Pinocchio and the Cult of the Trees
30 Sept. 2003
Supplement to the essay Pinocchio. The Puberty Rite of a Puppet.
they, their kings, their princes,
their priests, and their prophets,
who say to a tree, "You are my father,"
and to a stone, "You gave me birth" (Jeremiah, 2:27)
It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood:
Stones have been known to move and trees to speak; ( Shakespeare, Macbeth III iv)
Myths, tales and dreams express psychic contents through the instrument
of symbols, which are condensed representations charged with energies.
Karl Abraham indeed defined myth as a collective dream. Hencefore, the great
effort which must be invested in order to decode it. As in a dream, every
level condenses with another, until the psychic tension finds its equilibrium in the representation.
It is energy which becomes matter through the representation. Therefore, the sustance of matter is an accumulation of energy, which is maintained as representation through the process of repression.
It is not casual that both Joseph, Jesus' father, and Geppetto were
carpenters, and that Geppetto creates man (Pinocchio) from the bulk of
a tree.
We saw that Jesus was hanged to a cross, which is the Tree of Life,
because he had violated the Tree of Knowledge, which is the body - genital
of the god (see Theodor Reik, Myth and Guilt, Braziller, New York 1957).
In the Book of Deuteronomy, it is written:
Apparently, the question is a rethoric one, but the association
is clear, man = tree.
In Ezekiel, is written: Christmas is celebrated with a tree = pino - cchio.
The condensation of the representation goes further.
We can see how Dionysus, Goat and Father, condenses with Dionysus, the
sacred child devoured by the Titans. In the same way, the Tree, which was
Father God himself, condenses with the Son God. Geppetto, carpenter
and himself a tree, becomes Pino - cchio, a child of wood.
Theodor Reik has shown in Myth and Guilt, (op.cit.) that the Tree of Knowledge is the
body and the genital of the Primeval Father. Henceforth, the Original Sin (eating of the Tree of Knowledge) was an act of aggression and cannibalism perpetrated on the genital of the Father. However, there were two trees in the Garden of Eden: The Tree of Knowledge, and the Tree of Life. The former is the Father, and the latter is the Mother. That is the reason why the Lord was concerned that Man would take the Tree of Life only after he had taken possess of the Tree of Knowledge, namely, of the sexual knowledge which belongs to the Father (his genital):
Then the Lord God said: "Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever (Gen. 3:22)
In Israel, when children want to say that speaking with a person is useless,
because he does not listen, they say: "it is like speaking with stones and
trees".
Truth is indestructible. Even through inversions, displacements and
repression, it will always find its way into the surface.
By the way, it seems that Philosopher Benedetto Croce commented that "the wood of which Pinocchio is carved is humanity itself."
Analyzing a dream means decomposing again the synthesis of the matter into
energy, relieving the sufferance inherent in the repression - accumulation.
When the Christian myth tells that Joseph was a carpenter, it is hinting
that he too, the father of a Son - God, had made his son from a
tree.
The Talmud, too, does not speak of crucifixion. Mentioning Jesus it
says: "They hanged Jesus at the eve of Passover” (Sinhedrin 43a).
They did not crucify him, but hanged, as Pinocchio was hanged to the
Big Oak.
Theodor Reik has shown that in antiquity trees and stones
were not just symbols of god but the god himself ("The
Moses of Michelangelo and the Events on Sinai",
Supplement of "Shofar", in Ritual, Psycho-Analytical
Studies, Farrar & Straus, New York 1946).
When the Bible says: "And all the men of Shechem gathered
together...and made Avimelech king, by the oak [= The Big Oak of Pinocchio] of the pillar
that was in Shechem" (Judges 8:6), it did not mean to inform
us on the exact geographical location where Avimelech
was anointed king, but intended to emphasize that the oak (=
the god) of Shechem was witness to his anointment.
Henceforth, the sacredness of the event.
And again: "Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram, and said, "To your descendants I will give this land." So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him"(Gen. 12:6). To the oak of Moreh, meaning, the test unconsciously discloses the mnemonic traces that the tree was the god himself. In him Abram trusted, and to him he sacrificed. The later editor added "The Lord appeared to Abram...he built an altar to the Lord", but he forgot to delete the presence of the oak, which becomes secondary to the Lord. Nevertheless the oak is there, apparently uncalled for. The same in: "And the Lord appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre" (Gen. 18:1). Oaks and the Lord in the same context.
"When you besiege a city for a long time, making war against it in
order to take it, you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an axe against
them; for you may eat of them, but you shall not cut them down. Are the
trees in the field men that they should be besieged by you ?" (20:19)
Furthermore, it is interesting to compare the " ...you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an axe against them" with another verse: " If you make me an altar of stone, you shall not build it of hewn stones; for if you lift up your tool on it, you have polluted it. (Ex. 20:25). In both cases, we face the prohibition of lifting a tool against an object. In the first case against trees, and here against stones. "Wielding an axe"..."lift up your tool on it" are an obvious aggressive act perpetrated against the sacred object, trees and stones, which, according to Theodor Reik (op.cit.) are the god himself.
"And all the trees of the field shall know that I the Lord bring
low the high tree, and make high the low tree, dry up the green tree, and
make the dry tree flourish. I the Lord have spoken, and I will do it"
(17:24).
Meaning, the Lord creates man, who is a tree, and He does with him whatever
He pleases.
In the Book of Judges, we read:
"The trees went out to anoint a king over them" (8:8). Cf: "
As I did stand my watch upon the hill,
I look'd toward Birnam, and anon, methought,
The wood began to move" (Shakespeare, Macbeth V, v).
And in the Psalms:
"
Blessed is the man...He will be like a tree planted by the streams of water, That brings forth its fruit in its season, Whose leaf also does not wither. Whatever he does shall prosper" (1:1-3).
From all the above mentioned quotes, we learn that a tree =
god = man. From the god -tree comes man - tree, as is
written: "God created man, in the likeness of God he made
him" (Gen. 5:2).
When the Prophet complains: "she defiled the land, and committed adultery with
stones and with trees" (Jeremiah 3:9), he means that Israel has committed idolatry, worshiping stones and trees through sacred prostitution, which was the main cult of the Canaanites.
As Reik has shown (op.cit), stones and trees are both the god himself. Prometheus bound to a rock is equivalent to Jesus bound to the tree of the Cross.
Now, Pinocchio in Italian means "pino" (a pine) and "occhio" (an eye), namely, a pine - tree.
In antiquity, the cult of pines and firs was associated with Dionysus,
and in Hellenistic Syria, during the solstice of winter, which is equivalent
to Christmas, they celebrated the resurrection of Dionysus, the Child
- god devoured by the Titans and reassembled by Demeter, through torchlight
- processions (the candles of the Christmas tree) in the forests of sacred
firs dedicated to Dionysus.
At the beginning, Dionysus was the sacred goat, father - Totem of the
Greek tribes, parallel to Jahveh, Totem of the Hebrew tribes, and himself
a ram.
Still in the Hellenistic period, there were coins in which the child - god Dionysus
is represented with the same face of Zeus, the Father - god.
In Orphic myth, Dionysus is born from Persephone, and he bears
horns like a ram. In the representation of the Crib, the horns were removed.
However, the tension engendered by the repression displaced them into the
ox that stands near the sacred Child.
When an element is repressed, it continues to press for recognition,
and expresses itself in the oddest ways.
In archaic psyche, as in our unconscious, identification is reached through introjection (internalization). The cannibals, who eat their enemies, feel that they also acquire the properties of the introjected object. Eating the paternal genital means acquiring his sexual potency. With that sexual potency, they will be able to possess the Tree of Life (the Mother).
From the Bible, we know that the Israelites worshiped trees and stones as gods like their Canaanite neighbors.
The Prophets declared the cult of the trees idolatrous.
However, before the First Exile it had been the main cult of the ancient Hebrews, and not just a prevarication.
The inversion is amazing, because our ancestors did spoke with
stones and trees, begging them to fulfill their wishes.
It seems that no one has paid attention to the true meaning of the idiom "genealogical tree". Apparently, it is only a matter of speech, an allegory, but our unconscious and the ancients did not speak by abstractions and allegories. In our unconscious, as in childish and in archaic psyche, we intend very concrete contents. The concept "genealogical tree" betrays our unconscious belief that we all descend from a god - tree, which is our ancestor, and we are his children. Allegories are only an Ego overlay used as a device of defence, through the process of isolation, with the purpose of taking distance from the concrete contents of our unconscious mind.
Nice hunch, isn't it?
Last but not least, artists are the aptest to interpret collective unconscious contents. Master filmmaker, Akira Kurosawa, in his Dreams presented us the touching scene of a child who converses with peach-tree spirits after the trees have been cruelly cut down. That scene alone tells more than a hundred theories.
The tree that bleeds and speaks, of course, is from Dante's Grove of the Suicides:
Then slowly raising up my hand a bit
I snapped the tiny branch of a great thornbush
and its trunk cried: "Why are you tearing me?"
And when its blood turned dark around the wound
it started saying more: "Why do you rip me?
Have you no sense of pity whatsoever?"
--Inferno, tr. Mark Musa (From: The Stone Mother by Sara Rosenbaum, in http://si.arrr.net/stonemother/stonenotes.html)
Links:
Rembrandt and the Prodigal Son. On Elder and Youngest Sons
Isolamento e qualche gatto
Myth and the Cloacal Theory
On Trees and on Birds