Our sacred belonging

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All the folk customs and rituals which today celebrate our belonging to nature are but the scattered and oft-distorted remnants of a primordial nature religion.

This is the view put forward by French scholar Alain Daniélou (1907-1994) in his 1979 book Shiva et Dionysos. [1]

As the title indicates, he sees the same belief system as having been shared by India and ancient Greece – and, indeed, by other cultures.

He cites many convincing details that confirm that the cults of Shiva and Dionysus are essentially one and the same tradition.

And he explains: “Shaivism is essentially a nature religion. Shiva, like Dionysus, only represents one aspect of the divine hierarchy, that which concerns the whole of earthly life.

“Shaivism, in establishing a plausible co-ordination between subtle and living beings, has always been opposed to the anthropocentrism of urban societies.

“Its Western, Dionysian, form likewise represents a stage at which people were in communion with wild living, with the animals of the mountains and the forest.

“Dionysus, like Shiva, is a god of vegetation, of trees, of vines. He is also an animal god, a bull god.

“This god teaches people to turn their backs on human laws so as to rediscover those of the divine”. [2]

I can certainly see some parallels between Shaivism and the nature-based spirituality of the Kalash people of Pakistan which I recently wrote about [3] – the Indian god’s entourage contains various sprites, nymphs and phantoms, “all the spirits that rule over the aerial or terrestrial world, over the forests, the springs and the storms”. [4]

If European fairies and nature spirits can trace their origins back to the Indian sub-continent, this would explain why it is so hard to tell from which source the Kalash drew this folk belief.

Another connection is wine – Dionysus is the god of wine and the drink plays an important part in Indian-Greek-Roman Bacchanalian feasting, as well as being enjoyed by both humans and fairies in the Hindu Kush.

Daniélou writes: “The invention of wine and its spread among humankind constitutes an essential theme of the Dionysian legend.

“It seems that the vine was a plant of Indian origin imported into the Mediterranean with the cult of Bacchus well before the Aryan invasions.

“Meghastenes mentions the importance of the Indian vineyards. Wine became the sacred drink of the Mediterranean peoples. Cretan gardeners grew vines”. [5]

“The climate of Shaivite and Dionysian life is not only ritualistic. It’s a searching for joy, for pleasure, for the blossoming of the individual.

“Wine and other intoxicating drinks form part of that joie de vivre which is one of the fundamental aims of any existence, for happiness (ananda) is the very nature of the divine condition.

“All that is pleasure and joy brings us closer to God”. [6]

However, unlike today’s Kalash society (and, indeed, most others across the world), the old Shaivite world was matriarchal.

Daniélou says: “Property, home, land and servants all belonged to the woman.

“The man was just an impregnator, a wanderer interested in the arts, in war, in games, or he was dedicated to the intellectual or spiritual life”. [7]

The primordial religion is a religion of belonging and of being aware of that belonging.

“All the elements which constitute the world are interdependent, are part of a whole. There is no hiatus, no discontinuity, in the work of the Creator.

“The mineral world, the vegetal world, the animal and human world and the subtle world of the spirits and the gods exist one through the other, one for the other”. [8]

We can find and confirm our part in that great interconnected cosmos by taking part in celebrations and rites.

Daniélou says: “Communication between different states of being, between humans, spirits and gods, can only be effected by means of special techniques, called rites, which use the fault lines, the invisible joining points where communication between different worlds is possible”. [9]

“The seeker must discover in the world in which he lives, and in himself, the points of contact or of attachment to other worlds.

“He must know how to recognise in the mineral, vegetal and animal world, on the surface of the earth and in his own body, these forms, these points through which flow into him and into the world the fundamental energies in which are revealed the thought, the nature and the action of the Creator”. [10]

For the Shaivite and Dionysian tradition, dance is a perfect means of accessing this connection.

Says Daniélou: “Shiva as manifestation of primordial rhythmic energy is the ‘lord of the dance’ (Nata-raja). The cosmic universe is his theatre”. [11]

“The ecstatic dancers, inspired or possessed by the god, acquire perceptions of the invisible world, powers of prophecy and magic.

“In the semi-conscious hypnotic state brought on by the rhythm of the drums and the movements of the dance, they enter into contact with the gods, with wild animals, even with stones, and charm them”. [12]

He sees a continuation of this dancing tradition, via Greece, in the Sufi zikr dance in the Islamic world and in customs which survived until the 14th century in the Rhineland and Flanders as well as in southern Italy, [13] as I will discuss in another essay.

Sacred places are an important setting for sacred dances.

As the Romanian historian of religion Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) explains, the temple in any religion constitutes an “opening” towards a higher reality and “ensures communication with the world of the gods”. [14]

But the use of a building, along with the formulation of dogma and laws, is already a step away from a primal awareness.

Daniélou insists: “Shiva’s temple is nature. This is why the Shaivite rites of initiation take place in the forest or by the side of a river or sacred lake, and never in temples or human dwellings.

“Springs are home to nymphs or genies, rivers are goddesses, the source of the Ganges is in Shiva’s hair”. [15]

The natural world is an enchanted world, he says.

“For someone who is conscious of the fact that creation is not only a divine work, but the very form of the divine, every being, every life, every action takes on a sacred character, becomes a rite, a means of communicating with the celestial world”. [16]

As Paolo Santarcangeli explains, for any people which lives in harmony, “in consensus”, with the forces that surround it, “many animals are sacred or rather everything is sacred: sky, earth, water, fire, air.

“The whole life of the ‘primitive’ human is a succession of magical operations aiming to create a bond of affection with the surrounding world, to conjoin, to bewitch, to conjure the forces of nature”. [17]

Eliade defines this in terms of hierophany, of something sacred revealing itself to us.

He says this ranges from “the most elementary hierophany, for example the manifestation of the sacred in some object, a stone or a tree, up to the supreme hierophany, which for a Christian is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ”. [18]

He adds: “The modern Westerner feels a certain uneasiness regarding certain forms of the manifestation of the sacred: it is difficult for him to accept that, for certain human beings, the sacred could manifest itself in stones or trees.

“But it’s not a question of venerating a stone or a tree in itself. The sacred stone and the sacred tree are not adored for being such; it is rather than they are hierophanies, because they ‘show’ something which is no longer stone or tree, but the sacred“. [19]

“A sacred stone remains a stone – apparently (more precisely: from a profane point of view) nothing distinguishes it from all the other stones.

“On the other hand, for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality transmits a supernatural reality.

“In other words, for those who have a religious experience, Nature as a whole is likely to reveal itself as cosmic sacredness. The Cosmos in its totality can become a hierophany”. [20]

Eliade stresses that early human communities, whether nomadic hunters or sedentary farmers, shared something more important than the differences between them.

All of them “lived in a sacralised Cosmos, took part in a cosmic sacredness which was manifested as much in the animal world as in the vegetal one”. [21]

So the “magic” in this world, which many of us feel to be totally missing in industrial society, is in fact our knowing of a deep connection to everything around us – our conscious withness.

Writes Daniélou: “The manifestation of a world whose nature is energy demands two opposed poles.

“The substance, the matter of the world, is the current which unites these two poles. Matter is not something stable, but pure energy organised in space-time.

“In the primordial Trinity, it is neither Shiva nor Shakti who is the substance of what is created; it is the spark that flies between them, the attraction (raga), bliss (ananda), pleasure (kama) and love”. [22]

This fits nicely with the point I was making in my piece on the Kalash about their fairies representing the nervous system of the Whole, the means by which we feel our belonging to something much greater than us and through which we might, if we listen, be guided to act in its (and therefore our own) best interests.

Our pleasure at being in and part of nature – our awe – is the tingling sensation of becoming aware of who we really are.

The modern outlook regards only our individual existence as real, with any suggestion of a wider belonging seen as spurious and all talk of the sacred dismissed out of hand as ludicrous.

But Eliade writes: “The sacred is the real par excellence, at the same time strength, effectiveness, source of life and fertility.

“The desire of the religious person to live in the sacred amounts, in fact, to his desire to place himself in objective reality, to not allow himself to be paralysed by the endless relativity of purely subjective experiences, to live in a real and effective world and not in an illusion”. [23]

And part of that greater reality is the telos behind it, the meaning that flows into a receptive heart through the sacred veins of the cosmic being to which we all belong, whether we realise it or not.

Daniélou puts it thus: “Nothing can exist without being implied in its cause. If thought exists in beings, thought is necessarily part of the cosmic principle from which they issued.

“There thus exists universal thought, a universal conscience, and creation is not just an accident, but the choice of a transcendent will that wanted it to be the way it is”. [24]

[Audio version]

[1] Alain Daniélou, Shiva et Dionysos: La Religion de la Nature et de l’Eros de la préhistoire à l’avenir (Paris: Fayard, 1979). All translations from French in this essay are my own.
[2] Daniélou, p. 20.
[3] Paul Cudenec, ‘Rooted in our living world’. https://winteroak.org.uk/2025/06/23/rooted-in-our-living-world/
[4] Daniélou, p. 139.
[5] Daniélou, p. 195.
[6] Daniélou, p. 196.
[7] Daniélou, p. 265.
[8] Daniélou, p. 15.
[9] Daniélou, p. 225.
[10] Daniélou, p. 226.
[11] Daniélou, p. 249.
[12] Daniélou, p. 251.
[13] Daniélou, p. 253.
[14] Mircea Eliade, Le sacré et le profane (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), p. 29.
[15] Daniélou, pp. 166-67.
[16] Daniélou, p. 17.
[17] Paolo Santarcangeli, Le livre des labyrinthes, p. 108, cit. Daniélou, p. 34.
[18] Eliade, p. 17.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Eliade, p. 18.
[21] Eliade, p. 22.
[22] Daniélou, p. 97.
[23] Eliade, p. 31.
[24] Daniélou, p. 15.