A Myth that Guided Christl’s Life
The story of Baucis and Philemon
As a girl, Christl read.
Books became her escape from the rubble of bombed-out Vienna after World War II and from the bombed-out psyches of the adults around her. In the silence of the printed word, she entered a world of possibilities beyond even what the kindly, busy nuns taught her at boarding school.
An uncle gave Christl an illustrated book of Greek myths then. She read it repeatedly, till the stories and their images lived in her imagination. Most of these myths dissolved into the culture that was dominated by Catholicism, by the art in the churches, the grandeur of the bombed-out cathedral, and by Mozart with music as clear as the heaven in her head.
In that book, one myth stayed with her above all others:
Baucis and Philemon were a loving couple who honored the gods and were rewarded by a long life together. Then they were changed into two ancient trees that grew into one.
It is a story found only in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, one of the most widely read works of antiquity — and the original, longer version is worth knowing. Like most of these myths, the full version takes place in a world that could be capricious, deadly, with few guarantees, a place where life could be cheap or inexplicably glorious — somewhat like life in the ruins of post-war Vienna.
In Ovid’s account (which I retell here based on the word-by-word transliteration from Latin in Wikisource), this aging couple lived in a rustic cottage on a hilltop overlooking a city in Phrygia — now coastal Turkey — so contented to have each other that they did not need the bustle of the city below. (The names are usually pronounced BAH-sis and fuh-LEE-mon.)
One day two of the gods visited the city disguised as travelers. As a test, these gods went around town seeking shelter, but a thousand busy residents of the busy town refused them hospitality and shut their doors. So the gods — Zeus and Hermes, still in disguise — worked their way through rejection till they came to the remote cottage where Baucis and Philemon welcomed them in. The cottage door was so low that the gods had to stoop to enter it.
Ovid depicts the scene with a sophisticated Roman’s romantic, somewhat comic view of rural life, and a keen appreciation of food:
After seating the guests, Baucis added sticks from the thatch roof to wake up yesterday’s fire and, on her creaking knees and huffing, blew it into flame. She wedged a shard to level the three-legged table and scoured it clean with fresh mint. Then she chopped turnips with the vegetables Philemon had just gathered from their well-tended garden, and cooked them with a sliver from the smoked fatback hanging in the rafters.
While that cooked, Baucis spread a ceremonial cloth, worn and somewhat tattered, and brought out cherry preserves, radishes, roasted eggs, all served in earthenware — and then the wine cups and mixing bowl, carved from beechwood and sealed with a rub of beeswax. Nuts and figs followed the vegetable stew, next plums, apples, purple wild grapes — and then, in the center of the table, a white waxen comb dripping with honey capped the meal. Bright faces and good spirits carried conversation through the hours.
Filling the cup of Hermes again, Baucis saw that no matter how much wine she poured, the jug never became empty. The cups seemed to refill themselves. With this, the couple recognized that they were in the presence of a mystery and bowed to the ground before the gods and begged forgiveness for their meager meal.
They then ran to catch their only goose, the one that guarded the house, to sacrifice it as a feast for the guests. But after a blundering, comical chase between the limping couple and the quicker goose, the goose hid here, there, then under the table, then under the skirts of the laughing gods, who stopped the chase and granted the goose the reprieve of life.
At that, the gods revealed themselves (in such stories, this is a moment of glory and potential catastrophe). They told the couple to follow them up the mountain and not look back. When Baucis and Philemon hobbled to the top and were allowed to look back, they saw with horror that the entire city had been destroyed by flood, sucked into a swamp, and all its inhabitants punished in the terror of drowning.
In a change of the kind that gives this collection the title Metamorphoses, the gods transformed the old cottage into a majestic temple with slender fluted columns, a roof the color of sunrise, high carved doors and spacious marble floors — while Baucis and Philemon looked on, trembling with fear, and in grief for the dead.
Zeus, now in the terrifying, detached glory of those deities, granted the couple a wish. They conferred with one another, then Philemon reported that they wished to continue all their lives in that same place as keepers of the temple and, when the time came, to die at the same moment, so neither of them would ever be alone.
Zeus agreed.
Now we get to the part of the story that lived inside Christl for the rest of her life. Continuing with Ovid’s account:
After they lived a long life and grew old and frail as keepers of the temple, the couple received the second part of their wish. One day, leaning near the marble steps and recounting once again how the the city had been destroyed and the temple raised up by the gods, Baucis and Philemon saw on one another’s wrinkled bodies buds sprouting, green shoots covering them with branches and sprays of leaves, and realized first in shock, then with resignation, that their time had come.
They locked onto one another’s eyes and called out loving farewells, again and again, as long as they could, but more faintly, fading as the multiplying leaves and spreading bark hardened over their eyes and cemented their mouths and ears and sealed them in eternal silence — as the gods transformed them — metamorphosed them — into two mighty trees whose trunks and branches intertwined and spread their embrace wide over the sacred site.
Today, next to the rubble of that ancient temple, that ancient double, single tree still stands.
The first time Christl told me this favorite story of her childhood, it was early in our marriage. The voice of this strong, confident, independent woman became small and vulnerable as she told how:
Baucis and Philemon were a loving couple who honored the gods and were rewarded by a long life together. Then they were changed into two ancient trees that grew into one.
Then she confided with shy tenderness that since girlhood, she had wanted to find someone to grow old with — like the couple in the story, and the two trees.
In four decades together, we did become, in our way, like that couple, like those two ancient trees that intertwined and held one another and spread above and protected the eternal, tender, nurturing, dangerous, and sacred mystery of love.
Most mysterious of all, our way there was guided by an old story in a children’s book — and by the girl who read it.
After a marriage that filled 42 years with life, Christl Kaserer Grow died Feb. 15, 2021, three weeks after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She was 76. Read more about her in “Home Birth, Home Death,” “At the Nude Beach in Vienna,” “Christl’s Resume as a Mom,” “Christl and the Icon Panties.”
