Aldo Leopold, Esotericism, and the Legibility of the World

In this paper, I point to neglected esoteric currents informing and animating much of Aldo Leopold’s pioneering work in environmental ethics, especially currents relating to what we might call the legibility of the world. One of Leopold’s profound insights was that the new sciences of ecology not only reveal new facts about the interconnections of creatures and ecosystems, but also that they ask of us new ways of being, relating, and loving. Rightly reading a landscape, as Leopold often put it, is key here, for when we learn to see the entire biotic community, we discover moral relations that otherwise remain invisible – not only to individual creatures but to the Land itself. Leopold is justly recognized as the father of both conservation and modern environmental ethics, but his appeal and importance lies not only in his powerful objective description of complex ecological relations but also in his Land-based spirituality that resonates with and draws deeply from the Western esoteric tradition. Some of this connection has already been explored by Ashley Pryor who has pointed to Leopold’s reliance on key ideas from P D Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum. Pryor argues that Leopold’s writings — from his early unpublished work in the 1920s through to classics like “Thinking Like a Mountain” —  were deeply influenced by Ouspensky’s esoteric philosophy with its vision of an ensouled, interconnected reality where even inanimate nature possesses consciousness.

Pryor focuses on certain aspects that Leopold found in Ouspensky: a kind of esoteric vitalism, an expanded epistemology beyond reductive rationalism, and a cosmic, impersonal love as an integrating ethic. But we can say more, for both Leopold and Ouspensky share the idea that the world readable, presenting itself as legible and meaningful to those with eyes to see. Not incidentally, this is also one of the central claims of the Western esoteric tradition as a whole.

Of course, defining Western esotericism is highly contested. Antoine Faivre initially identified several essential characteristics of the Western esoteric tradition: correspondences, living nature, a focus upon imagination and mediation, and transmutation. To these four characteristics, Faivre added two secondary characteristics: concordance and transmission. Scholars have argued that Faivre’s way of delineating the field of is too static, too focussed on Renaissance and early modern Christian esotericism, and so risks marginalizing other important elements. In response to what was arguably a kind of quasi-essentialism, then, subsequent scholars have suggested alternative models, including a discourse based approach to understanding Western esotericism. Wouter Hannegraaf, for instance, suggests we approach esotericism as a category of “rejected knowledge,” those ideas marginalized by mainstream intellectual and religious insitutions and so excluded from academic and rationalist discourse. In a similar vein, Kocku von Stuckrad argues that esotericism is not a fixed tradition but a set of narratives that emerge as a contested category in differing historical and cultural contexts. While these interventions in the field are welcome and prevent us from seeing Faivre’s characteristics as necessary components of Western esotericism, nevertheless the six characteristics that Faivre identifies do pick out enormously common tropes within the contested discourses that make up Western esotericism. And what is interesting here is that several of these tropes concern what we might call the legibility of nature. In particular, the doctrine of correspondences and the related doctrine of Living Nature — including a living gnosis of Nature with soteriological significance — these issue directly in the esoteric practice of reading the world as if it were a script. As Faivre himself puts it, “multilayered, rich in potential of all kind, it [Nature] must be read as one read a book. Indeed, the word, magia, some important in Renaissance imagination, evoke this idea of a nature scene, known, and felt to be essentially alive in all its parts.” 

This centerpiece of Western esotericism — the esoteric reading of the world — lies at the heart of Ouspensky’s early, great work, as well. Although Ouspensky rarely speaks about the ‘book of nature’ directly, his entire text is structured around the idea that nature harbors a “hidden world” of deeper significance within it, one that gives the lie to modern ways of enframing nature and treating it as a dead object. Indeed, the very subtitlte of Ouspensky’s introduces it as “A Key to the Enigmas of the World.” I argue that, beyond those resonances previously identified by Ashley Pryor, this element in Ouspensky’s work is profoundly important for Leopold’s approach, as well. Throughout his work, Leopold regularly invites his reader to become readers of a landscape, readers of the world, to see the world with eyes that were already old when the forests were young, to discern invisible currents of energy and springs of value that cannot be captured by rational analysis alone but require instead an embodied, even poetic connection to the land. To read nature in such a way that we perceive in it ‘value in the philosophical sense,’ as Leopold puts it, is to see nature anew and to see through nature that which even the land neither encompasses nor exhausts. Leopold was not a traditional theist but he was haunted by a sense of divinity, more pantheistic than personal, and in this too he resonated not only with nature-mystics like Thoreau and Muir, but also with esoteric approaches.

Does this mean we should read Leopold as a representative of Western esotericism? Here we can return to the question raised earlier about the boundaries of the field. The legibility of the world that we find in Leopold has clear precedent in the esoteric work of Ouspensky, but also in premodern traditions, more generally. One might suggest that Leopold’s performance of this esoteric tradition was also a work of democratization and emancipation, a making exoteric both of the world’s legibility and of a land ethic partially incubated in esoteric traditions but now brought into the great outdoors and offered to all.