Afterword: The Afterlives of Romantic Paganism

Abstract

Barnett considers how Mary Shelley’s release of Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824) began to shape Percy Shelley’s reputation as a “classicist” and suggests the debts owed to the second-generation romantics’ idiosyncratic version of paganism by modern neopaganism and the emerging field of ecosexuality. While several critics have made connections between romanticism and current environmental movements, none so far has attempted to make a similar connection between romanticism and environmentalism’s theological expression, modern Paganism. This rapidly spreading religion—sometimes credited with being the fastest-growing in the world today—can trace its modern origins to the experimentations of the Shelley circle and its emphasis on fellowship, joy, and the pagan value of the natural world.

With the Romantic movement there comes a return to something very like a polytheistic imagination. The avenging sprit of the Ancient Mariner is a portent of much to follow: the forsaken Classical gods who haunt so many German Romantics, the spirits of Strindberg and Yeats, the angels of Rilke, the dark gods of Lawrence. All of these illustrate the principle which Freud perhaps more than anyone else has made us aware of. When our attention is focused on ourselves and our existential relation to nature, as distinct from the attention of science which is turned toward natural law and the attention of theology which is turned toward an intelligent personal God, we become immediately conscious of a plurality of conflicting powers.

— Northrop Frye, A Study of English Romanticism ¹

The Earth is our lover. We are madly, passionately, and fiercely in love, and we are grateful for this relationship each and every day. In order to create a more mutual and sustainable relationship with the Earth, we collaborate with nature. We treat the Earth with kindness, respect and affection.

— Elizabeth M. Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, “Ecosex Manifesto” ²