How Did Ancient Wilderness Narratives Form Identities and Relationships with Nature? And Do They Still?

Ancient wilderness narratives from Mesopotamian, Jewish, and Christian traditions shaped religious identity by portraying wilderness not merely as chaotic or dangerous, but as a space for personal transformation, divine encounter, and critique of societal order. Rather than reinforcing dominion over nature, these stories often highlighted awe, humility, and kinship with the wild, forming a legacy of spiritual introspection that resonates with modern wilderness experiences and ecological reflection. In both past and present, such narratives foster what scholars now call “resonant self-world relations,” emphasizing nature’s uncontrollability as essential to human thriving.

See also Ancient Mythologies of the Wilderness: Narrative, Nature, and Religious Identity Formation from the Babylonians to the Late Antique Christians (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

By Laura Feldt
Associate Professor
Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and Religion
University of Bergen
August 2025

Did you ever spend time on your own in wild nature or go hiking in areas known as wildernesses? Perhaps you’ve read books like The Call of the Wild or watched movies like Strayed or Into the Wild, or followed the globally popular reality TV program Alone in the Wilderness. Wilderness and wild nature feature prominently in nature writing and fiction, as well as TV documentaries – just think of David Attenborough… Wilderness, wild nature, and wildness are seemingly endlessly fascinating to us today in an era fraught with crises relating to nature and biodiversity. Wilderness areas are at the forefront of contemporary concern about the climate and environment, but wilderness and everything wild fascinate and inspire enthusiasm and wonder beyond the natural sciences and concrete geographies. People go to the wilderness to find themselves, to experience awe and fear, to go on spiritual journeys or to meditate. There is much to suggest that a fascination with the wild is not a solely contemporary interest, but that it has a longer history. Forests, deserts, steppes, remote mountains and the depths of the oceans have been intimately linked to religious identity formation in the ancient, medieval, and modern eras, and perhaps most famously, in the Romantic period with authors such as Thoreau or Emerson. But the history of wilderness fascination is ancient. 

            Important forms of interaction between humans and non-human nature in the ancient world took place in areas many would today call wilderness. These interactions affected ancient religions deeply. While wilderness mythology played an important role in the history of religions, it has been criticized for its role in forming anthropocentric outlooks on the natural world, and idealizing human separateness from the rest of the living world, thus playing a detrimental role as one of the roots of our current crises. But is that really all there is to the plethora of wilderness stories? In ancient myths from Mesopotamia and ancient Jewish and Christian texts, it is not all about destruction of and dominion over wildlands. Instead, some stories kindle emotions like awe and wonder at the wild powers of nature, and at times a felt kinship with wild beings. They also provide a critical perspective on human societies and power and help form identities and experiences that resonate with the more-than-human world. Ancient wilderness mythologies did play a decisive role in shaping the history of religions and influenced our relationships with wild nature. But wilderness was also a sphere of intense emotion and total devotion, and wilderness stories generated tendencies that support individual activities in religion and a focus on the inner person. Still today, wilderness narratives are often about individuals and an inner, spiritual journey. 

            How did people in the ancient world imagine and narrate their relationships with their wild surroundings? How were stories of the wilderness linked to religious identity formation and how did that change over time? The modern exploitation of wild nature and the industrial age ideals of its transformation into cultivated land do not have the strong ancient roots sometimes imagined. The stories show the transhistorical importance of intractable wildness in nature. Let us have a closer look at some examples. 

What Are Ancient Wilderness Mythologies About and How Are They Formative?

In ancient Mesopotamian wilderness mythologies from the Old Babylonian era (ca. 1900-1700 BCE), the heroic deities Inanna and Ninurta and the human heroes Lugalbanda and Gilgameš venture into the forest wilderness in distant mountains and their experiences go way beyond conquest and dominion. Rather, their wilderness experience helps define or change who they are. Contrary to previous research which has seen the mountain wilderness as a dangerous and inimical chaos-region, these stories bring out the complexity of human relationships with wildernesses. They advocate respectful interactions with the wilderness and with wild persons, like the forest person Huwawa and the bird person Anzu. The Sumerian stories of the wilderness from Old Babylonian times reflect a deep fascination with non-human wildlife and awe of the wilderness’ power. Embedded in these stories of adventures in the wild, we also find a subtle critique of order, power, and sovereignty and a praise of the wilderness. The same goes for the Akkadian wilderness tradition related to the famous king Gilgameš of Uruk. In the Standard-Babylonian epic from the library of Aššurbanipal in Nineveh from the 1st millennium BCE, variable relations pertain between several different ambiguous spaces in the epic – forest, steppe, and the jeweled orchard. The epic does not pit nature against culture. Instead, the narrative emphasizes the complex relationality between human persons, wild persons, animals, deities, plants, the forest, and the steppe. By highlighting the hero’s many boundary-transgressions in the wilderness or related to wild beings, epic even idealizes the hero’s wildness and a form of wilding – where an individual takes on wilderness traits in their behavior, attire, foodways, emotional practices, etc. – as a part of personal identity formation. The wilderness and wild persons are presented as dangerous, unpredictable, and ambiguous, but also as persons of value, worthy of respect, in command of the fertile abundance of the non-human world. The narratives also highlight how spending time in the wilderness can offer critical perspectives on social order, power, and sovereignty, and show how a person can be wilded – changing their identity.

            If we turn to the world of ancient Jewish wilderness mythologies, the narratives about the people’s wilderness experiences loom large in the Torah’s famous desert mythology. The desert becomes the scene of the people’s religious identity formation. Rather than a negative domain, the desert is ambiguous in the Torah stories. The desert stories do not reflect a nomad culture, nor do they reflect a desire for the people to transform it into an agricultural landscape. The desert stories reflect a mixed culture of agriculture and pastoralism where human life is precarious and food is scarce. Desert mythology, and the dreams of agricultural abundance it embeds, is born out of a world of scarcity and need. Agricultural food is therefore seen as a wondrous gift from Yahweh and the people’s survival is something for which to give thanks. It is not about exploitation of wild nature, its instrumentalization, or about turning it into agriculture. Rather, it is about human survival in a precarious world and how all fertility and thriving, for non-human organisms and humans alike, stem from Yahweh. Moreover, the stories frame the desert wilderness as a key arena for communication with Yahweh, for receiving wisdom (Torah), for healing and other marvels, and most importantly, for pedagogically forming the people’s religious identity towards thankfulness for the gifts of land and food in everyday life. Yet it must be said that while mobilizing the audience towards thankfulness for the gift of land and food, the texts do not embed any strong concerns for the protection of wildlife or non-human organisms; they remain anthropocentric.

            In Deuteronomy, where Israel’s desert experiences are re-narrated before their entry into the promised land, we also hear about wilderness and religious identity. Yet, those who wrote and edited these texts voice ideals that connect the wilderness to intense emotions and total devotion to Yahweh on the part of the members of Israel. The formation of explicit ideals of total devotion, connected to the wilderness, is a key step in the history of ancient wilderness mythologies. Wilderness, religious transformation, and an ideal of total devotion are coupled in Deuteronomy. This nexus is also seen in the stories of total devotion in the wilderness exemplified by Elijah and Elisha in 1 and 2 Kings, whereas in the collection of religious literature known as the prophet Isaiah, we meet an ambiguous wilderness image combined with an outright benign view of a flourishing wilderness placed under the care of Yahweh. Wilderness is here combined with apocalyptic ideas (Isaiah 34-35). Wilderness mythology is used to envision a new, fertile future, but one that remains within the scope of the biblical story world’s anthropocentric and agriculturally focused scope. The engagement with wilderness is varied.

            In ancient Christian wilderness mythology, wilderness mythology from the Hebrew Bible is used and transformed in the literature of the emerging Christ movement. If we look at the Gospel of Matthew as an example, we can see how the wilderness stories are used to sanction and legitimate Jesus’ identity, drawing on Hebrew Bible wilderness mythology and the Jewish wild man and apocalyptic prophet tradition. Wilderness becomes an important space for religious identity formation for the Christ devotees. Wilderness mythology is combined with ascetic ideals and ascetic practice. Renouncing material goods and withdrawing voluntarily to the wilderness are coupled with the ideal of total devotion. All other social ties, apart from the in-group of Christ-devotees, are rejected in favor of a world to come. The wilderness’ natural-material aspects almost disappear from these stories. Wilderness mythology is here very influential but there is not much interest in the physical, eco-material world; the focus is on human salvation. 

            Religious identity formation ideals connected to the wilderness flourish in Christian asceticism from the 4th century CE onwards. Through media such as letters and narratives, e.g., Athanasius’ influential Life of Antony, and incorporating Greek ideas, the desert became a decisive part of the Christian landscape. The ascetic, “wild” body of the monk even became a religious medium for accessing the other world: the monks of the wilderness were believed to be able to heal, perform amazing miracles, and speak with wild animals. In the anonymous narrative Historia monachorum in Aegypto, we get a kind of wilderness travel writing that offered touristic, armchair consumption of the wilderness for Christian readers far away from the desert. It connected the wilderness not only to the practice of pilgrimage, but also to ideas of Christian conversion in ways focused on a radical transformation of the self. The desert wilderness here became a route out of this world and into the other world, to salvation. The monks relate to the desert and its wildlife in fascinating ways that stimulate reactions of awe in the audience. Wilderness mythology gains an enormous power and authority. With time, any retreat, whether to an island, a forest, a treetop, or even a metaphorical one in one’s heart, could count as a stay in the wilderness. The power of wilderness mythology was even used to gain traction in elite, urban power struggles to the extent that those vying for a position as a bishop had to complete a stay in the wilderness first. Christian religious identity overall was framed as a pilgrimage into the wilderness, on the way towards the treasure in heaven. 

            As this brief tour of ancient wildernesses has hopefully shown, these ancient wilderness mythologies are not mainly about the dominion over nature, but about many other things: interactions with and fascination of the wild, withdrawal and self-exploration, cultural critique, intense emotion and devotion, and sometimes about a metaphorical understanding of life itself as wilderness pilgrimage, en route to salvation in the next world. At the same time, the wilderness remains an access point to the sacred power, fertility, and protection of the other world. 

            So, how were ancient wilderness mythologies formative and why are stories about individuals alone in the wilderness perennially fascinating? First, wilderness mythologies are important because they played a role in the changes in antique religions that led to new religious formations. The classical concepts of polytheism versus monotheism can obscure other interesting changes. Looking closely at the history of wilderness mythologies opens a new way of looking at momentous religious transformations in antiquity, at important changes that are not related to one or more deities. Instead, we see how wildernesses played a part in the development of types of religious identity formation that question and critique power structures and that practice self-training and self-exploration: people travel to wildlands also to go on an inner journey. Total devotion and intense emotion are decisive features of it. This shows that individuals and individualism played a role in ancient religions that have sometimes been seen as collective through-and-through. But what about wilderness stories in a broader perspective? 

Wild Resonance Experiences: Narratives and Nature Relationships 

The question of the role of narratives in framing our relationships with wild nature is an important and urgent one. Ancient wilderness mythologies are, most forcefully, stories about nature as fundamentally beyond human control and its importance for human experience, identity, and thriving. Interestingly, many contemporary wilderness stories are about that too. Ancient wilderness mythologies can inspire fascination and awe of nature, new forms of attention to nature beyond aggression and control and show us how transformative that can be. It would be wrong to conclude that wilderness stories per se are detrimental to human relationships with nature, considering the great historical variability. To be clear, some wilderness mythologies have certainly had harmful effects, especially in colonial contexts, and these devastating effects must be acknowledged and repaired to the greatest extent possible. Yet, extending this analysis to all forms of wilderness mythology is a mistake. Wilderness mythologies can also, via personal stories of encounters and relations with wild beings, and personal transformation in the wild, nurture and train audiences’ senses and experiences in more-than-human nature towards wild resonance experiences. Some stories can stimulate a desire to forge relationships with wild beings, respect and appreciation of wild nature, and mobilize for identity transformation. These aspects also belong to discussions and assessments of wilderness mythology. Without them, the long, historical, and continuing fascination with wilderness stories becomes hard to explain. The traditional analysis of wilderness overlooks how ancient stories about wilderness – wild, nonhuman nature beyond complete human control – plays a fundamental role in human identity formation. It also disregards several specific aspects of ancient wilderness mythologies that go beyond destruction and dominion. Drawing on the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa (2022, 2016), I think that these stories about the wild are, in an important sense, about nature’s opacity or unavailability and how important it can be for human thriving. Wilderness is a quintessential image of nature’s uncontrollability and unruliness. Such stories also speak of what it means for human identity and thriving. 

Feeling Small – Why Might It Be Important? 

In recent historical and sociological work, scholars have thought about the importance of feeling small, of uncontrollability in nature for human thriving. As environmental historian David Nye points out, both Kant and Burke highlighted that what Nye calls the environmental sublime – the irresistible forces of nature – forces us to humility, to recognizing humanity’s insignificance, and that “nature is a living, recalcitrant realm” (Nye 2022: 115-117, quote on 116). The problem with the classical understanding of the sublime is not this specific recognition of humility and wonder in the face of nature, but the subsequent assertion of reason’s dominion (Nye 2022: 116). What David Nye calls the environmental sublime today comes from immersion in nature and an “awed recognition of the almost infinitely complex relations between living organisms” (Nye 2022: 116). He holds that the recognition that nature is alive and recalcitrant can offer a meeting with the world that retains some of its opacity. What Nye describes in a way focused on the cultivation of new self-world relations in the contemporary late modern world overlaps to a certain extent with what Rosa addresses with his concept of resonance (2016) and his ideas of the importance of the unavailability of the world (2022). Nye historicizes the resonant self-world relations that the old term “the sublime” entailed. He suggests that where earlier versions of the sublime focused on the fear of human mortality in the face of an erupting volcano, for instance, newer formations change with changing historical and social circumstances. The environmental sublime today could, for instance, involve concern for the fate of a species, habitat, or ecology (Nye 2022: 117), instead of grandiose mountains or erupting volcanoes. 

            Across all the ancient stories we find positive appraisals of the wilderness as sites of divinely given fertility, abundance, of a recalcitrant power, of receiving wisdom and self-transformation, but also as places making humans feel small. Wildernesses are alive with an unruly power; they are recalcitrant and fertile. Contrary to Cronon’s influential assertion that wilderness in the ancient world was a place “to which one came only against one’s will” (Cronon 1996: 9), these ancient wilderness mythologies show that wilderness was something actively sought out, even an object of longing. They also offer examples of how humans in the ancient world reacted to being in wild environments on their own and how they reflected on it in written narratives with aesthetic appreciation. The common assumption in environmental history and landscape aesthetics that aesthetic appreciation of wild nature only began with Petrarca’s ascent of Mont Ventoux in 1336 (Krebs 2014) should thus be moved back a couple of thousand years, in view of Old Babylonian texts such as Inanna and Ebih or Lugalbanda in the Wilderness (Feldt 2025). 

            We will always be influenced by the stories we hear or read and by cultural and social habits, by what others tell us. Our nature experiences are too. For late modern subjects, the world has become a point of aggression, according to Rosa, all of which must be known, controlled, conquered, and made useful (Rosa 2022: 12). The normalization of this way of relating to the world, an aggressive world-relation, is something that has arisen in the last three hundred years (Rosa 2022: 14-15). As Rosa underlines, the attempt to make everything available to humans – the forests, the mountains, the sea – makes the world barren and hard and hinders human thriving (Rosa 2022: 26, 28-29; 2016: 455-461, 469). Using these points to look again at wilderness stories – old and new – may help us recognize how stories of wildland experiences help cultivate and frame wild resonance experiences. We could say that wilderness mythologies are stories of how humans can have resonant relations with nature. Such stories can stimulate other people’s experiences in nature because we are fundamentally dependent on others for understanding our own experience and emotional life. It is also for that reason that I find it so important not to neglect or overlook these additional qualities of wilderness stories. Ancient wilderness narratives can be understood as stories that deal with the uncontrollability of nature and how this becomes transformative. Such stories are relevant today, because we need more knowledge about nature experiences and narratives before modernization and industrialization. We could think of ancient narratives as part of our nature-cultural heritage, as testimonies to co-evolving biocultural histories. There is much to suggest that if the uncontrollability or unavailability of nature disappears, then it becomes much more difficult for humans to thrive (Rosa 2022). 

            The contemporary era, known as the Anthropocene by many scholars – the era in which humans became a planetary force and in which anthropogenic climate change requires urgent transformations of human life – compels us to rethink our approach to the world, ideas of human control, dominion, and power over nature. This same era, in which we must face our own destructive impact on the planet, is also the same era in which those precise destructive effects on our planet offset climate change in uncontrollable and unforeseeable ways. Again, nature becomes uncontrollable, unpredictable, dangerous. Ancient wilderness stories can, like other wilderness narratives, help stimulate another kind of world-relation than the one that makes the world fully controllable, see-through, and available to humans. In ancient wilderness mythologies, wilderness is not available or controllable. Ancient wilderness stories are stories about resonant self-world relations in nature, where the stories show how the persons involved are caught up in “wild nature” and they let themselves be affected and changed by it. In a sense, wilderness narratives are personal narratives about resonance experiences, about being open to the unexpected. As Rosa emphasizes, resonant relations do not entail that something is fully out of reach – then resonance is not possible. Resonance is only possible when you cannot fully control something, but when you can enter into a relation with it (Rosa 2022: 50-52). Both opacity and responsiveness are required for resonance (Rosa 2022: 55-58). Ancient wilderness myths are about that too. And about how it can matter for human self-transformation and thriving. By giving nature its own voice, character, and will – like for example in the stories of Humbaba, or the speaking animals of the Egyptian desert, or the providential ascetic forests of Gaul that can be transformed into charismatic, healing amulets – wilderness mythologies are stories that make nature personal, that speak of resonance experiences, of intractable mountains and deserts that come alive with speaking animals, monsters and gods, that speak to the self of the stories, stimulating an inner change. For this reason, wilderness might indeed be important for humanity. Or, indeed, in the famous words of a much later wilderness enthusiast, Thoreau in his essay “Walking,” it may even be that “in wildness is the preservation of the world.” 

References

Cronon, William. 1996. “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Environmental History 1/1: 7-28.

Feldt, Laura. 2025. Ancient Mythologies of the Wilderness: Narrative, Nature and Religious Identity Formation from the Babylonians to the Late Antique Christians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Harrison, Robert P. 1992. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Krebs, Angelika. 2014. “Why Landscape Beauty Matters.” Land 3: 1251-1269.

Nye, David. 2022. Seven Sublimes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Rosa, Hartmut. 2022. Unverfügbarkeit. Wien-Salzburg: Suhrkamp. 

Rosa, Hartmut. 2016. Resonanz: Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

Rüpke, Jörg. 2016. “Individualization and Privatization.” In Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the Study of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 702-717.