As I was taking a walk in the park the other day, I noticed most of the oaks trees which often stubbornly resist dropping their leaves until spring had surrendered nearly all of their fall adornments. The effects of wind and rain from a previous day were visible both on and off the walking paths. Leaves dotted long stretches of walkway while broken fingers of mistletoe had been haphazardly tossed down onto sections of paths which tunneled through areas where the trees were more densely populated. The sun’s warmth was a pleasant counterpoint to the cool ambient temperature which was lowered further by intermittent gusts of wind. Although conditions were perfect for casual walkers there was a dearth of people on hand to enjoy an afternoon cathartic.
At some point during my walking, after the early effort of reaching and sustaining a brisk but manageable pace, I find that I am able to lapse into a more contemplative state–not the regimented rigor of a monastic but an open-ended dialog where topics present themselves without fanfare or introduction: a fallen leaf or a bit of refracted sunlight edges from the periphery into focus, the wind calms, my breathing and heartbeat syncopate and I can hear only the skeletal groaning of the poplar and pine.
Perhaps the combination of mistletoe and oak leaves set off a chain reaction of associations which forced open the shuttered repositories of memories. I can’t say what triggered my introspection; however, as I continued to walk, the fragments of recollection from the fall of 1967 wove themselves into my consciousness. As near as I can describe it, the fall of that year marked the closest that I’ve come to having a mystical experience; it was a seminal moment in decision making for me; and, it was as highly unorthodox as it was out of character for a person as analytical as I am.
I’ve described that eventful night in October of 1967 in detail in an unpublished memoir that may one day see the light of day; however, my mention of that occasion here will be cursory, an overview at best. One night as I walked to philosophy seminar held at Carroll Feagins’ house that lay nestled in the woods behind the small pond on the Guilford College campus known at the time as Guilford College lake, my thoughts were preoccupied with current events and especially the impact these events would have on my life. The war in Vietnam and its coverage was ubiquitous; its carnage was served as frame of reference for nightly news reports. From my enrollment in Guilford down to that very moment in October I was opposed to the war and gradually the maturation of my own thought and personal beliefs had extended that opposition to include all war. Beliefs and ideals have little relevance when they are convenient, intellectual affectations held in isolation; they matter when one’s life is lived and tempered by them, when the quality of one’s life and the manner of one’s death depend upon the practice those principles define. So in the crisp night air with the moon’s autumn light illuminating the silent landscape like a preface to a Poe short story, I paused in the road as my internal dialog suddenly ceased. Before me stood a small section of oak trees which shouldered either side of the road and reached their limbs toward each other to form a canopy over the road. As I looked into the shadows, the dilemma that had dominated my thoughts came rushing back.
While I was still the same blue collar kid of recent immigrant origins, my approach to life had matured from a small town context to one which was now informed by the rich complexity of ideas I had encountered as a philosophy major; and, there was the lure of an intoxicating promise of open-ended potential to which James had referred. I had also discovered an “ism” in Quakerism that was so unencumbered yet impeccably profound that it defied glib compartmentalization. And I had fallen in love. My dilemma peered back at me in the darkness: Did I have the courage to live the ideals that I professed? Was the life of the mind antithetical to the life of the body? And what of love? My life had become inextricably bound to another; I knew the risk in Emerson’s advice –Give all to love…when the half-gods go, the gods arrive– but I was powerless not to heed it.
Shadows motioned to me. The moon was silent, a breeze stirred in the treetops, leaves shook loose from fingers of limbs that rattled as the wind steadied itself, then began to twirl and dance as they descended, plunging randomly, moving in a reel to the commands of an invisible caller. Although the quiet was mesmerizing, it did not ease the feeling of uncertainty that held me captive. I would graduate soon and be thrust from the elegant edifice erected by academia and be forced to face the “real world”. I had thought my way to pacifism while at Guilford and was confronting the prospects of what that choice meant for me; I had examined the destructive habits of my childhood and quelled the rage that often led to unexpected outbursts of violence. I was not squeamish and as a matter of fact I was less afraid of violence than I was of the ease with which I could behave so violently myself. Rationalization can be a powerful sedative; it can provide one with an armament of excuses to justify the prosecution of the most egregious acts: and retribution is its twin.
In retrospect there is a logic to the role chance played that October night. I wagered that my passage beneath the canopy of oaks would determine my fate. If I were able to walk through the glade of oaks untouched by a single leaf, no harm would come to me as a conscientious objector. As I entered the grove of oaks, the breeze intensified and leaves cascaded from overhead. The mind is a master magician, misdirection is its hallmark. By the time I was half way through the gallery of trees not a single leaf had touched me. I thought to myself that if this were a fitting test, an equally worthy sign was in order. So I stopped walking, looked skyward to watch the leaves descend, and risked the hubris my behavior might have elicited. More than affirmation, I sought a clear response, one without nuance: yes or no; right or wrong; good or evil; courage or cowardice; passive or aggressive; love or hate. I knew all too well that our lives were color wheels spinning so that the sharpest contrasts were often grayscale not black and white. The leaves floated toward me time after time and each one spun wildly away before it could touch me as if some hidden hand reached out to push it away or a breath deflected it. I don’t recall how long I stood there watching leaves fall in the enchanted moon mist. Time paused. I became aware of my breathing once again after I had resumed walking and made my way out of the hall of oaks. Not a single leaf had touched me.
I can state with reasonable certainty that in the fall of 1967 I had not yet read The Golden Bough, in fact, I knew nothing of James Frazier or his epic work on anthropology involving myth, folklore, and primitive religions despite my fondness for some of T. S. Eliot’s poetry. While it is possible to reconstruct events of the past, not even those charged with the eternal drama of life and death can survive completely intact, free from the prejudices of later speculation and the interpretation of hindsight. I have been unable to duplicate the emotional content of that night, nor have I experienced another like it. When I finally got around to reading The Golden Bough, I was forced to reconsider the notion that my experience was just another example of life’s randomness. Had my epiphany occurred amongst a bucolic setting of maples, it might have been filed away as an interesting coincidence or a good party story to entertain friends.
The Golden Bough: The Roots of Religion and Folklore by Sir James George Frazier was an opus of modest origin: Frazier’s initial intent in writing the book was to provide an explanation of an ancient Italian folk custom. It was believed that a runaway slave who could successfully pull down a bough from a special golden tree would win the right to fight to the death the king of the sacred forest grove at Nemi and perhaps become the next king of the woods. However, Frazier was intrigued by the similarity of the golden bough of Nemi and the golden bough mentioned in Virgil’s poem the Aeneid, which, allowed Aeneas to enter the underworld and gave him access to its secrets. By exploring the correspondence of the two stories, Frazier eventually opened up a whole new world of myth and ritual from the legends of the distant past to the practices of the primitive peoples of his day. Frazier’s work in anthropology suggested that the behavior and practices of primitive people were comprehensible, and could even be accorded rational in their own right; however, the most revolutionary notion that astonished Frazier’s readers was that through the study of primitive institutions we might gain insight into the workings of our own society. As Frazier elaborated on his initial studies, they became unwieldy with illustration and masked the thread of his original argument although these words of his appropriately summarize his views:
When all is said and done our resemblances to the savage are still far more numerous than our differences from him; and what we have in common with him, and deliberately retain as true and useful, we owe to our savage forefathers.
While Frazier cites accounts of myth and ritual on nearly every page of his book, the section devoted to Oak-Worship was particularly compelling in light of my own personal experience. The trees that I walked beneath were oaks and the leaves which tumbled down around me were not just any leaves, they were oak leaves. Frazier mentions that
Amongst the ancient Italians, according to Preller, the oak was sacred above all other trees. The image of Jupiter on the Capitol at Rome seems to have been originally nothing but a natural oak-tree. At Dodona, perhaps the oldest of all Greek sanctuaries, Zeus was worshipped as immanent in the sacred oak, and the rustling of its leaves in the wind was his voice.
The oak ranked first among the holy trees of the Germans and was their chief god. In fact the oak, Frazier adds,
was not only the sacred tree, but the principal object of worship of both Celts and Slavs.
My genealogical research traces my ancestral roots to an essentially European source divided among Italian, Irish, and German antecedents, which mixes elements of superstition, religion, folklore, and an heritage transmitted through primeval bloodlines. Perhaps my actions that night were merely a part of a twentieth century re-enactment of a sacred ceremony in which my ancestors might have participated, or a biological memory that was triggered by circumstance and flooded my consciousness with images imprinted on the body’s circuitry from the dawn of creation. My wager may have been addressed to more than empty air; it may have been an appeal to plead my case before the rustling leaves, the voice of god, the genetic codex of ancestors transmitted through millennia of evolution.
My foot race with age has brought me a considerable distance from that wooded encounter some 40 years ago. I’ve retraced the path I took that night a number of times and have never experienced anything more than a pleasant walk in the woods. The oaks stand unremarkably quiet, stoic guardsmen, bound by some arboreal honor code to watch over passers-by, and if, by chance, they are privy to secrets, they remain the epitome of discretion. I made a choice that night under a canopy of somber oaks shedding their leaves, their naked limbs dusted with the moon’s silvery light elongated into shadows diffused in the cold air of October, a month fit for Poe and his dark imagination; however, the shivers that ran down my spine were caused less by fear than expectation. I entered that glade of oaks seeking a sign. Like Socrates before me, I was certain I already knew the answer, the trick was finding the appropriate question to ask; and, myth, may be our only means to comprehend, that which eludes articulation.
