2023-08-06 16:45:00
It starts as a simple return to earth. Tired of her city life, Camille B.* drops everything to become a seasonal worker in the wine world. Passionate about ecology, she discovered biodynamics and its creator, a certain Rudolf Steiner, founder of anthroposophy. He is presented as a visionary of the early 20th century. “I was seduced by the holistic vision explaining that the plants we grow are connected to their cosmos”, recalls the now forty-something. Camille begins to flee from screens: “In Steiner’s cosmology, technology is associated with the demon Ahriman, that of materialism. But we don’t tell you that outright, we prefer to explain that screens prevent you from being in contact with his spirituality.”
The young woman learns to “energize”, then to pulverize highly diluted preparations, from dung having rested in cow horns or mealybugs burned on ash wood. Wacky potions, based on Steiner’s cosmic intuitions, but which galvanize Camille: “It’s exhilarating to think that we’re doing something important for the planet, while learning secrets.”
She fell from the clouds reading the comic strip Cosmobacchus by Jean-Benoît Meybeck, an investigation into the esoteric foundations of biodynamics. Camille realizes that Steiner thought the Moon is made of vitrified cow horns, that the Earth has reincarnated multiple times, or that noxious demons called Ahriman, Lucifer, and Soradt rule our planet. “Like Scientologists, Anthroposophists hide their true cosmology. They are very good communicators. The Demeter Label [NDLR : qui certifie les productions biodynamiques] thus highlights the fact that it would be more organic than organic”, assures Camille, who delivered to Unadfi (association fighting against the influence of sectarian groups) a powerful story of those years of “insidious indoctrination”.
Jeanne Soradt* plunged via a “woofing” (volunteering in an organic farm): “The farm was presented as a permaculture, but they based the plantations on the lunar calendar of biodynamics.” During his stay, he learns that Rudolf Steiner is a great philosopher, that Atlantis existed or that vaccines are poison. “I didn’t see myself as adhering to anything religious.” However, after resuming her studies, Jeanne begins to question this alternative world where “new age thought, anthroposophy and ecology are mixed”. “You adhere to more and more eccentric things. These are beliefs that confine the individual. But it took me several years to understand that I was a victim of influence”, testifies this thirty-year-old.
Neoshamanism
For the philosopher Dominique Bourg, long vice-president of the Nicolas Hulot Foundation, “there can be no history of the ecological movement without talking about anthroposophy”. But according to Grégoire Perra, a former anthroposophist who in France became the main opponent of the movement, the occultist Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) “knew nothing about nature”: “For Steiner, the oak is under the influence of Mars, while that the ash tree is a Jupiterian tree.The mistletoe is inherited from the former incarnation of the Earth, and is therefore not influenced by Lucifer, which is why anthroposophical medicine claims that it can cure cancer. I don’t see what knowledge of the natural world we can get from that…”
Rudolf Steiner is a pioneer of ecospirituality, a heterogeneous current for which the return to nature can only pass through an inner transcendence. The planet, or “Gaia”, represents a whole. Ecospirituality is opposed to the Enlightenment, to rationality, to materialism. It nourishes a particular fascination for the first peoples, who are considered to be ecologists before their time, having escaped the dualism of man and nature induced by modern civilization.
The climate crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic and the fear of an environmental apocalypse have boosted esoteric beliefs that claim ecology, such as druidism or wicca (“ancient pagan religion”, syncretism of different mythologies). Among them, shamanism is on the rise. Initially, the term designates the practices of traditional peoples, from Siberia to the Amazon, which make it possible to reach altered states of consciousness in order to communicate with the spirit world. But, for the specialists, it is now necessary to speak of “neo-shamanism”, so much the movement, which took off from the 1960s in association with the new age and deep ecology, has been adapted (in particular by the anthropologist Michael Harner) to the aspirations of Western societies, seduced by exotic rites. “In our modern society, we are looking for a solution that can be found in an elsewhere, whether temporal or spatial. This can be an archaic and ancestral past, or practices hidden in an Amazonian forest or a Mongolian yurt”, analyzes Denise Lombardi, researcher at the CNRS who will publish Le Néochamanisme. A rising religion? For this anthropologist, neo-shamanism is fully in line with ecospirituality, with the idea of a “benevolent nature that must be rediscovered”.
Miviludes recommends caution with regard to self-proclaimed shamans, who have collected “testimonies on experiences associated with dangerous, even lethal, psychotropic substances, the therapeutic effect of which has not been demonstrated and is not the subject of any scientific recognition”. But, according to Denise Lombardi, “to think that shamans are only charlatans and abusive people is an ineffective reductionism, with the risk of putting a lid on all these practices, which is not useful to understand them”.
“Modern Obscurantism”
If the engineer Jean-Marc Jancovici today brilliantly symbolizes a rationalist ecology, fond of figures and physics, ecological personalities promote on the contrary ecospirituality, even if it means endorsing pseudosciences. Dominique Bourg edited the Indonesian shaman Iwan Asnawi, an expert in “energetic therapies”, and regularly invites a “spiritual burst”. In 2020, MEP Michèle Rivasi participated in an event organized by anthroposophical doctors, where the use of mistletoe to treat cancer was extolled. La Nef, a bank created by anthroposophists, finances ecological municipalities such as that of Lyon, but also the Biocoop brands. Marion Cotillard prefaced For a spiritual ecology by the Indian Satish Kumar, champion of a “holistic” approach to the environment.
But it is undoubtedly Pierre Rabhi, who died in 2021, who best embodied these dangerous links between ecology and esotericism. The co-founder, with Cyril Dion, of the Colibris movement was close to anthroposophy. According to him, “the reign of rationality of the so-called Enlightenment” would only have established “a modern obscurantism”. A mystical positioning that the agronomist René Dumont, the first environmental candidate in a presidential election, had pinpointed in 1988: according to him, Pierre Rabhi “taught that the vibrations of the stars and the phases of the Moon played an essential role in agriculture, and propagated Steiner’s antiscientific theses, while condemning Pasteur”.
*Names and surnames have been changed.
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