The Great Forgetting (part I)

“It was only when science convinced us that nature was dead that it could begin its autopsy in earnest.” -James Hillman

The story of civilization does not begin with tools, crops, or cities. It begins with a forgetting. The Great Forgetting was not merely the shift from foraging to farming, nor simply the rise of kings and markets. It was the breaking of an ancient relationship.

People once lived in a world alive with spirit. Every tree, stone, and stream carried a voice. Every act of hunting, gathering, or burning was bound with reverence, but something changed. Slowly, the world itself was declared silent. What had been kin became a resource. What had been communion became consumption.

This forgetting altered more than economies and landscapes. It altered perception. When the world was stripped of life, people came to see themselves differently, no longer as relatives in a circle, but as rulers standing apart. The forgetting taught us to treat the world as an object and ourselves as machines.

Signs of Forgetting

The evidence of this forgetting is everywhere.

• We have paved over more land in the last century than in all prior human history combined.

• Children can name hundreds of cartoon characters, but cannot name the plants growing in their yards.

• Modern people spend more than 90% of their time indoors.

• Entire populations now live in cities where the night sky is invisible, the soil is toxic, and birdsong is drowned by traffic.

• The average person consumes media and advertising for more hours each day than they spend in conversation with family.

This is not simply lifestyle. It is amnesia. We have forgotten how to belong to the living world.

A World Once Alive

Before the forgetting, dawn was not just light but a blessing. Fire was not merely chemical, but a spirit who carried prayers. Rivers sang, stones endured, and the forest spoke through bird and wind.

This was not a belief system. It was reality. Everything was alive. Everything participated in creation. Gratitude was not optional; it was the natural response to being surrounded by relatives.

Yes, people harvested and killed. Trees were felled, prairies burned, deer hunted, salmon speared. But, in the old way, these were not acts of plunder. They were an exchange. A hunter paused to thank the deer. A gatherer offered tobacco to the roots she pulled. Firekeepers sang to the flames. Every taking was met with honoring.

Consumption without reverence was unthinkable. Life moved through "gift and return". 

A Story: A Village of Silence

There is a tale about a village that once sang to the dawn.

Each morning, the people lifted their voices. Children laughed as they brought water to the gardens. Elders prayed before tending the fire. The village lived in harmony, woven together with the living world.

But a new voice arose. Proclaiming, the sun does not listen. The fire does not care. The garden grows because you work it. Stop, your singing, it is foolishness.

Some resisted, many obeyed. The songs ceased. Days became silent. The children forgot the melodies. The elders stopped their prayers. The sun still rose, but no one greeted it. The bread still baked, but no one thanked the fire.

The world had not died, but in the people's eyes, it became lifeless. And the silence grew heavy in their hearts.

That village is our own.

The New Way

Agriculture itself was not the crime. Many Indigenous peoples cultivated crops while still honoring the land as kin. The rupture came when farming fused with hierarchy and conquest.

Land was claimed as property.. Fields were fenced. Animals became assets. Water was diverted, forests leveled, labor pressed into service under kings and overseers. The Gods, once companions, became monarchs ruling from above. Human society mirrored this cosmic order: rulers at the top, peasants at the bottom.

Once the world was declared dead, it could be dissected without conscience. Soil became dirt. Forests became lumber. Animals became commodities. People themselves became tools, their worth measured in labor and coin.

This was the "Great Forgetting", the slow erasure of relationship.

The Cost of Forgetting

The losses are written across the Earth's forests stripped bare, rivers poisoned, animals driven to extinction. But the deepest wound is carried in the human soul.

When the world is dead, meaning itself thins. Work becomes drudgery instead of offering. Food becomes fuel instead of communion. Relationships shrink to transactions. Grief becomes unbearable because death appears final and senseless.

Alienation spreads. People feel alone even in crowds. Addictions multiply, driven by hunger for connection. Violence grows easier because life no longer feels sacred. Mental anguish rises not only from individual struggle but from living inside a culture that has severed its ties to the living world.

This is the toll of the Great Forgetting.

A Story: The Two Hunters

Another story is told about two hunters.

The first hunter entered the forest with arrogance. He saw the deer as meat, the tree as an obstacle, land as his possession. When he killed, he felt only triumph and hunger.

The second hunter entered with reverence. He paused at the forest's edge, whispered thanks, and stepped lightly. He knew the deer had a spirit as alive as his own. When he killed, he bowed his head in prayer, honoring the balance. He knew his own body one day would feed the soil.

Both hunters fed their people. But only one remained in relationship. Only one remembered.

The Rainmaker

There is a story from China about a "Rainmaker" shared by Carl Jung, as told to him by Richard Wilhelm, which is often cited due to its multiple meanings. 

A tiny mountain village once fell into drought. Their crops withered, wells dried, the people were in despair. They tried everything to call the rains, Priests offered prayers, officials devised plans, but the sky remained empty. Finally, a wizened elder summoned the "Rainmaker" from a distant land.

When the Rainmaker arrived, the villagers expected chants, sacrifices, and charms. But he asked only that a small hut be erected at the edge of the village. There he sat in silence for three days. On the fourth day, clouds gathered and rain fell across the fields.

The astonished villagers demanded to know what magic he had worked. The Rainmaker replied, I did not call the rain. I sat until I was in balance within myself. When I came into this balance, the village came into balance. When the village came into balance, the heavens remembered how to rain.

This story is not about controlling nature. It is about remembering and restoring relationship. The Rainmaker did not fix the drought through power, but by returning himself to harmony. His balance rippled outward through the community, through the land, through the sky.

The Memory Beneath

The Great Forgetting was never total. The memory persists.

It lives in Indigenous teachings, carried forward despite colonization and suppression. It survives in ceremonies, where drum and song still call the spirits. It rises in children who talk to animals, in poets who hear rivers speak, in the awe we feel beneath the night sky.

Even science now circles back. Researchers have discovered that trees communicate through their roots and fungi, wolves reshape rivers, and Earth behaves like a living organism. In a new language, the old truth returns; the world is alive.

The memory waits beneath the surface like embers under ash.

The Threshold of Awakening

To name the Great Forgetting is not to surrender to despair. It is to recognize the wound so that healing can begin. We cannot awaken from what we refuse to acknowledge.

The forgetting was the loss of relationship. The awakening will be its renewal. It does not mean turning back to some imagined golden past, nor does it require abandoning modern tools. It means carrying forward the old memory that the world is alive, that reverence and reciprocity sustain life, that gratitude is the law of creation.

The Great Forgetting is not the end of the story. It is the threshold. Beyond it lies the possibility of remembering, of returning to center, of living once again, as if everything is alive, because it is.