Usapang Bayan: Remembering Nature on Halloween 2024: Cryptobiology - The Study of Nature Spirits (November 1, 2024, Friday 2-3 pm)

Remembering Nature on Halloween 2024

Cryptobiology: The Study of Nature Spirits

"Halloween's paganistic origin continues to evolve into a religious belief with ecological significance today. Nature spirits are friendly to environmentalists and are believed to be protecting Nature's resources against abuse.  " - avrotor 

Living with Nature Center

San Vicente, Ilocos Sur

Cryptobiology is a controversial field of study at the border of science and superstition, thus scientists call it pseudoscience.  It is however, gaining acceptance and support from scholars and people in general.   

Coed Angie Tobias 19, poses with driftwood specimens resembling the Philippine eagle and another descendant of the extinct Archaeopteryx. 

There are two fields of cryptobiology, one concerning animals (cyptozoology) and the other, plants (cryptobotany). The former took off with the discovery of strange creatures like the Coelacanth fish thought to have become extinct millions of years ago.  On the other hand, the search of legendary and fiction characters like Loch Ness, Bigfoot, and the Abominable Snowman, continues to draw attention.

                              Ms Melly C Tenorio, host, and Dr Abe V Rotor, guest 

A collection of Nature Spirit remains which resemble unique features of creatures and objects, a subject of pseudoscience called cryptobiology. On display at the author's residence at the Living with Nature Center in San Vicente Ilocos Sur.

Search for the Incredible 

Media with the advancement of science and  technology have embellished  findings and reports about a "third world of creatures". The platypus is among nature's most unlikely animals. In fact, the first scientists to examine a specimen believed they were the victims of a hoax.  If the Red Wood (Sequoia) was not discovered, no one would believe in its enormous size compared with high rise buildings. How many creatures completely unfamiliar to most of us live in a drop of pond water?  In terms of biological diversity, 90 percent of living things remain unknown and unidentified, more so if we include the prototype and extinct organisms since life appeared three billion years ago. 

Driftwood representing a Philippine eagle, hawk (lawin), and a dragon in biblical times and in fairy books. Displayed as a table top figurines, subject of curiosity and subsequent exchange of stories among young and old alike.   

 

This figure of an aquatic creature apparently swimming, was discovered in an estuary. Old folks claim the creature once lived where sea and river meet, a unique habitat of many strange creatures, animals and plants as well.  Mural background adds to the queer ambiance of the figure. 

Horned duck with wings half-spread ready for takeoff, gives a fantasy image of a strange creature, which kids relate with cartoon characters and unique specimens like the Pterodactyl, an extinct genus of pterosaurs.

 

 

Top photos: Half-serpent, half-avian with distinct eyes, beak and crown (palong Tag); yelping puppy in a greeting poise.  Lower photos: Long legged reptile emerging from a broken jar seems to be telling a story fit for a horror movie. 

    

Augury is the practice from ancient Roman religion of interpreting omens from the observed behavior of birds. A white dove means “peace”. A black dove means “war”.  It could also pertain to matters of the heart, relationships, luck, misfortune, death, Remember the emissary bird in the biblical Noah's Ark? Have you seen a black dove in our real world?

  

Out of this world creatures haunt the forest, playing the role of guardian against poachers and loggers.  Nature spirits are friendly to environmentalists and are believed to be protecting Nature's resources against abuse.  

Is the mythical Hydra a true creature?

Ghost of the Galleon in Driftwood 

"The longest trading fleet over two centuries,

across two oceans, linking three continents,

riding on wind currents, gyres and eddies, 

imprimatur then of power and wealth." - avr

• Cryptobiology: Study of creatures around myths and beliefs *Cryptobiology is the study of cryptids, creatures around which myths exist but whose current existence has never been verified. Some famous cryptids include bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, and the chupacabra. Cryptids are elusive creatures that dance on the fringes of human perception, whose existence has not been proven by science, but has been reported by many eye-witnesses. Modern science has proved the existence to creatures that existed only in imagination and fantasy.

• Cryptobiology is traced to our ancestors, and carried on through history, treasured in  primitive societies, religious organizations, and time honored beliefs and tradition conveyed in documents and folktales.   

• Cryptobiology, Keeper of Values and Tradition
One time I asked a man of his true name. He said when he was a boy he was sickly. To overcome his condition, his nickname was changed with one stroke of a bolo (Taga' sa punong kahoy.) To this day Mang Kapok (kapok is cotton tree, Ceiba pentandra), now a senior, is heathy and strong, thanks to the spirit of the place and the village herbolario.

• Beginning of Crypto communication. With the breakthrough in cybercommunication, it is evident that soon we will be communicating with Nature more directly than before, more than mere fantasy and imagination, over and above, inferential and psychological.  

• Cryptobiology and Conscientization. Conscientizatrion  conveys the idea of developing, strengthening, and changing consciousness. Consciousness leads us to think further than knowledge in the pursuit of values, truth and the ideal.  Here is a piece I wrote for a university lecture on Nature and Literature. ~

 

Part 2 - Dead Tree Walking

               "I came from Paradise lost, would you walk with me?"

Limb of a dead tree resembling a headless

human figure, España, Manila 2007

I am the ghost that walks

    from a forest before;

I am the conscience of man

    sleeping in its core.

I am the memory

    from the distant past;

lost among the throng,

    living in the dust.

I came from Paradise lost,

    orphaned by the First Sin;

the hands that cared for me

    can't now be seen.

I long for a heaven, too,

    a gift of being good and true,

but if heaven is only for man,

    I did serve him through.

But I am a ghost now.

    Would man join me for a walk

to tell the world the story

    of a once mighty oak? ~

Author's Note: Is the kapre that dwells in old big trees true after all?  Utter tabi tabi (bari bari Ilk) while making your way on an unbeaten path.  Pour a few drops of your drink before you down your glass.  Have you heard the song of a whale?  How about that of a mermaid? Anaconda can grow up to 20 meters long! You are lucky if you can pick a leaf of makahiya (Mimosa pudica) fresh and not drooping.  If you find a four-leaf clover don't miss the lottery. ~

Part 3 - Remembering Nature on Halloween 2024

I am Nature Crucified

"Sooner or later, we will have to recognize that the Earth has rights, too, to live without pollution. What mankind must know is that human beings cannot live without Mother Earth, but the planet can live without humans." - Evo Morales

"I am Nature crucified by the unending pursuit of Progress, the goal and measure of the Good Life."- avr

                               Silhouette of a tree skeleton, QC.  Photo by the author

I am Nature crucified, Paradise lost to my own guardian

whom my Creator assigned custodian of the living earth;

I am Nature crucified by loggers, my kin and neighbors 

annihilated, forever removed from their place of birth;

I am Nature crucified by slash-and-burn farming dreaded

- once lush forests now bare, desertification their fate;

I am Nature crucified, greedy men with giant machines

take hours to destroy what I built for thousands of years;

I am Nature crucified in the name of progress, countries 

vying for wealth and power, fighting among themselves; 

I am Nature crucified, rivers are dammed, lakes dried up,

swamps drained, estuaries blocked, waterways silted;

I am Nature crucified, the landscape littered with wastes,

gases into the air form acid rain, and thin the ozone layer;

I am Nature crucified, flora and fauna losing their natural

gene pools by selective breeding and genetic engineering;

I am Nature crucified, the earth is in fever steadily rising,

ice caps and glaciers melting, raising the level of the sea; 

I am Nature crucified, privacy and rest becoming a luxury

in a runaway population living on fast lanes, and rat race. 

I am Nature crucified, inequitable distribution of wealth

the source of conflict, greed and poverty, unhappiness;

I am Nature crucified by the promise of heaven in afterlife,

the faithful restrained to regain Paradise while on earth.

I am Nature crucified by scholars of never ending debates,

on the goodness of the human race in fraternal praises;

I am Nature crucified by the many denominations of faith,

pitting God against one another in endless proselytizing;

I am Nature crucified by licenses of freedom in extremism,

human rights and democracy - tools of inaction and abuse;

I am Nature crucified by mad scientists splitting the atom,

building cities, tearing the earth, probing ocean and space;

I am Nature crucified by capitalism, consumerism its tool

to stir economy worldwide, wastefulness its consequence;

I am Nature crucified by the unending pursuit of progress,

the goal and measure of superiority, nation against nation;

I am Nature crucified by man’s folly to become immortal:

cryonics, cloning, robotics - triumvirates for singularity.

I am Nature crucified, hungry, thirsty, imprisoned, naked,

abandoned – wishing some souls to stop, look and listen. ~

                 Published Lagro Gazette Jan-Mar 2017 QC

Part 4 - "Above me rises a dead tree..."

Lady devotee Angie Tobias turns her attention to Mother Nature in the 

midst of today's massive destruction of the environment symbolized 

by this driftwood artwork made by the author for Lent 2024.

When the sky is gray and red in sorrow,

the fields bare and dry all around,  

the sun beats hard on ev'ry levee and furrow;

I wonder where I am and bound.

No shade to find comfort even for a while, 

save a tree standing on a hill,

where some birds briefly rest and again fly,

leaving me empty at the scene.   

I look up and wonder, "Is this Golgotha?"

No sound, no breeze, but eerie

like I were in the heart of the Sahara;

above me rises a dead tree. ~

Part 5 -   Mythical Forest 

“What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.”

― Chris Maser, Forest Primeval: The Natural History of an Ancient Forest

Painting and Verse by Dr Abe V Rotor 

Mythical Forest in acrylic by the author, 2022

She saw only the trees, not the forest;

    spots of red, not the loving pair,

flowers, orchids, fluttering butterflies,

    and the peeping sunset but a glare.

Thus we see ourselves more than others,

    Narcisian* syndrome we've fallen,

leaving but Echo reverberating and dying;

    the forest, the lake all forsaken.

*In Greek mythology proud Narcissus fell into the lake and died 

leaving Echo whose love for him was unrequited.

Part 6 - The Scream of Nature 

In line with Pope Francis' Encyclical Laudato Si*

Laudato si' (Medieval Central Italian for "Praise Be to You") is the second encyclical of Pope Francis. The encyclical has the subtitle On care for our common home.  In it, the pope critiques consumerism and irresponsible development, laments environmental degradation and global warming, and calls all people of the world to take "swift and unified global action" thus described by Jim Yardley, writing for The New York Times.

 

The original German title given to the work by Munch is, Der Schrei der Natur (The Scream of Nature). The Norwegian word skrik usually is translated as scream, but is cognate with the English shriek. Occasionally, the painting also has been called, The Cry.

In his diary in an entry headed, Nice 22 January 1892, Munch described his inspiration for the image:

One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord—the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The color shrieked. This became The Scream.

This memory was later rendered by Munch as a poem, which he hand-painted onto the frame of the 1895 pastel version of the work:

I was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. (Wikipedia)

Scream of Nature

I hear nature scream from a lost eagle,

      owl hooting, starving on its roost,

playful swallows thinned out of their flock,

      watchful crows abandon their post.

I hear nature scream in a dying river,

      brooks that laugh with the rain

no more, so with children fishing then,

      rivulets in melodious strain.

I hear nature scream from the raging sea,

      rising and falling on the coral reef,

the shores exploding, melting in foam,

      in muffled cries of pain and grief.

I hear nature scream - oil spill!

      too late the fish and birds to flee;

black death blankets the tidal zone;

      fire is kind to end their agony.

I hear nature scream to the chainsaw,

      trees shrieking as they are felled,

stripped to logs like bodies in Austerlitz

      their stumps in Flanders Field.

I hear nature in the church praying

      to save trees on Palm Sunday;

to rebuild lost Eden for all creatures,

      for a Heaven here to stay. ~

Nature's Halloween

Let us remember these scenes on Halloween

 The endangered Philippine deer enshrined in a fountain at UST, Manila 

 

Skull of whale (Museum of Natural History, UPLB Laguna; whole trunks of forest trees carried down by flood on Fuerte Beach, Vigan Ilocos Sur 

 Cattle ranch on a steep slope ripped off the skin of the mountain in Santa, Ilocos Sur - an example of the irreversible ill consequences of "Tragedy of the Commons." *

  Sunken town of Pantabangan Nueva Ecija resurfaces during a extreme drought. Nature is sacrificed to human needs, more so to human wants in pursuit of affluence.  

Sunken pier, Puerto Sto Domingo, Ilocos Sur; Shipwreck, Tacloban, Leyte.

To some scientists the "uselessness" of technology is likened to Lamarck's theory of use and disuse, though biological in perspective. Lamarck believed that disuse would result in a character or feature becoming reduced. 

 

 Ruin of Intramuros, Manila, left by WWII 60 years after. 
Death of cities is on the rise all over the world.

 Berlin wall falls, Germany is re-united in 1989 since end of WWII.
But more walls are built dividing cultures and politics.

 Death of trees and forests is happening all over the world.

*The tragedy of the commons is a term used in social science to describe a situation in a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action. Proposed by Garrett James Hardin an American ecologist and philosopher who warned of the dangers of overpopulation.