Amerika

Cathedrals of Cellulose

Beyond the call of the forest with its widely celebrated landscape and ecological appeal, there is a subtle call upon the human being, a cry that appeals to its acéphalic, irrational essence.

It is in the forest that man chooses to lose his mind as a methodical way, liberéré de l’emprise de la raison — although at the moment of the rite, this awareness of the method can be lost, which confirms its effect — to enter the unknown, in opposite to the monstrous, grotesque and deformed aesthetics of modern everyday life,  disdained by both the pre-modern and the postmodern.

In the internment in the forest, in the semi-static — because, due to the structure that forms its cell wall, the displacement is almost non-existent — hypnotic, titanic dance, indifferent to human existence as a phylogenetic fact although, perhaps, not so much to man as a being who advances on the spaces that he can colonize; man abandons himself, but  abandons himself off the pre-eminence of humanization. He flees from social architectures for a moment and also from the preponderance of reason, from what binds him to the conventions of society, from what he feels he must respond to society, and from what he feels he must respond to himself in relation to society. He is intentionally beheaded: by inserting his head into the forest, his head disappears from the humanity of man and becomes part of the cathedral of cellulose: acéphalism.

The spatial structure of the forest landscape — in which trees serve as structurers — forms a kind of loggia-nexus between what is below and above (“as above, so below”): a different ecosystem with different keystone processes from the rest of the ecosystems; but also a spatial imaginary with different narratives and meanings from other imaginaries. In this loggia-nexus, different niches, actors, vectors and factors will converge filling with interactions the four-dimensional space-time continuum in where the forest will be located.

Every votive site, vessel of sacredness, is intimately related to the human, to the adscription of meanings and to the vision of the human related to the world that surrounds him but that he has not built. From this admiration for the constructions that come from the Numen is where it arises in man to take his admiration to a plus ultra where the meaning is first imbued with new derivations and new topographies of meanings, later materializing (by the work of the human demiurgos, perhaps shy and ardent in imitator hybris of the monstrous Leontocephalus,  lord of the axis mundi) as temples that capture the pre-existing temple — “Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.”

Thus, the trees become the cellulose pillars of the forest cathedral. Biopolymer pillars where l’acéphale goes inside to sink in and melt itself into the chthonic embrace of the shadow of the wooded cathedral, home of Silvanus.

In his Mystery of the Cathedrals, Fulcanelli mentions that

[t]he cathedral is a work of art goth (gothic art) or of argot, i.e. cant or slang. Moreover, dictionaries define argot as «a language peculiar to all individuals who wish to communicate their thoughts without being understood by outsiders». Thus it certainly is a spoken cabala. The argotiers, those who use this language, are the hermetic descendants of the argonauts, who manned the ship Argo. They spoke the langue argotique — our langue verte (‘green language’ or slang) — while they were sailing towards the felicitious shores of Colchos to win the famous Golden Fleece.

The cathedrals of cellulose mix in their structure elements of the telluric and the uranic, since they are links-lightning rods between the celestial and the terrestrial (living links, unlike the mountain). In this cathedral the alchemical-hermetic wedding of spiritus et anima takes place, which is why in entering the forest there is a call to get lost in it, a call to access the depths of the vault, to the sanctum sanctorum where non est in toto sanctior orbe locus but there is no certainty about whether you are entering or leaving the heart of the forest.

In trekking in the forest, the numinous predominates in the acéphalic vision because, even being during the day, the path that is traveled is through shadows, crackles, hollows and sounds of birds. The initiatic path of the forest demands the abandonment of reason and a therianthropic metamorphosis, because it is there that the wandering bird authentically experiences the hierophany of the forest: the transcendental experience of the beauty of the biopolymeric architecture of the mirrors which the Numen is reflected because, as Augustine of Hippo mentioned in The Order,  true beauty is anchored in divine reality and reflects it, and the contemplation of visual and musical harmony will truly lead the soul to the experience of supreme harmony and unity.

Tags: acephalism, forests, numinous