Fear of Forests

Why timber and matter share a word

Greek hyle meant wood, and specifically timber, the material a thing is built from. Aristotle borrowed it for matter in general, as the stuff a form is imposed on, and the philosophical sense has run beside the literal one ever since. Hylomorphism, the doctrine that things are compounds of matter and form, is named from it.

Hylophobia inherits the ambiguity whole. The 2008 encyclopedia of phobias gives the word two senses in one line, and records ylophobia as an alternative spelling:

• fear of a forest
• fear of materialism, explained by a sentence of its own, that in metaphysical thinking matter is regarded as the principle of evil

That is a real doctrine and not a gloss. Several strands of late antique thought, gnostic and neoplatonic, treated matter as the source of corruption and the material world as something to be escaped. A word for the fear of matter belongs to that vocabulary, and a word for the fear of trees belongs to a different one entirely. The book puts them in the same entry because Greek gave them the same root.

What the forest reading covers

Wiktionary carries hylophobia in the ordinary sense, fear of forests or wooded areas, with a citation from Peter Young's 2013 book on the oak.

It also carries a longer word for a narrower fear. Nyctohylophobia is the fear of dark wooded places and forests, and the quotation attached to it is a description of a garden: a magazine reported in 2002 that a man's nyctohylophobia was such that he divided his grounds into a very formal area where he felt safer and rougher woodland of which he was fearful.

That sentence is the best evidence in the sources that the fear is real and does something. A person laid out a garden around it, drawing a line between the part that was arranged and the part that was not, and the arrangement was the safety.

What is feared is probably not the trees

The formal garden detail points where the definitions do not. What separates the two halves of that garden is not the presence of trees but whether the space has been ordered. A forest is the standard instance of a place that has not been laid out, where the sightlines close and the extent cannot be established, and the fear that attaches to it looks like the same one recorded under bathophobia, where a dark room stops being frightening once its size is known.

The catalogue records that as a reading rather than a finding. Nobody has studied hylophobia. There is no case, no prevalence, no diagnostic listing and no treatment literature, and the two sources that carry the word disagree about what half of it means.