The Living Forest. Personifications of the Plant World in Native North America

Abstract

For the peoples of the North-West Coast of America the forest was regarded as the domain of the non-human, where plants and animals lived and prospered. This distinction is not to be understood, as was customary in anthropology, as an opposition between Nature and Culture. The animals were not regarded as deprived of culture: they were assumed to live in villages, having ceremonies and a social organization of their own. When at home they took off their skins and appeared as human beings. However, it is undeniable that the world of animals and plants was a realm different from the world of humans, it was in some sense an “other world”, where things that were uncommon or unthinkable in the human domain could occur at ease.

The forest was also the place where some beings lived, who were intermediate forms between the human and the animal, inhabitants of the borders that separate the human from the animal world.

On the other side of the continent, East of the Great Lakes, in what is now the state of New York, the Iroquois celebrated, in January or February, the Midwinter Ceremony, a sort of New Year’s celebration, during which appeared the False Faces masks, among a variety of other Medicine societies, who provided curing and cleansing rituals for the people. The wooden masks of the False Faces depict beings seen in the forest or in dreams. When wearing these masks, members of the society have special powers and can handle hot coals without being burned. During the Winter ceremonial and also once or twice a year the members went through the houses of the community performing rituals to clean them of diseases.

Analogously, in many Carnival festivals all through Europe the figure of the Wild Man makes his appearance, a character that has a long literary and iconographic heritage since the Middle Ages, and which is not always easily distinguishable from a wide array of other figures, all of them showing certain significant analogies. In the Carnival parades are frequently encountered figures with long hair and beard and wearing clothes made from leafs or animal skins. They could be confused with human-animal masquerades, where the most common elements are the sheep-skin clothes, the blackened faces and the shaggy hair, which we have already described for the Amerindian masks, while at other times they have vegetal connotations, like costumes with leaves or branches, holding boughs or sticks in their hands, giving the impression to be personifications of the trees or of the woods.