the forest is even more germane to how we exist today? There is indeed, and when we recognize that, several doors immediately open. For now, we shall only peep through them while deciding which one to enter. We are in a hall of mirrors.
Let us consider a burning wood fire. In his latest, as yet unpublished, work, Andrey Lebedev examines the etymology of hyle, the word for ‘wood’, ‘forest’, in ancient Greek and concludes that fire and conflagration are inherent in it; the etymology suggests flammability and burning.3 Since the point is still under debate, let us leave it for now and pursue a different avenue of inquiry.
Besides today’s forests, which are all but exhausted, and the ancient forests, which are half-exhausted, one of the most significant sources of energy must surely be nuclear energy. Atomic energy can also be seen as a product of combustion, but of what? Even highly specialized knowledge will take us only so far here because of issues science has yet to resolve. We can, and commonly do, represent an atomic reaction as a kind of burning, an explosion, a fast-developing fire or a process of slow decay. But a burning of what? In autogenous welding, the elements of hydrogen and oxygen combust, combine, become a molecule of a different compound, water, cease to exist autonomously but remain unchanged as water. A thermonuclear reaction, too, involves elements – uranium, plutonium, hydrogen – but something transformative is done to the elements themselves. We are talking about changes not to elements but to matter itself: the transformation of matter into energy. That is, what is ‘burning’ is not wood, petroleum, or coal, not compounds of elements. In a thermonuclear reaction, what is burning is matter itself.
How curious that the original meaning of the word for ‘matter’ in ancient Greek philosophy is wood, forest. The word ‘materia’ is Latin and its original meaning is primal matter. In Cicero, it is the matter of the world, of which everything consists and in which everything exists: materia rerum ex qua et in qua sunt omnia. This Latin philosophical term is a translation of that Greek philosophical term, ὕλη, hyle, whose primary meaning is ‘wood’. It is entirely possible that the official, technical meaning of materia in Latin, then meaning ‘matter’ as it now does in Russian and English, only became primary within official culture, while in popular culture the main meaning continued to be combustible material and, more specifically, wood in the sense of fuel, firewood. That is, before it was squeezed out there, too, by the philosophical usage. In Latin, felling timber is materiam caedere. In one of the Romance languages, this expression became madeira, whose primary meaning is simply forests.
In atomic energy, then, in a thermonuclear reaction, if we want to avoid a lot of specialist terminology, we can say more or less accurately that what is being burned is actually wood.
Unexpectedly, our own philosophical language is telling us that what is burned in the promising new thermonuclear energy reactions is the matter of the world: ‘wood’. In the light of this discovery, we shall exercise caution before deciding that hyle, meaning ‘an area of land covered with trees’ or ‘timber’, should take precedence over the classical philosophical meaning of ‘matter’. Language in general does not arise from adding sememes together; its origins are as deep as dreaming. In the word ‘wood’ it refers to trees, to fuel, and to the matter of the world. Let us not, therefore, be in too much of a hurry to decide which meanings are original and which are derivative. May not the use of materia in philosophy as well be, not a departure from the original meaning of ‘wood’, but a return to it? For now it seems that, as soon as we get into the forest, we lose our way.
Let us approach the forest from a different angle. This other aspect has long been present and all we need to do is look at it attentively. There is nothing new about comparing the world to a living being. No European figure has articulated such comparisons more comprehensively and clearly than Leonardo da Vinci, whom we will need to study closely. In this simile, the forests of the earth would correspond to the hair or fur on the body of a living creature. Here is one context:
… potrem dire, la terra avere anima vegetativa e che la sua carne sia la terra; li sua ossi sieno li ordini delle collegazioni di sassi, di che si compongono le montagni … il suo sangui sono le vene dilli acque; il lago del sangui, che sta di torno al core, è il mare oceano: il suo alitare è il crescere e decrescere del sangue … e il caldo dell’ anima del mondo è il foco, ch’è infuso per la terra …
So then we may say that the earth has a spirit of growth, and that its flesh is the soil; its bones are the successive strata of the rocks which form the mountains; its cartilage is the tufa stone; its blood the veins of its waters. The lake of the blood that lies around the heart is the ocean. Its breathing is by the increase and decrease of the blood in its pulses … and the vital heat of the world is fire which is spread throughout the earth …4
The human body nowadays is not completely covered with hair. I cautiously say ‘nowadays’ in order not to be drawn into the debate over whether early human beings were or were not covered with hair. For the theory of evolution, the issue is not crucial because there are other hairless animals – elephants, for example. What is phenomenologically important for us is to note that in our minds, our myths, and our fiction, the bigfoot, the furry anthropoid, the child born covered with hair, caesariatus, recur regularly and are evidently dear to us. We are intrigued by the idea that human beings can be hairy. It makes them either frightening, like the Leshiy, the Russian wood demon, or auspicious, as suggested by caesariatus in Latin, covered with hair, having long hair.
What is not speculation but fact is that the parts of the body covered with hair are prominent, most notably the head, hence the mind. If the most distinctive feature of humans is intelligence, then the locks on their head are an indication of that. They are like a microcosm. The beard clearly has a demarcation function: men have beards and women do not, so, in a manner still under debate, that is an indication of gender. Science tells us that chest hair betokens the presence of androgens, while underarm hair suggests a vestigial role for odour in the life of the species.
In folklore, mythology, and poetry, hair in that part of the human body directly serving procreation may be called a grove, a forest, or a meadow in the forest. In a recent article, Andrey Lebedev analyses a passage about the Naassenes in that great work by Hippolytus (born before 170 AD, died 235), Refutation of All Heresies.5 ‘Naassenes’ is the Hebrew name for the Ophites, of whom there were several varieties in the second century. The belief they held in common was that Jehovah had created only the material world, transient and illusory, and that man would have been left mired in it and blundering about for eternity but for the revelation of the serpent, ὄΦισ, of which in the first book of the Pentateuch of Moses it is said that it first opened man’s eyes to the abyss of the spiritual, by enabling him to discriminate between good and evil.6 The serpent, however, did not show the way, and it was for this that Christ came, the Light of the material world. Refuting the Ophites, Hippolytus paraphrases their teachings about mystical descents to earth which, incidentally, follow the paths of Aphrodite and Persephone.
It seems to me intuitively – and that is all one can say until Lebedev’s new etymologies of the forest are published – that wood-as-fire points us in a direction we need to think about. In his second article, while agreeing with attribution of the fragment about the sacred grove of Aphrodite to Empedocles, I would have argued with Lebedev’s approach. In my opinion, it is a dead end when it separates the physiological, embryological, and anthropogenic realities in the thought of Empedocles from the philosophical and poetic metaphor: Lebedev thinks that scientific positivity requires remaining down to earth, and believes that, in talking about the meadows and groves of Aphrodite, Empedocles ‘is describing metaphorically the female genitals’.
The tenacious, supposedly objective scholarly distinction between physical realia and poetry is neither self-evident nor factual. It proceeds from a questionable academic mythology that tries to distinguish what is a legitimate object of scholarly study from what is not. For example, the poetic. The delusion that anything properly scholarly and technical must be readily open to study betrays a blindness scholars allow themselves. We are not going to indulge in this blindness. […]7 The supposed encompassing