Toads

Animals to the left of me. Animals to the right. Stuck in the middle with you.

Yes, he walked into our house one evening.

They started talking about toads on another forum on 11 November, 2024, and I found it fascinating. Hildegard von Bingen got deep into the mystical attributes of toads. Who knew? Then, I hear the 19th century’s primary figure of Western Occult, Éliphas Lévi, wrote about the spiritual aspects of animals.

Don’t run. I am not woo. Until a year ago, I thought the whole subject of inquiry was referred to as “woo hoo”, but now am enlightened, and refer to all that stuff as “woo woo”, or “woo” for short. There’s a story—always a story— about how I got interested in this stuff, but that’s for another day. Don’t run. Listen to the toads.

I was raised in a farm family that always had piles of “Popular Science”, “Popular Mechanics”, and “Mechanics Illustrated” next to the kitchen table. Two of my siblings went off to college to be physicists, one sticking it out to become a Doctor of Philosophy in Physics. Why don’t they call it a “Doctor of Physics”? Someone is trying to establish a brand I guess.

Later, we added “Science Digest” to the pile and the back cover always had an ad for Rosicrucians, an organisations nobody could ever explain to me, including a guy on my Oregon fire crew in 1974, who was serious Rosicrucian initiate. When I asked him what is was all about, all he could ever say was “It’s complicated.” Now I know a little more about it and I agree.

It is all stirred together. There is a long history of Rosicrucians, Freemasons, Mystic Christians, and much more. Éliphas Lévi is seminal for the people who don’t hesitate to call all this stuff “Magic”. Western Occult organisations peaked out about 1900 and soon became manifest in ads on the back cover of “Science Digest”.

Jesus became manifest to Margaret Mary Alacoque a few miles from a house I rented a few years back in France and went off to kick-start the modern Sacred Heart devotion of the Roman Catholic Church. She met Jesus and he tore his chest open to expose his Sacred Heart. That is probably a different thing from the back cover of Science Digest. Someone said those ads came from organisations selling mail-order courses of essentially watered-down Christianity. Put enough water in your drink and it becomes a different thing.

Then, Western Occult got subsumed by post-WWII American trashiness, a culture of which I know much more about than the Mages, I stayed interested in American trashiness in my callow youth. The interest persists to the present, and I probably enjoy it too much.

Someone on the toad discussion thread mentioned the metaphysics of toads. Next, I find out Éliphas Lévi wrote about the magical properties of animals. I do know I find “The Wind in the Willows”, Bambi, The Wizard of Oz and the Narnia books high on my list of favorite youth literature and story. I don’t know about “Bambi”, but for the rest of all these, the authors were deep, deep into the woo.

Toads ward off evil spirits they say. Thank you, toads. We have a sunken utility box in front of our house about 60 cm in each direction where city water enters. Toads live there. I see them there every time I lift the heavy concrete cover off. There is alway a big old guy there and a rotating cast of others, including a leopard-spotted guy, “guy” being used in the non-gendered sense. I like to think the leopard spot one is the big guy’s girlfriend he has over for extended visits, but that is probably not true. I don’t even know if the big guy is the same toad each time. I don’t have him tagged.

I know a guy who lived next to a resevoir and he told me biologists were studying the turtles, strapping little transmitters to their backs. They had a little red blinking LED on them and he said it was quite a sight to see the blinking lights moving around the water at night. I would have liked to have seen that.

I played with a hand-me-down set of Animal Bingo cards as a kid. Each card had a nice colored drawing of a mammal on it. The raccoon card had been left out in the sun and was a pale yellow image of its former self. Tarot decks were originally a card game before they became a big deal in divination. They still have tarot tournaments in France and a local guy got his picture on the front page of the paper when he won the national championship. So, you tell me how much Animal Bingo pushed me to get a degree in biology.

Now, as silly as it seems, and as over-played as a currentmeme, a squirrel and a raccoon probably swayed votes in the 2024 presidential election.

Oh, mercy.

If we could talk to the animals, learn their languages

Maybe take an animal degree

We'd study elephant and eagle, buffalo and beagle

Alligator, guinea pig, and flea