There is very little evidence of the existence of tree-worship amongst the Chinese, but they have a tradition of a Tree of Life, and of a drink of immortality made from various sacred plants. They also make use of the divining-rod, which is an offshoot of tree-worship, and certain Taoist medals, like the talismans worn in Java, bear the familiar symbol of the sacred tree.[29] In Japan certain old trees growing near Shinto temples are regarded as sacred, and bound with a fillet of straw rope, “as if they were tenanted by a divine spirit.”[30] Japanese mythology tells of holy sakaki trees growing on the Mountain of Heaven, and of a herb of immortality to be gathered on the Island of Eternal Youth.

Amongst the semi-civilised races which border upon these ancient states the tree is still almost universally regarded as the dwelling-place of a spirit, and as such is protected, venerated, and often presented with offerings. In Sumatra and Borneo certain old trees are held to be sacred, and the Dyaks would regard their destruction as an impious act. The Mintira of the Malay Peninsula believe that trees are inhabited by terrible spirits capable of inflicting diseases. The Talein of Burmah never cut down a tree without a prayer to the indwelling spirit. The Siamese have such veneration for the takhien-tree that they offer it cakes and rice before felling it; so strong, indeed, is their dread of destroying trees of any kind, and thereby offending the gods inhabiting them, that all necessary tree-felling is relegated to the lowest criminals. Even at the present day they frequently make offerings to the tree-dwelling spirits, and hang gifts on any tree whose deity they desire to propitiate.[31]

In the Western Hemisphere, the fact that the drawing of a tree with two opposed personages or supporters, similar in design to the sacred tree of the Chaldaeans, has been found in an ancient Mexican MS., has been put forward as an additional argument in favour of the pre-Columbian colonisation of that continent and its early contact with the Eastern world.[32] Speaking generally, however, the worship of the tree appears to have flourished less widely in the New World than the Old, though traces of it have been found all over the continent.[33] A large ash-tree is regarded with great veneration by the Indians of Lake Superior, and in Mexico there was a cypress, the spreading branches of which were loaded by the natives with votive offerings, locks of hair, teeth, and morsels of ribbon; it was many centuries old, and had probably had mysterious influence ascribed to it, and been decorated with offerings long before the discovery of America.[34] By that date, however, the Mexicans had apparently advanced beyond the earliest stage of religious development, and expanded the idea of individual tree-spirits into the more general conception of a god of vegetation. It was in the honour of such a god that their May-Day celebrations were held and their human sacrifices offered. In Nicaragua cereals were worshipped as well as trees. In more primitive Patagonia the cruder form of worship persists, a certain tree standing upon a hill being still resorted to by numerous worshippers, each of whom brings his offering.

To return nearer home, the worship of the tree has prevailed at one time or another in every country of Europe. It played a vital part in the religion of Greece and Rome, and classical literature is full of traditions and ideas which can have been derived from no other source. The subject has been exhaustively treated by Bötticher in his Baumkultus der Hellenen.[35] Mr. Farnell, in his recently published work, says that in the earliest period of Greek religion of which we have any record, the tree was worshipped as the shrine of the divinity that housed within it; hence the epithet ἔνδενδρος, applied to Zeus, and the legend of Helene Dendritis.[36] Discoveries made in Crete and the Peloponnese within the present year (1896) seem to show that the worship of deities in aniconic shape as stone pillars or as trees played a great part in the religion of the Mycenaean period about 1500 B.C.[37] The persistent belief of the Greek and Roman peasantry in the existence and power of the various woodland spirits is also vitally connected with the primitive idea of the tree-soul.

In the centre of Europe, covered as it once was with dense forest, the veneration of the tree tinctured all the religious usages of the primitive inhabitants. In ancient Germany, the universal ceremonial religion of the people had its abode in the “grove,” and the earliest efforts of the Christian missionaries were directed towards the destruction of these venerated woods, or their consecration by the erection within them of a Christian edifice.[38] But long after their nominal conversion the Germans continued to people every wood with spirits, and the legends and folk-lore of their modern descendants are still rich in memories of this time-honoured superstition. Some of these wood-inhabiting spirits were favourable to man, ready to befriend and help him in difficulty; others were malicious and vindictive. The whole subject has been studied in Germany with characteristic thoroughness, the standard work being Mannhardt’s well-known and fascinating Wald- und Feldkulte.[39]

In Poland trees appear to have been worshipped as late as the fourteenth century, and in parts of Russia the power of the tree-spirit over the herds was so firmly held, that it was long customary to propitiate it by the sacrifice of a cow. The Permians, a tribe related to the Finns, worshipped trees, among other things, until their conversion to Christianity about 1380 A.D.[40] In parts of Esthonia the peasants even within the present century regarded certain trees as sacred, carefully protected them, hung them with wreaths, and once a year poured fresh bullock’s blood about their roots, in order that the cattle might thrive.[41] In the remoter parts of the Czar’s domain the belief in tree-demons still persists. They are held to be enormous creatures, who can change their stature at will, and whose voice is heard in the clash of the storm as they spring from tree to tree. In Finland the oak is still called “God’s tree,” and to this day the birch and the mountain-ash are held sacred by the peasants, and planted beside their cottages with every sign of reverence.

In France at Massilia (now Marseilles) human sacrifices were, in primitive times, offered to trees.[42] In the fourth century of our era there was a famous pear-tree at Auxerre which was hung with trophies of the chase and paid all the veneration due to a god.[43] In the life of St. Amandus mention is made of sacred groves and trees worshipped near Beauvais, and various Church councils in the early middle ages denounced those who venerated trees, one held at Nantes in 895 A.D. expressly enjoining the destruction of trees which were consecrated to demons. Traces of the ancient worship still survive here as elsewhere in popular custom; in the south of France they have a graceful observance, in which the spirit of vegetation is personified by a youth clad in green, who feigning sleep is awakened by a maiden’s kiss.

In our own islands, as every one knows, the oak-tree played a salient part in the old Druidical worship, and Pliny[44] even derives the name Druid from δρῦς, an oak, as some still connect it with darach, the Celtic word for that tree. The important rites with which the mistletoe was severed from the parent tree and dedicated at the altar furnish evidence of the veneration paid to the spirit of the tree, who, according to the teaching of the Druids, retreated into the parasite-bough when the oak leaves withered. The Teutons no doubt brought with them to Britain the religion of the sacred grove, and we find King Edgar condemning the idle rites in connection with the alder and other trees, and Canute fifty years later forbidding the worship entirely.[45] The ceremonies once connected with the worship of the tree survived in the form of a picturesque symbolism long after their origin had been forgotten. In 1515, at a Twelfth-Night pageant held at his palace of Greenwich by order of Henry VIII., tree-spirits represented by “VIII wylde-men, all apparayled in grene mosse sodainly came oute of a place lyke a wood” and engaged in battle with the royal knights.[46] It was also a custom of this king in the early years of his reign to resort to the woods with a richly-apparelled retinue in order “to fetche May or grene bows,”—the spirit of vegetation, whose renewed vigour was symbolised, unconsciously no doubt, in the green boughs with which the courtiers decked their caps.[47] May-day ceremonies to celebrate the new life in the forest can be traced in England as far back as the thirteenth century, and the importance still attached to them by the people as late as the seventeenth century is indicated by the rancour with which the Puritans attacked the Maypole, “a heathenish vanity greatly abused to superstition and wickedness.” These and other survivals will be more fully treated in a later chapter, and are only mentioned here as showing the ancient prevalence of a belief in tree-spirits, which indeed is alone competent to account for such customs.

In fine, no one who has not studied the subject can have any idea of the sanctity associated with the tree amongst pre-Christian nations. The general conclusion which Bötticher gives as the result of his elaborate research, is that the worship of the tree was not only the earliest form of divine ritual, but was the last to disappear before the spread of Christianity; it existed long before the erection of temples and statues to the gods, flourished side by side with them, and persisted long after they had disappeared.[48] Mr. Tylor, with greater caution, concludes that direct and absolute tree-worship may lie very wide and deep in the early history of religion, but that apart from this “there is a wide range of animistic conceptions connected with tree and forest worship. The tree may be the spirit’s perch, or shelter, or favourite haunt; or may serve as a scaffold or altar, where offerings can be set out for some spiritual being; or its shelter may be a place of worship set apart by nature, of some tribes the only temple, of many tribes, perhaps, the earliest; or lastly, it may be merely a sacred object patronised by, or associated with, or symbolising some divinity.”[49] These varied conceptions, Mr. Tylor thinks, conform, in spite of their confusion, to the animistic theology in which they all have their essential principles.

To discuss the origin of tree-worship would involve the consideration of the whole question of primitive culture, the theory of animism, and the subject of ancestor worship, together with a digression on the very obscure problem of totemism. The last word has not yet been said on these questions, and the time has certainly not yet come to say it. As will be shown in the next two chapters, the general conception of the tree-spirit includes at least two different series of ideas, that on the one hand of the tree-god, whose worship became organised into a definite religion, and on the other hand that of the tree-demons or tree-spirits, whose propitiation was degraded into or never rose above the level of sorcery and incantation. To define the relation between these two conceptions is extremely difficult, and it has been approached by different writers along two different lines of thought. Either the gods were developed from the spiritual forces assumed by primitive man to be inherent in nature, and gradually differentiated from the less friendly powers embodied in the various demons, until they came to be regarded as the kinsmen and parents of their worshippers; or they were ancestral spirits, at once feared and trusted from their very origin by their kinsmen, whilst all the class of minor spirits and demons were but degenerate gods or the ancestral spirits of enemies. The former view is put forward by Professor Robertson Smith, in a chapter that deserves most careful study, but he admits that it is difficult to understand how the friendly powers of nature that haunted a district in which men lived and prospered, and were regarded as embodied in holy trees and springs, became identified with the tribal god of a community and the parent of a race.[50] There is no such difficulty in Mr. Herbert Spencer’s theory that all religion arose from ancestor worship, or in Mr. Grant Allen’s supplementary contention that trees and stones came to be regarded as sacred and to be honoured with sacrifices because they were originally associated with the ancestral grave, and were hence assumed to have become the haunts or embodiments of the ancestral spirit.[51] This latter view, however, does not seem to take sufficient account of the thousand spirits who, in the belief of primitive men, thronged the woods, the mountains, and the springs, and appeared in horrible animal or semi-human form. Probably the truth lies between the two theories, and the primitive worship of the tree had more than one root.

CHAPTER II
THE GOD AND THE TREE

When we examine more closely the spiritual beings who have been thought to haunt or inhabit vegetation, we find that they fall more or less distinctly into two classes—into tree-gods on the one hand, and on the other into the various tree-demons, wood-spirits, dryads, elves, jinns, and fabulous monsters common to the mythology of all countries. There is, perhaps, no absolutely definite line of demarcation between the two classes, for primitive thought does not deal in sharp definitions. But the division, besides being convenient for our present purpose, is a vital one. For a god is an individual spirit who enters into stated relations with man, is mostly if not invariably regarded as akin to his worshippers, and is presumably their friend, ally, and protector. Whereas the demon is an independent and, as a rule, not individualised spirit, without human kinship, and for the most part unfriendly to man. The god is to be revered, approached and called upon by name; the demon, as a rule, to be dreaded and shunned. The present chapter will be devoted to the belief in the tree-inhabiting god.

The conception of an ubiquitous, unconditioned spirit is entirely foreign to primitive thought. All the gods of antiquity were subject to physical limitations. Those even of Greece and Rome were by no means independent of a material environment. There was always some holy place or sanctuary, some grove, tree, stone, or fountain, or later on some temple or image, wherein the god was assumed to dwell, and through which he had to be approached. To Moses Jehovah is “He that dwelt in the bush,”[52] and centuries later Cyrus, while admitting that the Lord of Israel had made him king of the whole world, yet speaks of Him as “the Lord that dwelleth in Jerusalem.”[53] Very frequently, especially in early times, this home or haunt of the god was a tree; his ceremonial worship was conducted beneath its shadow, and the offerings of his worshippers were hung upon its branches, or placed at its foot, or upon a table by its side, and assumed thereby to have reached the god. Thus the sacred sycamores of Egypt were believed to be actually inhabited by Hāthor, Nu̔ît, Selkît, Nît, or some other deity, and were worshipped and presented with offerings as such. The vignettes in the Book of the Dead demonstrate this belief unmistakably. They frequently depict the soul on its journey to the next world coming to one of these miraculous sycamores on the edge of the terrible desert before it, and receiving from the goddess of the tree a supply of bread, fruit, or water, the acceptance of which made it the guest of the deity and prevented it from retracing its steps without her express permission. “O, sycamore of the Goddess Nu̔ît,” begins one of the chapters in the Book of the Dead, “let there be given to me the water which is in thee.” As a rule in the vignettes the bust of the goddess is represented as appearing from amidst the sheltering foliage, but sometimes only her arm is seen emerging from the leaves with a libation-bowl in the hand. The conception is illustrated still more clearly on an ancient sarcophagus in the Marseilles Museum, where the trunk from which the branches spread is represented as the actual body of the deity.[54]

As man’s conception of the deity became more definitely anthropomorphic on the one hand and less local on the other, this primitive representation of the god in the tree underwent a change in two corresponding directions. In the one case an attempt was made to express more clearly the manlike form of the god; the tree was dressed or carved in human semblance, or a mask or statue of the god was hung upon or placed beside it. In the other case, as the god widened his territory or absorbed other local gods he became associated with all trees of a certain class, and was assumed to dwell not in a particular tree, but in a particular kind of tree, which thenceforward became sacred to and symbolical of him. This latter idea received special development in the religions of Greece and Rome. But in the early history of both those countries cases occur in which a god was worshipped in an individual tree. At Dodona, which was perhaps the most ancient of all Greek sanctuaries, Zeus was approached as immanent in his sacred oak, and legendary afterthought explained the primitive ritual by relating that the first oak sprang from the blood of a Titan slain while invading the abode of the god, who thereupon chose it as his own peculiar tree. Again, in ancient Rome, according to Livy, Jupiter was originally worshipped in the form of a lofty oak-tree which grew upon the Capitol. The same was probably true of other gods at their first appearance. Amongst the Greeks, indeed, the tree was the earliest symbol or ἄγαλμα of the god, and as such is frequently represented on ancient vases, marble tablets, silver vessels, and wall-paintings. Indeed, the solitary tree standing in Attic fields and worshipped as the sacred habitation of a god was in all probability the earliest Greek temple, the forerunner of those marvellous edifices which have aroused the admiration of every subsequent age; whilst the elaborate worship of which those temples became the home was presumably based upon a ceremonial originally connected with the worship of the tree.

According to Mr. Farnell, the latest writer on the subject, the chief gods of the Greeks were in their origin deities of vegetation, the special attributes which we associate with them being subsequent accretions. The pre-Hellenic Cronos gave his name to an Attic harvest-festival held in July, and his ancient emblem was the sickle.[55] Zeus, besides being the oak-god of Dodona, was worshipped in Attica as a god of agriculture and honoured with cereal offerings.[56] Artemis was not primarily a goddess of chastity, nor a moon-goddess, nor the twin-sister of Apollo, but an independent divinity, closely related to the wood-nymphs, and connected with water and with wild vegetation and forest beasts. She was worshipped in Arcadia as the goddess of the nut-tree and the cedar, and in Laconia as the goddess of the laurel and the myrtle. Her idol at Sparta was said to have been found in a willow brake, bound round with withies. At Teuthea in Achaea she was worshipped as the goddess of the woodland pasture, and at Cnidus as the nurturer of the hyacinth.[57] In the legend of the colonisation of Boiae she was represented as embodied in a hare which suddenly disappeared in a myrtle-tree.[58] But her character as a tree-goddess comes out still more clearly in the cult of the “hanging Artemis” at Kaphyae in Arcadia,[59] which no doubt grew out of the primitive custom of suspending a mask or image of the vegetation spirit to the sacred tree.

The association of Hera with tree-worship is less pronounced. She was said to have been born under a willow-tree at Samos, and her worship in that island was characterised by a yearly ceremony in which her priestess secreted her idol in a willow brake, where it was subsequently rediscovered and honoured with an oblation of cakes.[60] In Argos she was worshipped as the deity who gave the fruits of the earth, and as such was represented with a pomegranate in her hand. It is also worthy of note that the familiar symbol of a conventionalised tree between two griffins appears on the stephanos or coronet of the goddess on coins of Croton of the fourth century, and of certain South Italian cities, as well as on a colossal bust now at Venice, which, like the head on the coins, was presumably copied from the temple-image at Croton.[61]

Aphrodite was not a primitive Greek deity, but her connection with vegetative life is abundantly clear. She was, in fact, but a Hellenised variant of the great Oriental goddess, worshipped in different parts as Istar, Astarte, Cybele, etc., who was essentially a divinity of vegetation.[62]

This primitive connection of the gods of Greece with vegetative life was lost sight of in their later developments. Even at the date of the Homeric poems the more advanced of the Greeks had evidently arrived at “a highly developed structure of religious thought, showing us clear-cut personal divinities with ethical and spiritual attributes.”[63] But the older and cruder ideas of the nature of the gods left a persistent trace in the ritual with which they were worshipped, as well as in the designs of the artists who reflected the popular traditions. Thus the ancient custom of burning incense before the tree, decking it with consecrated fillets, and honouring it with burnt offerings, survived long after the belief of which it was the natural development had decayed. A sculpture preserved in the Berlin Museum represents the holy pine-tree of Pan adorned with wreaths and fillets. An image of Pan is near, and offerings are being brought to an altar placed beneath it. Again, Theocritus describes how at the consecration of Helen’s plane-tree at Sparta, the choir of Lacedaemonian maidens hung consecrated wreaths of lotus flowers upon the tree, anointed it with costly spikenard, and attached to it the dedicatory placard: “Honour me, all ye that pass by, for I am Helen’s tree.”[64]

The practice of giving the tree a human semblance, by clothing it in garments or carving its stump in human form, was the natural result of this worship amongst an artistic race, groping its way towards a concrete expression of its ideas. It represented the crude strivings of a people who, in their attempts to create gods in their own image, eventually produced an unsurpassable ideal of human grace and beauty. From the rudely carved tree-stump arose in due time the Hermes of Praxiteles. Bötticher reproduces several ancient designs in which the trunk of a tree is dressed as Dionysus. In one of these a mask is fastened at the top of the trunk in such a way that the branches appear to grow from the head of the god, and the trunk itself is clothed with a long garment; a table, or altar, loaded with gifts, stands beside it.[65]

In other cases, probably where the worshipped tree had died, its trunk or branches were rudely carved into an image of the god, and either left in situ, or hewn down and placed near the temple or, later, in the very temple itself. Both Pausanias and Pliny state that the oldest images of the gods were made of wood, and several Latin authors refer to the custom of thus carving the branches of auspicious trees (felicium arborum) as prevalent in primitive times amongst the Greeks.[66] The ἄγαλμα or emblem of Aphrodite, dedicated by Pelops, was wrought out of a fresh verdant myrtle-tree. At Samos a board was the emblem of Hera; two wooden stocks joined together by a cross-piece was the sign of the twin-brethren at Sparta, and a wooden column encircled with ivy was consecrated to Dionysus at Thebes.[67]

It may be fairly assumed that in cases such as these the worshippers believed that the dead piece of wood retained some at least of the power originally attributed to the spirit dwelling in the living tree. Their idolatry was but a childish deduction from an ancient and deeply-rooted theology. The same may be said for the wood-cutter, derided in the Apocrypha, who, “taking a crooked piece of wood and full of knots, carveth it with the diligence of his idleness, and shapeth it by the skill of his indolence; then he giveth it the semblance of the image of a man, smearing it with vermilion and with paint colouring it red; and having made for it a chamber worthy of it, he setteth it in a wall, making it fast with iron.”[68] Side by side with this foolish wood-cutter, who “for life beseecheth that which is dead,” may be placed the Sicilian peasant whom Theocritus represents as offering sacrifice to a carved Pan. “When thou hast turned yonder lane, goatherd, where the oak-trees are, thou wilt find an image of fig-tree wood newly carven; three legged it is, the bark still covers it, and it is earless withal. A right holy precinct runs round it, and a ceaseless stream that falleth from the rocks on every side is green with laurels and myrtles and fragrant cypress. And all around the place that child of the grape, the vine, doth flourish with its tendrils, and the merles in spring with their sweet songs pour forth their woodnotes wild, and the brown nightingales reply with their complaints, pouring from their bills their honey sweet song.”[69]

This crude worship of the god in the anthropomorphised tree lingered on amongst the peasantry side by side with the splendid temple ritual, even into days when the revelation of a Deity who filled all time and space, and was worshipped in temples not made with hands, was rapidly undermining the pagan worship of the cities. Maximus Tyrius, who lived in the second century A.D., and counted among his most diligent pupils the great Marcus Aurelius, relates how even in his day at the festival of Dionysus every peasant selected the most beautiful tree in his garden to convert it into an image of the god and to worship it.[70] And Apuleius, another writer of the same period, bears similar testimony. “It is the custom,” he says, “of pious travellers, when their way passes a grove or holy place, that they offer up a prayer for the fulfilment of their wishes, offer gifts and remain there a time; so I, when I set foot in that most sacred city, although in haste, must crave for a pardon, offer a prayer and moderate my haste. For never was traveller more justified in making a religious pause, when he perchance shall have come upon a flower-wreathed altar, a grotto covered with boughs, an oak decorated with many horns, or a beech-tree with skins hung to it, a little sacred hill fenced around, or a tree trunk hewn as an image (truncus dolamine effigatus).”[71]

Forms of the Tât or Didû, the emblem of Osiris.
(Maspero, op. cit.)

This custom of carving a tree into the semblance of a god, and subsequently worshipping it as his sanctuary or symbol, was current in many parts of the world. The chief idol form of Osiris, the Didû or Tât, is believed by Maspero to have originated as a simple tree-trunk disbranched and planted in the ground.[72] Usually it is represented with a grotesque face, beneath four superimposed capitals, with a necklace round its neck, a long robe hiding the base of the column in its folds, and the whole surmounted by the familiar Osirian emblems.

Again, it is said to have been a practice amongst the Druids, when an oak died to strip off its bark and shape it into a pillar, pyramid, or cross, and continue to worship it as an emblem of the god.[73] The cross especially was a favourite form, and any oak with two principal branches forming a cross with the main stem was consecrated by a sacred inscription, and from that time forward regarded with particular reverence.

The same custom prevailed in India. In the seventeenth century there existed near Surat a sacred banian-tree, supposed to be 3000 years old, which the Hindus would never cut or touch with steel for fear of offending the god concealed in its foliage. They made pilgrimages to it and honoured it with religious ceremonies. On its trunk at a little distance from the ground a head had been roughly carved, painted in gay colours, and furnished with gold and silver eyes. This simulacrum was constantly adorned with fresh foliage and flowers, the withered leaves which they replaced being distributed amongst the pilgrims as pious souvenirs.[74]

It was predominantly, though by no means exclusively, a Greek development to associate a particular god with a particular variety of tree. The oak, excelling all others in majestic strength and inherent vigour, became the emblem and embodiment of Zeus. The connection arose in all probability from the primitive worship of the Pelasgic Zeus in the oak grove of Dodona, but in classical times it was accepted throughout Greece. On coins and in other works of art the god is frequently represented as crowned with oak leaves, or as standing or sitting beside an oak-tree.[75] To have partaken of the acorns of Zeus was a vernacular expression for having acquired wisdom and knowledge. This especial sanctity of the oak as the tree of the father of the gods passed into Italy, and Virgil speaks of it as—

More sacred even than the oak to Zeus was the laurel to Apollo. No sanctuary of his was complete without it; none could be founded where the soil was unfavourable to its growth. No worshipper could share in his rites who had not a crown of laurel on his head or a branch in his hand. As endowed with the power of the god, who was at once the prophet, poet, redeemer, and protector of his people, the laurel assumed an important and many-sided rôle in ceremonial symbolism.[76] The staff of laurel in the hand of the reciting poet was assumed to assist his inspiration, in the hand of the prophet or diviner to help him to see hidden things. Thus the use of the laurel played an essential part in the oracular ceremonial of Delphi. Everywhere, in short, the bearing of the laurel bough was the surest way to the god’s protection and favour. The conception was slow to die. Clement, writing about 200 A.D., still finds the warning necessary that “one must not hope to obtain reconciliation with God by means of laurel branches adorned with red and white ribbons.”[77]

By an easy transition the laurel became sacred also to Aesculapius. As the source at once of a valuable remedy and a deadly poison, it was held in high esteem by Greek physicians. It was popularly believed that spirits could be cast out by its means, and it was usual to affix a laurel bough over the doorway in cases of serious illness, in order to avert death and keep evil spirits at bay.[78]

The ceremonial use of the laurel passed from Greece into Italy. When the Sibylline books were consulted at Rome, the laurel of prophecy always adorned the chair of the priest.[79] Victors were crowned with laurel, and in Roman triumphs the soldiers decked their spears and helmets with its leaves.

The tree of Aphrodite was the myrtle.[80] It was held to have the power both of creating and of perpetuating love, and hence from the earliest times was used in marriage ceremonies. In the Eleusinian mysteries the initiates crowned themselves with the oak leaves of Zeus and the myrtle of Aphrodite. The Graces, her attendants, were represented as wearing myrtle chaplets, and her worshippers crowned themselves with myrtle sprays. At Rome Venus was worshipped under the name of Myrtea in her temple at the foot of the Aventine. The apple-tree held a subsidiary but yet important place in the cult of Aphrodite. Its fruit was regarded as an appropriate offering to her and, according to Theocritus, played its part in love games.[81] The apples of Atalanta had no doubt a symbolical significance.

Athena also had her special tree. According to mythology she sprang fully armed from the head of Zeus, but research into the origins of the gods makes it much more probable that her true pedigree was from the olive, which grew wild upon the Athenian Acropolis, the chief seat of her worship. Mr. M‘Lennan even inclined to regard the olive as originally the totem of the Athenians.[82] At any rate their connection with that tree dates from an ancient time. “The produce of the olive-tree had an almost religious value for the men of Attica, and the physical side of Greek civilisation much depended on it.”[83] From the era of Pericles onwards the coins of Athens were stamped with the olive-branch, amongst other usual accompaniments of the tutelary goddess. Every sanctuary and temple of Athena had its sacred olive-tree, which was regarded as the symbol of the divine peace and protection. Naturally a legend arose to explain the connection. Athena and Poseidon, being at variance as to which of them should name the newly-founded city of Athens, referred the question to the gods, who in general assembly decreed the privilege to that claimant who should give the most useful present to the inhabitants of earth. Poseidon struck the ground with his trident and a horse sprang forth. But Athena “revealed the spray of the gray-green olive, a divine crown and glory for bright Athens.”[84] And the gods decided that the olive, as the emblem of peace, was a higher gift to man than the horse, which was the symbol of war. So Athena named the city after herself and became its protectress. This myth, which, according to Mr. Farnell, is one of the very few creation-myths in Greek folk-lore, was a favourite subject in art, and is frequently represented on late Attic coins.[85]

Other gods had their sacred trees: Dionysus, the vine; Dis and Persephone, the poplar, which was supposed to grow on the banks of Acheron. The cypress, called by Greeks and Romans alike the “mournful tree,” was also sacred to the rulers of the underworld, and to their associates, the Fates and Furies. As such it was customary to plant it by the grave, and, in the event of a death, to place it either before the house or in the vestibule, in order to warn those about to perform a sacred rite against entering a place polluted by a dead body.[86]

In regard to the number of trees which they held sacred the Semitic nations rivalled the Greeks. They venerated “the pines and cedars of Lebanon, the evergreen oaks of the Palestinian hills, the tamarisks of the Syrian jungles, the acacias of the Arabian wadies,” besides such cultivated trees as the palm, the olive, and the vine. But there is no clear evidence to prove that they ever coupled a particular species of tree with a particular god. In Phoenicia the cypress was sacred to Astarte, but it was equally connected with the god Melcarth, who was believed to have planted the cypress-trees at Daphne. “If a tree belonged to a particular deity, it was not because it was of a particular species, but because it was the natural wood of the place where the god was worshipped.”[87] It is true that the Chaldaeans regarded the cedar as the special tree of the god Ea, but the association was probably borrowed, like the god himself, from the non-Semitic Accadians, while the connection of the Nabataean god, Dusares, with the vine may be traced to Hellenic influence.

Outside the Semitic area individual gods are often found, as in Greece, linked with particular kinds of trees. In Persia the cypress was the sacred tree of the god Mithra, while in Egypt the acacia was intimately associated with Osiris. On an ancient sarcophagus an acacia is represented with the device, “Osiris shoots up.”[88] And in mortuary pictures the god is sometimes represented as a mummy covered with a tree or with growing plants. In both cases the idea of life arising out of death is probably implied.