the scholarly euphoria over the triumphs of technology is no better than the delight of one of Leo Tolstoy’s characters, a three-year-old girl who sets fire to hay in her log hut and invites her little brother to admire the splendid stove she has managed to light.8 All will be restored to what is dismissed as ‘poetic’, to the ‘gentle power of thought and poetry’.9
The meadow, the sacred grove, the forest in folklore and mythology, in poetry and philosophy, are in no way a mere metaphor for coyly referring to vulgar realia. We first understand the forest in industrial and aesthetic terms, and are then unable to find a better way of understanding the grove of Aphrodite than as a metaphor, a discreet euphemism, perhaps veiling with a fine phrase a nakedness we find embarrassing. Art has the ability to show nakedness in a way that makes it neither metaphorical nor physiological. Can words be similarly used to name the intimate? Indeed they can, and are, using metaphors like grove and meadow, ἄλσος and λɛιμῶν, between which Lebedev and other writers he refers to see ‘a close association … in sacral contexts’. For Empedocles, a grove is not a metaphor for Aphrodite because, as Lebedev himself points out, he sees that the earth itself is a uterus, the womb of humankind. Lebedev mentions Empedocles’ enthusiastic cult of Aphrodite. The grove or meadow of Aphrodite is not some ‘biological referential signifier’ for us, and neither is alsos a ‘metaphor for the reproductive organs in general conceived as a “holy precinct” with a walled temple-uterus inside’, but rather quite the opposite. The biological referent, if present at all, is referring to the forest as something primal, as matter, as something maternal. Lebedev speaks of the sacred Temple of Nature in pre-Platonic thought, when its sacramental mystery is the formation of the embryo, the focal secret of life and of nature. It is a secret hidden from the profane gaze of ordinary men, but not from the probing insight of the philosopher proceeding along the path of mystical initiation. I would like to read in its entirety the remarkable conclusion of this article, which, as is often the case with Lebedev, opens up much broader perspectives than the primitive positivism about which I have been complaining.
For our present purpose, it is important to notice that typologically alsos Aphrodites represents a variation on the theme of Templum Naturae, a recurrent topos in pre-Platonic thought. Here it probably connotes ἄβατον ἱɛρόν: the formation of the foetus conceived as a mystery of life is hidden from the sight of the polloi, but not from the intellectual eye of a philosophical epoptes. Thus the mystery initiation motif, prima facie eliminated from the fragment together with the Gnostic interpretation, is eventually restored as authentic, though in essentially different form: it has nothing to do with the mysteries of Persephone and Diesseits-Hades of the Naassenes, but relates to the philosophical rite of passage. The metaphorical complex of secret knowledge is well attested in Peri physeos. As a philosophical mystagogue, Empedocles leads Pausanias to the innermost sanctum of nature: the embryological treatise to follow upon the prefatory verses on the anatomy of the female genitals and reproductive organs will reveal to Pausanias the secrets of birth no mortal eye has ever seen. And the same metaphor conveys the fundamental idea of the holiness of life inherent in Empedocles’ philosophy of cosmic Love.10
So it will be difficult for us, too, as we enter into our new topic of the forest not to follow the mass of the polloi; we shall proceed with caution.
Perhaps the first objection we anticipate, and to which it is important and helpful to respond, is that scientific positivism, whether secondary or not, is what we are familiar with. However, to see the grove and the forest as something sacred and mysterious, we need a trained, discriminating eye. Seeing the forest other than from a commercial or aesthetic viewpoint would not seem to call for preliminary training. People talk about getting lost in the forest. We have the saying that someone ‘could get lost among three pine trees’; or, when baffled, we talk of being ‘in a dark forest’. May the explanation of this – that you cannot see far in a forest, that there are no familiar landmarks – be only a rationalization of an experience that in various guises many people have probably had, namely that being in a forest takes us out of metric space? The presence of trees, being among them, instils, or induces, or lulls us into a sense of – the range of vocabulary itself points to the singularity of the experience – something that does not lend itself to description. What the forest says to us – and the expression ‘trees can talk’ is yet another attempt to characterize the experience – causes a person to become confused and disorientated in more than a narrowly geographical sense.
Looking ahead, I will mention another way of talking about this osmotic quality of the forest: it is said to act like a drug, sometimes more, sometimes less powerful, depending on the experience. This power of the forest can be intimidating, and I will mention here a literary example to which we shall return: nausea, or perhaps more the sense of disorientation at sea, which the narrator of Sartre’s La Nausée experiences in the vicinity of a tree or of tree bark.11 Another example is the experience described by Vasiliy Belov, where a great pine tree evokes a sense of reverence in the person felling it.12 We need not enumerate other instances because everybody has felt them at one time or another. There is nothing contrived or artificial about these; on the contrary, they are unexpected and amazing, but feel out of the ordinary only because our habitual ways of looking at the forest are utilitarian or aesthetic. How we came to develop that habit we need not go into, because much more interesting is how insecure it is, how ready to be displaced and to yield to the amazing experiencing of the forest.
A constant feature of the experience of the forest is how intimate it feels, even while it seems intimidating, as in Sartre or as in the figure of the wood demon. The fear that grips us in the forest is not of a kind that we can take practical measures against; it is too much a part of us. We find the demon seems to be within us and that what we fear in him is ourselves, different, altered. When the spirit of the forest is something we desire and are seeking, it feels near and dear to us.
The experience we have of our relatedness to the forest might seem to be pointing us towards the secrets of the sacred grove, through which initiation into the mysteries begins, and there is no call for us to rush to decide which interpretation, the philosophical or the gnostic, is better. Of one thing we can be sure, and that is that every interpretation will be lame, will flounder, which is precisely why a plurality of interpretations is needed. That is why I am so lacking in confidence when I say that the signs might seem to be pointing in a particular direction, and why I believe it is better to indulge that uncertainty. One thing that is clear is that Empedocles, and the ancients generally, were far more at home with and had a much better understanding of the forest than we do, and that their thinking may well include insights we will be hard pressed to keep up with. May these reflections on our experiencing of the forest serve for the time being only to let us see how unartificial this unfamiliar way of seeing, or intuiting, the forest is.
The second doubt hanging over our choice of topic, which some have already voiced, is why particularly wood, the forest, should be singled out. Why not also the meadow, the more so when there are studies on the links between the forest and the meadow? Or why not take as our topic water, earth, sky, the sea? Experiencing the sky or water is no less of an issue for us. We are captivated by the starry sky. Come to that, just about everything captivates us no less than the forest. The first answer is that the earth which Xenophanes saw as infinite, the water which Thales saw as the first principle, could have established themselves in philosophical thought as primal matter, materia, but did not.13 The fact is that it was wood, hyle, the forest, that was adopted, and it is another question whether that came about before or after Aristotle. Perhaps it was an accident and came about simply because Aristotle, while lecturing, was looking for an example of what material eidos, form, is made of and took the nearest object to hand, which happened to be a wooden table. He had a concept for which he needed a name. The name reaches out towards the concept and acquires content. Content is the giving of form to the formless or, in this case, since wood is not formless, to something whose form is of no importance and can be used to provide a foundation for form that is of importance. Form puts its imprint on what it will, on a basis of matter: you can saw a piece of wood and form from it anything you like. This is a traditional and ostensibly philosophical commonplace,