THE TREE AS ORACLE
Amongst the innumerable sources from which the nations of antiquity
professed to derive knowledge of futurity and practical guidance in the
affairs of life the tree held a very prominent place. Tree-oracles
formed, indeed, the natural corollary of tree-worship, and their number
and popularity provide additional testimony to the genuineness and
extent of the ancient belief that certain trees were tenanted by a
supernatural essence. For it was as “animated demoniac beings,” to use
Robertson Smith’s phrase, that trees possessed oracular virtue. It was
the god dwelling in them who produced the mysterious rustlings and
movements of the branches, from which the responses were interpreted by
the attendant priests. But according to the ancient view the tree
derived a further title to its oracular prestige from its connection by
means of its roots with the under-world, the mysterious abode of
departed spirits, in whom wisdom and knowledge of the future were
supposed to be vested. Thus the special prophetic power attributed to
the variety of oak (probably the _Quercus esculus_) which grew at Dodona
was ascribed by later writers to the fact that its roots pierced the
earth more deeply than those of other trees, reaching down even to
Tartarus (_tantum radice in Tartara_).[201] It was from this under-world
that Saul summoned Samuel, and it was in the hope of obtaining help from
the spirit of some dead hero by means of a dream, that men were wont to
pass the night at his tomb or his temple. The modern Arabs who still
worship certain sacred trees, as the place where angels or _jinni_
descend, believe that a sick man who sleeps under such a tree will
receive counsel in a dream for the restoration of his health.[202]
Of organised oracles the earliest was no doubt the earth oracle, and the
part played in the ceremonial by natural fissures, springs, and trees
probably grew out of their close connection with the earth. The most
famous oracle of antiquity, that of Delphi, was situated at the opening
of a natural cleft in the rock, believed to be at the very centre of the
earth, and was originally presided over by the great earth-mother, Gaia,
the subordinate part played by the laurel which once grew near the cleft
being expressed by the legend that Daphne was the daughter and priestess
of Gaia.[203] The procedure at another famous oracle, that of Trophonius
at Lebadea, near Mount Helicon in Boeotia, was distinctly modelled on
the idea of a descent into the under-world,[204] the suppliant obtaining
his answer in a cave, where his experiences were so terrible that he
never smiled again; whence it came to be said of any particularly
lugubrious individual that he had consulted the oracle of Trophonius. A
still more striking illustration of the antiquity of this conception is
found in the account of the initiation of an augur given on a Babylonian
tablet in the British Museum. The candidate is there made to descend
into an artificial imitation of the lower world, where he beholds “the
altars amidst the waters, the treasures of Anu, Bel, and Ea, the tablets
of the gods, the delivering of the oracle of heaven and earth, and the
cedar-tree, the beloved of the great gods.”[205] Here the earth-oracle
and the tree-oracle are seen in very early conjunction; but the belief
in the divine power inherent in the tree can be traced still farther
back, for in a bilingual text of much earlier date we read of “the
cedar-tree, the tree that shatters the power of the incubus, upon whose
core is recorded the name of Ea,” _i.e._ the god of wisdom.[206]
The idea of the tree-oracle was familiar to other branches of the
Semitic race, and is expressed in their common tradition of a tree of
knowledge. Several allusions to oracular trees are met with in the Old
Testament. That Jehovah should speak to Moses out of the burning-bush,
if not to be regarded as a case in point, was at any rate quite in
conformity with surrounding tradition, for there is no doubt that the
belief in trees as places of divine revelation was very prevalent in
Canaan. The famous holy tree near Shechem, called the tree of the
soothsayers in Judges ix. 37, and the tree or trees of the revealer in
Genesis xii. 6 and Deuteronomy xi. 30, must have been the seat of a
Canaanite tree-oracle.[207] The prophetess Deborah gave her responses
under a palm near Bethel, which, according to sacred tradition, marked
the grave of the nurse of Rachel. And David, when he inquired of the
Lord as to the right moment for attacking the Philistines, received the
signal in “the sound of a going in the tops of the mulberry-trees.”[208]
The _ashêra_ or artificial tree in which the deity was supposed to dwell
also appears to have been used by the Canaanites for the purposes of
divination, a practice probably alluded to in the rebuke of the prophet,
“My people ask counsel at their stock, and their staff declareth unto
them.”[209]
But by far the most striking instance of a tree-oracle, and perhaps one
may even say the most signal vestige of the primitive tree-worship, was
the oracle of the Pelasgic Zeus at Dodona in Epirus. Here in a grove of
oaks there was a very ancient tree, believed to be the actual seat of
the deity, whose responses were interpreted from the rustling of its
branches, from the murmur of the sacred spring which welled forth at its
foot, or from the drawing of the oracle lots kept in an urn beneath it.
The origin of the oracle is lost in prehistoric gloom; probably it
existed earlier than the worship of Zeus himself. Homer makes Ulysses
visit it,[210] and Hesiod states that Zeus dwelt there in the trunk of a
tree.[211] Herodotus affirms, on the testimony both of the priestesses
of Dodona and of the Egyptian priests at Thebes, that the oracle was
introduced from Egypt, and adds that the manner in which oracles were
delivered at Thebes and at Dodona was very similar. The priests at
Thebes told him that two women employed in their temple had been
captured by Phoenicians, and sold the one into Libya, the other to the
Greeks; the former established the oracle of Zeus Ammon in the Libyan
desert, the latter that of Dodona. In the account given him by the
Dodonaean priestesses, it was asserted that the oracles were founded by
two black pigeons from Thebes.[212] We know from other sources that the
oracle of Zeus-Ammon was vested in an ancient tree (γεράνδρυον).[213]
But whatever may have been its origin there is no doubt that the oracle
of Dodona had a long and active career, continuing for close upon two
thousand years. Silius Italicus, towards the end of the first century
A.D., reiterates the statement of Hesiod that the deity at Dodona
occupied a tree;[214] Pausanias a hundred years later found the tree
still green and flourishing,[215] and Philostratos about the same time
saw it adorned with wreaths and sacred fillets, “because, like the
Delphic tripod, it gave forth oracles.”[216] A later writer states that
the oracular voices ceased on the felling of the tree by a certain
Illyrian bandit,[217] but there is evidence that the tree and the oracle
were still in existence in the middle of the fourth century A.D. These
ancient testimonies to the importance of the oracle have been
marvellously corroborated by the discovery in the course of recent
excavations of a large number of leaden tablets inscribed with the
questions addressed to the god by his votaries, and dating from 400 B.C.
onwards.[218]
According to classical mythology, the oracular virtue of the famous oak
of Dodona was not only transmitted to its offshoots, but even preserved
in the dead wood after its separation from the tree. Ovid, in relating
the story of the plague of Aegina, tells how Aeacus, standing beneath
A branching oak, the Sire’s own tree, from seed
Of old Dodona sprung,
calls upon Zeus to repeople his stricken kingdom, and fill his desolate
walls anew with citizens as numerous as the ants at his feet.
Not a breath
Was stirring, but the branches shook, the leaves
With rustling murmur waved.
Accepting the omen he kisses the sacred tree, falls asleep beneath it,
and wakes to find that the ants have been miraculously changed into men,
the famous Myrmidons.[219] Again, it is related by more than one author
that when the good ship _Argo_ was built, Athena introduced into it by
way of amulet a beam hewn in the grove of Dodona, which in the
subsequent voyage constantly gave the Argonauts warning and advice.[220]
At the famous oracle of Delphi the tree played as intrinsic, if not so
predominant, a part as at Dodona, its function being shared by the
fissure in the earth and the sacred spring, which testify to the
chthonic origin of the oracle, whilst the use of the sacred tripod has
been thought to connect it with the class of fire oracles.[221] There is
evidence that a laurel-tree grew beside the oracular fissure in Gaia’s
time,[222] and, according to tradition, the earliest temple of Apollo
was a hut of laurel boughs erected by the god’s own hands.[223] And
later on, when the original tree had disappeared and the fissure had
been enclosed in the Adytum, the entrance to the latter, as well as the
tripod on which the Pythia sat, were hidden in fresh laurel leaves
whenever the oracle was given, and the priestess having chewed laurel
leaves and crowned herself with a wreath of the sacred plant, waved a
laurel branch while chanting her ecstatic utterances. Every ninth year,
moreover, a bower of laurel branches was erected in the forecourt of the
temple. It is uncertain how far Apollo’s close connection with the
laurel may have originated from Delphi, but it is a fact that in later
times his oracular function was inseparably bound up with the use of
that tree, and the laurel became the recognised instrument of prophecy
(_per lauros geomantis_). And at Delphi, when the laurel trees had
disappeared, the oracle ceased, for the messenger sent by the Emperor
Julian to reinaugurate it received for answer, “Tell the king that the
cunningly-built chamber has fallen to the ground; Apollo no longer has
bower, or inspired laurel, or prophetic spring; vanished is the talking
water.”[224]
To pass briefly over other examples of tree-oracle, in Armenia the
fire-priests were wont to interpret the will of the god from the
movements observed in the branches of the holy plane-tree at
Armavira.[225] The Chaldaeo-Assyrians read the future in the rustling of
the leaves of the prophetic trees.[226] At Nejrân, in Yemen, the Arabs
professed to obtain oracles from the spirit who inhabited a sacred
date-palm.[227]
In the Sháh Námeh, Firdausi, working no doubt upon an ancient tradition,
tells how Sikander, or Alexander the Great, consulted a tree-oracle in
Persia.[228] “From thence he proceeded to another city, where he was
received with great homage by the most illustrious of the nation. He
inquired of them if there were anything wonderful or extraordinary in
their country, that he might go to see it, and they replied that there
were two trees in the kingdom, one a male, the other a female, from
which a voice proceeded. The male tree spoke in the day and the female
tree in the night, and whoever had a wish went thither to have his
desires accomplished. Sikander immediately repaired to the spot, and
approaching it, he hoped in his heart that a considerable part of his
life still remained to be enjoyed. When he came under the tree a
terrible sound arose and rang in his ears, and he asked the people
present what it meant. The attendant priest said it implied that
fourteen years of his life still remained. Sikander at this
interpretation of the prophetic sound wept, and the burning tears ran
down his cheeks. Again he asked, ‘Shall I return to Rúm and see my
mother and children before I die?’ and the answer was, ‘Thou wilt die at
Kashán.’”
Amongst the Romans other forms of augury appear to have taken the place
of the old tree-oracles and reduced them to comparative insignificance.
The most important of those that remained was the prophetic ilex grove
upon the Aventine hill, sacred to Faunus and Picus. Hither the applicant
came, fasting and meanly clothed, and having crowned himself with beech
leaves, sacrificed two sheep to the deities of the grove, and laying
himself down upon their pelts, awaited the counsel of the gods in his
dream.[229] There was another grove oracle of Faunus at Tibur by the
Albunean spring,[230] and at the neighbouring Preneste, where the oracle
of Jupiter was held in great repute, the oracle lots were fashioned from
the wood of his sacred oak.[231] At the more sequestered Tiora Matiena
the tree-oracle appears to have dwindled into a mere vestige, the
responses being given by a woodpecker perched upon an oaken column.[232]
To tree-omens, as distinguished from tree-oracles, the Romans attached
much importance, and they possessed several treatises dealing with such
portents. The family and community tree described in the last chapter
had a certain oracular character, and foretold in its own fortunes the
prosperity or adversity of those whom it represented. The withering of
the laurel grove of Augustus was held to portend the death of Nero, and
with him the extinction of the Augustan house and its adopted members;
the fall of Vespasian’s cypress foretold the death of Domitian. If the
sacred tree attached to a sanctuary were uprooted by the wind, it was a
clear proof that the deity had withdrawn his protection, and unless the
tree upreared itself anew, his worship at that spot was discontinued.
The Sibylline books contained explicit instructions with regard to these
eventualities and were invariably consulted in every such case.
Innumerable instances of these tree-omens are given in classical
literature.[233]
The legends of trees which spoke intelligibly belong rather to myth than
to history, but they were quite in accordance with the ancient belief
that any tree which contained a tree-soul, were it the spirit of a god
or only that of a dryad, might express itself in words. Thus the spirits
inhabiting the three trees of the Hesperides gave advice to the
wandering Argonauts. Philostratus relates that at the command of
Apollonius a tree addressed him in a distinct female voice.[234] When
Rome was invaded by the Gauls a voice from out of the grove of Vesta
warned the Romans to repair their walls or their city would fall.[235]
And after the battle in which Brutus and Aruns Tarquinius slew each
other, a powerful voice from the neighbouring grove of Arsia announced
that the victory lay with the Romans.[236] A later instance is that of
the _gharcad_ tree which spoke to Moslim b. ‘Ocba in a dream, and
designated him to the command of the army of Yazīd against Medina.[237]
It has already been mentioned that the responses at Dodona were
sometimes interpreted from the oracle lots kept in an urn that stood
upon a sacred table beneath the tree, and the same form of divination
was also apparently in use at Delphi,[238] whilst at Preneste it was the
sole method employed. Indeed this outgrowth of the tree-oracle was in
common use throughout the ancient world. There is a probable allusion to
it in Ezekiel xxi. 21. The Scythian soothsayers were wont to divine by
the help of a number of willow rods, which they placed upon the ground,
uttering their predictions as they gathered them up one by one. They
also practised divination by means of the bark of the linden-tree.[239]
Amongst the neighbouring Alani, in Sarmatia, women foretold the future
by means of straight rods cut with secret enchantments at certain times
and marked very carefully.[240] The Germans used to divine by means of
the fragments of a branch cut from a fruit-tree, which they threw on to
a white cloth.[241] The omen sticks of the Druids, frequently referred
to in the Bardic poems, were probably rods cut from a fruit-tree and
marked with mystical emblems.[242]
It is not easy to define the exact connection between these oracle-lots
and that strange survival, the divining-rod, but it may be taken for
certain that the belief in the efficacy of the latter is “a superstition
cognate to the belief in sacred trees,”[243] and that the idea
underlying both the oracle-lot and the divining-rod was that they were
animated by an indwelling spirit, probably by the spirit of the tree
from which they were cut. We know from Pliny and Pausanias that the
earliest images of the gods were made of wood, and that the Greeks,
Romans, and other pre-Christian nations worshipped stakes or peeled rods
of wood, painted, or dressed, or roughly carved in the semblance of an
anthropomorphic god, and supposed to be inhabited by a divine essence.
It was probably by a similar mode of reasoning that the spear, the
sceptre, the staff of the general, the standards of the army, the
herald’s wand, the rods of the flamens, the lituus of the augur, and the
truncheon of the constable came to be symbolically representative of
power and inviolability, the primitive assumption being that they
retained some of the divine spirit resident in the tree from which they
were cut.[244] From a similar parentage sprang the popular custom of
striking men, cattle, and plants with a green switch (Lebensrute) at
certain seasons of the year in order to make them fruitful, an
observance of which so many instances have been collected by Mannhardt.
“It was the tree-soul, the spirit of vegetation,” he concludes,
“communicated by means of this switching, which drove away the demons of
sickness and sterility and evoked fruitfulness and health.”[245] The
divining-rod is, if one may say so, first cousin to the “life-rood.”
Each represents and embodies a different function of the
supernatural—the one its procreative, the other its prophetic attribute.
The divining-rod is the meagre survival of the once renowned
tree-oracle.
It may seem strange that in this positive age there should exist people
calling themselves educated, who believe that a stick cut from a hazel
or thorn-bush may in the hands of a specially endowed person possess a
magical power of revealing the secrets of the earth. But so it is. There
are in this country at the present hour some half-dozen professional
experts, who claim the faculty of discovering unsuspected springs of
water by means of the divining-rod, and furnish well-attested instances
of their success. It is not necessary to discuss the credibility of
their assertions or to formulate a theory to account for their success.
The subject of the divining-rod concerns us only in so far as it is a
vestige—a poor and atrophied vestige—of the magic eloquence once
associated with the sacred tree. It is impossible to say when the use of
the divining-rod first originated. It is mentioned in the Vedas, and is
well known to have flourished amongst the Chaldaeans and Egyptians. But
in those early days the function of the magical rod was not restricted,
as it was later and is now, to the search for water or buried treasure.
The Greeks and Romans found many uses for it. Cicero speaks of providing
for one’s wants, _quasi virgulâ divinâ, ut aiunt_. It was a familiar
instrument in the hands of the British Druids, and is still largely
employed in China. Mediaeval writers speak of it as being in very common
use among the miners of Germany.[246]
At all times and in all places the act of cutting and preparing the rod
has been the subject of much ceremony. It had to be severed at a
particular moment, and from a particular kind of tree, the latter
varying according to the country. As a rule a fruit-tree, or some other
tree that was useful and beneficent to man, was chosen. The Chinese
prefer the peach; the Druids made choice of the apple-tree.[247]
Elsewhere the hazel, the willow, and the black-thorn have been selected,
and the last-named is still known in Germany as the “wishing-thorn,” as
it is the tree from which wishing-rods were cut. The time at which the
rod was cut was equally important. For centuries the Chinese have
adhered to the first new moon after the winter solstice as the most
favourable date for the ceremony. The French custom was to cut it on
Mercury’s day (Wednesday) at the planetary hour of Mercury.[248] In
Sweden divining-rods of mistletoe are cut on midsummer eve.[249] Even in
comparatively modern times believers in the divining-rod professed to
expect more of a rod which had been cut between sunset and sunrise, upon
some holy day or at new moon, from a branch on which the rising sun
first shone.[250]
These mystic observances smack of a far-distant past, and the modern
water-finder appears to have discarded them. His practice is to cut a
forked branch about eighteen inches in length from any convenient hazel
or white-thorn bush, and grasping the prongs very firmly between the
thumb and two first fingers of each hand, the joint being held
downwards, he walks over the ground where it is desired to find water.
If he approaches a hidden spring, the joint will begin to rise against
his will, and when he has reached it, will make a complete half
revolution, breaking or bending the twigs held in his hands, until the
joint is uppermost. The depth of the spring is estimated by the force
with which the rod is repelled from it. The mental exhaustion of the
operator after a successful operation is said to be considerable. In an
old volume of the _Quarterly Review_ (No. 44) an account is given of a
certain Lady Noel who was skilful in the use of the divining-rod. She
used a thin forked hazel-twig, which immediately bent when she came over
the underground spring, its motion being more or less rapid as she
approached or withdrew from the spot. “When just over it the twig turned
so quick as to snap, breaking near the fingers, which by pressing it
were indented and heated and almost blistered. A degree of agitation was
also visible in her face.”
Many of the superstitious practices that still survive in remote
villages are no doubt of the same ancestry as the divining-rod. In the
valley of Lanzo in Piedmont, lovers in doubt whether to marry consult
the oracle in the form of a herb called _concordia_, the root of which
is shaped like two hands, each with its five fingers. If the herb they
find has the hands conjoined, the omen is favourable; but unfavourable
if the hands point different ways.[251]
The following naïve recital is quoted in Brand’s antiquities:—“Last
Friday was Valentine’s day, and the night before I got five bay-leaves,
and pinned four of them to the four corners of my pillow, and the fifth
to the middle; and then, if I dreamt of my sweetheart, Betty said we
should be married before the year was out.”[252] This belief in the
magical power of certain leaves is enshrined in many jingles, still
found in the rustic formulary, such as—
The even ash-leaf in my glove
The first I meet shall be my love;[253]
or
Find even ash or four-leaved clover
And you’ll see your true love before the day’s over.[254]
In old days on St. Valentine’s eve many a rustic maid has sprinkled
bay-leaves with rose-water and laid them across her pillow, and then
lying down in a clean night-gown, turned wrong side out, has softly
recited—
Good Valentine, be kind to me,
In dreams let me my true love see;[255]
or, if she were a Staffordshire lass, she probably preferred St.
Thomas’s eve, and having placed a sprig of evergreen under her pillow,
sighed—
Good St. Thomas, stand by my bed
And tell me when I shall be wed.[256]
To those who are new to the subject of comparative mythology these
doggrels whispered by foolish country girls under the stress of a
natural impulse may seem absurdly irrelevant. But to that science which
strives to unravel the beliefs and ideas of long dead people, every
vestige, every survival is important. The charms above mentioned did not
spring, fully matured, from the brain of some peculiarly inventive
dairy-maid. They have a long, long pedigree, and, like the zebra stripe
which will sometimes appear on a purebred horse, they throw us back to
an age when man believed that the world was controlled by spirits, and
that he, like everything else, was but a puppet in their hands.