Tree Worship
From the earliest times, trees have been the focus of religious
life for many peoples around the world. As the largest plant
on earth, the tree has been a major source of stimulation to the
mythic imagination. Trees have been invested in all cultures
with a dignity unique to their own nature, and tree cults, in
which a single tree or a grove of trees is worshipped, have
flourished at different times almost everywhere. Even today
there are sacred woods in India and Japan, just as there were in
pre-Christian Europe. An elaborate mythology of trees exists
across a broad range of ancient cultures.
There is little evidence in the archaeological record of tree
worship in the prehistoric world. In the early historical
period, however, there is considerable evidence that trees held a
special significance in the cultures of the ancient world.
In Ancient Egypt, several types of trees appear in Egyptian
mythology and art, although the hieroglyph written to signify tree
appears to represent the sycamore (nehet) in particular. The
sycamore carried special mythical significance. According to
the Book of Dead, twin sycamores stood at the eastern gate of
heaven from which the sun god Re emerged each morning. The
sycamore was also regarded as a manifestation of the goddesses
Nut, Isis, and especially of Hathor, who was given the epithet
Lady of the Sycamore. Sycamores were often planted near
tombs, and burial in coffins made of sycamore wood returned the
dead person to the womb of the mother tree goddess.
In the desert environments of Ancient Egypt and Ancient
Mesopotamia trees, and especially fruit trees, assumed a special
importance. The head dress worn by one of the women buried
in the tomb of Queen Pu'abi at the Sumerian site of Ur (c. 2500
BCE) includes in the elaborate decoration clusters of gold
pomegranates, three fruits hanging together shielded by their
leaves, together with the branches of some other tree with golden
stems and fruit or pods of gold and carnelian.
In Egypt, the evergreen date palm was a sacred tree, and a palm
branch was the symbol of the god Heh, the personification of
eternity. For later cultures, the palm branch also served as
an emblem of fecundity and victory. For Christians, the palm
branch is a symbol of Christ's victory over death. It also
signified immortality and divine blessings and is often seen as an
attribute of Christian martyrs. It also denotes particular
Christian saints such Paul the Hermit and Christopher, as well as
the Archangel Michael. The palm tree is also a symbol of the
garden of paradise.
Trees also figure prominently in the culture and mythology of
Ancient Greece. Perhaps the most famous grove, of
plane-trees, was that sacred to Zeus, known as the Altis, at
Olympia. The oak tree was also sacred to Zeus, especially
the tree at the sanctuary of Zeus in Dodona which also served as
an oracle; it would seem the rustling of the leaves was regarded
as the voice of Zeus and the sounds interpreted by priestesses.
The oak was also sacred to Pan, while the myrtle-tree was sacred
to Aphrodite. In the Pandrosium near the temple known as the
Erechtheum on the Athenian Acropolis, besides many other signs and
remains of Athens' mythical past - a salt-water well and a mark in
the shape of Poseidon's trident in a rock - could also be seen a
living olive tree sacred to the goddess Athena.
An olive tree
growing today outside the Erechtheum
In several Greek myths, women and
men are frequently transformed into trees: Atys into a pine tree,
Smilax into a yew, and Daphne into the laurel, which was sacred to
Apollo. In Ancient Rome, a fig-tree sacred to Romulus grew
near the Forum, and a sacred cornel-tree grew of the slope of the
Palatine Hill. Sacred groves were also found in the city of
Rome.
Perhaps not surprisingly, trees appear at the foundations of many
of the world's religions. Because of their relative rarity
in the Near East, trees are regarded in the Bible as something
almost sacred and are used to symbolize longevity, strength, and
pride. Elements of pagan tree cults and worship have
survived into Judeo-Christian theology. In Genesis, two
trees - the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and
Evil - grow at the centre of the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:9).
Scriptural and apocryphal traditions regarding the Tree of Life
later merge in Christianity with the cult of the cross to produce
the Tree of the Cross. The fantastic Story of the True Cross
identifies the wood used for the cross in the crucifixion of Jesus
Christ as being ultimately from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and
Evil in the Garden of Eden. Other stories claim that Adam
was buried at Jerusalem and three trees grew out of his mouth to
mark the centre of the earth.
In Ancient Assyria, contemporary with the ziggurats, trees, fruit
trees especially, were associated with fertility. The
significance of trees in Ancient Assyria is shown in the numerous
relieves of winged deities watering or protecting sacred trees.
Sacred trees, or trees of life, were associated in Ancient Assyria
with the worship of the god Enlil.
Some trees become sacred through what may have occurred in their
proximity. It was under a pipal tree that Siddhartha Gautama
(born 566 BCE) meditated until he attained enlightenment (Nirvana)
and became the Buddha. The Bodhi or Bo (Enlightenment) tree
is now the centre of a major Buddhist sacred shrine known as Bodh
Gaya.
For the ancient Celts, the Yew tree was a symbol of immortality,
and holy trees elsewhere functioned as symbols of renewal. A
tree scarred by lightning was identified as a tree of life, and,
according to Pliny the Celtic Druids believed that mistletoe grew
in places which had been struck by lightning. The Druids
performed rituals and ceremonies in groves of sacred oak trees,
and believed that the interior of the oak was the abode of the
dead. In India, it is believed that the Brahma Daitya, the
ghosts of brahmans, live in the fig trees, the pipal (ficus
religiosa), or the banyan (ficus indica), awaiting liberation or
reincarnarnation. Among the eight or so species of tree
considered sacred in India, these two varieties of fig are the
most highly venerated.
The identification of sacred trees as symbols of renewal is
widespread. In China, the Tree of Life, the Kien-Luen, grows
on the slopes of Kuen-Luen, while the Moslem Lote tree marks the
boundary between the human and the divine. From the four
boughs of the Buddhist Tree of Wisdom flow the rivers of life.
The great ash tree Yggdrasil of Nordic myth connects with its
roots and boughs the underworld and heaven.
In Japan, trees such as the cryptomeria are venerated at Shinto
shrines. Especially sacred is the sakaki, a branch from
which stuck upright in the ground is represented by the shin-no-mihashira,
or sacred central post, over and around which the wooden Shrines
at Ise are built. The shin-no-mihashira is both the sakaki
branch and the pillar confirmed in the nethermost ground, like the
heaven-tree in many Japanese legends.
Sacred forests still exist in India and in Bali, Indonesia.
The holy forests in Bali are annexed to temples that may or may
not be enclosed in it, such as the Holy Forest at Sangeh.
The general feeling of respect and veneration for trees in India
has produced a great variety of tree myths and traditions.
With the encouragement of Pope Saint Gregory the Great in the 6th
century CE, a common practice among proselytizing Christians was
to graft Christian theology onto pre-existing pagan rites and
sacred places. In the case of pagan tree cults, this may
initially involve the destruction of the sacred grove or the
cutting down of a sacred tree. However, it would appear that
frequently a church would be built on the same site, thereby
co-opting it in the service of Christian conversion. The
process effectively Christianized the sacred powers or energies of
the original site. Examples of this include the medieval
Gothic cathedral of Chartres, which was built on a site which was
once sacred to the Celtic Druids (acorns, oak twigs, and tree
idols in the sculptural decorations on the South Portal of the
cathedral may allude to the original Druidic oak grove). And
before the Druids, during the Neolithic period, the same site may
have been a sacred burial mound.
Trees and Architecture
The Egyptian temple was conceived essentially as a stone model of
the creation landscape. The orders of columns, however, were
designed not as direct representations of plant life (the palm,
lotus, and papyrus bundle), but as stone reproductions of
idealized landscape features.
Egyptian palm-leaf
capital
The palm-form column, for example,
which appears already fully developed by the 5th Dynasty (2465 -
2323 BCE) and used constantly for the next 2000 years, shows the
palm tree as a circular column as if it were the trunk of a palm
tree with the topmost section ornamented with palm leaves shown as
if tied with a thong around the column.
A famous passage in Vitruvius describes the origin of columns in
Greek and Roman architecture (cf. the temples on the Athenian
Acropolis) as derived from tree trunks, a not entirely fanciful
explanation given both the tree-like tapering of the classical
column (even the flutes may be stylized representations of ribbed
tree bark), and the belief that stone temples in ancient Greece
were based upon earlier types made of wood. It is known for
a fact that the Temple of Hera at Olympia originally had columns
of oak, two of which (the others having having been replaced by
stone columns as they wore out) were still in place when Pausanias
visited Olympia in the 2nd century CE.
The classical column
as a tree trunk illustration in Philibert de l'Orme's Le Premier
Tome de l'Architecture, 1567
A similar architectural tradition
identifies the origin of Gothic pointed arches and vaults in the
interlacing of tree branches, and likens the view down the nave of
a Gothic cathedral to a path through a wood of tall overarching
trees. The suggestion can be made that the arches and
vaulting of Chartres Cathedral may deliberately resemble the path
to the sacred grove that stood on the original site, with the
crossing of the church symbolizing, or perhaps actually located
at, the central clearing in the grove where Druidic rituals
formerly took place.
Trees are abode of spirits?
When a tree comes to be viewed, no longer as the body of the
tree-spirit, but simply as its abode which it can quit at
pleasure, an important advance has been made in religious thought.
Animism is passing into polytheism. In other words, instead
of regarding each tree as a living and conscious being, man now
sees in it merely a lifeless, inert mass, tenanted for a longer or
shorter time by a supernatural being who, as he can pass freely
from tree to tree, thereby enjoys a certain right of possession or
lordship over the trees, and, ceasing to be a tree-soul, becomes a
forest god. As soon as the tree-spirit is thus in a measure
disengaged from each particular tree, he begins to change his
shape and assume the body of a man, in virtue of a general
tendency of early thought to clothe all abstract spiritual beings
in concrete human form. Hence in classical art the sylvan
deities are depicted in human shape, their woodland character
being denoted by a branch or some equally obvious symbol.
But this change of shape does not affect the essential character
of the tree-spirit. The powers which he exercised as a
tree-soul incorporate in a tree, he still continues to wield as a
god of trees.
Trees considered as animate beings are credited with the power of
making the rain to fall, the sun to shine, flocks and herds to
multiply, and women to bring forth easily; and, second, that the
very same powers are attributed to tree-gods conceived as
anthropomorphic beings or as actually incarnate in living men.
For instance, the tree-spirit makes the herds to multiply and
blesses women with offspring. In Northern India the Emblica
officinalis is a sacred tree. On the eleventh of the month
Phalgun (February) libations are poured at the foot of the tree, a
red or yellow string is bound about the trunk, and prayers are
offered to it for the fruitfulness of women, animals, and crops.
Again, in Northern India the coconut is esteemed one of the most
sacred fruits, and is called Sriphala, or the fruit of Sri, the
goddess of prosperity. It is the symbol of fertility, and
all through Upper India is kept in shrines and presented by the
priests to women who desire to become mothers. In the town
of Qua, near Old Calabar, there used to grow a palm-tree which
ensured conception to any barren woman who ate a nut from its
branches.
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