Quest Magazine

Thinking Aloud: The Specialization of Theosophy

By Eldon Tucker

Theosophical Society - Eldon Tucker With each new generation of members in the Theosophical Society, we find the same questions being asked. New members wonder just what this Theosophy is that they're being told about. Is it true? Was it made up by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and her followers? What does it really say? With conflicting texts and a diversity of dissenting views among members, newcomers can be left bewildered, perhaps giving up and moving on to other groups without finding spiritual satisfaction. How did we let them down?

The spiritual effort initiated by Blavatsky and her teachers includes much more that just the Theosophical Society. There are numerous theosophical and related groups that have branched off from the initial Society. Countless individuals and organizations have been affected for the better and may still feel an influence. Looking into the future, perhaps a century or two, we may find still other specializations of theosophical work. Those specializations result from the many possible uses for the theosophical treasury of ideas by groups with differing approaches.

One specialization is the formalization of Theosophy as a well-defined system of thought, a philosophy, with distinctive terminology. This Theosophy has become an intellectual tradition that can be taught and understood by people regardless of their backgrounds. It might be called tip-of-the-iceberg Theosophy, since only the surface meanings can be studied and passed on. The heart of Theosophy requires a spiritual awakening in an individual in order to be understood, and so in this intellectual Theosophy, it may be lost. There are several variations or flavors of this formalized philosophy: (a) Blavatsky-Judge Theosophy, (b) Purucker Theosophy, and (c) Besant-Leadbeater Theosophy. The materials for any of those variations can be carefully compiled and organized, as was done by A. E. Powell for Besant and Leadbeater's materials.

The second specialization is the combination of theosophical ideas with popular thought in various ways. Huston Smith in his books on world religions shows how various systems of thought have arisen to meet the spiritual needs of their times, to revive the heart-life and compassion and the quest for wisdom of a complacent or even decadent people. When we take theosophical ideas and combine them with other ideas, relating them to the way of thinking of various peoples, we are making progress in this direction.

It doesn't take a Krishna to appear and dramatically do all the work for us. We can participate in this effort too, altering the thought and life of those around us. New religions and philosophies can arise either from an evolution of existing systems of thought or from the creation of something completely new. We can help with either of those developments. For such use of the theosophical philosophy, "purity" of the ideas is not important. The important thing is to make something new and useful. The final product--a belief system with a code of life--may not be "perfect" from our point of view, and may even be inaccurate or wrong when considered in terms of the Mystery Teachings, but it may still be a great boon to society. If the effect of a new movement is to better the life of people, leading them back to the path of compassion and the great spiritual quest, then this second specialization of Theosophy has done well.

The third specialization of Theosophy is along the line of a junior school to the Mysteries. It would be somewhat akin to the various Esoteric Schools associated with the existing theosophical groups. These future groups may evolve from the existing ones or be newly founded at some point. With these groups, the emphasis is on keeping the philosophy pure, on depth of understanding, on a living oral tradition of learning and study, by which advanced students train and pass on their knowledge to each succeeding generation. Some groups may be akin to spiritual colleges, training chelas, but not involved in public work, like Theravada Buddhism, the Buddhism of the Elders. Others may take on the trappings of exoteric religions, stress public works, and be like Mahayana Buddhism, the Buddhism that stresses extroverted compassion.

It may take a few generations for the theosophical movement to differentiate or specialize into these different efforts to improve the lot of humanity. Meanwhile, there may be growing tension in theosophical groups over the future direction of the groups. The existing groups appear already to have started on these specializations. The United Lodge of Theosophists seems to have made a good start at promoting a formalized intellectual theosophical philosophy. The Adyar Theosophical Society (ours) seems to have made a good start at melding theosophical ideas with popular thought and thereby planting the seeds for future religious directions. The Pasadena Theosophical Society seems to have made a good start at being a spiritual-training group. All of those groups are, to be sure, more complex and diverse than this generalization.

A key idea with theosophical groups is the freedom of belief that members enjoy. Because of that freedom, it is possible for the membership to entertain many different ideas about the nature of Theosophy and what should be done with it. This freedom is fine for one's personal study, but it can create problems at the organizational level. The way any organization operates and its resources are used depends on the ideas one has about its nature and goal.

Can theosophical groups be democratic? Democratic procedures in arriving at decisions can be healthy and good, just as freedom of belief and expression is also desirable. But for both there must be limits, as expressed in a mission statement, a purpose for the Society. Some members may want to carry forward that purpose and so become workers; other members not in accord with that purpose can find other avenues of expression. As the theosophical movement continues to develop specializations, the selection of groups to belong to and the materials to study will multiply. There will be places where we feel strongly "at home," and other places where we may feel like aliens or outsiders.

A theosophical group is not true to its mission if a surge of new members can vote to throw overboard the old purpose and to do something entirely different. There is plenty of opportunity to found other groups and efforts, and to work side-by-side with other groups, so redirecting existing groups is unnecessary and counterproductive to the work.

This is not to say that existing groups are doing everything they could or are doing things in the best way. There is room for improvement, but that improvement should be evolutionary, not revolutionary.

What is it that is the purpose of our Theosophical Society? The three objects--brotherhood, study of comparative religions, and investigation of the unexplained and latent--fall somewhere between the extremes of a pro-Krishnamurti anarchism where all spiritual authorities (except himself) are rejected and a dead-letter worship of the writings of Blavatsky that would make fundamentalist Christians seem liberal by comparison.

If I could define Theosophy for the Theosophical Society, I'd say that it is a distinct body of esoteric doctrines derived from the Mahatmas, given to us by Blavatsky and perhaps a few other initiates. These doctrines are subject to human error in expression, but are more accurate than the ideas of the homegrown philosophies of those who are uninitiated in the Mysteries. We should teach, promote, and have as a significant goal the keeping of these original fragments of Mystery teachings in their pristine, untainted form. I'd want any theosophical group I join and support to affirm this viewpoint.

The Theosophical Society in America has a large turnover in membership. Is that because people are sampling it and deciding it's not right for them, or because we're doing something wrong, and need to change our approach? From the standpoint of the specialization of the theosophical movement, I'd say that we just need to find something good to do for the world, as a Society, and do it the best we can, and leave it to others to serve the many other needs that the world has.

The Internet is something new. People working with computers, or in college, have had the opportunity to learn about and use it. Others are left wondering what it's all about. It will be helpful in the future to have show-and-tell presentations of what's out there and how people can benefit from it. Even without a computer of one's own, it's still possible to get free e-mail and use a computer at many public libraries, if one is aware of what's available.

There are a number of uses of the Internet that could be looked into. There could be more online publications. There could be an online news-only mailing list, perhaps moderated, with timely information without the high volume of chat and less-nice traffic of typical mailing lists that leads people to unsubscribe. There could be online audio theosophical lectures (using the Real audio encoder program). It's even possible to make online slide-show presentations of Theosophy with associated sound tracks.

Any changes that are made in our Society, I think, should be gradual, evolutionary, arising out of cooperative projects where we all get together to promote Theosophy or better the world. Increased communication among members would arise through a day-to-day interaction, through doing things together, through working for a common purpose. No grand plan, petition, document, constitution, or finished product of thought will evolve the organization. The coming together of members in mind and heart would arise because everyone would be helping formulate, organize, and carry out the work of the Society, rather than in imposing their approach on others, requiring others to do work someone else's way.

Do we want to change the Society? Do we want to work for the philosophy in and through the Society? Then we need to start doing our work, building bridges of cooperation between ourselves and others in the Theosophical Society. There's bountiful work to be done, both in and outside of the Society. Let's simply find something good to do and get going!

The Tree in the Hoop

By Chris Hoffman

Theosophical Society - Chris Hoffman has facilitated human change processes in therapeutic, business, and educational settings for more than twenty years. He is the author of numerous professional articles and poems and is currently finishing a book on the Hoop and the Tree. At the climax of his great healing vision, the nineteenth-century Lakota medicine man Black Elk glimpsed the breathtaking wholeness of the universe. As poetically summarized by Black Elk's interviewer (Neihardt 36; cf Holler xx-xxi, 1, 7, and DeMallie xxii, 129-30), Black Elk saw that he was "standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy."

The essential holiness or wholeness of the universe that brought healing to Black Elk, and to his people, appeared to him through the visual metaphor of the Hoop and the Tree. This image of the Hoop and the Tree is not accidental. It appears not only in Lakota mythology but also in various forms throughout the great wisdom traditions of the world—and indeed in modern psychology and systems science—as an image of the deep structure of wholeness and health both in the universe and in the human soul. It is an image of the beauty at the heart of everything.

The Hoop and the Tree represent two dimensions of the soul, which must be fully developed and in balance with each other for wholeness. Their combined image crystallizes the essence of our collective wisdom in a practical way that helps us to understand how we can grow toward psychological and spiritual wholeness. It also acts as a key to the great variety of spiritual and mythological ways within our human diversity. To understand the wholeness in the combined image, we must look at the separate meanings of each dimension.

The Hoop

The Hoop or circle has to do with all aspects of relationship. When people gather to eat together as a family, to sing songs, or to sit at the knee of a storyteller, they spontaneously form the shape of the Hoop. We speak of our inner or family "circle." Thus all mandalas ("magic circles") and other images of the Hoop are traditional symbols of relationship.

Native Americans honor all their relations through Hoop-shaped medicine wheels and sweat lodges. Taoists use the well-known Hoop of the yin-yang to represent being and "flowing" in right relationship with the way of nature. Psychologists do their healing within the "sacred circle" of the therapeutic relationship. The Hindu Wheel of Rebirth is the Hoop of Relationship viewed through time: I am related to you not just because we are brothers or sisters in this life, but because you may have been my great-grandfather in a previous incarnation and you may be my great-granddaughter in a future incarnation. The Hopi people honor Spider Woman, the Earth Mother, whose web makes the shape of concentric linked Hoops. We are all part of her web--humans, animals, mountains, trees, rivers--and if you touch any part of the web, the whole web will quiver.

The Tree

The Tree has to do with what the poet Robert Bly calls "vertical longing." The psychic dimension of individual growth, aspiration to a high place (something "to live up to," a "higher calling"), and profundity (the "depths of the soul") is a vertical dimension. Jung says that in order to develop one must forge a link between the upper and the lower, the conscious and the unconscious aspects of the psyche (Fordham 76-7). Traditional wisdom, as well as contemporary spiritual and psychological practice, associate this dimension with the imagery of trees, mountains, ladders, and pillars.

Traditional Tree imagery includes the Christian Tree of the Cross, the Scandinavian Yggdrasil or world ash, the Jewish Tree of the Menorah, shamanic ascent and descent via trees and roots, and the spiritual ascent of the Prophet which is the inner reality of Islamic prayer, one of the five Pillars of Islam. Development in the Tree dimension includes ascending for psychological "peak experiences" or contact with the Divine, and growing to become fruitful in our lives. It also includes descending to explore our cultural and psychological "roots." A tree can grow tall only if it has sturdy and far-reaching roots.

Hoop and Tree Together

All the great wisdom traditions teach about the importance of right relationship (Hoop) and also about the importance of individual aspiration toward some state of enlightenment or connection with the Divine (Tree). Some traditions emphasize the Hoop and others emphasize the Tree, but most point to a model of psycho-spiritual wholeness that is Hoop and Tree together.

Christianity, for example, has as its central image the Tree of the Cross, which powerfully represents ascent to connection with the Divine. According to tradition, Christ also descended from this Tree into Hades "to the extreme of its depth" in order to bring healing. Tradition also says that Christ brought the Tree of the Cross to Hades and planted it there as a witness to truth. So the Christian Tree is the axis of the universe, which runs from Hades to Paradise.

Yet the principal sacrament of Christianity is a Hoop ritual. In Holy Communion, the consecrated bread and wine are shared among all. Although the Roman Catholic Church places some restrictions on participation in this sacrament, the early Christian church and the non-Roman denominations all tend to emphasize inclusion and participation. Theologian Harvey Cox says, "Communion is like a family meal, the gathering of old and young, sick and well, around a common table and reminds all those who participate that the goods of the earth should be shared, not hoarded" (Cox 404). Holy Communion and the Cross form the Hoop and Tree of the Christian world.

Jesus Christ himself taught the Hoop-and-Tree way to wholeness. When asked about the best way to live, Jesus replied, "Love the Lord and love your neighbor" (Mark 12.30-1). That is a summary of the Tree and the Hoop teaching--the Tree aspiration to the Lord, and the Hoop relation to the community. Accept Divine love (ascent/descent along the Tree axis) and then give this love to the world (Hoop).

Each summer in the high plains of North America, hundreds of people gather in four-day ceremonies, to pray to a sacred Tree and dance around it in a sacred Hoop. As part of these Lakota sun dances, the dancers carry the spiritual renewal obtained from the Tree out to the wider Hoop of community.

People of European descent come to these dances from as far away as Australia and Germany. It is no wonder the dances resonate for them. For hundreds of years ancient Europeans danced this Hoop-and-Tree pattern in religious observations every spring. Maypole dances were performed not only in England, but also throughout Europe, from Spain to Scandinavia, though the timing of the festival varied, depending on the latitude. The Maypole itself was originally a Tree, freshly cut for each festival and paraded into town with great rejoicing. In a great Hoop round that Tree, the people danced merrily to music, celebrating a great healing--the renewal of life. In this way the Hoop and the Tree shaped one of the most important religious festivals of pre-Christian Europe.

The ancient Greeks centered their world on Mount Olympus (mountains being symbolically cognate with trees), with Zeus ruling from above and Hades from below, while the whole cosmos was bounded on the horizontal plane by the Hoop of Oceanos, who encircled the world at its outermost limits, continuously flowing back on himself in a circle.

The Tree in the Buddhist story is the bodhi tree, under which Buddha attained enlightenment, after which he carried the blessings of his achievement out into the community. His initial work of teaching is known as turning the Wheel of the Dharma, the Hoop. There is a form of shrine, widespread in the Buddhist world, called a stupa. The stupa acts as a reminder of the shape of wholeness. It is said to be "an abstract image of the state of enlightenment attainable by all beings" (Landaw and Weber 42). This shape of wholeness takes the form of a Hoop (mandala) extended upward along the Tree axis.

Judaism includes the Hoop and the Tree in the mystical practice of Kabbalah, which presents a route to the Divine called the Tree of Life, or Otz Chiim. One may follow this path to wholeness by meditating on the fruits of this Tree, called Sefiroth, literally "spheres," depicted as circles (Hoops) on the Tree. In the Kabbalistic story, the primordial ideal human, Adam Kadmon, was patterned on the Tree of Life with its Sefiroth. Thus the ideal image of wholeness has Hoops in balance on the Tree.

The Sufis of Islam actually move the shape of wholeness into the body through the celebrated dance of the "whirling dervishes" of the Mevlevi order. The dervishes start whirling slowly, spreading their arms like wings, the right palm turned upward toward the sky to gather divine grace, and the left palm turned downward to give it to the earth. The dancers whirl faster and faster to a supreme moment of union. Each dancer turns full 360-degree circles, experiencing the Koran's teaching that "wheresoever you look, there is the face of God." Here we have clearly the shape of the Hoop--the whirling--and the shape of the Tree--the upright bodies together with the hands passing grace from up to down.

The Tantric teachings of Hinduism describe the fully developed self with a Hoop-and-Tree model. According to Tantra, the human body has a set of energy centers distributed along the spine. These energy centers are called chakras, a Sanskrit word meaning "wheel." Since Hindu symbolism depicts the spine as a Tree, Tantra represents wholeness with these wheels or Hoops in alignment on the Tree.

The San Bushmen of the Kalahari practice a remarkable technology for healing and spiritual growth, which exemplifies the Tree growing within the Hoop. This practice is the !kia-healing dance (the exclamation point representing one of the four clicking sounds in their language). Within a Hoop of singers and musicians, the practitioners of !kia experience a spiritual ascension along the Tree axis toward the divine. During !kia, a practitioner may perform cures, handle fire or walk on it, have x-ray vision, see over great distances, or converse with supernatural powers. Like the good shaman or Buddhist bodhisattva, the !kia master ascends the Tree for the benefit of the community. The point is not so much in experiencing transcendence as in bringing back its fruits. To experience !kia without doing any healing would be seen as a misuse of the !kia-related powers. Here the Tree grows within the Hoop for the benefit of the Hoop.

Someone once asked Sigmund Freud to say what a healthy person ought to be able to do and do well. Freud's answer was pithy: "to love and to work" (lieben und arbeiten). Now if we understand "to work" in the sense of working toward something, then Freud's definition of health was the Hoop and the Tree: the Hoop of relationship and the Tree of aspiration.

Carl Jung was even more explicit. He analyzed thousands of dreams in his lifetime and digested an almost unimaginable amount of the world's literature on mysticism, religion, and philosophy. One of the fruits of this prodigious labor was Jung's concept of the archetype of the Self, a model of psychological and spiritual wholeness.

Jung found that symbols of the Self appear universally in dreams, visions, active imagination, and works of art, particularly spiritual or religious art. What does this symbol of psycho-spiritual wholeness look like? The Hoop and the Tree. Jung said, "If a mandala [Hoop] may be described as a symbol of the Self seen in cross section, then the tree would represent a profile view of it: the Self depicted as a process of growth" (Jung 253).

The world's wisdom traditions offer countless other examples of the Hoop-and-Tree pattern of wholeness. Perhaps this is because even the helix of our DNA carries the shape of an extended Hoop spiraling around a Tree axis. The pattern is coded in the very basis of life.

Complementary Dimensions

The Hoop and the Tree are two dimensions of wholeness, neither of which is complete in itself, neither of which is "better" than the other. They are different and complementary. The Hoop has a female tone, the Tree a male tone. The meaning of the Hoop is relational; the meaning of the Tree is aspirational. Together the Hoop and the Tree offer a model of integrating community and individuality, a way to increased understanding between men and women, and an image of what is needed for a person, or a society, to come into balance and wholeness.

We can say that the Hoop is the image by which self talks to self about the Greater Self in which we all are connected. It is through the Hoop that we connect with other living beings, with the rocks, the soil, the air, the green and growing things, the dying and the dead that fertilize new life, the person we once were, and the person we will be. The Hoop has to do with hearing the beat, getting with the rhythm, feeling the music of what is, and skillfully entering in with just the right amount of effort. The Hoop is oneself as the process of relating.

This also means that from the Hoop perspective, psycho-spiritual wholeness consists of being in relationship appropriately, imbalance is incomplete or inappropriate relationship, and healing occurs when one is restored to appropriate relationship. The Hoop says that the heart of the universe cleaves fast to your own heart, as close as lovers' hearts one to the other. We have only to stop, perceive, and be. Practice of the Hoop dimension begins the end of loneliness and alienation.

Whereas the Hoop is the affiliative aspect of wholeness, the Tree is the autonomous aspect. The Tree is a double metaphor. It stands for the great central axis of the entire cosmos, around which everything revolves, and it stands for the central axis of our own psychological and spiritual being, around which our individual experience of life revolves.

To the psyche, the Tree represents the growing core of the whole self; it is the emphasis on individual development. The Tree is the valiant sprouting of each individual life force, and each individual's urge to bear fruit. The Tree is the image by which self talks to self about its interior growing core, the core that aspires to skill, wisdom, and contact with the Divine—the core that knows where it stands in the world and that is able to draw nourishment from its ancestry and from sleep, dreams, and unconscious processes. Practice of the Tree dimension roots us in the universe and gives us strength to reach our highest ideals.

An Image of Healing

Though we live in an era of shriveled Hoop and truncated Tree, the Hoop and the Tree together give us a robust model for healing ourselves and our society.

One example of a Hoop-and-Tree approach to healing is the twelve-step recovery program pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous. In this program you ascend the Tree by turning your will and life over to the care of the Divine, and descend into the darkness of the Tree's roots through a searching and fearless moral inventory. Then you work on mending your Hoop through making amends to all. The twelfth step is a classic Hoop-and-Tree integration: "Having had a spiritual awakening [Tree] as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs [Hoop]."

As the wisdom traditions show, the Hoop-and-Tree model is yet more profound and robust than the powerful twelve-step model. As just one example, the Hoop dimension relates us to all the universe, not just to other human beings. From the Hoop perspective we cannot be fully whole unless we act in right relationship to the entire living planet and all of its peoples and creatures by reducing, reusing, and recycling. The Hoop-and-Tree image also teaches the good news that at our best we are all ecological beings. We all belong here, we are home.

References

Cox, Harvey. "Christianity." In Our Religions, ed. Arvind Sharma, pp. 357-423. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993.
DeMallie, Raymond J. The Sixth Grandfather. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.
Fordham, Frieda. An Introduction to Jung's Psychology. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968.
Holler, Clyde. Black Elk's Religion: The Sun Dance and Lakota Catholicism. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995.
Jung, C. G. Alchemical Studies. Collected Works 13. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967.
Landaw, Jonathan, and Andy Weber. Images of Enlightenment. Tibetan Art in Practice. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1993.
Neihardt, John G. Black Elk Speaks. New York: Pocket Books, 1972.

Chris Hoffman has facilitated human change processes in therapeutic, business, and educational settings for more than twenty years. He is the author of numerous professional articles and poems and is currently finishing a book on the Hoop and the Tree. His web site is www.hoopandtree.org .

A Tree Out There

John P. O'Grady

It has been said that each of us has a tree out there somewhere.

The difficulty these days is that you have to go in search of it. In former times it was customary—and in some places may still be—to plant a tree for good luck when a baby is born. Thus one's tree was right there in the yard, and it would grow with the child. Between them they enjoyed an intimate rapport with life, a shared destiny.

This symbolic tree was carefully tended, and if it flourished, so did the human being, but if it was afflicted with blight or if it perished, the corresponding human life suffered a fate in kind. There was an affinity between the arboreal and human realms, expressed in a language unbound by any dictionary. I have heard it said that if you know how to "read" your tree, you have a most effective oracle. All you have to do is go out there and find it.

Prince Siddhartha searched many years before finding his tree, but when he did, he sat himself down in its shade and became the Buddha. Adam and Eve found their way to a tree, one of two that grew in the Garden of Eden. It was called the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. For reasons of his own, God had told the couple to stay away from it, but they ignored the warning and ate of its fruit. God found them out and was vexed; he banished them from the Garden before they could get to the other tree. My friend Jan VanStavern found hers, a venerable maple, growing in front of her childhood home. Upon returning from school each day, she would throw her arms around it in a great embrace. Today she measures the character of those who enter her life by hugging them: the noble souls feel like the old maple tree.

I caught a glimpse of my own tree once, when I was a boy growing up in New Jersey. It was an early morning in mid-October and the trees were putting on their autumn glory. The day was still in shadow. At the edge of our backyard stood an ordinary shagbark hickory, a tree I had never paid much attention to. A hard frost the night before had fringed the hickory's golden leaves. I happened to be looking out the back window of our house when the rays of the morning sun first glanced off the tree's uppermost boughs. The tip of that shagbark suddenly became a golden flare, a flaming sword turning every which way, guarding who knows what gate.

Then just as suddenly, the shagbark let go its uppermost leaves and poured forth a slow, golden cascade upon the lawn. As the sun rose higher and its light fell lower on the tree, the same process—a moment of brilliance followed by a saffron rain of leaves—repeated itself, again and again, down the length of the canopy. For ten minutes or more I watched this go on, until the sun had undressed that tree entirely. I can't remember exactly what happened next—certainly some spectacular shift in consciousness would have been in order—but sights such as this are lost on suburban boys, and likely I went back to my Saturday morning cartoons. My tree remained unclaimed.

In high school I came across a quote by St. Bernard: "What I know of the divine," he says, "I learned in the woods." This seemed like a modest improvement upon the Catholicism I was raised in. Shortly after that I read Walden—another improvement—and decided that I, too, would go to the woods. So in college I moved to Maine and majored in forestry, where I was taught that "trees are America's renewable resource."

"Resource" is one of those funny words, commonly used but only understood uncommonly. Originally it was a verb and meant "to go back to the well (i.e., the source) and get more water." Later it came to mean a substance or material recognized to have utility for society, something that can be quantified, assigned a value, and applied to a purposeful end. Usually a resource is consumed progressively as it serves its purpose, but trees we say, because of their " renewability," escape this fate. Nowadays we speak of human resources, the renewability of which, I suppose, depends upon your faith.

In my senior year, I took a culminating course called "Forest Economics." It was not designed for those who would live in the woods. In an everyday sense, the word "economics" refers to the management of the household—making the bed, buying the groceries, balancing the checkbook—but in the university, economics is said to be "the study of the allocation of scarce resources." Applied to trees, this definition leads to some strange ways of talking. "In terms of production," the professor explained, "trees are unique because they are simultaneously the factory and the product. If only we could find some way to encourage them to harvest themselves, then we'd really be in business!"

Little of this style of thinking ever proved useful to me, but I still recall the slides the forestry professor showed of an old-growth redwood stand in California. The lecture hall all at once felt more like a cathedral than a mausoleum, and those photographic images might just as well have been stained glass. The redwoods towered with their greenness and handsome branches, their crowns lost in a misty rustle among the coastal clouds. Later, when I finally made it to California, I learned that the birds of heaven, here called marble murrelets, nested in the lofty redwood boughs, and ten thousand mysteries were lodged in the fern-thickened shade of the forest floor. The professor said nothing of all this; his mind was elsewhere. "Hurry up and get out there and see these trees now," he said. "All those senescent stands will be harvested within the next ten years. Even age rotations are what those timberlands need. Good forest management will take care of that."

The message was clear: in these American woods, there is no past, no poetry, only the bottom line; no ghost, no god in the tree nor angel in the air, but only the feathery schemes of experts who have the forest all figured out. When I graduated from the University of Maine in 1980, I had a B.S. in Forestry and they gave each graduate a white pine seedling, but still I had not found my tree.

Proverbs are the original field guides to life. In Russia it is said that from all old trees comes either an owl or a devil, and this wisdom holds true in North America as well. Local legends and vernacular histories abound with tales of strange goings-on connected with trees. Near High Point, New York, for instance, there is the story of Rowland Bell, a barefooted fiddle player who lived in a log cabin and had quite a reputation as a healer. He would cut a lock of his patient's hair and place it in the hole of an aged chestnut tree that grew along the road nearby. The tree would then shake and tremble like an aspen and the patient would be cured, the malady having been shifted to the tree. But that was a hundred years ago; chestnut blight has long since killed that tree, and today managed health care tries to keep most people out of the woods.

On the campus of a small college in the northeast there is an ancient oak known as the "Chewing-gum Tree." Its trunk, from the base to as high as you can reach, is sheathed in a thick layer of hardened gum wads, the residuum of several decades of ruminating students who disposed of their spent quids by sticking them to the tree. The word around campus is that if you walk by this oak at midnight you can hear a faint murmuring or buzzing coming from it, said to be the voices of all those gum-chewing students from the past, still discussing long-forgotten exams or the joys and sorrows of youthful love. Some students believe that if you ask this oak a question about your future, it will tell you. Privately the administrators at the college regard the tree as an eyesore and even a health hazard (all those generations of germs!), but they fear removing it because it is supposed to have been planted by the college founder; to cut it down would be seen—at least in the eyes of alumni benefactors—as tantamount to cutting down the family tree.

The old shamans who lived in the thickly wooded Pacific Northwest had a strong spiritual connection with trees, much like the druids had with the oak in Europe. Through an assortment of rituals and charms, the shaman used his or her tree as a spiritual helper to ascend into the sky and consult with various cosmic beings in order to gain news of the other world. Among the Salish people, one of the most powerful spiritual helpers was known as "Biggest Tree," and it was reported to aid the shaman in obtaining special gifts made from cedar. These little gifts were in fact "alive" for those who had the power to perceive and use them.

A similarly magical worldview lies at the very roots of the Great Western Tradition. In ancient Athens there was a religious sect known as the theoretikoi, who resorted to thick forests and quiet groves in order to conduct their meditative practices. When discussing the psyche, Aristotle often uses the term theoria, the root of our word "theory." Roughly translated it means "contemplation," but it can also mean "sending ambassadors to an oracle." Perhaps this was the Greek way of seeking "Biggest Tree." After all, the most famous of their oracles was the one at Dodona, which originally consisted of an immense old oak with a spring gushing from its base. Through the rustling of its leaves and the remarkable doves that alighted in its boughs, Zeus announced his supreme will to human beings. That old oak stood and delivered its sacred messages to many centuries of eager querents, until a robber came along and cut it down. When the tree fell, the oracle fell silent forever.

Once upon a time in Japan, there was an old willow growing beside a stream. Nearby was a temple. On the other side of the stream was a village. One day the villagers felt they needed to build a bridge, so they decided the tree should be cut down and used to supply timber. One young man among them, however, loved and respected the willow. He alone remembered that the temple had been built in the first place by their ancestors to honor that very tree. He offered other trees from his own land to the bridge builders if they would spare the willow. They agreed, and so it was saved from the axe.

Shortly after that, the young man encountered a beautiful young woman sitting under the willow. They agreed to marry, but she told him he could never ask where she was from nor who her parents were. The two lived happily together for many years. The man grew very old and frail, but his wife remained young and beautiful.

Then one day the Emperor decided a new temple should be built. The village offered the willow to supply the lumber, believing that this would bring them good fortune. On the morning the tree was being felled, the man who had once saved the willow was awakened by his wife. "I am the spirit of the willow," she said. "Because you saved me once, I married you to make you happy, but now I must leave you forever. The willow is about to die, and so must I, for we are one and the same. I go now to the willow." And with that, she went away.

The world's largest American elm stands in Louisville, Kansas—or so it did until March of 1997, when "an angry youth," according to the Manhattan Mercury newspaper, tossed a firebomb into a hollow of its massive trunk. Residents of Louisville, Kansas, were strongly attached to their elm and are deeply grieved over its loss. "This random act of violence," wrote one commentator, "not only ruins a lovely, highly prized tree, it ruins a champion from a species that is seen all too rarely these days. An outbreak of Dutch elm disease in the 1960s wiped out a large portion of our nation's elms, especially in cities, where elm-lined streets became barren."

In America, we love our trees and keep track of the biggest in each of the species. I have visited a few of them myself. Even though none of them turned out to be my tree, they do belong to somebody. In Louisville, Kansas, there is talk about placing a memorial shelter and plaque at the site of the immolated elm. That all trees felled by human hands should receive such homage!

Earlier in this century, Aldo Leopold wrote that conservation is "a matter of what a man thinks about while chopping, or while deciding what to chop. A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of the land. Signatures of course differ, whether written with axe or pen, and this is as it should be." Signatures, I suspect, are written with a far wider variety of instruments than merely axe or pen. It would be worthwhile to talk with that "angry youth" and find out on whose behalf he was acting. Was it his tree?

At the center of Nordic mythology was the World Tree, called Yggdrasil. It was described as an immense ash rooted in Hell but the boughs of which supported Heaven. In between lay the Earth. The trunk of the World Tree was an axis that linked human beings to those who dwell above as well as to those below. There was a prophecy that, at the end of the world, Yggdrasil would provide shelter to the last man and woman, and from them would sprout a new lineage. The Old Norse word Yggr, which is related to the English word "ogre," is another name for the god Odin, supreme deity and creator of the cosmos. To hang a man on the gallows was to string a sacrifice on Yggr's tree; after death he became a member of Odin's band, riding the storms with him.

To "baffle" a person once meant to subject him to public disgrace or infamy by hanging him upside down from a tree, a horrifying reversal of everything that person stood for. A public hanging, or any form of execution, is a ritual moment of suspense, requiring witness: what hangs in the balance is a question of transformation. The gallows is but one tree hung between two others. Our coffins are made of trees.

Indeed, death traditionally has been portrayed as a forester. He was called holz-meier, or "wood-mower," by the sixteenth century German writer Kaiserberg. In a book entitled De arbore humana, he writes: "So is Death called the village-mower or wood-mower, and justly hath he the name, for he hath in him the properties of a wood-cutter, the first of which is communitas, he being possessed in common by all such as be in the village, and being able to serve them all alike. So is the wood-cutter common to all the trees, he overlooketh no tree, but heweth them all down." Along the Columbia River, the Indians' custom was to place the bodies of the dead in boxes and sling them by cedar-bark cords from the branches of trees; eventually the cords would give way, and the bones would be strewn upon the ground like fallen leaves.

A logger in Oregon once appeared on network news. A reporter had come out to the woods to interview him at work. He took time out from his labors to answer the reporter's questions. The logger was very polite. He wore a hard hat. He resented environmentalists because they all lived in the city and said they loved the forest but knew nothing about it. "How can you love what you don't know?" For his part, the logger was intimate with the forest, having cut down a good bit of it. He did not live in the city. He knew what he loved and stood by it. Behind him stretched a vast swath of open land; stumps and slash indicated a recently removed forest.

The reporter could not resist a certain irony. She pointed to the clear-cut. "How is this love?"

Not a fair question to be asked on national television, but as that man now looked out in hopeless confusion upon the field of his endeavors, the inexplicable terrain of his love, he was desperately looking for something. Maybe his tree.

"I do love the forest," he said at last. "This doesn't look good, I know—but my family....I'm sorry that what we have to do is so ugly."

The words of another spiritual forester come to mind. "Too late I learned to love Thee," writes St. Augustine in his Confessions, "O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! Too late I learned to love Thee! And behold, Thou wert within and I abroad, and there I searched for Thee; deformed I, plunging amid those fair forms which Thou hadst made. Thou wert with me, but I was not with Thee." Now here's a fellow who found "Biggest Tree."

To find your own tree, a transition needs to be made. But of what kind? In psychoanalytic theory, a "transitional object" refers to something used by a child as a kind of emotional comforter. Typically it is a piece of cloth or a doll or a teddy bear. In their theory, psychoanalysts regard the transitional object as a psychological bridge that enables the child to cross from "primitive narcissism" to a more mature emotional attachment to human beings, which are the only appropriate hooks on which to hang our love, or so they say. Thus in a small child, a deep and powerful attachment to a teddy bear, or a tree, is considered normal, but in an adult such fondness for the nonhuman is a sure sign of neurosis, or worse.

Nevertheless, there seems to be something a little off about this way of describing how the innumerable relations out there compose our respective worlds. The wrong theory is a major handicap to finding your tree. Pigeons alighting in the boughs at Dodona, murrelets in a redwood tree—things my forestry professors never spoke of. A lady once complained to the great American artist James McNeill Whistler that she did not see the world he painted. "No, ma'am," he replied. "But don't you wish you could?"

Earlier I mentioned that there were two trees in the Garden of Eden, and that Adam and Eve found and tasted but one of them, the Tree of Knowledge. The other tree, the tree they never attained, was in fact the biggest tree in the Garden, the one that God guarded most jealously. It was the Tree of Life. "And the Lord God said, Behold the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the Tree of Life, and eat, and live forever...." And so Adam and Eve were driven away, into endless generations of longing. What the Bible fails to report, but is well attested by legends surrounding the story, is that for the rest of their lives, Adam and Eve kept trying to find their way back, not for the Garden itself nor for any home they wished to reclaim, but for the Tree they never found.

After I spent most of my growing-up years daydreaming of trees far north and west of New Jersey, a perverse law of compensation would have it that, as I stand on the threshold of middle age, living in the dark woods of Idaho, much of my dreamlife should now be spent back in the Garden State. The other night, for instance, I dreamed of that hickory tree in our old backyard. It's been twenty years since last I saw it, yet there it was again in all its flaring, turning glory. This time, instead of remaining in the house, I rushed out into the yard in order to throw my arms around its trunk and claim my tree as it shed its golden treasure of leaves upon me and the leaf-gold lawn.

But I woke up before I got there.

John P. O'Grady, whose previous articles in the Quest include "Looking for the Dutchman's Treasure" (See March-April 1999 > Looking for the Dutchman's Treasure) and "Translating the World," is still looking for his tree in Idaho, where he teaches a wide variety of literature classes at Boise State University.

Viewpoint: Trees Around Us and Within Us

By John Algeo

Archetypes are persistently re-created. One of the most enduring of archetypes is that of the tree. Why human beings should resonate so strongly to the image of a tree is mysterious. Evolutionary biologists might propose that it is because, in our phylogenetic past, we were tree-dwellers and so have a hankering for our arboreal first homes. Fundamental literalists might suppose that it is because we have inherited, along with original sin from the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, an unsated desire for the fruit of the Tree of Life.

Apart from any explanation why, the fact is that we are attracted to the image of the tree. Consider a few of them. The Edenic Trees of Knowledge and of Life had offshoots in the Kabbalistic tree of Life and in the Tree of the Cross on which Christ was crucified, which Medieval legends held to be made from wood of the Tree of Life. The Buddha reached enlightenment by sitting under the Bo Tree of Wisdom. Odin became the god of wisdom by hanging on a tree, perhaps Yggdrasil, the world ash tree that unites heaven, earth, and hell. The druids, Celtic wizards whose name means "tree," worked their magic in oak groves. The Bhagavad Gita has a tree that grows upside down, with its roots in heaven and its branches in the world. In Tibet a marvelous kumbum tree grows with mystical symbols from the mystery language Senzar on its leaves and bark.

In addition to mythological ones, there are other trees throughout our culture, our bodies, and our environment. We have family trees as diagrams relating us and our kinfolk. Philologists construct language trees to show how tongues like Latin, Sanskrit, and English are related historically. Logicians, electrical engineers, and computer scientists all draw trees to depict connections. Our vascular and nerve systems are treelike in their forms, and so are river systems. Although the gallows tree is no longer a familiar sight, it echoes in our racial memory. There is something fundamental and ultimate about trees and tree shapes.

And, of course, there are also Christmas trees. Today we are likely to imagine that Christmas trees have always been associated with the holiday as part of the "Old English" celebration of the Yuletide. But in fact, they are relatively recent in America and even more so in England. The Christmas tree developed in Germany as a blend of pagan and Christian symbols and was brought to America in the seventeenth century by German settlers. The Christmas tree did not become common in England until two hundred years later, when it was introduced there by Queen Victoria's German husband, Prince Albert.

This Christmas-season issue of the Quest has appropriately two articles about trees. In "The Tree in the Hoop," Chris Hoffman compares the universal symbol of the tree with that of the hoop or circle as complementary expressions of wholeness. In "A Tree Out There," John P. O'Grady explores the intensely personal aspect of the mythological tree: we each have a special tree somewhere, and we have to find it.

At this time of year, most homes have a Christmas tree in them. Trees are all around us. Trees are inside us, in our bodies and in our minds. We ourselves are the tree of Christ, re-created, not just annually, but from moment to moment, perpetually.

Oz - Annotated

Preprint from Quest.

The Annotated Wizard of Oz: "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" by L. Frank Baum;Pictures by W. W. Denslow. Ed. with an Introduction and Notes by Michael PatrickHearn. Centennial ed. Preface by Martin Gardner. New York: Norton, 2000.Hardback, $39.95, cii + 396 pages + color plates.

This is, for the time being, the definitive edition of the Great AmericanFairy Tale, Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz. The text of the 1900 first edition is reprinted with its illustrations and a plethora of informative notes about the text, allusions, and analogs. The front matter includes a ninety-page"Introduction to The Annotated Wizard of Oz," which is the fullest and most detailed available biographical account of the book and its author. It even treats Baum's Theosophical and related interests (pp. xc-xciv), though it does not adequately recognize the importance that those interests had for Baum andThe Wizard. The volume is abundantly illustrated, in addition to Denslow's original drawings, with black and white and full-color photographs and reproductions. A fourteen-page bibliography covers Baum's work and important studies of Baum and Denslow. For all devoted Ozzians, this is The WonderfulWizard of Oz bible.

Quest Magazine

Thinking Aloud: The Specialization of Theosophy

The Tree in the Hoop

A Tree Out There

Viewpoint: Trees Around Us and Within Us

Oz - Annotated

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