The Tree Became A Goat - People in the Wilderness

New England was opposed to old. It singled out strands of  religion. New England left class, status, court, stage, literature. Severity and plainness were closer to the medieval. Two hundred years after  founding it worried its literature didn't compete. Step child English affiliates still worry. The spiritual did not renew the physical but contaminated it.

Uncontaminated nature means uncontaminated by mind, not land fills.  The Puritans transferred sin from themselves to the forest to drive it out on the back of some goat, except the tree was the goat.  The sin bearer was the forest. A scapegoat is no good unless lost.  The forest had to be mowed lest sins find a way back. Trees hid the Predator. The tree became the goat and was cut. The forest hid the terror of the dark so was cut.  This thinking fueled American botanical and biological extinction.

Puritans thought "the world" as physical nature, would contaminate. This thinking made their souls toxic in the austere soil of New England. Early New England believed that savage men, wild men and their own sins lurked at the clearing's edge, only kept at bay by cutting back the growth. Defoliate the  forest, clear cut and exterminate the ground to prevent sin made a profit. Against the evil in themselves they built a theology of dominion for their superior race. This is the dominion that will take us all to the antichrist. It is a new puritan age, a "spiritual imagination... impotent, sterile, or dead... an era of violence, chaos, destruction, madness, and slaughter (Thomas Merton, Seeking Paradise, 85).

Raze and Exterminate might as well have been the names of Romulus and Remus. They lay down at the Puritan door of New England. Question these ravenous sucklings with the Pennsylvania Dutch, who survived their murderous adversaries in Holland and Switzerland and domesticated the natural, invited it indoors, befriended it in their own natures, painted it, sculpted it and threw it on the forge. Garrisoned  against the natural New England only welcomed the Pennsylvania genius of inviting nature indoors two centuries later.  By 1850 transcendentalism had them all wishing  for the pond. Pennsylvania didn’t make any Scarlet Letters, it decorated chests and barns.

"To the Puritan, nature was not benign. The wilderness was a place of terror" (Broyles). This puritan celebrated  his malaise. Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather drew sharp provincial/pastoral views. Their depravity offended Hawthorne who called  the "virgin soil as a cemetery" (The Scarlet Letter), "the pine trees, aged, black, and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy utterances on the breeze, needed little transformation to figure as Puritan elders; the ugliest weeds of the garden were their children," or as William Bradford put it (1620) "a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men." Michael Broyles makes the telling observation that "much of the story [of Pilgrim's Progress] is set in America...it was the metaphorical terrain the believer had to traverse...," which he says to distinguish the gentler Puritan composer William Billings (The New England Psalm Singer, 1770. Also see Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music, 25). A great deal more than this has been said of those first  centuries.

Divide and conquer was the English rule, Quakers aside, who had more in common with the pacifist Pennsylvania sects than the English who ruled Pennsylvania. Come out from among them and be ye separate. Basic English sought to exploit differences among the  Germans that Penn's colony had been founded to set free. But relations with the "world" were a sticking point for immigrants of the Lily too, who divided into Church and Sect, churched vs. plain. The separate but unequal existence of Germans alongside the English in American civilization ended from the Civil War on when the Dutch began to assimilate. Some people think the Amish are the last bastion of the "separate" and that these differences existed up till 1950 in speaking German, farming, going barefoot. The Amish may continue to exist in 2050, but assimilation got the rest. Jumping ahead, the new goat, since the trees are gone, is the human genome hid in the HistoPossum and Opiome of the new world.

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