The Earthiness of Octavia Butler’s Earthseed

And the underworld that went missing

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I recently did an interview with my old friend, the radio producer Jesse Dukes, for his podcast Upper Middle Brow. He co-hosts the show with his friend Chris Bagg and most of the episodes feature the two of them discussing a book. Not a new book, just an upper middle brow book. They also have a format for shows with guests, where we can discuss one of the books that have already been featured on the podcast. I decided to talk about their episodes on Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.

You can listen to the episode that I’m featured on here (and this is where you can find their original discussion of Parable). In addition to Bulter’s Parable of the Sower we discuss a number of other things, including my book, Sister Death, and why I used to refer to theology as “speculative fiction”.

Since this discussion, however, I’ve been thinking about Octavia Butler a lot. I’ve been thinking, especially, about the idea of earthseed. Butler apparently intended to turn the parable series (which includes Parable of the Sower as well as its sequel Parable of the Talents) into a trilogy. But despite the fact that she drafted and drafted that third book—the book that was supposed to have taken the characters off of the earth and into the heavens—she didn’t end up writing it. I’ve found myself wondering if one of the imaginative challenges she faced was that her vision of earthseed had lost track of its underworld—the underworld that it needed to germinate, and take root.

What is Earthseed?

Earthseed is, in the most basic terms, a religion that Butler invents in Parable of the Sower. Well, it’s actually the religion that her main character Lauren Olamina invents. It’s not entirely clear that this is Butler’s own religious vision, though there are some indications that it is. It sometimes seems to me, for instance, that the story itself exists as a vehicle of expression for earthseed. That is to say, earthseed feels less like a feature of the narrative than the narrative seems like a vehicle for earthseed.

Lauren Olamina is living in a postapocalyptic America that feels eerily close to our own world, perhaps in large part because the novel (written in 1993) was set in a near-future doomscape in the year 2024! That’s not where the uncanny similarities end. But I will leave it there for now. What’s important to know, in order to understand earthseed, is that it’s a religion Olamina begins to invent as she’s living in a gated community near Los Angeles that’s only just barely keeping the social and political chaos of the outside world at bay.

The core of earthseed is the idea that God, the divine, is change. God is change, and change is divine. It’s not so much the case that Olamina is calling people to worship change. Rather, she’s calling for them to recognize that change is the principal of the absolute. Change is the truest thing. Life and death themselves are just manifestations of change.

Earthseed is a path toward recognizing the inevitability of change. But it’s also an affirmation of a kind of deep mutuality between humans and the divine. Olamina tells us that we are not simply subject to change, it’s not something simply imposed upon us. Rather, change is responsive to us. Change shapes us, and yet we also shape change. Understanding earthseed calls for an adaption to this reality in both its heaviness and its uplift.

But earthseed also offers a kind of promise. “The destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars,” Olamina writes. I love that vision of roots and stars (that’s why there are roots and stars in the icon for my substack!) The practice of earthseed is to aim for the heavens. Not a fantastic afterlife that may or may not exist. Instead, she’s talking about the actual heavens—outer space. It’s a vision of life beyond this world—a vision of grand possibility.

I recently learned that earthseed is actually a religion that people practice. On the Internet, at least! I can see the appeal of it, though without Lauren Olamina it’s not immediately clear to me how the community dimension would form. I can’t imagine, for instance, that if I started an earthseed chapter many of you would want to follow me! But maybe that just says something about me.

At any rate, it’s also not clear to me that Butler would have wanted earthseed to live off of the page, as a real breathing tradition. One of the lovely things about books is that we can immerse ourselves in them, in order to imagine another reality. But it’s never as easy as we might think to lift that imagined reality of out a book and make it real. Was Butler just offering a beautiful vision, while also installing some elements into the story (skepticism, or critique) that would prevent this religion from actually coming to life?

Maybe these novels were a vehicle for Butler to create a form of religion, while also offering a scathing critique of the way that religion and power often tend to work. Butler was suspicious of religion, and this included the religion that she herself created. She was critical of the way that Christianity had turned divinity into a kind of sky cop, who policed the behavior of people on earth. But no religious figure is above criticism for Butler, not even the prophet of earthseed. In Parable of the Talents, which is narrated by Lauren Olamina’s daughter, Lauren herself becomes a more ambivalent figure. It starts to become apparent that the religion of earthseed, and the power it gave her access to, may have done something to her.

And yet Butler also recognized the sustaining social influence of the black church that she grew up within. The theologian Delores Williams—a womanist theologian—wrote about what she described as a kind of survival, or quality of life theology in the black church. It was a theology that she found among black women, who found in God not a figure who saved them from the terrible things that happened but that gave them the power to make a way out of no way. I think about Octavia Butler as someone who, perhaps, saw that survival theology at work and understood the power of it. She knew that this sort of theology wasn’t something she could completely dismiss.

So, Butler explored what this sort of religion could look like, or might look like. In the postapocalyptic context of Parable of the Sower, earthseed is what gives her main character the power to imagine a life outside of her gated community. And she ends up building a following, in large part because she has a community and a vision. Or at least that’s what it seems like. It’s earthseed—her theology, her vision—that seems to keep everyone together.

The key to earthseed is that it’s not bound to this world. Jesse and I ended up having a discussion (a debate, really) about this element of earthseed. I thought it was crucial that earthseed be something that could be separated from the world, but without losing its earthiness. It’s an afrofuturist imaginary that can break with this world, and its antiblackness, without losing its earthiness. Lauren Olamina (like Butler) is a black woman. And Butler was both inspired by, and an inspiration for, afrofutrist imaginaries. Earthseed is a religion with the power to seed the most human and most beautiful elements of earthiness in another world. It’s a path for the survival of earthiness, in another world.

The otherworldly hope and expection of earthseed is the reason why the religion is so focused on the heavens: the reason why it’s rooted in the stars. Lauren thinks of earthseed as a religion with the power to take people into the actual heavens. Into space; not a figurative or spiritual heaven, but a real one, a material one.

It’s also this challenge, of taking earthseed into the heavens, that seemed to challenge Butler imaginatively in ways that she wasn’t necessarily up for. She couldn’t write the book (or just didn’t write the book) that took earthseed off of the earth.

Why Would Earthseed Need an Underworld?

A seed won’t germinate unless the conditions are favorable for its growth. It needs the right growing conditions, and typically this means soil. Most seeds need soil—earth— for their growth and development. They need to be planted in the underworld. They need something chthonic in order to change or transform.

Butler retains some of the popular elements of Christianity in earthseed. There’s a divine figure: change. And heaven remains a central figure of hope and expectation. I think that she arguably even has a hell in the story: the world. Hell is just life in the new world after the old world (which was no paradise, either) has fallen apart.

But in the earthseed imaginary, there’s no underworld. There’s no world of the dead that Lauren Olamina can come into contact with in some way, for instance. Earthseed takes root in the heavens, but not even the heavens seem to have a notably chthonic dimension where things can root.

Without an underworld, it seems to me that earthseed becomes just another vision of a heaven without something to hold it up. An unreality, an impossible spiritual fantasy. Part of what makes earthseed so appealing is its earthiness. Not that it’s tied to the world, per se, but that it’s earthy. It’s a seed that contains the best of the earth within it. It has a kind of ground; it’s grounded, and grounding. It feels real, tactile, and tangible (rather than fantastic and unreal).

I think that Butler understands what popular ideas about heaven, in the Christian tradition, seem to lack. They feel unreal, they lack materiality. Her vision of heaven is tactile. But there’s no underworld. No soil. Nowhere for things to take root. No chthonic dimensions of earthiness.

The popular figure of heaven in the Christian tradition is genealogically linked to (though, today, rather dissociated from) the figure of the heavens in biblical texts. The heavens, in the Bible, are the skies. This is where divine things live, and have their being. And humans can only get close to them when they’re at the top of a mountain, for instance. In biblical texts the heavens are separated from the earth by a kind of dome. When God wants to make it rain (or flood the earth), God can open windows in the dome. So you get the sense that the heavens are not only filled with stars, but also with a kind of primal water. And the thing that’s holding that dome up is the earth. Below the earth is the underworld, where the dead live. At least some of this cosmology is probably borrowed from the ancient Egyptians, who held that the dead (in the underworld) could use boats to travel from the primal waters below the earth into the primal waters in the heavens.

If we understand where the idea of heaven comes from, and how it evolved, we can see that even the figure of heaven is connected to an underworld. There’s an underworld that’s holding heaven up, we could say. Over the course of time, in contact with other cultural visions of the heavens and the earth, the heavens change. The underworld becomes mostly fire and brimstone (hellish), and the heavens seem less connected to it. But even in the figure of heaven, there’s a kind of underworld ghosting it.

It makes me wonder what earthseed could have become, with an underworld. What would it mean, for instance, if travel to the heavens were made possible not by taking a rocket ship (built and funded by space colonizers) but through another sort of portal? What kind of portal? I don’t think my own science fictional imagination can stretch that far. But I would have loved to see what Butler could have made with an underworld.