After six months of reminding myself to research mistletoe from seeing it suck away at the lives of junipers and cottonwoods in the desert, I finally did a little low-key research on this parasitic symbol of love and courtship. Thought it might make an interesting blog. We'll see.
So it ends up that mistletoe most likely derives from the German
Mist meaning dung and
Tang meaning branch, reason being that birds eat the seeds, crap them out onto branches where they sneak their way into the tree's core a la Sigourney Weaver's nemesis in Alien. After five weeks or so of digging their way in chigger-style, the mistletoe copycats the tree's branch scheme as well as it can and sprouts itself from the tree, oddly brighter and yellower in color and dropping white, semen-filled berries for further domination. According to my friend Dodge as he told it apathetically to my band of girls one sunny afternoon in November, the mistletoe, like the romance it represents, will find a host and feed on it until both the tree and the mistletoe weaken and die together, leaving only the broken shell of the original tree and wilted rotting mistletoe all around the ground beneath it. Oh what baggage, oh what destruction. Oh, the sentimentality of it all!
In the areas of the desert I have walked, mistletoe leaves a bloody trail of leafless branches stretching bare and naked toward the sky while several clumps of mistletoe leech away at their last breaths, mocking the host trees by bearing their own leaves and fruits that deny the tree its own posterity. My girls used to gather the mistletoe to hang in our camps during the Christmas season, but we somberly quit as we followed the path of arboreal carnage the mistletoe parasites left in their wake. Hanging mistletoe felt like celebrating the Charles Manson of trees, like honoring the vampiric extent this plant takes for survival. And it surely made us at least half as cynical about love and romance as our friend Dodge was.
We most likely owe the Vikings for the kissing traditions. Balder was the Viking god of the summer sun (this legend makes for an appropriate Arizonan April trail tale). Anyway, Balder dreamed he was going to die. His mother flipped out because she knew that if Balder died, everything on the earth would die with him. Her name was Frigga and she was the goddess of love and beauty. Since she's Viking, let's assume she would kick Aphrodite's ass if they cage fought each other.
Well, Frigga did what only a mother would think to do, and she went to all the plants and animals on the planet and asked that they would be kind to her son because he was a good boy. The consequences of Mom's words were typical--it was as bad for Balder as it was for any young boy who walks towards to the junior high's front doors only to have his mom call out, "I love you, Pumpkinpants!" in front of all the jocks that hang out in the foyer until twenty minutes into first period--Balder had more rocks thrown at him in teasing than any of the other young gods and goddesses. Frigga was pretty powerful, though, so nothing worse than broken eyeglass rims ever happened to him.
That is, until this other boy god, Loki, found out that mistletoe had no sway against Frigga's power because mistletoe was not plant or animal as it has no roots of its own, no identity without a branch to leech from. Loki was as low as you could go......I'm not sure who would win a cage fighting match between Loki and Shakespeare's Iago. That's how bad. Loki not only made a poisoned dart from the mistletoe but he also tricked Balder's blind brother Hoder to shoot it into Balder for him. Balder died. Loki was a real bastard.
Here's where those tried and true Christianity parallels and Jung's collective unconscious comes into play. Three days after Balder jumped the Great Boa as they say somewhere, Frigga's tears washed the mistletoe's red coloring off from all its berries and washed them white as snow (or white as semen most Druids would say) and this miraculously raised Balder from the dead. Frigga was so thrilled and grateful for mistletoe afterward that whenever she saw it she got so damned excited she'd kiss anybody and everybody standing underneath it. Which is kind of a nice story and I like that kind of kissing more than the awkward, aw geez, we're both standing under the mistletoe...are we supposed to make out? type of kissing mistletoe pushes these days.
So, a happy ending. Also, it ends up mistletoe isn't so bad after all, botanically speaking. Mistletoe among juniper trees, for example, actually encourages more juniper berries to sprout before the tree chokes up under the mistletoe's grip. More birds and animals come for more juniper berries and the result concludes with more animals and juniper trees in that area than before the mistletoe arrived. What a paradox, huh? Also, mistletoe from some trees are so plush and bunchy that birds get giddy over them and make their nests there in the high branches. So, that seems positive.
Conclusion: love is a leech that can suck you dry and the romance might well die right along with your soul. But cry it out and you will live again. Sure. That's the way this big round ball keeps on keeping on. There are times and there are seasons and there's always another spring and another. We can only hope that if we are so lucky for romance and mistletoe to stick its parasitic tentacle against the soft meshy skins of our metaphysical aortas, that at least we can have the strength to live with these growths long enough that we both survive to fill our neck of the woods with plenty of birds' nests and juniper berries and happy little animal families a good long while. Then, if we all die together, it's romantic and meaningful, just like Old Dan and Little Ann, those timeless beloved coondogs that couldn't live without their love, and a red fern grows between them. The only book I ever saw my father cry in. So that's something. Mistletoe. Finally researched it.
I like to think that I'll be living out my next few years like a young Katharine Ross......26-year-old English teacher hanging out with Western outlaws and keeping them in line while I help them bust into South American banks, and then, hopefully, I'll find a Dustin Hoffman to burst into the temple doors someday yelling, "Emily! Emily!" and waving a large wooden cross so I don't end up marrying some strange Provo man I don't really love. It will be very dramatic I hope, and I will be very beautiful. Fingers crossed! Anyway, just wanted to lay down the word--I'm moving back to Utah. *cue very formidable and conclusive metal door slamming shut*
