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Paper short abstract

This paper explores biblical narratives where nature speaks and acts—mountains clap, stones cry out, creation groans—as early accounts of eco-possession, revealing how natural environments assert agency within human consciousness and culture.

Paper long abstract

This paper investigates biblical narratives as early accounts of what may be called eco-possession: moments in which natural environments do not remain silent backdrops to human experience but actively penetrate human bodies, minds, and communities. Passages such as Psalm 19, where the heavens “proclaim” divine glory; Isaiah 55, where trees clap and mountains sing; and Romans 8, where creation “groans” in labor, all present nature as an agent with voice, desire, and communicative force. These texts depict rivers, fields, stones, and forests not merely as metaphors but as participants in a shared communicative field, taking hold of human consciousness and articulating their own conditions. Reading these passages alongside Latour’s definition of agency—entities “make us do things”—and Haraway’s notion of naturecultures, I argue that biblical traditions already encode forms of possession in which humans are moved, spoken through, or taught by nonhuman environments. Eco-possession in these contexts differs from demonic or divine possession by foregrounding the entanglement of natural and human life, as well as the porousness of the human subject to ecological forces. Recognizing these scriptural accounts as testimonies to nature’s expressive agency expands the archive of possession narratives and invites new ethical and ontological reflections: What happens when the forest, the mountain, or the field speaks through us?

Literature:

Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto. Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.

Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press, 2005.