>>20028On the other hand, the idea of religion and culture as separate and the idea that you have to "believe in" a practice for it to be religiously valid is a very western, even Abrahamic notion. Most historical religions are shockingly transactional when it comes to the sort of small scale rituals and offerings you're talking about. The wishing well is a pretty good example. You don't need to believe in the wishing well. It doesn't care whether or not you believe in it. It just works. Most "genuine" religious knowledge consists of stuff people simply know is true, like how people in Asia "just know" that if you sneeze it means someone's talking shit about you behind your back. I mean, that's how it has to be. Religion is still talking about the world as a whole, and people understand the world through knowledge. Imperfect knowledge is still knowledge.
>>19648Medieval Europeans mostly didn't assume people were separate from nature, if anything they mostly assumed that humans were distinct but very much part of nature (since they could hardly be anything else). What they did tend to assume is that nature was massively powerful and full of things they could not actually control or even understand without divine help.
The idea that nature is something to be protected is extremely modern and would be utterly absurd in earlier times. That would be like saying we need to protect the sun, or protect the electromagnetic force. You don't have the right to speak of protecting nature, you don't qualify to do so. When most ancient types spoke of being in tune with nature they mostly considered it as "being in tune with how you were supposed to be to begin with", because most of them didn't assume that humans were actually not part of nature in the first place. Respecting nature and thinking it needed to be protected are completely different concepts.
Honestly even in the modern world it's pretty weird how "people" and "nature" are separated, or "natural" and "supernatural", or "science" and "magic/superstition". Historically all of these pairs were the same thing. It's really only Enlightenment era windbags who felt the need to prove they were smarter than everyone who came before that started making hard separations to this effect.