. The druids under the mistletoe, frolics in the meadows on a full moon night, the old libations, we are also molded by this. This great emptiness of soul that we felt was in fact a state of lack: we wanted, without knowing it, the return of paganism.
Somewhere between Woodstock and Getafix, France is about to give herself up again to the genius of the haruspices, to the adoration of nymphs, to the protection of the spirits of waters and rivers, inoffensive divinities brutalized by the hand of the male. We will soon be able to reconnect with telluric dances and the mysteries of initiation. Wreaths of flowers will be reborn on our heads and orgies will take place in village squares to celebrate the weddings of Gaia and Dionysus. The human arrogance anchored in the Judeo-Christian soil will finally be demolished by the revival of the secret powers of Hell and Olympus. The pride of man will be crushed by the omnipotence of the gods above and below, returned to their mastery. What are these artists fornicating with the matrix earth if not the resurrection of the satyrs? “Le Grand Pan is dead”, proclaimed Apollinaire: hey no, before our eyes, here he is again.
In pagan thought, man is an intruder. He disturbs the gods. He bothers Nature. He saves his skin only by sacrificing the blood of his children. There are not so far from the kind dryads to the terrifying Minotaur fond of human flesh. We are now embarked on a strange labyrinth. May Athena protect us.
* Sylvain Fort is an essayist