This sense of the two races is intriguing. But my mind is digging at your words like a dog wanting something deeper. Apart from the value you've assembled, I still struggle to understand 'why trees' at all, in a way that isn't projection. To be such presences in our myth-making has to mean they bring something to us. My rambling thoughts follow, perhaps not coherently. :)
I suspect I am looking for the spiritual meaning of trees, which you charted. But why are they so central to our earliest myths? I think you're right that they are an external reflection of us. We love them because they are a helpful symbol that maps our experience and relation to the gods.
I have been gripped by a view that turns trees upside down, where their rooted fingers probe and anchor and grasp upward into a star, while their legs and lungs suck greedily of sunlight and air. They are 'engines' or 'sacraments' of conversion, introducing the outer life of the world between the stars into the world hidden within the skin of our world. They mediate the influencers of the salamanders to the undines.
ROC and his conversations with the trees, and the fauns in the trees, reminds me of the Green Man. Men are upside-down trees, and we feel this. We want the rootedness of home, but we have none of it naturally. Our heads waft in the seeming emptiness outside the earth-mother, our feet not rooted, free to run or be pushed by weather and need. We are little walking trees, and our foliage is invisible to us, a porous distended kaleidoscope of spiritual senses that brush against the presence and senselight of other angels. They move and breathe through us like breezes, or nourish the roots we have in our spirit body to the spirits surrounding us, and we are blind or insensate to it all. we think we have had ideas, or are surprised by revelations. A tree's sense of self does not include earth, sun, or air, but perhaps is a dyad of reception and reaching, extending and articulating, converting warmth and sweetness through its central sacrament to be able to share with others.
The Green Man is a reminder, perhaps, that the way of trees is to humbly stick our heads back in the sand, and like an alchemist, poke our intuition through a doorway into the glory and presence of a loving, living universe. That looking up at the stars is to be paired with the reverence of being born out of one, and borne on one.
Trees are our elder brothers, I suppose. They are more than massive, they are alive, and they are - more likely than not - home to their own fairy or spiritual being. And I suspect some of us can sense that, even when we don't know what we sense. It's not mere gravity and pressure we feel in their being, but the gravitas of presence.
Some of us can espeicially sense it with mountains, some with rivers or oceans. I'm guessing we happy few are tree folk, and its in our blood.
The led image of your post on the search for a symbolic meaning of the The Tree of Two Trees is exactly the same southern live oak whose image comes up on my screen saver and comes up a few times a year. I culled it yeas ago as a model for the cover of the first of nine volumes of Tale of Two Times, unfortunately that draft cover was not used. I'll try to dig it out and maybe restack your essay and fill in some details. Anyway, the Father of Phytas is central and key to the whole Celtic weave of the main plot and the fate and actions of its Heroines and Heroes and the whole cosmos revolves around it profoundly, but its nature and revelation in narrative is gradual and somber, and in places wild and odd. MThe Tree appears in first, naturally, in Southern California, to Hans Beckerath, a German Graduate Student in Biology who had been studying physics with the notion of getting into particle physics before he converted to biology. (I knew two such biologists in my days, long, long ago.) He is one of the companions recruited into the last War Thing of the Clan of Thiuderieks. Thiuderieks is the first Keen Maker and originator of the Workshop of the Clan’s Keen Makers. The Workshop connects to Earth's Province (the physical universe) by its Antechamber's Front Gate. The Antechamber is where the Clan’s Makers work on various Devices. The Antechamber con be vast, the Antechamber opens to the Inner Sanctum which connects the Workshop to the Commons of the gods, which is the invisible cosmos and it, in turn, opens to Heaven. Only Keen Maker's have the skill and ability work in the Inner Sanctum The Commons is the Tales's vastly retooled Purgatory for all creatures. Getting back to Hans and the Tree, Hans is one of the three raw non-Clan recruits for the War Thing, although they, of course do not know it. The Old Goth term for raw is Greenwood, from the ancient Touchstone (You can hear in the 8 minute audio Substack podcast by Martha Vogel, the second greatest wise woman of the 9,000 year-old Clan.) The first wise wise woman of the Clan is the Ethiopian grandmother of the young lady Hans has fallen in love with, Yohanna Okubo. She is Ethiopian and Nigerian through her father. Anyway, Yohanna is the prospective first Word Wise of the Clan’s most subtle hierarchy and an authentic Catholic Christian Witchdoctor who Hans came to love because she can charm animals, a sidewinder in their case. Again, anyway, Hans when it sees The Tree is standing on the deck of the Cliff Rancho which is Delved into the side of a cliff in the foothills of the San Gabriels, much in the recent fire news. He is in the Company of Ricardo Chavez, also a young man a year or so older than Hans, the co-greatest Keen Maker of all time, and like Hans, Ricardo young men who have it all in athletic looks, physique, social smarts and self discipline. Ricardo is the greatest male Keen Maker since Thiuderieks. Ricardo is Mexican-American, through his parents of the blood of the Aztec Court. Ricardo has had a genuine vocation to the priesthood but he has been been seduced in the best but astounding the young woman who has the deepest friendship with Yohanna. And she is the greatest Keen Maker of all time and the acme of all Goth Devices exceeding the Workshop system itself. The Device made by Yohanna's dear friend is, one could say ,the Spirit of the Father of Phytas.
This sense of the two races is intriguing. But my mind is digging at your words like a dog wanting something deeper. Apart from the value you've assembled, I still struggle to understand 'why trees' at all, in a way that isn't projection. To be such presences in our myth-making has to mean they bring something to us. My rambling thoughts follow, perhaps not coherently. :)
I suspect I am looking for the spiritual meaning of trees, which you charted. But why are they so central to our earliest myths? I think you're right that they are an external reflection of us. We love them because they are a helpful symbol that maps our experience and relation to the gods.
I have been gripped by a view that turns trees upside down, where their rooted fingers probe and anchor and grasp upward into a star, while their legs and lungs suck greedily of sunlight and air. They are 'engines' or 'sacraments' of conversion, introducing the outer life of the world between the stars into the world hidden within the skin of our world. They mediate the influencers of the salamanders to the undines.
ROC and his conversations with the trees, and the fauns in the trees, reminds me of the Green Man. Men are upside-down trees, and we feel this. We want the rootedness of home, but we have none of it naturally. Our heads waft in the seeming emptiness outside the earth-mother, our feet not rooted, free to run or be pushed by weather and need. We are little walking trees, and our foliage is invisible to us, a porous distended kaleidoscope of spiritual senses that brush against the presence and senselight of other angels. They move and breathe through us like breezes, or nourish the roots we have in our spirit body to the spirits surrounding us, and we are blind or insensate to it all. we think we have had ideas, or are surprised by revelations. A tree's sense of self does not include earth, sun, or air, but perhaps is a dyad of reception and reaching, extending and articulating, converting warmth and sweetness through its central sacrament to be able to share with others.
The Green Man is a reminder, perhaps, that the way of trees is to humbly stick our heads back in the sand, and like an alchemist, poke our intuition through a doorway into the glory and presence of a loving, living universe. That looking up at the stars is to be paired with the reverence of being born out of one, and borne on one.
Trees are our elder brothers, I suppose. They are more than massive, they are alive, and they are - more likely than not - home to their own fairy or spiritual being. And I suspect some of us can sense that, even when we don't know what we sense. It's not mere gravity and pressure we feel in their being, but the gravitas of presence.
Some of us can espeicially sense it with mountains, some with rivers or oceans. I'm guessing we happy few are tree folk, and its in our blood.
Oh yes, this is only my initial attempt to grasp at the meaning of trees. Your comment was wonderful, thank you!
Did you get my FSPP post?
Shit! This went out garbled and truncated. Oh well. Too late to fix. I hope some of it makes sense, JBSP
Did you get this?
Yup! I still need to read your comment
This is marvelous. Trees must be in the air because I May have one coming next week about trees.
The led image of your post on the search for a symbolic meaning of the The Tree of Two Trees is exactly the same southern live oak whose image comes up on my screen saver and comes up a few times a year. I culled it yeas ago as a model for the cover of the first of nine volumes of Tale of Two Times, unfortunately that draft cover was not used. I'll try to dig it out and maybe restack your essay and fill in some details. Anyway, the Father of Phytas is central and key to the whole Celtic weave of the main plot and the fate and actions of its Heroines and Heroes and the whole cosmos revolves around it profoundly, but its nature and revelation in narrative is gradual and somber, and in places wild and odd. MThe Tree appears in first, naturally, in Southern California, to Hans Beckerath, a German Graduate Student in Biology who had been studying physics with the notion of getting into particle physics before he converted to biology. (I knew two such biologists in my days, long, long ago.) He is one of the companions recruited into the last War Thing of the Clan of Thiuderieks. Thiuderieks is the first Keen Maker and originator of the Workshop of the Clan’s Keen Makers. The Workshop connects to Earth's Province (the physical universe) by its Antechamber's Front Gate. The Antechamber is where the Clan’s Makers work on various Devices. The Antechamber con be vast, the Antechamber opens to the Inner Sanctum which connects the Workshop to the Commons of the gods, which is the invisible cosmos and it, in turn, opens to Heaven. Only Keen Maker's have the skill and ability work in the Inner Sanctum The Commons is the Tales's vastly retooled Purgatory for all creatures. Getting back to Hans and the Tree, Hans is one of the three raw non-Clan recruits for the War Thing, although they, of course do not know it. The Old Goth term for raw is Greenwood, from the ancient Touchstone (You can hear in the 8 minute audio Substack podcast by Martha Vogel, the second greatest wise woman of the 9,000 year-old Clan.) The first wise wise woman of the Clan is the Ethiopian grandmother of the young lady Hans has fallen in love with, Yohanna Okubo. She is Ethiopian and Nigerian through her father. Anyway, Yohanna is the prospective first Word Wise of the Clan’s most subtle hierarchy and an authentic Catholic Christian Witchdoctor who Hans came to love because she can charm animals, a sidewinder in their case. Again, anyway, Hans when it sees The Tree is standing on the deck of the Cliff Rancho which is Delved into the side of a cliff in the foothills of the San Gabriels, much in the recent fire news. He is in the Company of Ricardo Chavez, also a young man a year or so older than Hans, the co-greatest Keen Maker of all time, and like Hans, Ricardo young men who have it all in athletic looks, physique, social smarts and self discipline. Ricardo is the greatest male Keen Maker since Thiuderieks. Ricardo is Mexican-American, through his parents of the blood of the Aztec Court. Ricardo has had a genuine vocation to the priesthood but he has been been seduced in the best but astounding the young woman who has the deepest friendship with Yohanna. And she is the greatest Keen Maker of all time and the acme of all Goth Devices exceeding the Workshop system itself. The Device made by Yohanna's dear friend is, one could say ,the Spirit of the Father of Phytas.