The Nomadic Alternative – Page 205

chorus and dance were the concrete media through which they pacified their restlessness and drank the fire of Divine Love.*

The Essenes and Therapeutes were immediately ancestral to the institutionalized vagrancy of the Early Christian monks. Jesus Christ had removed himself into the desert for forty days and nights, a period quite sufficient for the effects of malnutrition and sunstroke to make him "see things". By prolonging the forty days and nights indefinitely the Desert Fathers boarded a vehicle fast moving in the direction of a personal paradise, since the privations of the wilderness rapidly exhausted the possibilities of further torment.

Nakedness symbolized the Adamic state of pre-innocence. It also re-duced a sensitive skin to the texture of old boot leather. As St. John Climacus noted in his Ladder of Paradise, "Just as mud can no longer be polluted by swine, so the flesh, dried and hardened by austerity, can no longer be endangered by the violence of demons."

Barren 'thingless' wastes are admirably suited to make men 'see things'. The Star of the Desert, St. Anthony, attracted to his cave a circus of monstrosities--"bulls, lions, wolves, asps, scorpions, waving, howling, slithering snakes, hissing and crying ..."--which energetically ripped at his flesh till he escaped to a bright refuge from further horrors. Like the hunters and gatherers, the desert anchorites ran away at the approach of strangers. "If pursued", wrote Evagrius the Scholastic, "they make off with astonishing speed and hide in inaccessible places." Like them too they extravagantly denied themselves the luxury of propagating their food supply.

James, future Bishop of Nisibis, kept himself alive on the unforced produce of the soil, the fruit of wild trees and on plants "not unlike our own vegetables". By practising the most simple foraging economy, they protected themselves from the egotism of the grower.

In his Spiritual Meadow St. John Moschus describes the human grazers in terms reminiscent of the 'wild men' in the Gilgamesh Epic. "They wander in the deserts as if they were wild animals themselves. Like birds they fly about the hills, and forage like beasts. Their

*For the Essenes and Therapeutes see Philo, Quod omnis probus, XII and Josephus, Jewish War, II. viii, 2-13. Also Hastings, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics.