Concerning 'An Old Soul'

Bob Johnson

10:30 PM (28 minutes ago)

I liked this post very much, I always felt the opposite about forests, felt like I was crawling back into the womb, like Tolkien, felt the trees had spirits, intelligence on a different scale than we humans experience, but still present, maybe Druids felt the same?

-Bob

Sir, when I spend time in wild places just being paved over, like this valley you brought me to, all the while well knowing what my urban and suburban friends and family think of men who hunt in the high places and lonely spaces, the bullshit I have been injected with through academia, media and even horror movies, just falls away like contaminated water.

It is fascinating, that those who embrace the forest as a place to live and retreat rather than as a space to pave or visit, seem to be outliers of modernity, alienated souls. Perhaps we are alienated outsiders because we have somehow retained a level of genetic memory that has been domesticated out of so many of our fellows?

People in suburbs and cities are so corrupted by movie tropes that when I announced that I was visiting two hunting guides in the Rockies 4 years ago my family pleaded with me not to go, to get chipped, etc., unable to envision any reason why mountain men would invite me to their forested mountains other than to hunt me!

From the movie Deliverance and horror flicks from the Hills Have Eyes to most every tale of dread to come from Hollywood, to the news and state only discussing the tiny slice of mass shooters who are pale and have long guns and ignoring the hordes of urban mass shooters, modernity's ruling class and media priesthood have, wittingly or unwittingly kept alive the ancient fear of forests.

There is, however, an even more ancient love of forests, found in our deepest memories and preserved by the members of our lowest castes, including you and I, sons of Eastern Woodland slaves, whose ancestors, being members of the British Isles' lowest class, where in turn descended from the earliest western Europeans, either by matrilineal descent, geographic empathy or cultural appropriation. For, by the time the Romans hit the shores of Albion, the men of the British Isles, the scions of chariot-riding Arуan war bands just like the Proto-Romans, had largely become Sylvan, had been assimilated by the forest. Indeed, when scholars from early modern Europe journeyed to North America, they described the Indians as Sylvids, little different from the French Peasant, Irish Kern or Scottish Highlander in habits, war-making or racial characteristics.

This is the kind of cultural layering that preserves a region's most ancient human characteristics at its lowest social levels. For instance, today, the aristocratic bearing of Old Southern Anglo Gentry is preserved most incompletely in feral negro swag [from descendants of the servants of the vanquished] just as Native American warrior tradition is most completely preserved by the descendants of their conquerors, now hunters and soldiers... from airborne troops yelling, "Geronimo," to pilots operating Apache helicopters, to dear hunters preserving a lifeway unknown to Europeans at the time they discovered the Amerindians. We may also see that the descendants of Arуan, meat-eating invaders of Indian now eat as vegetarians, having been assimilated by the "skinny-fat" civilized cultures that their once mighty nomad ancestors conquered ages ago.

Tolkien and other folklorists, like Campbell, Edison and Frazier, saw the world of Faerie as a window into the deepest past and saw modernity as a monstrous erasing mechanism. In Tolkien elves and dwarves represent the vanished races who had been closest to the land. Hobbits represent children of any age, who begin life—if left alone—mimicking those earliest genetic and spatial ancestors. The orks and goblins represent corrupted humans who have been twisted by slavery and industry, the wraiths and dark lords representing those corrupted by control of slavery and industry, Golum my materialistic obsession, the dog of the puppet master.

The humans represent adults partially corrupted by these things, with the only hope being the cultivation of good among the children and the heroic or esoteric resistance of materialism. The starkest example is Saruman and the Ents, the intelligent eldritch stewards of the forest.

Gandalf obviously relates to Odin and the vanishing self-knowledge of the human race.

In everyday life the notion of an uncorrupt age is given expression in the card suit commonly known as "clubs" in the standard card deck. In the complete Tarot deck of 72, in which the 52-card playing deck is combined with 24 major arcana cards, clubs are not clubs, but "wands" represented by a staff with a cloverleaf on it, in turn representing the peasant class, who would be the genetic or empathetic descendants of the earliest former inhabitants of the world.

These empathetic and genetic regressions are so powerful and deeply embedded that most viewers of King Kong movies cheer on the doomed ape rather than the protagonists of their own species and race.

The person alienated from civilized society in the city and suburbs is most likely to seek the solace of the forest, as is the most aware and traditional of men raised in that now rare and once near universal setting.

I understand that awareness and tradition are supposed to be opposites in the Modern view. But these have, throughout most of history, been regarded as being associated. Conversely, so-called "progressive" worldviews tend to demonstrate the lowest level of awareness concerning the human condition, usually focusing only on materialistic concerns such as security, pleasure and longevity. The typical progressive view sees a champion athlete or heroic person as a tragedy, as his speed, power and dynamism come at the expense of a simpering, lingering longevity. This is not just a modern phenomena. Philosophers of late antiquity saw the heroes and champions of classical antiquity, such as Milo and Polydamas, both Samson-like figures, as tragic fools.

Meanwhile, rural, materialistic aspirants of the modern expression of civilization will rape and pillage their ancestral lands for social currency and the denatured suburbanite and urbanite will fear the forest on multiple levels, one of which is certainly the dread of silence, wildness and solitude within the heart of a person of the din, civic order and the madness of crowds. For a person weaned on projection of mass hysteria, the human being's traditional place of reflection and individual serenity threatens a madness more fearsome than mob panic, for there is no place to hide from oneself in the forest.

The return to the forest, as well as its return, is greeted by many dissidents of postmodernity with enthusiasm. For instance, our mutual friend Baruch in Isrаel, is illegally attempting to restore the ancient trees of his homeland, against the wishes of The State.

I'll be hiking the mountain forests above your valley in the morning—that mountain has been mocking me for four years now and I have experienced a building need to walk under its trees and step on it's rocky brow, an internal urge I can't explain. Perhaps it is as simple as the fact that we are apes, and that the womb of apekind is the forest, where hands count for more than two additional feet. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the forest was sacred to the gods and feared by the folk, and only journeyed into by the hero—which is to say the man who has rejected the artificial hierarchy of civilization, and what is God if not The Beginner, who Aristotle addressed as "The Cause Uncaused."

Thank you.

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