Divine Stuff

When you work for hours on a hands on project--a garden, woodworking, renovating a house, art, whatever--you realize, eventually, the stuff starts speaking (for lack of a better word) and telling you what it wants to be, or how it works, and that it's a full participant in creation. It's not passive at all.

The age old systems of poetic understanding cast the Earth--stuff--in a female role. In the creative process of agriculture the Earth, the goddess, gave birth to the crops when activated by the sun--which took the male role. The Hermes/Mercury character is, perhaps, the spirit of fertilization.

The monotheist cults didn't see the divinity in stuff, which is possibly appropriate for cults for city dwellers, accountants and bureaucrats. Their god is hidden and remote, maybe only accessible through a professional in a building, and quite possibly gone. The world of trees, fields, soil, and water doesn't even exist in their imagination. It's deleted from their scriptures. Stuff is just there for production, conversion to money tokens. Animals are just animated meat.