Amon, the great ram, do you think he doesn’t stand alone in the universe, without your permission, oh cheap little man? Because he’s there, do you think you bred him, out of your own almightiness, you cheap-jack?
Amon, the great ram! Mithras, the great bull! The mistletoe on the tree. Do you think, you stuffy little human fool sitting in a chair and wearing lambs-wool underwear and eating your mutton and beef under the Christmas decoration, do you think then that Amon, Mithras, Mistletoe, and the whole Tree of Life were just invented to contribute to your complacency?
You fool! You dyspeptic fool, with your indigestion tablets! You can eat your mutton and your beef, and by sixpenn’orth of the golden bough, till your belly turns sour, you fool. Do you think, because you keep a fat castrated cat, the moon is upon your knees? Do you think, in your woolen underwear, you are clothed in the might of Amon?
You idiot! You cheap-jack idiot!
Was not the ram created before you were, you twaddler? Did he not come in night out of chaos? And is he not still clothed in might? To you, he is mutton. Your wonderful perspicacity relates you to him just that far. But any farther, he is—well, wool.
Don’t you see, idiot and fool, that you have lost the ram out of your life entirely, and it is one great connection gone, one great life-flow broken? Don’t you see you are so much the emptier, mutton-stuffed and wool-wadded, but lifeless, lifeless.
And the oak-tree, the slow great oak-tree, isn’t he alive? Doesn’t he live where you don’t live, with a vast silence you shall never, never penetrate, though you chop him into kindling shred from shred? He is alive with life such as you have not got and will never have. And in so far as he is a vast, powerful, silent life, you should worship him.
You should seek a living relation with him. Didn’t the old Englishman have a living, vital relation to the oak-tree, a mystic relation? Yes, mystic! Didn’t the red-faced old Admirals who made England, have a living relation in sacredness, with the oak-tree which was their ship, their ark? The last living vibration and power in pure connection, between man and tree, coming down from the Druids.
And all you can do now is to twiddle-twaddle about golden boughs, because you are empty, empty, empty, hollow, deficient, and cardboardy.
Do you think the tree is not, now and for ever, sacred and fearsome? The trees have turned against you, fools, and you are running in imbecility to your own destruction.