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Process Paganism is a broad orientation rather than a single settled doctrine. Different forms may draw upon process philosophy, ecological thought, theology, animism, ritual practice or naturalism in different proportions.
The account developed here is one particular form of Process Paganism: a non-theistic, immanent and deanthropomorphised version built from Spinoza, Whitehead, Kant, Nick Land and Hilan Bensusan.
Its central claim is that reality is not fundamentally composed of fixed and self-contained things, but of processes, relations and rhythms. What appears to be a stable entity is better understood as a temporary consistency within a wider field of becoming.
A person, animal, tree, river or ecosystem persists, but none remains materially or relationally identical from one moment to the next. Bodies breathe, metabolise, age and adapt. Rivers flow, erode and alter their courses. Forests develop through growth, decay, competition, symbiosis and regeneration. Identity is therefore not the absence of change. It is a pattern maintained through change.
This form of Process Paganism does not depend upon supernatural gods, separate spiritual substances or a transcendent realm beyond Nature. Its spirituality arises from encounters with the more-than-human processes in which human existence is already embedded.
Spinoza provides the principle of immanence. Whitehead provides a dynamic account of process and relational becoming. Bensusan contributes a rhythm-oriented ontology in which entities emerge through intersecting temporal patterns. Kant’s sublime offers an account of experiences that exceed ordinary representation and alter the subject. Land’s Outside names the nonhuman excess that resists reduction to human concepts, purposes and values.
Taken together, these ideas support a Process Paganism that is spiritual without requiring supernaturalism, naturalistic without treating Nature as inert matter, and ecological without idealising Nature as harmonious or benevolent.
Immanence: God or Nature
The ontological foundation of this form of Process Paganism is Spinoza’s identification of God with Nature.
For Spinoza, God is not a personal creator standing outside the universe. God is the infinite reality of which every finite being is an expression. Nothing exists independently of Nature, and nothing acts from beyond it. There is no ultimate division between a sacred creator and a profane creation.
The sacred is therefore not located in another world. It is not a supernatural layer hidden behind material reality. It concerns the depth, power and inexhaustibility of this world itself.
Individual beings are modes of Nature: particular ways in which the power of existence is expressed. Human beings possess no privileged metaphysical status. We are neither separate from Nature nor placed above it. We are finite arrangements within it, dependent upon innumerable processes that precede and exceed us.
This provides the basis for a deanthropomorphised spirituality. Nature is not the product of a humanlike mind. It does not exist for human benefit, nor does it organise itself according to human moral expectations. Human thought is one activity of Nature among others, not the pattern against which all existence must be measured.
The phrase God or Nature may remain useful, provided that God is not understood as a supreme person or conscious ruler. It names reality as an infinite, self-producing and internally differentiated whole.
Yet the language of substance can sometimes appear too static. This form of Process Paganism therefore interprets Spinozist immanence through a more explicitly processual account of existence.
Process: Being as Becoming
Whitehead’s philosophy shifts attention away from enduring substances and towards events, relations and becoming.
Rather than imagining the world as a collection of already complete objects, process philosophy understands entities as achievements of composition. A being exists through its relations with what precedes it and with the environment in which it emerges. It is not first complete and then related to other things. Relation belongs to its constitution.
Reality is therefore active. It is continually forming, inheriting, responding and transforming. Every event receives a world and contributes something to what follows.
A tree, from this perspective, is not merely an object occupying a location. It is an ongoing coordination of sunlight, soil, water, carbon, fungi, insects, weather, inherited biological patterns and surrounding organisms. Remove these relations and there is no independent tree left behind. Its unity is real, but it is a produced and temporary unity.
The same applies to human beings. Personal identity depends upon bodily processes, language, memory, social relations, food, microbial life, technology, climate and history. The apparently autonomous subject is itself an ecological and historical event.
This form of Process Paganism treats relational becoming as spiritually significant. The sacred is not a permanent essence hidden inside things. It appears through the production, transformation and dissolution of forms.
Death and decay cannot therefore be understood only as the negation of life. They are also processes through which existing compositions break down and become conditions for other forms of existence. This does not remove the grief or violence of death from the perspective of those who undergo it. It means that no process can be understood entirely from one scale or standpoint.
Nature contains cooperation, symbiosis and care, but also predation, parasitism, illness, catastrophe and extinction. Process should not be romanticised as automatically progressive or morally good. Its spiritual significance lies in its generative reality, not in its conformity to human desires.
Rhythm: The Formation of Temporary Worlds
A process ontology explains that reality is becoming. Rhythm helps explain how temporary forms arise within that becoming.
Rhythm is not restricted to music or chant. It refers more broadly to patterned recurrence, variation, interruption and expectation. Heartbeats, breathing, hunger, sleep, migration, tides, seasons, reproduction and erosion all possess rhythmic organisation.
Rhythm combines repetition with difference. A rhythm must repeat sufficiently to be recognisable, but no repetition is perfectly identical. Every recurrence takes place under altered conditions. Rhythm therefore allows continuity without requiring permanence.
Hilan Bensusan’s rhythm-oriented ontology is useful because it treats entities as crossroads of rhythms. A being is not an isolated substance that later enters temporal patterns. It emerges where multiple rhythms intersect and achieve a provisional coordination.
An animal is formed through metabolic, neurological, reproductive, seasonal and ecological rhythms. Its life depends upon the partial alignment of these processes. It must eat at certain intervals, sleep according to particular cycles, respond to changes in temperature and coordinate its movements with those of prey, predators, offspring or companions.
The animal is not merely located within an environment. Its rhythms are entangled with environmental rhythms. A migratory bird exists through atmospheric conditions, seasonal changes, magnetic orientation, food availability and inherited routes. Alter these rhythms sufficiently and its established form of life becomes impossible.
Rhythm therefore provides an account of situated existence. Every being inhabits a world structured by particular tempos, repetitions and interruptions. Different organisms inhabit different worlds because they respond to different rhythms.
A bat is oriented towards frequencies unavailable to unaided human hearing. A tree responds to seasonal and climatic durations that exceed immediate human awareness. Fungi organise themselves through subterranean processes that rarely become visible at the surface. Geological formations unfold at scales that make human lifetimes appear momentary.
There is no single rhythm against which all beings should be measured. Nature consists in overlapping, diverging and conflicting temporalities.
This is an ontological use of rhythm, rather than the musical sense associated with polyrhythm. The point is not that reality resembles a piece of music, but that beings persist through recurring patterns that may synchronise, interfere with or interrupt one another.
An entity can therefore be understood as a temporary rhythmic consistency. Existence is neither absolute chaos nor permanent order. It is the continual formation and disruption of pattern.
The Outside: Nature Beyond Human Measure
If reality is wholly immanent, the Outside cannot mean a supernatural domain beyond Nature.
Instead, the Outside names what exceeds the capacities of a particular form of perception, organisation or thought. It is not outside reality. It is outside a situated being’s access to reality.
Land’s concept of the Outside is useful because it resists the assumption that human consciousness is the centre and measure of existence. The Outside names forces and processes that do not conform to human meanings, purposes or values.
Within this version of Process Paganism, however, the Outside need not be treated as a single abyss or as an exclusively destructive force. There are multiple outsides because every form of life is situated and limited.
Ultrasound belongs to the Outside of ordinary human hearing, but not to the perceptual world of a bat. Geological time lies outside ordinary human intuition, although it is intrinsic to the landscape. The smell-world of a dog, the electrical sensitivity of a shark and the migratory orientation of a bird disclose dimensions of Nature that human beings do not directly inhabit.
The Outside is therefore relational. Something is outside in relation to a particular set of capacities.
Human beings are also part of the Outside from the perspective of other creatures. Artificial light, machinery, architecture, chemical pollution and human noise enter nonhuman worlds as forces that may be overwhelming, unintelligible or destructive.
The Outside should not be romanticised as wilderness located far from civilisation. It appears wherever reality exceeds the forms through which it is habitually organised. It may be encountered in a forest, a city, a storm, an illness, an animal, a machine or the unfamiliar behaviour of one’s own body.
This concept deanthropomorphises spirituality because it prevents the more-than-human world from being reduced to disguised human personalities. A river does not need human intentions to exceed us. An animal does not need a humanlike soul to possess its own form of existence. A forest does not need to convey a moral lesson in order to transform those who enter it.
The Outside is Nature’s resistance to complete translation into human terms.
The Sublime: The Breakdown of Human Measure
Kant’s sublime provides the experiential dimension of this framework.
The sublime arises when imagination struggles to present something that exceeds its powers. Vast magnitude, overwhelming force or incomprehensible complexity cannot be contained within an adequate mental image. Ordinary intuition reaches its limit.
For Kant, this failure ultimately reveals the superiority of human reason. Although imagination cannot adequately represent the overwhelming object, reason discovers within itself an idea of totality or freedom that exceeds sensible Nature. The sublime begins with the failure of imagination but ends with the elevation of the rational human subject.
This form of Process Paganism retains Kant’s account of cognitive disruption while rejecting its anthropocentric conclusion.
The failure of imagination need not prove the superiority of human reason. It may instead reveal the limits of human perception and thought. The sublime becomes an encounter in which the subject discovers that reality is not structured according to human scale.
The subject is not elevated above Nature. It is displaced within it.
The sublime is therefore more than a feeling of awe. It has the capacity to alter intuition and reason. Intuition concerns the forms through which reality is immediately perceived and organised. Reason concerns the conceptual structures through which experience is interpreted.
An encounter becomes spiritually significant when it disrupts both.
Geological time may alter intuition by placing personal duration against an almost inconceivable scale. Animal perception may challenge the assumption that the human sensory world is the world as such. A storm may expose the fragility of bodily and technological control. A swarm may disrupt the identification of agency with individual organisms. Decomposition may undermine the image of the body as a sealed and autonomous unity.
Such encounters do not necessarily provide a final doctrine. Their importance lies partly in their power to loosen established habits of thought.
The sublime within this Process Paganism is therefore not limited to spectacular landscapes. It can arise whenever an encounter reveals scales, temporalities or agencies that resist assimilation.
Nor is it necessarily pleasurable. It may involve fear, grief, disorientation or revulsion. What makes it transformative is not emotional comfort, but the breakdown of an inadequate measure.
Rhythmic Dislocation
Connecting the sublime with rhythm-oriented ontology allows it to be understood as rhythmic dislocation.
Every organism anticipates reality through patterned expectation. Hunger prepares the body for food. Sleep cycles organise attention. Habits establish sequences. Language, work and social life impose recurring temporal structures. Perception itself depends upon the anticipation of continuity.
An encounter with the Outside occurs when a rhythm arrives that cannot be smoothly absorbed into these expectations.
A disaster may violently interrupt ordinary time. Bereavement may destroy the rhythms around which a shared life was organised. An ancient landscape may place human duration beside a radically different temporal scale. Seasonal change may expose the conflict between industrial schedules and ecological cycles.
The sublime emerges when this interruption reorganises the subject’s relation to reality.
Reason changes because inherited concepts no longer appear sufficient. Intuition changes because the world begins to be perceived through different scales, relations or temporal patterns.
The subject does not thereby gain complete access to the Outside. The Outside is not mastered by the transformation it causes. Something always remains beyond assimilation.
This prevents the sublime from becoming another form of human conquest. Transformation does not produce omniscience. It produces a greater awareness of situatedness and limitation.
Wildlife and More-Than-Human Worlds
The combination of process, rhythm and the Outside supports a non-anthropocentric wildlife ontology.
Animals are not passive objects occupying a human world. Each participates in the production of a situated world through its sensory capacities, bodily rhythms, ecological relations and forms of attention.
A fox inhabits territories, scents, dangers and opportunities that are not identical to those perceived by a human observer. A bird encounters currents, magnetic orientations and seasonal signals that remain largely unavailable to human intuition. A nocturnal animal inhabits darkness not as an absence of light, but as a structured field of activity.
These are not merely subjective interpretations of a world already completed from the human point of view. They are real articulations of Nature.
This avoids both reductive materialism and simplistic anthropomorphism. Wildlife does not need to be treated as a collection of machines, but neither must animals be imagined as concealed human personalities. Their otherness lies in their distinct forms of embodiment, temporality, perception and relation.
Spiritual attention to wildlife therefore requires restraint. The animal should not be exhausted by the myths, symbols or meanings humans attach to it.
A fox may participate in human mythology, but it is not reducible to a symbol of cunning. An owl may carry cultural associations with wisdom or death, but its existence exceeds those associations. The more-than-human being always remains partly outside the conceptual role assigned to it.
This remainder is not a failure of spirituality. It is central to it.
Practice as Attunement
Without gods, worship need not be the central practice of this Process Paganism. Attunement becomes more important.
Attunement means becoming responsive to rhythms, processes and forms of life that normally remain unnoticed or subordinated to human schedules.
Walking, silence, fasting, seasonal observance, repeated gesture, breath, drumming, listening and sustained attention may all alter the rhythms of the practitioner. Their significance lies not merely in representing beliefs, but in reorganising perception and participation.
Ritual can therefore be understood as the deliberate construction of conditions in which ordinary habits are interrupted and other rhythms become perceptible.
A seasonal ritual need not personify the season as a deity. It may instead situate human life within cycles of growth, decline, migration, dormancy and return. A funeral ritual need not promise escape from Nature. It may place grief within processes of dissolution, memory, continuity and transformation.
Such practices are not attempts to dissolve the human entirely. Human beings cannot cease to be situated human organisms. The aim is to weaken the assumption that the human standpoint is exhaustive.
Attunement is therefore not fusion. It is a more careful participation in relations that remain partly opaque.
Symbols as Operators
This form of Process Paganism also requires a particular account of symbols.
Symbols should not primarily be understood as signs that represent fixed meanings. In a representational model, a symbol stands in for something absent: an animal signifies a human quality, a shape signifies an idea, or a ritual object signifies a supernatural being. The symbol is interpreted by translating it into a meaning established through human language and convention.
Such an approach risks returning the more-than-human world to human categories. Animals become representations of personality traits. Landscapes become illustrations of moral ideas. Natural processes become coded messages supposedly addressed to human observers. The world is once again treated as though its purpose were to communicate humanly intelligible meanings.
This Process Paganism instead treats symbols as operators.
An operator does not merely stand for something. It does something. It alters a relation, directs attention, establishes a rhythm, marks a threshold, intensifies an encounter or changes the conditions under which experience unfolds.
The significance of a symbol therefore lies less in what it means than in what it produces.
A circle need not represent eternity, unity or the cosmos. Drawn around a ritual space, it may operate by changing movement, attention and orientation. It establishes an inside and an outside, directs bodies along particular paths and modifies the practitioner’s awareness of position.
A rune need not be reduced to a dictionary definition or a conventional human concept. Its form, placement, sequence, material and handling may operate upon the ritual field. It may interrupt habitu
Symbols as Operators
This form of Process Paganism also requires a particular account of symbols.
Symbols should not primarily be understood as signs that represent fixed meanings. In a representational model, a symbol stands in for something absent: an animal signifies a human quality, a shape signifies an idea, or a ritual object signifies a supernatural being. The symbol is interpreted by translating it into a meaning established through human language and convention.
Such an approach risks returning the more-than-human world to human categories. Animals become representations of personality traits. Landscapes become illustrations of moral ideas. Natural processes become coded messages supposedly addressed to human observers. The world is once again treated as though its purpose were to communicate humanly intelligible meanings.
This Process Paganism instead treats symbols as operators.
An operator does not merely stand for something. It does something. It alters a relation, directs attention, establishes a rhythm, marks a threshold, intensifies an encounter or changes the conditions under which experience unfolds.
The significance of a symbol therefore lies less in what it means than in what it produces.
A circle need not represent eternity, unity or the cosmos. Drawn around a ritual space, it may operate by changing movement, attention and orientation. It establishes an inside and an outside, directs bodies along particular paths and modifies the practitioner’s awareness of position.
A rune need not be reduced to a dictionary definition or a conventional human concept. Its form, placement, sequence, material and handling may operate upon the ritual field. It may interrupt habitual perception, connect separate moments, direct a process or establish a pattern through which further events are encountered.
Similarly, an animal appearing during a ritual need not be interpreted as a sign carrying a coded message for the human participant. Its appearance is first an event: the arrival of another rhythm and another situated world. What matters is how that encounter changes the process already underway.
The aim is therefore not to eliminate convention entirely, which would be impossible, but to prevent convention from exhausting the symbol.
A symbol may have inherited associations, but its operation cannot be reduced to them. Its effect depends upon its material form, position, timing, repetition, relation to other elements and the conditions of the encounter.
Symbols are consequently closer to gestures, instruments or switches than to words in a code.
They may open or close a sequence. They may intensify attention. They may produce hesitation, repetition or interruption. They may orient the body towards a direction, animal, place or process. They may bring otherwise separate rhythms into temporary relation.
This operational account fits the wider process ontology. If beings are temporary consistencies produced through relations, then symbols do not need to represent already completed objects. They can participate in the production of new consistencies.
A symbol is itself an event within a process.
Its effects are not exclusively mental. The placement of an object changes a physical space. Repeated gestures affect breathing and bodily expectation. Marks on wood, stone or earth influence movement and attention. A ritual arrangement may coordinate several participants, materials and environmental rhythms.
The symbol operates across thought, body and environment because these are not completely separate domains.
This also changes the interpretation of ritual efficacy. A ritual need not succeed because a supernatural being receives its message. Nor need it be dismissed as merely psychological. It may be effective because its operators alter the relations from which perception, action and experience emerge.
The operation may be subtle. It may modify attention rather than external events. It may reorganise memory, grief or expectation. It may alter how a place is subsequently encountered. It may introduce a rhythm that continues after the formal ritual has ended.
Operational symbols should therefore not be treated as devices for controlling Nature. Their purpose is not to force more-than-human processes to conform to human intention. They are better understood as methods of entering, redirecting or intensifying relations whose outcomes cannot be fully determined in advance.
Because the Outside exceeds human categories, the effects of an operator cannot always be predicted or translated into a final meaning. A symbol may continue to generate different consequences in different arrangements and encounters.
Its openness is part of its function.
The avoidance of representation is especially important when animals and natural phenomena are involved. A fox should not become merely a symbol of cunning, nor a raven merely a symbol of death. Such interpretations subordinate living beings to human conceptual schemes.
Within an operational approach, the animal remains a real participant whose capacities and rhythms exceed the meanings humans attach to it. A carved or drawn animal form may operate by orienting attention towards the animal’s movements, habitat, temporalities or manner of perception without claiming to define what the animal ultimately is.
The symbol does not capture the animal. It changes the conditions under which the human encounters its alterity.
This operational theory also distinguishes the present form of Process Paganism from symbolic systems based primarily upon correspondence. It does not assume that each plant, animal, planet, colour or shape possesses one fixed metaphysical meaning.
Relations are contextual rather than permanently encoded.
The same operator may act differently according to its material, timing, location and combination with other operators. A mark placed at an entrance operates differently from the same mark placed on a body, beside water or within a sequence of repeated gestures.
Symbols therefore belong more closely to grammar than vocabulary. Their importance lies in how they combine, interrupt, repeat and transform one another within a process.
Ritual becomes a composition of operators.
Its elements are selected not because each represents a hidden proposition, but because together they establish a field of possible transformation. Materials, gestures, rhythms, directions, silences and marks work upon one another and upon the participants.
This operational use of symbols complements the sublime. The symbol does not make the Outside fully intelligible. It does not translate more-than-human reality into a manageable human message. Instead, it can prepare intuition and reason for disruption.
An effective operator may destabilise familiar categories, interrupt habitual time or direct attention towards scales and processes that ordinarily remain unnoticed.
The symbol therefore does not represent the Outside.
It opens a relation to it.
Ethics Without Cosmic Moralism
This form of Process Paganism does not assume that Nature possesses a human moral order.
Predation, disease and extinction cannot be explained as expressions of cosmic justice. Nature is not benevolent merely because it is sacred. The sacred and the morally good are not identical.
Ethics instead emerges from the recognition of interdependence, limitation and situated power.
Spinoza’s concept of conatus is useful here. Every being strives to persist and express its capacities. Yet persistence is rarely solitary. Organisms depend upon habitats, symbiotic relations, inherited conditions and wider ecological systems.
To increase one being’s power may support or diminish the powers of others. Ethics therefore concerns the composition of relations: which forms of life can coexist, which arrangements increase shared capacities, and which processes destroy the conditions of future flourishing.
This does not produce a simple command to preserve everything unchanged. Ecosystems are dynamic, and human beings also participate in Nature. The ethical task is not to withdraw from all intervention, but to act with awareness of entanglement and consequence.
The Outside imposes epistemic humility upon this ethics. Human beings cannot fully know the consequences of every intervention or the worlds inhabited by other beings. Uncertainty therefore requires caution rather than domination.
A deanthropomorphised spirituality should not result in indifference to suffering. The fact that Nature exceeds human morality does not prevent humans from developing ethical commitments. It means those commitments cannot be projected onto the universe as though they governed every process.
A Particular Form of Process Paganism
This account should not be treated as the definitive meaning of Process Paganism.
Other forms may retain gods, spirits, ancestors, devotional practice or more conventional forms of animism. Some may draw directly upon Whiteheadian theology. Others may be more closely connected to reconstructionist pagan traditions, ecological ritual or magical practice.
The position developed here is one non-theistic and philosophical strand within that broader field.
Its distinctiveness lies in the combination of several claims:
For some reason my copy and paste cut off and I was unable to edit. Sorry about that.
The account developed here is one particular form of Process Paganism: a non-theistic, immanent and deanthropomorphised version built from Spinoza, Whitehead, Kant, Nick Land and Hilan Bensusan.
Its central claim is that reality is not fundamentally composed of fixed and self-contained things, but of processes, relations and rhythms. What appears to be a stable entity is better understood as a temporary consistency within a wider field of becoming.
A person, animal, tree, river or ecosystem persists, but none remains materially or relationally identical from one moment to the next. Bodies breathe, metabolise, age and adapt. Rivers flow, erode and alter their courses. Forests develop through growth, decay, competition, symbiosis and regeneration. Identity is therefore not the absence of change. It is a pattern maintained through change.
This form of Process Paganism does not depend upon supernatural gods, separate spiritual substances or a transcendent realm beyond Nature. Its spirituality arises from encounters with the more-than-human processes in which human existence is already embedded.
Spinoza provides the principle of immanence. Whitehead provides a dynamic account of process and relational becoming. Bensusan contributes a rhythm-oriented ontology in which entities emerge through intersecting temporal patterns. Kant’s sublime offers an account of experiences that exceed ordinary representation and alter the subject. Land’s Outside names the nonhuman excess that resists reduction to human concepts, purposes and values.
Taken together, these ideas support a Process Paganism that is spiritual without requiring supernaturalism, naturalistic without treating Nature as inert matter, and ecological without idealising Nature as harmonious or benevolent.
Immanence: God or Nature
The ontological foundation of this form of Process Paganism is Spinoza’s identification of God with Nature.
For Spinoza, God is not a personal creator standing outside the universe. God is the infinite reality of which every finite being is an expression. Nothing exists independently of Nature, and nothing acts from beyond it. There is no ultimate division between a sacred creator and a profane creation.
The sacred is therefore not located in another world. It is not a supernatural layer hidden behind material reality. It concerns the depth, power and inexhaustibility of this world itself.
Individual beings are modes of Nature: particular ways in which the power of existence is expressed. Human beings possess no privileged metaphysical status. We are neither separate from Nature nor placed above it. We are finite arrangements within it, dependent upon innumerable processes that precede and exceed us.
This provides the basis for a deanthropomorphised spirituality. Nature is not the product of a humanlike mind. It does not exist for human benefit, nor does it organise itself according to human moral expectations. Human thought is one activity of Nature among others, not the pattern against which all existence must be measured.
The phrase God or Nature may remain useful, provided that God is not understood as a supreme person or conscious ruler. It names reality as an infinite, self-producing and internally differentiated whole.
Yet the language of substance can sometimes appear too static. This form of Process Paganism therefore interprets Spinozist immanence through a more explicitly processual account of existence.
Process: Being as Becoming
Whitehead’s philosophy shifts attention away from enduring substances and towards events, relations and becoming.
Rather than imagining the world as a collection of already complete objects, process philosophy understands entities as achievements of composition. A being exists through its relations with what precedes it and with the environment in which it emerges. It is not first complete and then related to other things. Relation belongs to its constitution.
Reality is therefore active. It is continually forming, inheriting, responding and transforming. Every event receives a world and contributes something to what follows.
A tree, from this perspective, is not merely an object occupying a location. It is an ongoing coordination of sunlight, soil, water, carbon, fungi, insects, weather, inherited biological patterns and surrounding organisms. Remove these relations and there is no independent tree left behind. Its unity is real, but it is a produced and temporary unity.
The same applies to human beings. Personal identity depends upon bodily processes, language, memory, social relations, food, microbial life, technology, climate and history. The apparently autonomous subject is itself an ecological and historical event.
This form of Process Paganism treats relational becoming as spiritually significant. The sacred is not a permanent essence hidden inside things. It appears through the production, transformation and dissolution of forms.
Death and decay cannot therefore be understood only as the negation of life. They are also processes through which existing compositions break down and become conditions for other forms of existence. This does not remove the grief or violence of death from the perspective of those who undergo it. It means that no process can be understood entirely from one scale or standpoint.
Nature contains cooperation, symbiosis and care, but also predation, parasitism, illness, catastrophe and extinction. Process should not be romanticised as automatically progressive or morally good. Its spiritual significance lies in its generative reality, not in its conformity to human desires.
Rhythm: The Formation of Temporary Worlds
A process ontology explains that reality is becoming. Rhythm helps explain how temporary forms arise within that becoming.
Rhythm is not restricted to music or chant. It refers more broadly to patterned recurrence, variation, interruption and expectation. Heartbeats, breathing, hunger, sleep, migration, tides, seasons, reproduction and erosion all possess rhythmic organisation.
Rhythm combines repetition with difference. A rhythm must repeat sufficiently to be recognisable, but no repetition is perfectly identical. Every recurrence takes place under altered conditions. Rhythm therefore allows continuity without requiring permanence.
Hilan Bensusan’s rhythm-oriented ontology is useful because it treats entities as crossroads of rhythms. A being is not an isolated substance that later enters temporal patterns. It emerges where multiple rhythms intersect and achieve a provisional coordination.
An animal is formed through metabolic, neurological, reproductive, seasonal and ecological rhythms. Its life depends upon the partial alignment of these processes. It must eat at certain intervals, sleep according to particular cycles, respond to changes in temperature and coordinate its movements with those of prey, predators, offspring or companions.
The animal is not merely located within an environment. Its rhythms are entangled with environmental rhythms. A migratory bird exists through atmospheric conditions, seasonal changes, magnetic orientation, food availability and inherited routes. Alter these rhythms sufficiently and its established form of life becomes impossible.
Rhythm therefore provides an account of situated existence. Every being inhabits a world structured by particular tempos, repetitions and interruptions. Different organisms inhabit different worlds because they respond to different rhythms.
A bat is oriented towards frequencies unavailable to unaided human hearing. A tree responds to seasonal and climatic durations that exceed immediate human awareness. Fungi organise themselves through subterranean processes that rarely become visible at the surface. Geological formations unfold at scales that make human lifetimes appear momentary.
There is no single rhythm against which all beings should be measured. Nature consists in overlapping, diverging and conflicting temporalities.
This is an ontological use of rhythm, rather than the musical sense associated with polyrhythm. The point is not that reality resembles a piece of music, but that beings persist through recurring patterns that may synchronise, interfere with or interrupt one another.
An entity can therefore be understood as a temporary rhythmic consistency. Existence is neither absolute chaos nor permanent order. It is the continual formation and disruption of pattern.
The Outside: Nature Beyond Human Measure
If reality is wholly immanent, the Outside cannot mean a supernatural domain beyond Nature.
Instead, the Outside names what exceeds the capacities of a particular form of perception, organisation or thought. It is not outside reality. It is outside a situated being’s access to reality.
Land’s concept of the Outside is useful because it resists the assumption that human consciousness is the centre and measure of existence. The Outside names forces and processes that do not conform to human meanings, purposes or values.
Within this version of Process Paganism, however, the Outside need not be treated as a single abyss or as an exclusively destructive force. There are multiple outsides because every form of life is situated and limited.
Ultrasound belongs to the Outside of ordinary human hearing, but not to the perceptual world of a bat. Geological time lies outside ordinary human intuition, although it is intrinsic to the landscape. The smell-world of a dog, the electrical sensitivity of a shark and the migratory orientation of a bird disclose dimensions of Nature that human beings do not directly inhabit.
The Outside is therefore relational. Something is outside in relation to a particular set of capacities.
Human beings are also part of the Outside from the perspective of other creatures. Artificial light, machinery, architecture, chemical pollution and human noise enter nonhuman worlds as forces that may be overwhelming, unintelligible or destructive.
The Outside should not be romanticised as wilderness located far from civilisation. It appears wherever reality exceeds the forms through which it is habitually organised. It may be encountered in a forest, a city, a storm, an illness, an animal, a machine or the unfamiliar behaviour of one’s own body.
This concept deanthropomorphises spirituality because it prevents the more-than-human world from being reduced to disguised human personalities. A river does not need human intentions to exceed us. An animal does not need a humanlike soul to possess its own form of existence. A forest does not need to convey a moral lesson in order to transform those who enter it.
The Outside is Nature’s resistance to complete translation into human terms.
The Sublime: The Breakdown of Human Measure
Kant’s sublime provides the experiential dimension of this framework.
The sublime arises when imagination struggles to present something that exceeds its powers. Vast magnitude, overwhelming force or incomprehensible complexity cannot be contained within an adequate mental image. Ordinary intuition reaches its limit.
For Kant, this failure ultimately reveals the superiority of human reason. Although imagination cannot adequately represent the overwhelming object, reason discovers within itself an idea of totality or freedom that exceeds sensible Nature. The sublime begins with the failure of imagination but ends with the elevation of the rational human subject.
This form of Process Paganism retains Kant’s account of cognitive disruption while rejecting its anthropocentric conclusion.
The failure of imagination need not prove the superiority of human reason. It may instead reveal the limits of human perception and thought. The sublime becomes an encounter in which the subject discovers that reality is not structured according to human scale.
The subject is not elevated above Nature. It is displaced within it.
The sublime is therefore more than a feeling of awe. It has the capacity to alter intuition and reason. Intuition concerns the forms through which reality is immediately perceived and organised. Reason concerns the conceptual structures through which experience is interpreted.
An encounter becomes spiritually significant when it disrupts both.
Geological time may alter intuition by placing personal duration against an almost inconceivable scale. Animal perception may challenge the assumption that the human sensory world is the world as such. A storm may expose the fragility of bodily and technological control. A swarm may disrupt the identification of agency with individual organisms. Decomposition may undermine the image of the body as a sealed and autonomous unity.
Such encounters do not necessarily provide a final doctrine. Their importance lies partly in their power to loosen established habits of thought.
The sublime within this Process Paganism is therefore not limited to spectacular landscapes. It can arise whenever an encounter reveals scales, temporalities or agencies that resist assimilation.
Nor is it necessarily pleasurable. It may involve fear, grief, disorientation or revulsion. What makes it transformative is not emotional comfort, but the breakdown of an inadequate measure.
Rhythmic Dislocation
Connecting the sublime with rhythm-oriented ontology allows it to be understood as rhythmic dislocation.
Every organism anticipates reality through patterned expectation. Hunger prepares the body for food. Sleep cycles organise attention. Habits establish sequences. Language, work and social life impose recurring temporal structures. Perception itself depends upon the anticipation of continuity.
An encounter with the Outside occurs when a rhythm arrives that cannot be smoothly absorbed into these expectations.
A disaster may violently interrupt ordinary time. Bereavement may destroy the rhythms around which a shared life was organised. An ancient landscape may place human duration beside a radically different temporal scale. Seasonal change may expose the conflict between industrial schedules and ecological cycles.
The sublime emerges when this interruption reorganises the subject’s relation to reality.
Reason changes because inherited concepts no longer appear sufficient. Intuition changes because the world begins to be perceived through different scales, relations or temporal patterns.
The subject does not thereby gain complete access to the Outside. The Outside is not mastered by the transformation it causes. Something always remains beyond assimilation.
This prevents the sublime from becoming another form of human conquest. Transformation does not produce omniscience. It produces a greater awareness of situatedness and limitation.
Wildlife and More-Than-Human Worlds
The combination of process, rhythm and the Outside supports a non-anthropocentric wildlife ontology.
Animals are not passive objects occupying a human world. Each participates in the production of a situated world through its sensory capacities, bodily rhythms, ecological relations and forms of attention.
A fox inhabits territories, scents, dangers and opportunities that are not identical to those perceived by a human observer. A bird encounters currents, magnetic orientations and seasonal signals that remain largely unavailable to human intuition. A nocturnal animal inhabits darkness not as an absence of light, but as a structured field of activity.
These are not merely subjective interpretations of a world already completed from the human point of view. They are real articulations of Nature.
This avoids both reductive materialism and simplistic anthropomorphism. Wildlife does not need to be treated as a collection of machines, but neither must animals be imagined as concealed human personalities. Their otherness lies in their distinct forms of embodiment, temporality, perception and relation.
Spiritual attention to wildlife therefore requires restraint. The animal should not be exhausted by the myths, symbols or meanings humans attach to it.
A fox may participate in human mythology, but it is not reducible to a symbol of cunning. An owl may carry cultural associations with wisdom or death, but its existence exceeds those associations. The more-than-human being always remains partly outside the conceptual role assigned to it.
This remainder is not a failure of spirituality. It is central to it.
Practice as Attunement
Without gods, worship need not be the central practice of this Process Paganism. Attunement becomes more important.
Attunement means becoming responsive to rhythms, processes and forms of life that normally remain unnoticed or subordinated to human schedules.
Walking, silence, fasting, seasonal observance, repeated gesture, breath, drumming, listening and sustained attention may all alter the rhythms of the practitioner. Their significance lies not merely in representing beliefs, but in reorganising perception and participation.
Ritual can therefore be understood as the deliberate construction of conditions in which ordinary habits are interrupted and other rhythms become perceptible.
A seasonal ritual need not personify the season as a deity. It may instead situate human life within cycles of growth, decline, migration, dormancy and return. A funeral ritual need not promise escape from Nature. It may place grief within processes of dissolution, memory, continuity and transformation.
Such practices are not attempts to dissolve the human entirely. Human beings cannot cease to be situated human organisms. The aim is to weaken the assumption that the human standpoint is exhaustive.
Attunement is therefore not fusion. It is a more careful participation in relations that remain partly opaque.
Symbols as Operators
This form of Process Paganism also requires a particular account of symbols.
Symbols should not primarily be understood as signs that represent fixed meanings. In a representational model, a symbol stands in for something absent: an animal signifies a human quality, a shape signifies an idea, or a ritual object signifies a supernatural being. The symbol is interpreted by translating it into a meaning established through human language and convention.
Such an approach risks returning the more-than-human world to human categories. Animals become representations of personality traits. Landscapes become illustrations of moral ideas. Natural processes become coded messages supposedly addressed to human observers. The world is once again treated as though its purpose were to communicate humanly intelligible meanings.
This Process Paganism instead treats symbols as operators.
An operator does not merely stand for something. It does something. It alters a relation, directs attention, establishes a rhythm, marks a threshold, intensifies an encounter or changes the conditions under which experience unfolds.
The significance of a symbol therefore lies less in what it means than in what it produces.
A circle need not represent eternity, unity or the cosmos. Drawn around a ritual space, it may operate by changing movement, attention and orientation. It establishes an inside and an outside, directs bodies along particular paths and modifies the practitioner’s awareness of position.
A rune need not be reduced to a dictionary definition or a conventional human concept. Its form, placement, sequence, material and handling may operate upon the ritual field. It may interrupt habitu
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Symbols as Operators
This form of Process Paganism also requires a particular account of symbols.
Symbols should not primarily be understood as signs that represent fixed meanings. In a representational model, a symbol stands in for something absent: an animal signifies a human quality, a shape signifies an idea, or a ritual object signifies a supernatural being. The symbol is interpreted by translating it into a meaning established through human language and convention.
Such an approach risks returning the more-than-human world to human categories. Animals become representations of personality traits. Landscapes become illustrations of moral ideas. Natural processes become coded messages supposedly addressed to human observers. The world is once again treated as though its purpose were to communicate humanly intelligible meanings.
This Process Paganism instead treats symbols as operators.
An operator does not merely stand for something. It does something. It alters a relation, directs attention, establishes a rhythm, marks a threshold, intensifies an encounter or changes the conditions under which experience unfolds.
The significance of a symbol therefore lies less in what it means than in what it produces.
A circle need not represent eternity, unity or the cosmos. Drawn around a ritual space, it may operate by changing movement, attention and orientation. It establishes an inside and an outside, directs bodies along particular paths and modifies the practitioner’s awareness of position.
A rune need not be reduced to a dictionary definition or a conventional human concept. Its form, placement, sequence, material and handling may operate upon the ritual field. It may interrupt habitual perception, connect separate moments, direct a process or establish a pattern through which further events are encountered.
Similarly, an animal appearing during a ritual need not be interpreted as a sign carrying a coded message for the human participant. Its appearance is first an event: the arrival of another rhythm and another situated world. What matters is how that encounter changes the process already underway.
The rejection of representation does not require that symbols have no history or cultural associations. No symbol is encountered outside all inherited practices. Human convention inevitably contributes to how forms are recognised and used.
The aim is therefore not to eliminate convention entirely, which would be impossible, but to prevent convention from exhausting the symbol.
A symbol may have inherited associations, but its operation cannot be reduced to them. Its effect depends upon its material form, position, timing, repetition, relation to other elements and the conditions of the encounter.
Symbols are consequently closer to gestures, instruments or switches than to words in a code.
They may open or close a sequence. They may intensify attention. They may produce hesitation, repetition or interruption. They may orient the body towards a direction, animal, place or process. They may bring otherwise separate rhythms into temporary relation.
This operational account fits the wider process ontology. If beings are temporary consistencies produced through relations, then symbols do not need to represent already completed objects. They can participate in the production of new consistencies.
A symbol is itself an event within a process.
Its effects are not exclusively mental. The placement of an object changes a physical space. Repeated gestures affect breathing and bodily expectation. Marks on wood, stone or earth influence movement and attention. A ritual arrangement may coordinate several participants, materials and environmental rhythms.
The symbol operates across thought, body and environment because these are not completely separate domains.
This also changes the interpretation of ritual efficacy. A ritual need not succeed because a supernatural being receives its message. Nor need it be dismissed as merely psychological. It may be effective because its operators alter the relations from which perception, action and experience emerge.
The operation may be subtle. It may modify attention rather than external events. It may reorganise memory, grief or expectation. It may alter how a place is subsequently encountered. It may introduce a rhythm that continues after the formal ritual has ended.
Operational symbols should therefore not be treated as devices for controlling Nature. Their purpose is not to force more-than-human processes to conform to human intention. They are better understood as methods of entering, redirecting or intensifying relations whose outcomes cannot be fully determined in advance.
Because the Outside exceeds human categories, the effects of an operator cannot always be predicted or translated into a final meaning. A symbol may continue to generate different consequences in different arrangements and encounters.
Its openness is part of its function.
The avoidance of representation is especially important when animals and natural phenomena are involved. A fox should not become merely a symbol of cunning, nor a raven merely a symbol of death. Such interpretations subordinate living beings to human conceptual schemes.
Within an operational approach, the animal remains a real participant whose capacities and rhythms exceed the meanings humans attach to it. A carved or drawn animal form may operate by orienting attention towards the animal’s movements, habitat, temporalities or manner of perception without claiming to define what the animal ultimately is.
The symbol does not capture the animal. It changes the conditions under which the human encounters its alterity.
This operational theory also distinguishes the present form of Process Paganism from symbolic systems based primarily upon correspondence. It does not assume that each plant, animal, planet, colour or shape possesses one fixed metaphysical meaning.
Relations are contextual rather than permanently encoded.
The same operator may act differently according to its material, timing, location and combination with other operators. A mark placed at an entrance operates differently from the same mark placed on a body, beside water or within a sequence of repeated gestures.
Symbols therefore belong more closely to grammar than vocabulary. Their importance lies in how they combine, interrupt, repeat and transform one another within a process.
Ritual becomes a composition of operators.
Its elements are selected not because each represents a hidden proposition, but because together they establish a field of possible transformation. Materials, gestures, rhythms, directions, silences and marks work upon one another and upon the participants.
This operational use of symbols complements the sublime. The symbol does not make the Outside fully intelligible. It does not translate more-than-human reality into a manageable human message. Instead, it can prepare intuition and reason for disruption.
An effective operator may destabilise familiar categories, interrupt habitual time or direct attention towards scales and processes that ordinarily remain unnoticed.
The symbol therefore does not represent the Outside.
It opens a relation to it.
Ethics Without Cosmic Moralism
This form of Process Paganism does not assume that Nature possesses a human moral order.
Predation, disease and extinction cannot be explained as expressions of cosmic justice. Nature is not benevolent merely because it is sacred. The sacred and the morally good are not identical.
Ethics instead emerges from the recognition of interdependence, limitation and situated power.
Spinoza’s concept of conatus is useful here. Every being strives to persist and express its capacities. Yet persistence is rarely solitary. Organisms depend upon habitats, symbiotic relations, inherited conditions and wider ecological systems.
To increase one being’s power may support or diminish the powers of others. Ethics therefore concerns the composition of relations: which forms of life can coexist, which arrangements increase shared capacities, and which processes destroy the conditions of future flourishing.
This does not produce a simple command to preserve everything unchanged. Ecosystems are dynamic, and human beings also participate in Nature. The ethical task is not to withdraw from all intervention, but to act with awareness of entanglement and consequence.
The Outside imposes epistemic humility upon this ethics. Human beings cannot fully know the consequences of every intervention or the worlds inhabited by other beings. Uncertainty therefore requires caution rather than domination.
A deanthropomorphised spirituality should not result in indifference to suffering. The fact that Nature exceeds human morality does not prevent humans from developing ethical commitments. It means those commitments cannot be projected onto the universe as though they governed every process.
A Particular Form of Process Paganism
This account should not be treated as the definitive meaning of Process Paganism.
Other forms may retain gods, spirits, ancestors, devotional practice or more conventional forms of animism. Some may draw directly upon Whiteheadian theology. Others may be more closely connected to reconstructionist pagan traditions, ecological ritual or magical practice.
The position developed here is one non-theistic and philosophical strand within that broader field.
Its distinctiveness lies in the combination of several claims:
- []Reality is wholly immanent. []Existence is fundamentally processual and relational. []Beings are temporary consistencies formed through intersecting rhythms. []The Outside names what exceeds the capacities and categories of situated beings. []The sublime is the transformative disruption through which human intuition and reason are reorganised by that excess. []Wildlife consists of more-than-human worlds that cannot be reduced to human symbols or purposes. []Ritual is a practice of attunement rather than worship. []Symbols are operators within processes rather than representations of fixed meanings.
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For some reason my copy and paste cut off and I was unable to edit. Sorry about that.
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