The Mystery of the Cross-Roads

FEW phenomena or situations in nature have intrigued, teased, or tantalized the mind of man more than the meeting and parting of ways. The mighty rise of a mountain might challenge his courage and athletic instincts to try the steep ascent and lead him, if frustrated, to imagine that supernatural powers hinder his upward climb or even purpose to plunge him down to his destruction. The depths of the waters would repulse the diver and bar his downward progress unless, it was imagined, access was granted by supernatural agency. The impassable, mist-shrouded marshes and fens and dark, endless forests challenged the courage of the boldest and bravest to try to defy their animaland, supposedly, demon-haunted widths and depths. Compared to such perils and terrors, easily manifest to the more or less primitive mind, the meeting and parting of roads might be thought to seem like a comforting landmark of human endeavour and reassuring advance of civilization into the mysterious realm of nature. Yet this has turned out to be very far from being the case. The meeting and parting of ways is a phenomenon that has to an amazing extent captured popular imagination, in a way that bridges the cleft between primitive superstition and modern poetic fantasy; it has left its imprint on the mind of man on various levels of development. In the recorded folklore of many lands cross-roads' are associated with the appearance and activities of various, generally uncanny creaturesghosts, witches, and demons of many kinds. They are a place where mysterious preternatural phenomena occur and magic rites of multiple sorts are performed.2 At them suicides were in former times traditionally buried. An indication of the impact this widespread fascination with cross-roads and the popular superstitions connected therewith has had even on the sophisticated modern mind are its reflections in literature, even aside from that of the popular kind. Who, having read Ibsen's Peer Gynt, can forget the Button-moulder, the re-caster of negative souls, who in the final act of the immortal play relentlessly awaits the protagonist, on each roadintersection to find out if the latter qualifies as his legitimate prey ? Scarcely less memorable to readers of Galsworthy's short story The Apple Tree is the suicide's grave at the cross-road, the sudden recognition of whose surroundings sends the ageing wayfarer Ashurst on a journey down memory lane to vividly relive a bitter-sweet romance of his youth. Readers of Heinrich Heine may recall the woebegone lyric poet's contemplation of the blue Armensiinderblume 'Poor Sinner's Flower' (Wild Chicory) at a cross-road

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Civilization · Courage · Demon · Fantasy · Instinct · Literature · Realm · Uncanny · Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research · History · Philosophy

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