Читать книгу 20 MINUTES TO MASTER … WICCA - Vivianne Crowley, Vivianne Crowley - Страница 17

The Wiccan universe is a holistic universe. All of creation is alive. People, animals, plants, trees, rocks, crystals, molecules, even atoms, have their own purposes and spiritual force. They are entities or organisms. This is not just a romantic anthropomorphism created to sustain us through the angst of human life. Material creation is infinitely more mysterious than our everyday awareness tells us. Our sense receptors have evolved to show us that a table is a table – no more and no less.

We do not have to view it as a collection of moving molecules teeming with atoms like a giant ant hill of activity. However, this might be nearer the truth. Many of the ways in which we perceive the universe are an illusion. When we look out into the sky at night we see an emptiness filled with planets and stars, but the dark spaces are not empty. They are full of something which physicists call dark matter. This is the dark remnants of stars, black holes and particles as yet unknown to physics. Dark matter fills more than ninety per cent of the universe. Dark matter is not only out there in space. It is all around us. Scientists can tell of its existence because of the tiny magnetic interactions of its particles and its effect on gravitational fields. Our universe is infinitely mysterious and our understanding of it is only just beginning.

In our holistic universe, it is not only the animal, plant and mineral life of our planet that is alive. It is the planet itself. This idea was developed by Otter (also known as Tim or Oberon) Zell of the Pagan Church of All Worlds, but more famously by distinguished scientist James Lovelock in his ‘Gaia hypothesis’.1 James Lovelock is the inventor of the microwave oven. He was the first person to measure CFC gases and to observe that our ozone layer was becoming depleted. He believes that the Earth is a living being. His idea evolved when he started thinking about ways of detecting life on Mars. If the Earth’s atmosphere consisted of gases in chemical equilibrium, like the atmospheres of Mars and Venus, it would be 99 per cent carbon dioxide. Instead, the Earth has an atmosphere with very little carbon dioxide, 21 per cent oxygen and 78 per cent nitrogen. Oxygen and nitrogen are produced by the living organisms that inhabit the Earth. Bacteria release nitrogen and plants photosynthesize, releasing oxygen. Plankton in the oceans remove carbon from the atmosphere and turn it into their tiny shells. When the plankton die, their shells fall to the sea bed. Here they are converted into the calcium carbonate found in limestone rocks. Together, plants, animals and minerals interact in such a way as to seem part of a living being, a greater whole. This is the biosphere, or Gaia. James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia hypothesis’ is the scientific recognition of what Witches and magicians have always known: that the Earth is alive. It is a balanced, integrated, self-regulating system working in such close harmony that it acts like a single being. This then is how Wicca sees our world – fascinating, interacting, mysterious and alive.