Did you know that the proper way to greet an infant is to grasp their feet as though you were grasping their hands in a warm embrace? The feet are the first hands, the back hands, and in a baby they are the doorway to enter if you want to be received. They are the portal that is our access to the ground: the gate through which our terrestrial mother speaks to us.
If we are going to re-nature the human body, and we must if we are to thrive, we must address the severing of the root of connection with the Living Earth.
This hacking away at the root of what it means to be human is an undertaking, one of the principal undertakings, of Empire. This severing has been approached with methodical violence by empires since Rome, and probably before. Rome was perhaps unsurpassed in its annihilatory glee.
A central part of the Roman undertaking was the absolute destruction of earth-based peoples. Rome sought not only to kill the people, but to destroy their very gods. It cut the heads off their statues to deprive them of breath. Aware that they were dealing with Animists, and that spirit could come even into the stone, they sought to destroy everything that was connected to the good mother earth. A signature Roman maneuver was to destroy the temples to the original gods of a place, which were often constructed at features of geomantic significance, places where the beneficent energies of the Mother Earth are most palpable, and to erect Roman temples on top of them. Christianity later adopted this specific tactic. It is quite common to find Christian churches (consecrated to analogues in the Christian pantheon of saints rather than their Indigenous counterparts) sitting atop the decimated ruins of Indigenous sacred sites and temples. A shrine to the Virgin thus sits atop a temple originally consecrated to Athena, for example. People are then, in this age of forgetfulness, astounded by the curative powers of the church, while in actuality they are experiencing the curative powers of the Our mother, The Earth.
The Nike of Samothrace was not originally without a head.
This severing of our root of relatedness to the earth is apparent in the origin stories of western civilization, as I have noted. It is also experienced, viscerally, in the fact that most modern people’s feet are not touching the ground. I grew up in a family where I’m not sure anyone's feet had actually touched the ground for several generations.
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