In the oldest tales the beast in the forest does not hunt. It waits at the edge of the path, and it thinks.
This one sits by a mossy stone where the woods begin, horns curling up into the dark, one clawed hand raised to his chin. Somewhere behind him the wind moves through a set of old chimes, and the sound drifts out over the trees like a question no one has asked yet.
The villagers call him a monster. They say he lives in the deep forest, where the wild things are, and that whoever goes in after dark may not come back the same. They are right about that. They are wrong about everything else.
For the beast in the forest is not a stranger. He is the part of us we left behind when we built our houses with straight walls and decided we were no longer animals: the hunger, the fear, the wild joy, the anger we do not show at dinner. Every tale that sends a hero into the dark woods is sending him to meet this creature. And every tale that ends well ends the same way. The hero does not kill him. He learns his name.
The old peasants had a story about it. A man was ploughing his field when the plough caught on something and stopped. He cursed and dug down to free it, and found an iron ring set in a flat stone. When he lifted the stone, he saw a stair going down into the earth, into a cave full of treasure. What stops the plough is not always misfortune. Sometimes it is the door.
So the Faun waits, and thinks, and asks only one thing of whoever comes down the path: will you look at me, or will you reach for your sword?
Years later a knight will walk out of this same forest carrying this same horned head in his hand, certain that he has won. He will have cut off his shadow. He will soon learn that a shadow cannot be cut off.
The thinking beast follows Carl Jung's studies of the shadow and the archetypes: the monster of the old tales as the rejected part of ourselves, and the dark forest as the place where we must go to meet it.
(Fine Art Photography. Created in August 2023.)
