SPIRIT-HAUNTED TREES
According to Empedocles 'there are two destinies for the souls of
highest virtue--to pass into trees or into the bodies of lions,'
this conception of plants as the habitation of the departing soul
being founded on the old idea of transmigration. Illustrations of the
primitive belief meet us in all ages, reminding us how Dante passed
through that leafless wood, in the bark of every tree of which was
confined a suicide; and of Ariel's imprisonment:
Into a cloven pine, within which rift
Imprison'd, thou didst painfully remain
A dozen years....
... Where thou didst vent thy groans,
As fast as mill-wheels strike.
In German folk-lore the soul is supposed occasionally to take the form
of a flower, as a lily or white rose; and, according to a popular
belief, one of these flowers appears on the chairs of those about to
die. Grimm[321] tells a pretty tale of a child who 'carries home a bud
which the angel had given him in the wood; when the rose blooms the
child is dead.' Similarly, from the grave of one unjustly executed
white lilies are said to spring as a token of the person's innocence,
and from that of a maiden three lilies, which no one save her lover
must gather, a superstition which, under one form or another, has
largely prevailed both amongst civilised and savage communities. In
Iceland it is said that when innocent persons are put to death, the
sorb or mountain ash will spring over their grave, and the Lay of
Runzifal makes a blackthorn shoot out of the bodies of slain heathens,
and a white flower by the heads of fallen Christians. The well-known
story of 'Tristram and Ysonde' tells how 'from his grave there grew an
eglantine which twined about the statue, a marvel for all men to see;
and though three times they cut it down, it grew again, and ever wound
its arms about the image of the fair Ysonde.' With which legend may be
compared the old Scottish ballad of 'Fair Margaret and Sweet William':
Out of her breast there sprang a rose,
And out of his a briar;
They grew till they grew to the church top,
And there they tied in a true lover's knot.
It is to this time-honoured fancy that Laertes refers when he wishes
that violets may spring from the grave of Ophelia,[322] and Lord
Tennyson has borrowed the same idea:
And from his ashes may be made,
The violet of his native land.[323]
Some of the North-Western Indians believed that those who died a
natural death would be compelled to dwell among the branches of
tall trees, and the Brazilians have a mythological character called
Mani[324]--a child who died and was buried in the house of her mother.
Soon a plant--the Mandioca--sprang out of the grave, which grew,
flourished, and bore fruit. According to the Iroquois, the spirits of
certain trees are supposed to have the forms of beautiful females;
recalling, writes Mr. Herbert Spencer,[325] 'the dryads of classic
mythology, who, similarly conceived as human-shaped female spirits,
were sacrificed to in the same ways that human spirits in general were
sacrificed to.' 'By the Santals,' he adds, 'these spirits or ghosts are
individualised. At their festivals the separate families dance round
the particular trees which they fancy their domestic lares chiefly
haunt.'
In modern Greece certain trees are supposed to have their 'stichios,'
a being variously described as a spectre, a wandering soul, a vague
phantom, occasionally invisible, and sometimes assuming the most widely
different forms. When a tree is 'stichimonious,' it is generally
considered dangerous for anyone 'to sleep beneath its shade, and the
woodcutters employed to cut it down will lie upon the ground and hide
themselves, motionless, and holding their breath, at the moment when it
is about to fall, dreading lest the stichio at whose life the blow is
aimed with each blow of the axe, should avenge itself at the precise
moment when it is dislodged.'[326] This idea is abundantly illustrated
in European folk-lore, and a Swedish legend tells how, when a man was
on the point of cutting down a juniper tree, a voice was heard saying,
'Friend, hew me not.' But he gave another blow, when, to his horror and
amazement, blood gushed from the root.
Such spirit-haunted trees have been supposed to give proof of their
peculiar character by certain weird and mysterious signs. Thus the
Australian bush-demons whistle in the branches, and Mr. Schoolcraft
mentions an Indian tradition of a hollow tree, from the recesses of
which there issued on a calm day a sound like the voice of a spirit.
Hence it was considered to be inhabited by some powerful spirit, and
was deemed sacred. The holes in trees have been supposed to be the
doors through which the spirits pass, a belief which reappears in the
German idea that the holes in the oak are the pathways for elves, and
that various diseases may be cured by contact with these holes. It is
not surprising, too, that the idea of spirit-haunted trees caused them
to be regarded by the superstitious with feelings of awe. Mr. Dorman
tells us[327] of certain West Indian tribes, that if any person going
through a wood perceived a motion in the trees which he regarded as
supernatural, frightened at the strange prodigy, he would address
himself to that tree which shook the most. Similarly, when the wind
blows the long grass or waving corn, the German peasant is wont to say
that the 'Grass-wolf,' or the 'Corn-wolf' is abroad. Under a variety
of forms this animistic conception is found in different parts of the
world, and has been embodied in many a folk-tale--an Austrian Märchen
relating, for instance, how there sits in a stately fir-tree a fairy
maiden waited on by a dwarf, rewarding the innocent and plaguing the
guilty; and there is the German song of the maiden in the pine, whose
bark the boy split with a gold and silver horn.
FOOTNOTES:
[321] _Teutonic Mythology_, ii. p. 827.
[322] _Hamlet_, Act v. sc. 1.
[323] See _Folk-lore of Plants_, pp. 12, 13.
[324] Dorman's _Primitive Superstitions_, p. 293.
[325] _Principles of Sociology_, 1885, pp. 357-359.
[326] _Nineteenth Century_, April, 1882, p. 394; _Superstitions of
Modern Greece_, by M. Le Baron d'Estournelles.
[327] _Primitive Superstitions_, p. 288.