Today would have been the 78th birthday of American scientist, author, and all-around amazing man Carl Sagan. About a year ago, Lupa wrote a wonderful post on Dr. Sagan’s influence on her relationship with this world we are in, and I would be remiss if I didn’t add my own voice to the chorus of Pagans Whose Worlds Have Been Rocked by Carl Sagan.

Carl Sagan. Photo by NASA via Wikimedia Commons.

I came late to the love-fest, sometime in my late twenties. If I could tell you the exact date, I would, because it strikes me as a momentous date. I just remember coming out of my bedroom one January evening to the sound of a man who sounded distressingly like Jim Henson talking about medieval monks (don’t judge me; my hearing has never been my greatest asset). The voice belonged to Carl Sagan, and this was my introduction to the Cosmos series. By the end of the episode, I was hooked.

Week after week, my wife and I would cuddle on the couch with mugs of hot chocolate and let Sagan lead us on an amazing journey of discovery throughout the Cosmos. I was familiar with some of the concepts; others were new to me; but pervading it all was a sense of the universe that I’d seldom experienced: a place, a thing, a being of such wonder and beauty in and of itself. Not worthy of reverence because some deity or other had made it, not worthy of care just because we live here. Inherently worthy simply by virtue of its existence.

That was, to badly misquote Tom Stoppard, “the crack that flooded my brain with light”. It turned my Paganism in a whole new direction, a direction more deeply rooted in now and here than anything I’d explored before. This in turn has brought me to a greater sense of commitment to both my place and my spirituality and is one of the bedrocks of my spiritual environmentalism.

My wife read the Cosmos companion book before I did; it is delightfully full of highlighted passages and dog-eared pages she wanted to draw my attention to. One of those pages is in Chapter 13, at a place where Sagan tells the entire freaking history of everything, from just after the Big Bang through the evolution of humankind, in the style of a religious creation myth. I absolutely will not subject you to all of it, but it starts like this:

For unknown ages after the explosive outpouring of matter and energy of the Big Bang, the Cosmos was without form. There were no galaxies, no planets, no life. Deep, impenetrable darkness was everywhere, hydrogen atoms in the void.

and it ends like this:

And then, only a moment ago, some small arboreal mammals scampered down from the trees. They became upright and taught themselves the use of tools, domesticated other animals, plants and fire, and devised language. The ash of stellar alchemy was now evolving consciousness. At an ever-accelerating pace, it developed writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution.

Well, dang. Sagan’s work had inspired me again. That story, that reminder that epic tales need not be solely the province of heroes and gods, and that the amazing Mysteries of the natural world needn’t be conveyed only in dry, technical prose accessible only to scientists. I mean, seriously. Do you know what plants can do? What zany single-celled organisms living in ocean vents can do? What the human body can do? I’m not even a professional scientist, just an avid amateur, and still, every day I find something new; every day I am struck anew with wonder. With reverence. Carl Sagan, who believed that every scientist should approach their work with a sense of wonder, gave me that gift. Planted the seed that eventually flowered as “Restorying the Sacred”.

I suspect Dr. Sagan would be quietly, amusedly appalled by we, the small company of “Sagan’s Pagans”, who draw so much inspiration from his work. After all, he seldom had much praise to offer religion. And yet I like to hope that, ultimately, he might have come to some understanding that we share his reverence for this Earth, and this Cosmos, just with more candlelit rituals and less differential calculus. After all, in Pale Blue Dot he wrote:

A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.

Though many of us build not from science alone, but also from the experience of our own senses, I feel–I hope–that we draw forth these reserves of reverence and awe in our Pagan practices. The ash of stellar alchemy has evolved consciousness. I hope we have done well by that gift–and by Dr. Sagan. Happy birthday.