Cold Genius

December Letter From The Forests of Arduinna

After several weeks of very bitter cold, which made white the branches on trees and the grass on the hills here, it has warmed a bit and begun again to rain.

During those frigid days, despite the good insulation of our home and its efficient heating system, you could touch the walls and feel the weather outside. “A chill in the bones” applies just as well to the bones of a house as they do of the body, and I felt that latter condition just as much as the former.

I’ve never driven a car, and am in no hurry ever to do so. Feet and my bike get me usually where I’d like or need to go, and will usually get me to train stations or buses when I’d like to go farther. When it’s as cold as it was, however, bikes just aren’t possible. Besides the danger of ice, there’s the wind chill making it even colder than it already is.

Because my husband works very long days, and because I really enjoy such things, it’s usually me who does the grocery shopping during the week. I do this the European way, frequent trips rather than very large weekly or monthly ones. Refrigerators in European homes are small, if they have them (I’ve been in several which eschewed them completely), so there’s not much space for extra.

Anyway, because of the cold, it’s been harder for me to make these trips. There is one rural bus that passes near my home often enough during the day that I can use it rather than my bike, but I’d never actually tried it out before last week.

Because I was in a bit of a hurry and also hadn’t brought my glasses, I failed to notice on the schedule that there’d be no return bus for several hours. Because I was taking a bus, I’d not worn any of the extra layers I don when I’m going for long walks or bike rides in the cold. And complicating things further, I’d decided to buy a lot more groceries than normal.

That’s how it came that I was trudging home through the woods with several large grocery sacks in a frigid evening. It was too dark to use the road to walk home: German drivers take that route especially fast after work, and I was wearing dark clothing. The moon wasn’t up yet, either, so it took a while to find the way through the forest. And then the handle of one of the bags broke.

By the time I’d finally gotten home, it felt I’d never warm up again. Yet I’d do it all again, though better prepared. There is a profound peace that arises when you finally stop fighting the feeling of being cold and surrender to it, similar to the peace that comes when you surrender to any other sense of discomfort and decide instead to let yourself feel it.

Cold, of course, is very often associated with death. One of the theories of the end of the universe has everything all dying out in “heat death,” an endless eternal cold stopping the movement even of subatomic particles. (Perhaps the Christian “lake of fire” is mostly meant to keep the rest of heaven warm into eternity.)

There’s a haunting but beautiful local history of this village. Atop a hill stands the ruins of a very strange house, whose owner wanted a castle. He and his wife spent years and a lot of money adding towers and other features to his house, turning it into something quite similar to the famed Winchester House.

One winter’s night decades ago, the couple was driving through a snowstorm back home. In the darkness and obscured vision, they missed the turn for their road and accidentally took a logging path. This was all before cell phones, and they were in a very isolated place, and the car got stuck. They were both quite old, too old to make the journey through the dark and icy forests to the nearest house. And the heater in their car couldn’t keep up and the battery eventually died.

The couple was found near the car later the next day. The farmer who found them noted that they were lying together on the ground, frozen. They’d surrendered to the cold and to death, but together: they were holding each other’s hands when they died.

In 1691, Henry Purcell wrote a mystical opera (or semi-opera, since only part of it involves singing) called King Arthur, or the British Worthy. It’s quite a pagan affair, and much more magical than anything Shakespeare wrote. But it’s not particularly noteworthy otherwise except for one deeply haunting song.

The opera tells the story of Arthur vying against a heathen king for control of Britain. It also pits Merlin against a heathen sorceror who summons gods to turn places into deep ancient forests that will stymie Arthur in his quest to rescue a blind Cornish princess.

That forest scene is the most renowned: Osmond, the heathen sorceror, summons winter himself, the “Cold Genius.”¹ In Purcell’s opera, only the supernatural beings sing. When the Cold Genius first appears, he asks why it has been that he was summoned with the following lines:

What power art thou, who from below
Hast made me rise unwillingly and slow
From beds of everlasting snow?
See'st thou not how stiff and wondrous old
Far unfit to bear the bitter cold,
I can scarcely move or draw my breath?
Let me, let me freeze again to death.

This song was made quite famous by Klaus Nomi’s live televised performance of it. His performance is even more poignant since he was dying and barely able to stand that day: it was his last performance before becoming hospitalized and dying alone of AIDS. Nomi wore even more extravagant clothing during that performance to hide the effects of the disease ravishing his body.

The association of death and pagan gods with cold is particularly pronounced in Europe, for reasons that are quite obvious. Monotheism developed in dry, arid climates under an oppressive and ever-present sun. It’s not a huge leap from a single burning all-illuminating light in the sky to a singular, all-illuminating god eager to burn away the enemies of those who invoke him.

The thick forests and deep winters of many parts of Europe were a constant topic of lament for Christian missionaries. The figure of the devil emerges from those dark and cold places, as do the witches and the werewolves the Church sought to eradicate through trial and flame. Cold and dark meant evil and death, and the Christians’ god promised to save the devout from both.

It’s hard not to notice with irony, then, that the world is in chaos specifically because of the loss of cold. Rising temperatures melting the “evil” cold genius of ice caps and glaciers everywhere, a desert sun god spreading his influence to the farthest reaches of the planet, burning away the darkness with his ‘light.’

Thinking of the peace of surrender to cold, to the stillness of frigid nights, and to the great catastrophic changes we shall soon see more and more of, Purcell’s “Cold Song” seems a better prayer than “thy kingdom come.”

Updates

As well as a writer, I’m also an editor, and have been finishing up the last series of edits for a soon-to-be-released book by Melinda Reidinger. It’s called The White Deer: Ecospirituality and the Mythic, and it’s a book I think many of you would really enjoy. The pre-sale for the book is now open, and it’s being released in multiple editions. Go here to find out more.

I’ll have another installment in my series, The Mysteria, next week for you.

For those of you who prefer to read on Kindle, The Secret of Crossings has just been released in that format. Or you can read it in print or other digital forms.

I’ve several upcoming book reviews that I’ll publish in January. One is of Dougald Hine’s really incredible and kind book, At Work In the Ruins. It’s available for pre-order, and he’ll be a guest on The Re/al/ign in January. Another review I’ll have is A World Full of Gods, by John Michael Greer. It’s a re-release, and I was deeply honored to be asked to write an endorsement for the book.

Years ago, I was inside the Newgrange passage tomb during the winter solstice. I’ve written about the story of how that happened several times, but here is one version of that story: “The Tomb of the Atheist.”

And tomorrow, I’ll re-post one of my most popular essays, called “The Chthonic King of Christmas.”

Hope these cold days find you happy and inspired.

Be well,

—Rhyd

1. Genius means “spirit.” I detail how it was that genius later came to mean a brilliant person, as well as the way that demon later came to mean only evil spirits, in my essay “The Genius and the Demon.”