THE TREE IN ITS RELATION TO HUMAN LIFE
Having dealt with the Tree in its connection on the one hand with gods,
and on the other with spirits of more equivocal attributes, we have now
to consider a series of myths and traditions wherein it was regarded as
entering into a still more intimate relationship with man. Sometimes it
was represented as the source from which the human race originally
sprang, sometimes, conversely, as the object into which the soul might
retreat after death, or into which an individual might be transmuted,
body and soul, by some miraculous agency. In other cases the life of a
particular tree was held to be bound up with that of an individual or a
community, and lastly, in a still larger conception, the tree came to be
very widely regarded as the embodiment of the spirit of fertility, the
especial patron of the field and flock.
To the modern mind, which claims to have deciphered Nature’s scattered
hieroglyphs, and finds a genealogical document even in the evanescent
wrinkles on a baby’s foot, the idea of man taking origin from a tree
will seem in the highest degree fantastic, but to the primitive
intelligence it probably presented no greater difficulty than the
extraction of the new baby from the parsley bed does to the modern
child. The early inquirer may well have found in it the most natural
answer to the eternal riddle, “Whence came our first parents?” the most
plausible solution to the strange problem of man’s separate existence
upon the globe, supplying the necessary link between him and the great
mother-earth, which supported and fed him while alive, and received him
again into her bosom when dead. Speculation apart, however, the solution
would appear to have commended itself to many different inquirers, for
the belief that the human race took its first origin from trees is met
with in the mythology of the most widely separated races.
Thus we read in the Eddas that when heaven and earth had been made, Odin
and his brothers walking by the sea-shore came upon two trees. These
they changed into human beings, male and female. The first brother gave
them soul and life; the second endowed them with wit and will to move;
the third added face, speech, sight, and hearing. They clothed them also
and chose their names, Ask for the man’s and Embla for the woman’s. And
then they sent them forth to be the parents of the human race.[153]
Again, according to the Iranian account of the creation the first human
couple, Maschia and Maschiâna, issued from the ground in the form of a
rhubarb plant (the _Rheum ribes_), which was at first single, but in
process of time became divided into two.[154] Ormuzd imparted to each a
human soul, and they became the parents of mankind.
In the corresponding legend current amongst the Sioux of the Upper
Missouri[155] one seems to catch an echo from the Garden of Eden. Here
the original parents, like the trees from which they developed, at first
stood firmly fixed to the earth, until a monster snake gnawed away the
roots and gave them independent motion, just as in Paradise the serpent
destroyed the harmony and mutual trust which united Adam and Eve.
The classical nations possessed a similar tradition. According to
Hesychius it was believed by the Greeks that the human race was the
fruit of the ash, and Hesiod relates that it was from the trunks of
ash-trees that Zeus created the third or bronze race of men.[156] The
oak was particularised as the favoured tree in another tradition.
“Whence art thou?” inquires Penelope of the disguised Ulysses, “for thou
are not sprung of oak or rock, as old tales tell.”[157] Virgil, too,
speaks of
Nymphs, and fauns, and savage men, who took
Their birth from trunks of trees and stubborn oak.[158]
The Damaras of South Africa believe that the universal progenitor was a
tree, out of which came Damaras, Bushmen, oxen and zebras, and
everything else that lives.[159]
In other legends human beings are represented as arising from the tree
as its fruit. The first book of the _Mahâbhârata_ tells of an enormous
Indian fig-tree from whose branches hung little devotees in human form;
and an Italian traveller of the fourteenth century was assured by the
natives of Malabar that they knew of trees, which instead of fruit bore
pigmy men and women. So long as the wind blew they remained fresh and
healthy, but when it dropped they became withered and dry.[160] A
somewhat similar tradition was familiar to the Arab geographers, who
tell of a talking tree growing at the easternmost point of the habitable
world, which bore young women on its branches in place of fruit.[161]
And even to the present day folk-tales of Saxony and Thuringia speak of
children as “growing on the tree.”
In another class of origin-myths _individual_ births are represented as
taking place directly from a tree. Adonis came forth at the stroke of a
sword from the tree into which his mother, the guilty Myrrha, had been
transformed in answer to her prayers.[162] The Phrygian Attis, according
to one version, was fathered by an almond-tree; while, according to
another, his body was confined by Cybele in a pine-tree, from which on
the return of spring he was born again.[163] The Khatties of Central
India claim to be descended from a certain Khat, “begotten of wood,”
who, at the prayer of Karna, an illegitimate brother of the five sons of
Pându (heroes of the _Mahâbhârata_), sprang from the staff he had
fashioned from the branch of a tree to assist him against his legitimate
kinsmen.[164]
The above examples prove how widely the conception prevailed that human
beings or man-like spirits might owe their first origin to the tree. In
a later stage these crude myths were rationalised in three directions.
In one the tree came to be, not the source, but the scene of a
miraculous birth; in another its supposed connection with a human being
was explained by a metamorphosis legend; and, thirdly, the tree came to
be regarded as the symbol and minister of fecundity.
Many of the gods of Greece were born or brought up, according to
tradition, at the foot of some tree, whence Bötticher argues that their
worship was founded on a pre-existing tree-cult. Rhea gave birth to Zeus
beneath a poplar in Crete, and the ruins of her temple in an adjoining
cypress grove were shown even up to the Augustan age.[165] The people of
Tanagra asserted that the young Hermes was reared amongst them under a
purslane-tree (_andrachnos_), the remains of which were for long
treasured in the temple of the god as a sacred souvenir of the
institution of his worship.[166] Hera was born and brought up under a
willow in Samos, described by Pausanias, who saw it still in leaf, as
the most ancient of the sacred trees known to the Greeks.[167] Leto gave
birth to Apollo and Artemis in the island of Delos while clasping two
trees, by some authorities particularised as an olive and a palm, by
others, under the idea that Apollo must have been born at the foot of
his own tree, as two laurels.[168] Romulus and Remus were found under
the _Ficus ruminalis_ by the Tiber, and in later days were worshipped in
the Comitium beneath a sapling from that tree. The same idea is met with
in the mythology of other nations. Vishnu was born beneath the pillared
shade of the banian; Buddha was born and died under a sâl-tree.
The converse of these origin myths is represented in the numerous
legends of metamorphosis and transmigration. The well-known story of
Apollo and Daphne seems to supply an instance of the way in which the
metamorphosis story arose to explain a more primitive connection, the
meaning of which had been lost. It is an established fact that the
laurel was held sacred in Greece as connected with earth-oracles before
the worship of Apollo was introduced. A sacred laurel grew by the
prophetic cleft at Delphi in the days when the earth-goddess, Gaia,
still presided over the oracle, and according to tradition the goddess’
daughter, Daphne, a mountain nymph, was priestess under her.[169] The
story which explains the transference of the oracular power from Gaia to
Apollo tells how Daphne, fleeing before the god, entreats her mother,
Earth, to save her; the ground opens to receive her, and in her place a
laurel appears. Apollo, balked of his love, cries: “If thou may’st not
be my wife, thou shalt for ever be my tree,” and henceforward he makes
the laurel his sanctuary, and crowns his head and his lyre with its
leaves. Thus he steps into her mother’s place, and the laws of Zeus—the
old earth-oracles under a new name—are proclaimed through him.
The story is one of the many folk-tales concerning the conversion of
mortals into trees which Ovid has so gracefully elaborated in his
_Metamorphoses_, and which assume a new importance now that we can trace
them back into that old world when tree and man, and indeed all living
things, were held to be so near akin. How far they owed their origin to
the desire to find a new sanction for the traditional tree-worship by
investing it with a human interest, it is impossible to say. It is
sufficient for us that they demonstrate the survival of very ancient
modes of thought amongst races who had otherwise reached a high degree
of civilisation. They were amongst the miracles of classical antiquity,
and like other miracles, if they prove nothing else, they at least
afford invaluable evidence as to the state of mental culture amongst
those who found them credible.
One of the most interesting of these metamorphosis legends concerns the
fate of the three daughters of the Sun and Clymene, who were so
heart-broken at the tragic fate of their brother Phaëton that they were
changed into poplars by the banks of the stream into which he had been
hurled,—the Eridanus or Po. The tears they shed were preserved in the
form of amber:—
As she bent
To kneel, Phaëthusa, eldest born, her feet
Felt stiffen, and Lampetië, at her cry
Starting, took sudden root, and strove in vain
For motion to her aid. The third, her hair
In anguish tearing, tore off leaves! And now
Their legs grow fixed as trunks, their arms as boughs
Extend, and upward round them creeps a bark
That gradual folds the form entire, save yet
The head and mouth, that to their mother shrieks
For help. What help is hers to give? Now here,
Now there she rushes, frantic, kissing this
Or that while yet she can, and strives to rend
Their bodies from the clasping bark, and tears
The fresh leaves from their sprouting heads, and sees,
Aghast, red drops as from some wound distil.
And “Ah, forbear!” the sufferer shrieks; “forbear,
O mother dear! our bodies in these trees
Alone are rent! Farewell!” And o’er the words,
Scarce-uttered, closed the bark, and all was still.
But yet they weep; and in the sun their tears
To amber harden, by the clear stream caught
And borne, the gaud and grace of Latian maids.[170]
The story of Baucis and Philemon—the worthy peasants who so hospitably
entertained the gods, Zeus and Hermes, disguised as travellers, that
their cottage was changed into a temple and they themselves into its
priest and priestess—is more familiar. Their prayer that neither should
witness the death of the other was fulfilled by the gods, by means of a
device familiar enough to the folk-lore of the time:—
As one morn upon the hallowed steps,
Bowed now with years, they stood, and to a knot
Of wondering hearers told the Temple’s tale,
Surprised each saw the other’s figure change
And sprout with sudden verdure: and, as round
Their forms the rapid foliage spread, while yet
They could, one mutual fond “Farewell” they took,
One kiss, and o’er their faces closed the bark,
And both in trees were hidden! Still the boughs
That interlacing link the neighbour trunks
Tyana’s peasant loves to show:—the tale
Her gravest elders—men not like to lie,
As wherefore should they lie?—with serious faith
Attested to these ears. The honoured boughs
Myself have seen with garlands decked, myself
One garland added more.[171]
In many cases metamorphosis legends were attached to particular kinds of
trees, thereby no doubt reinforcing the reverence and affection with
which they were regarded. The Greek name for the almond tree, “Phylla,”
recalled the fate of Phyllis, the beautiful Thracian, who hanged herself
in despair when she thought Demophoon had deserted her, and was changed
by the gods into one of these trees. Shortly afterwards the truant lover
returned, heard the sorrowful tidings, visited the tree, and embraced it
with tears. Then suddenly its branches, which till then had remained
bare, burst forth into blossom and verdure, as if to show how joyfully
conscious they were of the beloved’s return. Melus, priest of Aphrodite,
filled with grief at the death of his foster-son Adonis, hanged himself,
and was changed by the goddess he served into an apple-tree, from which
time forward the apple came to be regarded as the most acceptable gift
that a lover could offer at her shrine. Lotis, a beautiful nymph,
pursued by Priapus, threw herself on the mercy of the gods, and by them
was changed into the lotus-tree.
The pine-tree, into which Cybele, in a moment of anger, had changed her
lover and devotee, Attis, owed its perennial verdure to the compassion
of Zeus for her remorse. The pomegranate was connected in tradition with
a certain maid whom Dionysus loved, and the crown-like form of its
blossom was accounted for by the story that the god, before he changed
her into a tree, had promised her that she should one day wear a crown.
The frankincense-tree owed its virtue to the nectar and ambrosia
scattered by Apollo on the tomb of Leucothea, who had secured his love,
and in consequence had been buried alive at the instance of her rival,
Clytia. The tree grew from her grave, and Clytia, pining away in turn
from grief, was changed into a plant whose blossoms were destined
henceforth, like our sunflower, perpetually to confront the sun, her
faithless lover.
The vicarious immortality which the jealous but faithful Clytia thus
secured was shared by other fabled personages, many of whom, according
to that poetical sentiment which is begotten of all that is gentle and
beautiful in nature, were changed into flowers. The idea is indeed a
graceful one. For a beautiful youth or maiden, dying young and unhappy,
no better recompense than such a flower-change could be imagined by a
people, full indeed of the instinctive craving for immortality, but
vague in their assurance of a life beyond the grave.
The nymphs who, hearing of the sad death of the beautiful Narcissus,
hurried to perform his obsequies, found that he had been changed into a
flower, the cup of which was filled with the tears that he had shed.
“Bid daffodillies fill their cups with tears,” sings Milton, using the
old English name for the narcissus. Rhodanthe, the universal praise of
whose beauty had aroused the jealous anger of Artemis, was changed by
Apollo into the rose. The pipe of Pan was fashioned from the reeds into
which the nymph, Syrinx, had been transformed by her sister nymphs in
their determination to rescue her from the god’s unwelcome overtures.
There are many instances in classical mythology wherein flowers were
believed to have arisen from the blood, _i.e._ the very life, of dying
persons. The violet sprang from the blood of Attis when Cybele changed
him into a pine-tree. From the blood of Hyacinthus, killed in anger by
Zephyrus, Apollo caused the hyacinth to grow. Acis, crushed to death by
Polyphemus, was changed into a stream, but from his blood there sprang
the flowering rush. According to the Egyptians the vine arose from the
blood of the Titans.
In other cases tear-drops were, so to speak, the seed of the miracle.
The anemone grew from the tears that Aphrodite shed at the death of
Adonis:—
“Woe, woe for Cytherea, he hath perished, the lovely Adonis.
A tear the Paphian sheds for each blood-drop of Adonis,
And tears and blood on the earth are turned to flowers.
The blood brings forth the rose; the tears, the wind-flower;
Woe, woe for Cytherea, he hath perished, the lovely Adonis!”[172]
Shakespeare, it will be remembered, gives to the anemone the magical
power of producing love.[173]
The legendary lore of the East contains traditions similar to those
above mentioned, of which it will be sufficient to cite the
following:—The Burmese believe that the _Canna Indica_ or Indian shot
sprang from the sacred blood of the Buddha. His evil-minded
brother-in-law, incensed at not being allowed to hold a separate
assembly of his own, rolled down a rock upon the teacher from a lofty
hill. A fragment bruised the Buddha’s toe, and drew from it a few drops
of blood, from which the sacred plant arose.[174]
In another class of legends, more characteristic of mediaeval than of
classical mythology, the _soul_ of the dead person was believed to pass
into a tree. They are, in fact, cases rather of metempsychosis than of
metamorphosis. A legend current in Cornwall tells how, after the loss of
her lover, Iseult died broken-hearted, and was buried in the same church
with Tristram, but by the king’s decree at some distance from him. Soon
ivy sprang from either grave, and each branch grew and grew until it met
its fellow at the crown of the vaulted roof, and there clasped it and
clung to it as only ivy can.[175] In another version the plants that
sprang from the graves of the lovers were a rose and a vine. The same
idea is met with in the familiar ballad of Fair Margaret and Sweet
William.
Margaret was buried in the lower chancèl,
And William in the higher;
Out of her breast there sprang a rose,
And out of his a brier.
They grew till they grew into the church top,
And then they could grow no higher;
And there they tyed in a true lover’s knot,
Which made all the people admire.[176]
A story is told in Japan of a faithful couple who, after enjoying long
years of happiness, died at last at the same moment; their spirits
withdrew into a tall pine-tree of great age, which a god had once
planted as he passed that way. On moonlight nights the lovers may be
seen raking together the pine-needles under the tree, which to this day
is known as the Pine of the Lovers.[177]
A certain Chinese king had a secretary, Hanpang, for whose young and
beautiful wife he conceived a violent passion. Failing in his designs
upon her, the king threw Hanpang into prison, where he shortly died of
grief. His wife, to escape the royal suit, threw herself from a lofty
terrace, having entreated as a last favour that she might be buried
beside her husband. The king in his anger ordered otherwise. But that
same night a cedar sprang from each grave, and in ten days they had
become so tall and vigorous in their growth that they were able to
interlace both branch and root, and the people called them the Trees of
Faithful Love.[178]
In Germany the following story is told to explain why a certain blue
flower, the endive, which grows by the roadside, is called the
“Wegewarte” or way-watcher. A maiden, eagerly anticipating the return of
her lover from a long voyage, visited every morning and evening the spot
where they had parted, and anxiously paced the road, awaiting his
coming. At last, worn out by her long vigil, she sank down by the
wayside and expired. On the spot where she breathed her last the flower
appeared.[179]
There is a Japanese story in which a mother is represented as hearing
her dead son’s voice in the sighing of a sacred willow which grew above
his grave.[180] Grimm quotes other examples.[181] In the song of
Roncesvalles, a blackthorn grows above the dead Saracens, a white flower
above the dead Christians. In other legends white lilies grow from the
graves of persons unjustly executed. From a maiden’s grave grew three
lilies which none but her lover might pluck.
In all these legends we have a survival of very primitive ideas about
the soul, ideas out of which subsequently arose the formal doctrine of
transmigration. The immortality of the soul was accepted, but there was
always an inclination to quarter it in some new living thing. The
instances above given, in which it was thought to pass into some plant,
especially concern us, as illustrating the primitive belief that trees
and shrubs might contain a spirit in human form.
A further derivative of the assumed kinship between human and vegetable
life is the conception of the tree as sympathetically interwoven with
the life and fortunes of an individual, a family, or a community. “In
folktales the life of a person is sometimes so bound up with the life of
a plant that the withering of the plant will immediately follow or be
followed by the death of the person. Among the M‘Bengas in Western
Africa, about the Gaboon, when two children are born on the same day the
people plant two trees of the same kind and dance round them. The life
of each of the children is believed to be bound up with the life of one
of the trees, and if the tree dies or is thrown down they are sure that
the child will soon die. In the Cameroons, also, the life of a person is
believed to be sympathetically bound up with that of the tree. Some of
the Papuans unite the life of a new-born child sympathetically with that
of a tree, by driving a pebble into the bark of the tree. This is
supposed to give them complete mastery over the child’s life; if the
tree is cut down the child will die.”[182] According to the Talmud, the
destruction of Bithar, in which four hundred thousand Israelites lost
their lives, originated in the resentment of one of its inhabitants at
the wanton destruction of a young cedar-tree, which, according to the
custom of the place, he had planted at the birth of his child.[183]
It was usual amongst the Romans to plant a tree at the birth of a son,
and from its vigour to forecast the prosperity of the child. It is
related in the life of Virgil, that the poplar planted at his birth
flourished exceedingly, and far outstripped all its contemporaries. A
similar superstition has persisted even into times that are almost
contemporary. Lord Byron, for all his scepticism, had the idea that his
life and prosperity depended on the fate of an oak which he had planted
when he first visited Newstead.[184]
The mystical relationship of man and tree is further illustrated in an
old German belief quoted by Mannhardt, that a sick child placed in a
hole made in a tree by sawing off a branch, or by splitting it open with
a wedge, will recover as soon as the tree-wound heals. Should the child
die and the tree survive, the human soul will inhabit the tree for the
rest of its life.[185]
The family tree and the community tree were merely extensions of this
conception. The heroic descendants of Pelops regarded the plane-tree as
especially sacred to them and bound up with their fortunes, and in later
times we find families taking their names from trees. Mannhardt quotes
in this connection the German surnames Linde, Holunder, Kirschbaum,
Birnbaum, etc.[186]
But more important than the family tree is the community tree. In many
an old German village there stood a tree, often a May-tree, which the
villagers guarded as the apple of their eye. It was looked upon as the
life-tree, the tutelary genius, the second “I” of the whole community.
Devotions were paid to it and gifts offered as to a deity.[187] The
ancient fig-tree in the Comitium at Rome, already alluded to as a
supposed descendant of the very tree under which Romulus and Remus were
found, is another case in point.[188] It was held to be closely
connected with the fortunes of the city, and Tacitus describes the
terror of the Romans when, in the reign of Nero, it suddenly began to
flag and wither, and their relief when, upon the Emperor’s death, it was
found to have renewed its vigour.[189] Pliny tells of two myrtle-trees,
called the Patrician and Plebeian, which grew before the temple of
Quirinus at Rome. As sacred to Venus, and hence symbolical of union,
these trees were held to represent the amity which existed between the
two orders. At first they had grown with equal vigour, but when the
patricians began to encroach upon the power of the plebs their tree
outgrew the other, which languished beneath its baleful shadow. After
the Marsian war, however, from which date the power of the Senate began
to decline, it was noticed that the patrician tree showed signs of age,
while the plebeian sprouted forth with new vigour.[190] Curiously
enough, there is, or was so recently as 1885, an old tree in Jerusalem,
opposite Cook’s office, belonging to an old family and protected by the
Sultan’s firman, which the Arabs consider will fall when the Sultan’s
rule ends. “It lost a large limb during the Turco-Russian war, and is
now (1885) in a decayed state.”[191]
[Illustration: Fig. 24.—Imperial coin of Myra in Lycia, showing
tree-goddess.(Goblet d’Alviella.)]
From conceptions such as these the transition is easy to that wider view
which regarded the tree as the material representative of the mysterious
feminine reproductive power, the good genius of general prosperity. We
know that the Semitic nations worshipped under various names a great
mother-goddess, the progenitrix of gods and men, and there is evidence
to show that the tree was widely venerated as her divine symbol. In the
coins of Heliopolis (Baalbek), where this great deity was worshipped
under the name of Astarte, the figure of the goddess under the peristyle
of her temple is sometimes replaced by a pyramidal cypress. In a coin of
Myra, in Lycia, the bust of a goddess is represented in the foliage of a
tree.[192] The goddess, who is of the veiled archaic type and wears on
her head the _calathus_, the symbol of fertility, is identified by Mr.
Farnell with Artemis-Aphrodite, “who is here clearly conceived as a
divinity of vegetation.”[193] The Canaanites, and under their influence
the Israelites, worshipped Ashtaroth, the fruitful goddess, under the
symbol of an _ashêra_, a tree or pole, decked with fillets, like the
May-tree. An ancient Babylonian cylinder represents a decorated tree
with a worshipper beside it, who in the inscription invokes the goddess
as her servant.[194] On other cylinders the tree-symbol sometimes
accompanies and sometimes replaces the figure of Istar, the great
procreative goddess more or less related to the goddess of the
_ashêrim_.[195]
[Illustration: Fig. 25.—Sacred tree and worshipper.(Goblet d’Alviella.)]
The conception of the tree as the symbol of fertility seems to be still
more clearly emphasised in the Assyrian cylinders and bas-reliefs, where
it is conventionally represented as a date-palm between two personages,
who approach it from either side bearing in their hands a cone similar
to the inflorescence of the male date-palm. Mr. Tylor suggests that
these personages, variously represented as kings or priests, genii with
wings and heads of eagles, or mythical animals, may represent the
fertilising winds or divinities, whose procreative influence was
typified by the artificial fecundation of the palm, a procedure which is
necessary for its successful culture, and which we know from Herodotus
to have been familiar to the Babylonians.[196] The design is usually
surmounted by the winged disc representing the sun, and the whole is not
improbably meant to symbolise the mystery of procreation, in which the
male element enshrined in the sun, and the female element inhabiting the
tree are appropriately represented. The same collocation is met with on
an altar from the Palmyrene now in Rome, on one of the faces of which is
the image of a solar god, and on the other the figure of a cypress with
a child carrying a ram amidst its foliage.[197] In this connection it
may be remembered that Apuleius, wishing to paint the son of Venus in
his mother’s lap, is related to have depicted him in the midst of a
cypress-tree.
[Illustration: Fig. 26.—The sacred tree as symbol of fertility.(From an
Assyrian bas-relief. Perrot et Chipiez.)]
The above facts are important for their bearing on the conception of a
tree-inhabiting spirit of vegetation or generalised tree-soul, which, as
Mannhardt and Frazer have shown, lies at the root of many otherwise
inexplicable observances found amongst the peasantry in different
countries and at different periods of history. These customs will be
dealt with more fully in a subsequent chapter. In all of them we find a
tree, or the branch of a tree, or a human being or puppet dressed to
represent a tree, figuring as the symbol or representative of a spirit
who is regarded as more or less friendly to man, and endowed with the
power of assisting his material prosperity. In more primitive times than
the present this prosperity resolved itself into a question of
fecundity, and the power which could make the fields to bear, the flocks
to multiply, and women to give increase, naturally held the foremost
place in the affections of the people. The rich and the cultured found
other attributes to worship and other gods to personify them, but the
peasant clung to the observances by which the spirit of fertility was
propitiated. Hence the tree, long after it had ceased to be worshipped
as the home of the great gods, or to be regarded as the parent of
mankind, still held a firm place in the devotions of the people as the
embodiment of the all-powerful patron of universal fertility.
Of the innumerable observances founded on this idea the following may be
taken as a sample. The sacred chili or cedar of Gilgit, on the
north-western frontier of India, was held to have the power of causing
the herds to multiply and women to bear children. At the commencement of
wheat-sowing three chosen unmarried youths, who had undergone
purification for three days, started for the mountains where the cedars
grew, taking with them wine, oil, and bread, and fruit of every kind.
Having found a suitable tree they sprinkled the oil and wine on it,
while they ate the bread and fruit as a sacrificial feast. Then they cut
off a branch and brought it to the village, where amid general rejoicing
it was placed on a large stone beside running water. A goat was then
sacrificed and its blood poured over the cedar branch, while the
villagers danced around it. The goat’s flesh was eaten, and every man
went to his house bearing a spray of cedar. On his arrival he said to
his wife, “If you want children I have brought them to you; if you want
cattle I have brought them; whatever you want, I have it.”[198]
The same idea is no doubt to be traced in the form of survival, in the
custom of giving a branch of laurel to a bride which is found, according
to Mannhardt, at Carnac in Brittany;[199] in the introduction of a
decorated pine-bough into the house of the bride, met with in Little
Russia, as well as in the ceremony of “carrying the May,” adorned with
lights, before the bride and bridegroom in Hanoverian weddings.[200]
The day of these observances is past, but underlying them there was a
vital and still valid truth. To us as to the ancients the tree is still
the patron of fertility, as those have discovered to their cost who have
bared a country of its forests. To us as to them it is still the thing
of all things living that is endowed with the most enduring life, the
most persistent vigour. Generations come and go, but the tree lives on
and every spring puts forth new leaves, and every autumn bears new seed,
and even to its last decrepitude the leaves are as green and the seeds
as full of life as in the prime of its youth. What changes has not the
oldest tree in England witnessed! In the southern counties there is an
ancient way, once thronged by travellers, but now deserted and broken in
its continuity; yet to this day, even where parks and pastures have
overlain it, its course may still be traced by the yew-trees planted at
its side by pilgrims journeying to the shrine of St. Thomas of
Canterbury, in the days when their brothers were fighting for the White
Rose or the Red.