here it is loaded with decorations; and now I want to show you that
they too are Forest Memories--that since the evergreen moved over into
the service of Christianity, one by one like a flock of birds these
Forest Memories have followed it and have alighted amid its
branches. Everything here has its story. I am going to tell you in
each case what that story is; I am going to interpret everything on
the Christmas Tree and the other Christmas decorations in the room.”
It was at this point that her keen attention became fixed on him and
never afterwards wavered. If everything had its story, the mistletoe
would have its; he must interpret that: and thus he himself
unexpectedly had brought about the situation she wished. She would
meet him at that symbolic bough: there be rendered the Judgment of the
Years! And now as one sits down at some point of a road where a
traveller must arrive, she waited for him there.
He turned to the Tree and explained briefly that as soon as the forest
worshipper began the worship of the tree, he began to bring to it his
offerings and to hang these on the boughs; for religion consists in
offering something: to worship is to give. In after ages when man had
learned to build shrines and temples, he still kept up his primitive
custom of bringing to the altar his gifts and sacrifices; but during
that immeasurable time before he had learned to carve wood or to set
one stone on another, he was bringing his offerings to the grove--the
only cathedral he had. And this to him was not decoration; it was
prayer. So that in our age of the world when we playfully decorate the
Christmas Tree it is a survival of grave rites in the worship of
primitive man and is as ancient as forest worship itself.
And now he began.
With the pointer in his hand he touched the star at the apex of the
fir. This, he said, was commonly understood to represent the Star of
Bethlehem which guided the wise men of the East to the manger on the
Night of the Nativity--the Star of the New Born. But modern
discoveries show that the records of ancient Chaldea go back four or
five thousand years before the Christian era; and as far back as they
have been traced, we find the wise men of the East worshipping this
same star and being guided by it in their spiritual wanderings as they
searched for the incarnation of the Divine. They worshipped it as the
star of peace and goodness and purity. Many a pious Wolfram in those
dim centuries no doubt sang his evening hymn to the same star, for
love of some Chaldean Elizabeth--both he and she blown about the
desert how many centuries now as dust. Moreover on these records the
star and the Tree are brought together as here side by side. And the
story of the star leads backward to one of the first things that man
ever worshipped as he looked beyond the forest: the light of the
heavens floating in the depth of space--light that he wanted but could
not grasp.
He touched the next object on the Tree--the candle under the star--and
went on:
Imagine, he said, the forest worshipper as at the end of ages having
caught this light--having brought it down in the language of his myth
from heaven to earth: that is, imagine the star in space as having
become a star in his hand--the candle: the star worshipper had now
become also the fire worshipper. Thus the candle leads us back to the
fire worshippers of ancient Persia--those highlands of the spirit
seeking light. We think of the Christmas candle on the Tree as merely
borrowed from the candle of the altar for the purpose of illumination;
but the use of it goes back to a time when the forest worshipper, now
also the fire worshipper, hung his lights on the trees, having no
other altar. Far down toward modern times the temples of the old
Prussians, for example, were oak groves, and among them a hierarchy of
priests was ordained to keep the sacred fire perpetually burning at
the root of the sacred oak.
He touched the third object on the tree--the cross under the
candle--and went on:
“To the Christian believer the cross signifies one supreme event:
Calvary and the tragedy of the Crucifixion. It was what the Marys saw
and the apostles that morning in Gethsemane. But no one in that age
thought of the cross as a Christian symbol. John and Peter and Paul
and the rest went down into their graves without so regarding it. The
Magdalene never clung to it with life-tired arms, nor poured out at
the foot of it the benizon of her tears. Not until the third century
after Christ did the Bishops assembled at Nice announce it a Christian
symbol. But it was a sacred emblem in the dateless antiquity of
Egypt. To primitive man it stood for that sacred light and fire of
life which was himself. For he himself is a cross--the first cross he
has ever known. The faithful may truly think of the Son of Man as
crucified as the image of humanity. And thus ages before Christ,
cross worship and forest worship were brought together: for instance,
among the Druids who hunted for an oak, two boughs of which made with
the trunk of the tree the figure of the cross; and on these three they
cut the names of three of their gods and this was holy-cross wood.”
He moved the pointer down until he touched the fourth object on the
tree--the dove under the cross, and went on:
“In the mind of the Christian believer this represents the white dove
of the New Testament which descended on the Son of Man when the
heavens were opened. So in Parsifal the white dove descends,
overshadowing the Grail. But ages before Christ the prolific white
dove of Syria was worshipped throughout the Orient as the symbol of
reproductive Nature: and to this day the Almighty is there believed to
manifest himself under this form. In ancient Mesopotamia the divine
mother of nature is often represented with this dove as having
actually alighted on her shoulder or in her open hand. And here again
forest worship early became associated with the worship of the dove;
for, sixteen hundred years before Christ, we find the dove nurtured in
the oak grove at Dodona where its presence was an augury and its wings
an omen.”
On he went, touching one thing after another, tracing the story of
each backward till it was lost in antiquity and showing how each was
entwined with forest worship.
He touched the musical instruments; the bell, the drum. The bell, he
said, was used in Greece by the Priests of Bacchus in the worship of
the vine. And vine worship was forest worship. Moreover, in the same
oak grove at Dodona bells were tied to the oak boughs and their
tinklings also were sacred auguries. The drum, which the modern boy
beats on Christmas Day, was beaten ages before Christ in the worship
of Confucius: the story of it dies away toward what was man’s first
written music in forgotten China. In the first century of the
Christian era, on one of the most splendid of the old Buddhist
sculptures, boys are represented as beating the drum in the worship of
the sacred tree--once more showing how music passed into the service
of forest faith.
He touched the cornucopia; and he traced its story back to the ram’s
horn--the primitive cup of libation, used for a drinking cup and used
also to pour out the last product of the vine in honor of the vine
itself--the forest’s first goblet.
He touched the fruits and the flowers on the Tree: these were oldest
of all, perhaps, he said; for before the forest worshipper had learned
to shape or fabricate any offerings of his own skill, he could at
least bring to the divine tree and hang on it the flower of spring,
the wild fruit of autumn.
He kept on until only three things on the Tree were left
uninterpreted; the tinsel, the masks, and the dolls. He told her that
he had left these to the last for a reason: seemingly they were the
most trivial but really the most grave; for by means of them most
clearly could be traced the presence of great law running through the
progress of humanity.
He drew her attention to the tinsel that covered the tree, draping it
like a yellow moss. It was of no value, he said, but in the course of
ages it had taken the place of the offering of actual gold in forest
worship: a once universal custom of adorning the tree with everything
most precious to the giver in token of his sacrifice and
self-sacrifice. Even in Jeremiah is an account of the lading of the
sacred tree with gold and ornaments. Herodotus relates that when
Xerxes was invading Lydia, on the march he saw a divine tree and had
it honored with golden robes and gifts. Livy narrates that when
Romulus slew his enemy on the site of the Eternal City, he hung rich
spoils on the oak of the Capitoline Hill. And this custom of
decorating the tree with actual gold goes back in history until we can
meet it coming down to us in the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece
and in that of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides. Now the custom
has dwindled to this tinsel flung over the Christmas Tree--the mock
sacrifice for the real.
He touched the masks and unfolded the grim story that lay behind their
mockery. It led back to the common custom in antiquity of sacrificing
prisoners of war or condemned criminals or innocent victims in forest
worship and of hanging their heads on the branches: we know this to
have been the practice among Gallic and Teuton tribes. In the course
of time, when such barbarity could be tolerated no longer, the mock
countenance replaced the real.
He touched the dolls and revealed their sad story. Like the others,
its long path led to antiquity and to the custom of sacrificing
children in forest worship. How common this custom was the early
literature of the human race too abundantly testifies. We encounter
the trace of it in Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac--arrested by the
command of Jehovah. But Abraham would never have thought of slaying
his son to propitiate his God, had not the custom been well
established. In the case of Jephthah’s daughter the sacrifice was
actually allowed. We come upon the same custom in the fate of
Iphigenia--at a critical turning point in the world’s mercy; in her
stead the life of a lesser animal, as in Isaac’s case, was
accepted. When the protective charity of mankind turned against the
inhumanity of the old faiths, then the substitution of the mock for
the real sacrifice became complete. And now on the boughs of the
Christmas Tree where richly we come upon vestiges of primitive rites
only these playful toys are left to suggest the massacre of the
innocent.
He had covered the ground; everything had yielded its story. All the
little stories, like pathways running backward into the distance and
ever converging, met somewhere in lost ages; they met in forest
worship and they met in some sacrifice by the human heart.
And thus he drew his conclusion as the lesson of the night:
“Thus, Josephine, my story ends for you and for me. The Christmas Tree
is all that is left of a forest memory. The forest worshipper could
not worship without giving, because to worship is to give: therefore
he brought his gifts to the forest--his first altar. These gifts,
remember, were never, as with us, decorations. They were his
sacrifices and self-sacrifices. In all the religions he has had since,
the same law lives. In his lower religions he has sacrificed the
better to the worse; in the higher ones he has sacrificed the worst to
the best. If the race should ever outgrow all religion whatsoever, it
would still have to worship what is highest in human nature and so
worshipping, it would still be ruled by the ancient law of sacrifice
become the law of self-sacrifice: it would still be necessary to offer
up what is low in us to what is higher. Only one portion of mankind
has ever believed in Jerusalem; but every religion has known its own
Calvary.”
He turned away from the Tree toward her and awaited her
appreciation. She had sat watching him without a movement and without
a word. But when at last she asked him a question, she spoke as a
listener who wakens from a long revery.
“Have you finished the story for me?” she inquired.
“I have finished the story for you,” he replied without betraying
disappointment at her icy reception of it.
Keeping her posture, she raised one of her white arms above her head,
turning her face up also until the swanlike curve of the white throat
showed; and with quivering finger tips she touched some sprays of
mistletoe pendent from the garland on the wall:
“You have not interpreted this,” she said, her mind fixed on that sole
omission.
“I have not explained that,” he admitted.
She sat up, and for the first time looked with intense interest toward
the manuscript on the table across the room.
“Have you explained it there?”
“I have not explained it there.”
“But why?” she said with disappointment.
“I did not wish you to read that story, Josephine.”
“But why, Frederick?” she inquired, startled into wonderment.
He smiled: “If I told you why, I might as well tell you the story.”
“But why do you not wish to tell me the story?”
He answered with warning frankness: “If you once saw it as a picture,
the picture would be coming back to you at times the rest of your life
darkly.”
She protested: “If it is dark to you, why should I not share the
darkness of it? Have we not always looked at life’s shadows together?
And thus seeing life, have not bright things been doubly bright to us
and dark things but half as dark?”
He merely repeated his warning: “It is a story of a crueler age than
ours. It goes back to the forest worship of the Druids.”
She answered: “So long as our own age is cruel, what room is left to
take seriously the mere stories of crueler ones? Am I to shrink from
the forest worship of the Druids? Is there any story of theirs not
printed in books? Are not the books in libraries? Are they not put in
libraries to be read? If others read them, may not I? And since when
must I begin to dread anything in books? Or anything in life? And
since when did we begin to look at life apart, we who have always
looked at it with four eyes?”
“I have always told you there are things to see with four eyes, things
to see with two, and things to see with none.”
With sudden intensity her white arm went up again and touched the
mistletoe.
“Tell me the story of this!” she pleaded as though she demanded a
right. As she spoke, her thumb and forefinger meeting on a spray, they
closed and went through it like a pair of shears; and a bunch of the
white pearls of the forest dropped on the ridge of her shoulder and
were broken apart and rolled across her breast into her lap.
He looked grave; silence or speech--which were better for her? Either,
he now saw, would give her pain.
“Happily the story is far away from us,” he said, as though he were
half inclined to grant her request.
“If it is far away, bring it near! Bring it into the room as you
brought the stories of the star and the candle and the cross and the
dove and the others! Make it live before my eyes! Enact it before me!
Steep me in it as you have steeped yourself!”
He held back a long time: “You who are so safe in good, why know
evil?”
“Frederick,” she cried, “I shall have to insist upon your telling me
this story. And if you should keep any part of it back, I would know.
Then tell it all: if it is dark, let each shadow have its shade; give
each heavy part its heaviness; let cruelty be cruelty--and truth be
truth!”
He stood gazing across the centuries, and when he began, there was a
change in him; something personal was beginning to intrude itself into
the narrative of the historian:
“Imagine the world of our human nature in the last centuries before
Palestine became Holy Land. Athens stood with her marbles glistening
by the blue Ægean, and Greek girls with fillets and sandals--the
living images of those pale sculptured shapes that are the mournful
eternity of Art--Greek girls were being chosen for the secret rites in
the temple at Ephesus. The sun of Italy had not yet browned the little
children who were to become the brown fathers and mothers of the brown
soldiers of Cæsar’s legions; and twenty miles south of Rome, in the
sacred grove of Dodona,--where the motions of oak boughs were
auguries, and the flappings of the wings of white doves were divine
messages, and the tinkling of bells in the foliage had divine
meanings,--in this grove the virgins of Latium, as the Greek girls of
Ephesus, were once a year appointed to undergo similar rites. To the
south Pompeii, with its night laughter and song sounding far out
toward the softly lapping Mediterranean and up the slopes of its dread
volcano, drained its goblet and did not care, emptied it as often as
filled and asked for nothing more. A little distance off Herculaneum,
with its tender dreams of Greece but with its arms around the
breathing image of Italy, slept--uncovered.
“Beyond Italy to the north, on the other side of the eternal snowcaps,
lay unknown Gaul, not yet dreaming of the Cæsar who was to conquer
it; and across the wild sea opposite Gaul lay the wooded isle of
Britain. All over that island one forest; in that forest one worship;
in that worship one tree--the oak of England; and on that oak one
bough--the mistletoe.”
He spoke to her awhile about the oak, describing the place it had in
the early civilizations of the human race. In the Old Testament it was
the tree of the Hebrew idols and of Jehovah. In Greece it was the
tree of Zeus, the most august and the most human of the gods. In Italy
it was the tree of Jove, great father of immortals and of
mankind. After the gods passed, it became the tree of the imperial
Cæsars. After the Cæsars had passed, it was the oak that Michael
Angelo in the Middle Ages scattered over the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel near the creation of man and his expulsion from Paradise--there
as always the chosen tree of human desire. In Britain it was the
sacred tree of Druidism: there the Arch Druid and his fellow-priests
performed none of their rites without using its leaves and branches:
never anywhere in the world was the oak worshipped with such
ceremonies and sacrifices as there.
Imagine then a scene--the chief Nature Festival of that forest
worship: the New Year’s day of the Druids.
A vast concourse of people, men and women and children, are on their
way to the forest; they are moving toward an oak tree that has been
found with mistletoe growing on it--growing there so seldom. As the
excited throng come in sight of it, they hail it with loud cries of
reverence and delight. Under it they gather; there a banquet is
spread. In the midst of the assemblage one figure towers--the Arch
Druid. Every eye is fixed fearfully on him, for on whomsoever his own
eye may fall with wrath, he may be doomed to become one of the victims
annually sacrificed to the oak.
A gold chain is around his neck; gold bands are around his arms. He is
clad in robes of spotless white. He ascends the tree to a low bough,
and making a hollow in the folds of his robes, he crops with a golden
pruning hook the mistletoe and so catches it as it falls. Then it is
blessed and scattered among the throng, and the priest prays that each
one so receiving it may receive also the divine favor and blessing of
which it is Nature’s emblem. Two white bulls, the horns of which have
never hitherto been touched, are now adorned with fillets and are
slaughtered in sacrifice.
Then at last it is over, the people are gone, the forest is left to
itself, and the New Year’s ceremony of cutting the mistletoe from the
oak is at an end.
Here he ended the story.
She had sat leaning far forward, her fingers interlocked and her brows
knitted. When he stopped, she sat up and studied him a moment in
bewilderment:
“But why did you call that a dark story?” she asked. “Where is the
cruelty? It is beautiful, and I shall never forget it and it will
never throw a dark image on my mind: New Year’s day--the winter
woods--the journeying throng--the oak--the bough--the banquet
beneath--the white bulls with fillets on their horns--the white-robed
priest--the golden sickle in his hand--the stroke that severs the
mistletoe--the prayer that each soul receiving any smallest piece will
be blessed in life’s sorrows! If I were a great painter, I should like
to paint that scene. In the centre should be some young girl,
pressing to her heart what she believed to be heaven’s covenant with
her under the guise of a blossom. How could you have wished to
withhold such a story from me?”
He smiled at her a little sadly.
“I have not yet told you all,” he said, “but I have told you enough.”
Instantly she bent far over toward him with intuitive scrutiny. Under
her breath one word escaped:
“Ah!”
It was the breath of a discovery--a discovery of something unknown to
her.
“I am sparing you, Josephine!”
She stretched each arm along the back of the sofa and pinioned the
wood in her clutch.
“Are you sparing me?” she asked in a tone of torture. “Or are you
sparing yourself?”
The heavy staff on which he stood leaning dropped from his relaxed
grasp to the floor. He looked down at it a moment and then calmly
picked it up.
“I am going to tell you the story,” he said with a new quietness.
She was aroused by some change in him.
“I will not listen! I do not wish to hear it!”
“You will have to listen,” he said. “It is better for you to
know. Better for any human being to know any truth than suffer the
bane of wrong thinking. When you are free to judge, it will be
impossible for you to misjudge.”
“I have not misjudged you! I have not judged you! In some way that I
do not understand you are judging yourself!”
He stepped back a pace--farther away from her--and he drew himself
up. In the movement there was instinctive resentment. And the right
not to be pried into--not even by the nearest.
The step which had removed him farther from her had brought him nearer
to the Christmas Tree at his back. A long, three-fingered bough being
thus pressed against was forced upward and reappeared on one of his
shoulders. The movement seemed human: it was like the conscious hand
of the tree. The fir, standing there decked out in the artificial
tawdriness of a double-dealing race, laid its wild sincere touch on
him--as sincere as the touch of dying human fingers--and let its
passing youth flow into him. It attracted his attention, and he turned
his head toward it as with recognition. Other boughs near the floor
likewise thrust themselves forward, hiding his feet so that he stood
ankle-deep in forestry.
This reunion did not escape her. Her overwrought imagination made of
it a sinister omen: the bough on his shoulder rested there as the old
forest claim; the boughs about his feet were the ancestral forest
tether. As he had stepped backward from her, Nature had asserted the
earlier right to him. In strange sickness and desolation of heart she
waited.
He stood facing her but looking past her at centuries long gone; the
first sound of his voice registered upon her ear some message of doom:
“Listen, Josephine!”
She buried her face in her hands.
“I cannot! I will not!”
“You will have to listen. You know that for some years, apart from my
other work, I have been gathering together the woodland customs of our
people and trying to trace them back to their origin and first
meaning. In our age of the world we come upon many playful forest
survivals of what were once grave things. Often in our play and
pastimes and lingering superstitions about the forest we cross faint
traces of what were once vital realities.
“Among these there has always been one that until recently I have
never understood. Among country people oftenest, but heard of
everywhere, is the saying that if a girl is caught standing under the
mistletoe, she may be kissed by the man who thus finds her. I have
always thought that this ceremony and playful sacrifice led back to
some ancient rite--I could not discover what. Now I know.”
In a voice full of a new delicacy and scarcely audible, he told her.
It is another scene in the forest of Britain. This time it is not the
first day of the year--the New Year’s day of the Druids when they
celebrated the national festival of the oak. But it is early summer,
perhaps the middle of May--May in England--with the young beauty of
the woods. It is some hushed evening at twilight. The new moon is
just silvering the tender leaves and creating a faint shadow under the
trees. The hawthorn is in bloom--red and white--and not far from the
spot, hidden in some fragrant tuft of this, a nightingale is singing,
singing, singing.