Gateway between worlds

Posted 9 months ago

This week my footsteps in nature brought me along the boardwalk at Couchiching Beach Park toward the Orillia park wharf. The November sunshine was so warm, two small children spread out a picnic cloth on the edge of the boardwalk and place settings neatly arrayed an outdoor autumn luncheon. I couldn't help noticing all the oak leaves clustered in the rocks along the waterfront and especially those cornered in at the wharf's edge. This got me wondering again about the oak tree and how the leaves are so different from other leaves.

When I checked Wikopedia, the online encyclopedia, it states that in Celtic mythology, the oak tree is the tree of doors, believed to be a gateway between worlds. In Norse mythology, the oak was sacred to the thunder god, Thor. Some scholars speculate that this is because the oak, as the largest tree in northern Europe, was the one most often struck by lightning. Thor's oak was a sacred tree of the Germanic Chatti tribe. Its destruction marked the Christianisation of the heathen tribes by the Franks.

In classical mythology, the oak was a symbol of Zeus and his sacred tree. An example is the oracle of Dodona, which in prehistory consisted solely of a holy oak. The oak tree is traditionally sacred to Serbs and is widely used throughout Serbia on national and regional symbols both old and new.

In the Bible, the oak tree at Shechem is the site where Jacob buries the foreign gods of his people (Gen. 35:4) . In addition, Joshua erects a stone under an oak tree as the first covenant of the Lord (Josh. 24.25-7). In Isaiah 61, the prophet refers to the Israelites as "Oaks of Righteousness."

"The Proscribed Royalist, 1651," a famous painting by John Everett Millais, depicted a Royalist fleeing from Cromwell's forces and hidden in an oak. Millais painted the picture in Hayes, Kent, from a local oak tree that became known as the Millais Oak.

Carl von Linnaeus, (1707 -1778), was a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of binominal nomenclature The formal system of naming species is called binominal nomenclature (especially in zoological circles), binary nomenclature (especially in botanical circles), or the binomial classification system. Linnaeus is known as the father of modern taxonomy. Taxonomy is the science of finding, describing and categorizing organisms. Linnaeus is also considered one of the fathers of modern ecology.

Linnaeus was born in the countryside of Smaland, in southern Sweden. His father was the first in his ancestry to adopt a permanent last name; prior to that, ancestors had used the patronymic naming system of Scandinavian countries. His father adopted the Latin-form name Linnaeus after a giant linden tree on the family homestead. Linnaeus got most of his higher education at Uppsala University and began giving lectures of botany there in 1730. He lived abroad between 1735-1738, where he studied and also published a first edition of his Systema Naturae in the Netherlands. He then returned to Sweden where he became professor of botany at Uppsala.. In the 1740s, he was sent on several journeys through Sweden to find and classify plants and animals. In the 1750s and '60s, he collect and classify animals, plants, and minerals, and published several volumes. At the time of his death, he was widely renowned throughout Europe as one of the most acclaimed scientists of the time.

The Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau sent him the message: "Tell him I know no greater man on earth. The German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote: "With the exception of Shakespeare and Spinoza, I know no one among the no longer living who has influenced me more strongly." Swedish author August Stindberg wrote: "Linnaeus was in reality a poet who happened to become a naturalist."

Linnaeus described only five species of oak from eastern North America, based on general leaf form. These were white oak, Quercus alba; chestnut oak, Q. Montana; Red oak, Q. rubra; willow oak Q. phellos; and Water oak, Q. nigra. Because he was dealing with confusing leaf forms, the Q. prinus and Q. rubra specimens actually included mixed foliage of more than one species.

Mythology is the study of myths or a body of myths. Comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures. In the study of folklore, a myth is a sacred narrative explaining how the world and humankind came to be in their present form. Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1873-1961) and his followers tried to understand the psychology behind world myths. Jung argued that all humans share certain innate unconscious psychological forces, which he called archetypes. These universal archetypes express themselves in the similarities between the myths of different cultures. Like Jung, Claude Levi- Strauss believed that myths reflect patterns in the mind.

And so, for me, it was a gateway between worlds to have the oak leaves cross my path in mid November, on a sunny late-summer kind of afternoon. It was a gateway between the world of reality and the world of mythology. As patterns of oak leaves danced in the cool autumn waters of Lake Couchiching, marvelous myths reflected back as oakleaf shaped patterns in the mind.

Joyce-Anne Locking is an Orillia resident and nature lover.

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