Bones of the World: An Occult Reminiscence - Written by Equanimous Rex, A.A.O.

 

When I was a child, growing up in rural Maine, I was always fearful of the forest. This was particularly unfortunate as Maine is the most forested state in the U.S., being about 90% covered in the stuff. The state also swallows up the northern tip of the Appalachian mountains.  It is a hilly, woody, wet place in the summer. Icy and frozen in the winters. A lot of people, when they think of Maine, think of ocean-side tourist traps, lobster shacks, and so on. They think of Vacationland. While my ancestors had a claim to “New World”  maritime life —a couple hundred years back, before the United States even existed— I myself was not raised and have never lived on the coast. I was a forest Mainer through-and-through, the coast was for lobstermen and affluent out-of-staters. As such, the forest was a constant looming companion. Roads are cut into it, houses and lawns are etched from it, but you never lose the sense of being surrounded. 

My earliest memories are of living in what passes as a city in Maine —which, now that I am older, I realize are quite small when compared to places like N.Y.C., Philadelphia, Denver, etc— but by the time I was seven or so, my parents decided to move to a small town. Their decision was pragmatic, an attempt to move beyond the poverty, crime, and violence we began to see around us. Much of Maine is very poor, despite the polished tourist traps. Later, when I'd learn more about my family history, I'd think of leaving the “city” as our familial return, a return to the forests we had lived for hundreds of years before being burned out by the British, before being pulled south to Maine by the economic promises of textile and paper mills. Though perhaps not the same exact place in the forest, it was nevertheless connected. It would not be incorrect to say that it is really all one big forest, the New England–Acadian ecoregion to be exact. My family may have moved south, to Maine, in an attempt to seek a better life working in the factories and mills, but the New England-Acadian ecoregion doesn’t care about man-made borders. 

 

Cephas - North America second level political division 2.svg Terrestrial ecoregions of North America : a conservation assessment. Taylor H Ricketts; et al. Washington, D.C. : Island Press, ©1999. xxiv, 485 p. : ill. (some col.), maps (some col.) ; 28 cm. (ISBN 9781559637220)

The Trailer Park

My childhood home —excepting the early handful of apartments— was a trailer. It was not even a double-wide. The trailer started its life in a trailer park, and ended it on a plot of land. The trailer park was generic, dirty, and forgettable.  The most vivid memory I have of it was that it was surrounded by what seemed to me at the time to be a forest of infinite depth. My first encounter with the real woods. It never seemed to end. I certainly never found the end of it.

The trailer park was one long road with lots on either side, each with a trailer sitting upon it. The property boundary was —as so many property boundaries are in Maine— a crude stone wall about knee-high that ringed the outer limits. I do not know who made it, and there is an estimated 100,000 miles of these sorts of short stone walls spread throughout New England, so I never even questioned it. They were the bones of our human world. The division between civilization and the wild, right in our backyard. Palpable. 

Despite this, I rarely went very far into the woods. They were dark, even during the day, and full of strange noises. The other trailer park children and I, my little brother included, would however occasionally wander off to specific places of interest. It was safer, and more comforting, to venture as a group.  Often, it would have been an older sibling, or a parent, who would point out these spots to the younger kids. I don't remember exactly how I knew about Dead Man's Rock, for example, or the similarly poetic Dead Man's Tree —I do not know who named them, but this is what we called them.

 

The rock was, to my recollection, a massive boulder, half-sunk into the ground. This is at least what it appeared to be to me at the time. It had the appearance of a dome, and was taller than myself. In the middle ran a giant crack, wide enough for smaller children and myself to squeeze through. I still remember the sensation of my head dipping below the apex of the rock, fully enclosed by stone except for above, behind, and beyond. It felt like I had been swallowed up by the rock, and some part of me believed every time I passed through it that it would rumble closed, squishing me, trapping me forever. It never did, to my knowledge.

The tree —Dead Man's Tree— was a massive dead tree, which had fallen between two small hillocks, creating what passed to us children as a bridge. It wasn't very high up, I think now, but then it seemed quite dangerous. We took the task of crossing it quite seriously, often making all sorts of promises, vows, and declarations, in the way children of a certain age will, if left to their own devices. We'd swear things on our lives, on ours immortal souls, on our favorite playing cards, and say such-and-such, like "if I don't cross this tree I'll burn in Hell", to spur each other on, to embolden ourselves —we didn't want to burn in Hell when we died! The crossing back and forth was, in retrospect, stuffily somber and ritualistic for make-believe, and the memory has a tinge of humor.

The trailer park was also full of animals, most of them domesticated, but with the odd wild visitor as well. My family had two dogs, both mutts. We also had an indoor cat. Other cats, outdoor cats, came and went, because of the fisher problem. Fishers, or fisher-cats as they're sometimes called, are a type of big weasel type critter that live out in the northeastern woods. Most of the U.S. doesn't have them. They are known to eat a wide variety of things, including foxes, rabbits, and cats. I never saw one once growing up, but I've seen them since —usually driving around at night— so I do know they keep a low profile. They were blamed for a rash of cat disappearances in the area of the trailer park. We had lost a cat as well, though I only hazily remember this. I also remember a neighbor's rabbits, kept in outdoor hutches, were killed, and it was blamed on the fishers. When I was little, I imagined the forest teeming with black-eyed weasels, waiting to snatch up beloved pets and devour them bones and all. 

“A fisher climbing a tree at night.”

There were the usual array of wildlife, skunks and raccoons that would dig through garbage, deer and foxes, the occasional whisper of a bear or mountain lion. Birds of all sorts chirped and hunted. The only thing we really seemed to lack was lizards. Instead, we had amphibians. Toads were my favorite, and were harder to find than salamanders. One time, I had collected a selection of toads in a plastic pail, so that I could observe them. One of the other trailer park boys —I think he might have been around age thirteen, and whose name I cannot recall— traded me a hermit crab for a little toad. He had taken the crab from the ocean, he told me, having just arrived back home from a trip to the beach.

 

I was very happy with this trade, because it was my parent's rule that I could not keep toads as pets, because they would die in captivity —this argument always convinced me, since I didn't want them to die— but in my mind a hermit crab required care lest it die. If someone didn't take care of it, it wouldn't last long. I got a bowl, water, added salt, and put the crab in the water. Despite my efforts it  died within hours. I was distraught, incapable of saving the damned thing. I remember the other boy came back some time later, saw the dead crab, and then held out a fist. He told me he had something to show me, and when I asked what it was, he opened his hand, palm up. Sitting on his palm was the small toad I had traded him earlier that day, but something was wrong with it. My brain couldn't figure out what at first, and I wasn't sure what I was looking at. It finally clicked, though, that what I was looking at was the toad, but with all of it's legs cut off. It was dead, and the older boy had killed it. 

The furthest I ever ventured into the woods was with my father. One winter, in lieu of buying a Christmas Tree, he brought me into the forest. The only thing other than our winter clothes, and my father's pack of smokes, was a hatchet. We went far beyond the stone wall that marked the edge of the trailer park property. There was what seemed to be a mountain of snow on the ground left behind by the previous night's snowstorm. I don't know how deep the snow was, because I was so small, but I seem to remember it going at least knee deep. It felt like we walked forever. Eyes peeled for our prize, we finally settled on a specimen. My dad chopped the poached pine and hauled it home. It was a glorious thing. The tree was a perfect Yuletide sacrifice. Later, when it had turned brown, and the snow had long melted, we burned it to ash. 

The Plot of Land

Eventually we moved, taking the trailer with us and dropping it on a couple acres. It was the first time my parents owned land. I was a little older, ten or twelve, something like that. We had a small front yard, and back yard, and the outer rim of the woods made up of scrubby, stunted foliage —opportunistic plants taking advantage of the disturbed ecosystem, indicating the area had been cleared to make place for a housing lot. Our trees melded seamlessly into a much larger expanse of forest behind our house, which we did not own, but which we explored as though we did. I was getting bolder at this age, and would wander further on my own. The gaggle of trailer park companions was absent, we had not kept in touch. There were no children our age living as immediate neighbors. Either I adventured in the woods with my little brother, only a few years younger, or I went by myself. Still, I never went too far.

 

It was around this time that my mother told me the story of the "loogaroo". The loogaroo was a creature something like a sasquatch or a Loch Ness monster, the way my mother explained it. The word for what she meant was "cryptid", which I would learn later. It was a dog-like or wolf-life creature that would go around and eat animals and such. I was not sure what made this loogaroo so terrifying, because we knew very well that coydogs, fisher-cats, foxes, and all sorts of animals did just that. I suppose it was that the loogaroo could kill a person. Though this was never explicitly explained to me, it was communicated all the same. 

When I was older, I'd learn that it was spelled "loup-garou", which is the French word for werewolf, essentially. It seems to translate to "wolf-werewolf", from the Old French "leu garoul", "leu" being wolf, "garoul" meaning werewolf. "Garoul" comes from "garulf" which is related to the word "werwulf" from Proto-West Germanic. 

The loup-garou legend originates from Maine's high populations of French descended people, whose ancestors brought with them the legends when they colonized maritime Canada / eastern Maine. This is evidenced by the fact that the so-called rougarou can be found in French Louisiana among the Cajuns. The Cajun-French are the displaced descendants of the Acadian-French, who once colonized maritime Canada / eastern Maine. Due to hostilities and violence between the European monarchies of France and England, a series of proxy wars broke out between North American colonies. Some portion of the Acadian-French were put on ships and forced to leave the area by the English, and eventually were settled in Louisiana, and became known as "Cajuns".

 

The loup-garou stems from the European conception of the werewolf, but there were no connotations of it being anything like what medieval Europeans would have conceived of werewolves. There was no talk of sorcery, bargains with the Devil, or anything like what you expect to find in a werewolf trial of yore. The loup-garou instead became something like the Maine chupacabra. Another thing to imagine out in the woods, among all the black-eyed giant weasels. Something to watch out for, something to keep in mind, or as such seemed reasonable. I think the fact my mother materialized the loup-garou —that is to say, secularized, made modern— indicated to me then she really believed in it. If she had mentioned witchcraft or demonic powers, I think I would have pegged her as pulling my leg. As it is, she saw it as existing wholly within the material, if mysterious, world. It was, to her —and later to me, for some amount of time in my childhood— a very real threat. 

It was when I was older, a teenager, that I'd face my fears of the loup-garou. I had been tasked with the chores related to trash. I would bag up the trash in the house, when the trash can was full, and take it out to a small "trash shed" my father had built. It was necessary to keep animals out. Without the trash shed, any manner of raccoons, skunks, possums, foxes, or other animals would have torn the bags to shreds. They couldn't be put in cans, because the animals would just find a way into them. It was my job to bring the trash out to the trash shed, whenever it was full, which sometimes meant I had to walk out to it at night. 

One evening, I brought the trash outside, and noted the full moon hanging above me. At this point I do not think I formed entirely the connection between the loup-garou, werewolves, and the moon. Truly, it is a series of connections that were only tenuous at best, much of the moon-lore being modern, and the werewolf being memetically removed for me from anything to do with the "loogaroo". 

Yet, when I went out that night, with the moon full in the sky, casting clear light down onto the crust of snow that had cemented itself over the winter, for the first time in a long time the loup-garou came to mind. I walked slowly to the shed, deliberately. I was maybe thirteen or fourteen, older, but not too old to believe in the loup-garou in the right circumstances. But a reasonableness had started to descend over me, or more accurately perhaps, a sort of stubborness. I wanted to assert myself against the world, and for me, the world at that moment seemed to include —if not literally— the loup-garou-as-fear. The hair on the back of my neck prickled up as I moved to the trash shed, each step crunching into the ice and snow, and as I walked, I began to believe. 

I thought, "the loogaroo will know that I'm taunting it, it will smell it". 

I thought, "if I turn around, I will see it standing there, and it will pounce."

I thought, "there is no such thing as a loogaroo. It's just some bullshit mom told me."

I thought, "but what if it isn't?"

So every step I took my belief, spontaneous, erupted up in me, and I became momentarily convinced —in the hazy day-dream logic way that plagued me especially thoroughly as a young teenager— that I would be fine if only I continued to walk slowly toward the trash shed. I did so. I unlocked it, placed the trash bag within, and closed the door. I turned around, not too hastily, but without faltering, and found myself alone. I felt an electric tingle of relief wash over me, rising up from my spine, but I would be lying if I said I did not almost run back inside, not wanting the nocturnal forest long to my back. 

Emerging From The Forest 

In a way, the fear of the forest was justified. It is not a place that was made for humans. To survive in the forest, a human must adapt to it. There is no other way. It is a persistent compromise, a language of harsh realities. Coupled with a bleak, deadly winter, it stands to reason to warn children off wandering too far into the chaotic, non-Euclidean depths of the forest. At the best of times it is a voracious mound of life atop life, beautiful but hungry. At the worst it is an icy desert, bereft sustenance, frozen and lifeless. By the time I was a child growing up in Maine, most of the large carnivores had been hunted to near extinction, driven out, or were managed. The forest however does not rely upon predators to be a dangerous place. Most adults cannot manage to survive long in the forest without importing supplies from civilization, let alone children, and it is so painfully easy to get lost among the tangles of the trees. 

Growing up in the woods, I'd come to learn a lot about them by the time I was an adult. With knowledge and practice comes courage, and with courage comes wisdom. You explore, further and further. You learn what animals there are, what they sound like, what they act like, and what motivates them —almost universally the same sorts of things that motivate most people. You come to understand what it is that humans need to survive, what is offered by civilization, what is offered by the wilderness, and come to some arrangement. 

Part of growing up is learning that the scariest animal you're likely to find in the forest is another human, and even then they're mostly tame. That isn't to say I'd like to wander up on a mother black bear and her cubs, or an angry moose, or a mountain lion, but that the thing which keeps the forest truly dangerous, truly terrifying, is ignorance. 

Like an astronaut in space, or a scuba-diver under the waves, the explorer of the forest must have special equipment, life-support of a more earthy quality. Like the aforementioned, they delve into a place unsuited for human life. Unlike the explorers of space and the sea, what the forest dweller lives in is tangibly alive, life stacked on top of life, itself stacked on top of death and decay. We exist in small outposts along the edges of a true boundary, that between Civilization and the Wild, and should we get too lost in that wilderness, most of us would die as surely as being lost at sea. The forest is life, but it is life locked up, hidden away, poisoned, thorned, barked, furred, fanged. To borrow its life, to make that life part of our own life, and to avoid being subsumed into it, requires a special knowledge, and it's implementation is one that will require much sacrifice. There are reasons that humans tend to take temporary excursions into the wilds for spiritual reasons, the permanent residents relegated to ascetics and hermits. Even the hermits and ascetics of history tended often to be kept alive by nearby outcroppings of civilization, thus reaping the benefits of agricultural or pastoral societies (while providing spiritual returns). 

At the current date, I am by no means an expert on wilderness survival, the forest, or anything like that, but I am significantly more learned about it than I used to be, and would even consider myself an enthusiastic amateur. Likewise, I am an occultist, and so I know a lot more about things like "loogaroos" than I ever did before. What horrors do the deep woods hold that I cannot contend with? I had been plunged, like so many humans before me, into the fear of the forest, and as said before, this tradition exists for good reason. But this nightmare-forest is itself a sort of spiritual object, a sort of veil between the mysteries of the woods that await the inquiring occultist should they seek them out. To conquer it, to move past this fear, wielding the fiery sword of practical wisdom, bushwhacking your way through the literal and spiritual vines and thorns, has been a practice of time immemorial, and can be found in initiatory traditions around the world. 

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