The sacred tree stands less obviously in the direct line of ancestry of gods and of God than the sacred stone and the sacred stake which we have just considered. I would willingly pass it over, therefore, in this long preliminary inquisition, could I safely do so, in order to progress at once to the specific consideration of the God of Israel and the rise of Monotheism. But the tree is nevertheless so closely linked with the two other main objects of human worship that I hardly see how I can avoid considering it here in the same connexion: especially as in the end it has important implications with regard to the tree of the cross, as well as to the True Vine, and many other elements of Christian faith and Christian symbolism. I shall therefore give it a short chapter as I pass, premising that I have already entered into the subject at greater length in my excursus On the Origin of Tree-Worship, appended to my verse translation of the Attis of Catullus.

The worship of sacred trees is almost as widely diffused over the whole world as the worship of dead bodies, mummies, relics, graves, sacred stones, sacred stakes, and stone or wooden idols. The great authorities on the subject of Tree-Worship are Mannhardt’s Baumkultus and Mr. J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Neither of those learned and acute writers, however, has fully seen the true origin of worship from funeral practices: and therefore it becomes necessary to go over the same ground again briefly here from the point of view afforded us by the corpse-theory and 139ghost-theory of the basis of religion. I shall hope to add something to their valuable results, and also incidentally to show that all the main objects of worship together leads us back unanimously to the Cult of the Dead as their common starting-point.

Let us begin in this instance (contrary to our previous practice) by examining and endeavouring to understand a few cases of the behaviour of tree-spirits in various mythologies. Virgil tells us in the Third 脝neid how, on a certain occasion, 脝neas was offering a sacrifice on a tumulus crowned with dogwood and myrtle bushes. He endeavoured to pluck up some of these by the roots, in order to cover the altar, as was customary, with leaf-clad branches. As he did so, the first bush which he tore up astonished him by exuding drops of liquid blood, which trickled and fell upon the soil beneath. He tried again, and again the tree bled human gore. On the third trial, a groan was heard proceeding from the tumulus, and a voice assured 脝neas that the barrow on which he stood covered the murdered remains of his friend Polydorus.

Now, in this typical and highly illustrative myth—no doubt an ancient and well-known story incorporated by Virgil in his great poem—we see that the tree which grows upon a barrow is itself regarded as the representative and embodiment of the dead man’s soul, just as elsewhere the snake which glides from the tomb of Anchises is regarded as the embodied spirit of the hero, and just as the owls and bats which haunt sepulchral caves are often identified in all parts of the world with the souls of the departed.

Similar stories of bleeding or speaking trees or bushes occur abundantly elsewhere. “When the oak is being felled,” says Aubrey, in his Remains of Gentilisme, “it gives a kind of shriekes and groanes that may be heard a mile off, as if it were the genius of the oak lamenting. E. Wyld, Esq., hath heared it severall times.” Certain Indians, says Bastian, dare not cut a particular plant, because there comes out of it a red juice which they take for its blood. 140I myself remember hearing as a boy in Canada that wherever Sanguinaria Canadensis, the common American bloodroot, grew in the woods, an Indian had once been buried, and that the red drops of juice which exuded from the stem when one picked the flowers were the dead man’s blood. In Samoa, says Mr. Turner, the special abode of Tuifiti, King of Fiji, was a grove of large and durable afzelia trees. “No one dared cut that timber. A story is told of a party from Upolu who once attempted it, and the consequence was that blood flowed from the tree, and that the sacrilegious strangers all took ill and died.” Till 1855, says Mannhardt, there was a sacred larch-tree at Nauders in the Tyrol, which was thought to bleed whenever it was cut. In some of these cases, it is true, we do not actually know that the trees grew on tumuli, but this point is specially noticed about Polydorus’s dogwood, and is probably implied in the Samoan case, as I gather from the title given to the spirit as king of Fiji.

In other instances, however, such a doubt does not exist. We are expressly told that it is the souls of the dead which are believed to animate the speaking or bleeding trees. “The Dieyerie tribe of South Australia,” says Mr. Frazer, “regard as very sacred certain trees which are supposed to be their fathers transformed; hence they will not cut the trees down, and protest against settlers doing so.” Some of the Philippine Islanders believe that the souls of their forefathers inhabit certain trees, which they therefore spare. If obliged to fell one of these sacred trunks, they excuse themselves by saying that it was the priests who made them fell it.

Now, how did this connexion between the tree and the ghost or ancestor grow up? In much the same way, I imagine, as the connexion between the sacred stone or the sacred stake and the dead chief who lies buried beneath it. Whatever grows or stands upon the grave is sure to share the honours paid to the spirit that dwells within it. Thus a snake or other animal seen to glide out of a tomb is 141instantly taken by savages and even by half-civilised men as the genius or representative of the dead inhabitant. But do trees grow out of graves? Undoubtedly, yes. In the first place, they may grow by mere accident, as they might grow anywhere else; the more so as the soil in such a case has been turned and laboured. But beyond this, in the second place, it is common all over the world to plant trees or shrubs over the graves of relatives or tribesmen. Though direct evidence on this point is difficult to obtain, a little is forthcoming. In Algeria, I observed, the Arab women went on Fridays to plant flowers and shrubs on the graves of their immediate dead. I learned from Mr. R. L. Stevenson that similar plantings take place in Samoa and Fiji. The Tahitians put young casuarinas on graves. In Roman Catholic countries the planting of shrubs in cemeteries takes place usually on the jour des morts, a custom which would argue for it an immense antiquity; for though it is a point of honour among Catholics to explain this fete as of comparatively recent origin, definitely introduced by a particular saint at a particular period, its analogy to similar celebrations elsewhere shows us that it is really a surviving relic of a very ancient form of Manesworship.

In Gr忙co-Roman antiquity it is certain that trees were frequently planted around the barrows of the dead; and that leafy branches formed part of the established ceremonial of funerals. I cannot do better than quote in this respect once more the case of Polydorus:=

            Ergo instauramus Polydoro funus, et ingens

            Aggeritur tumulo tellus; stant Manibus ar忙,

            C忙ruleis most忙 vittis atraque cupresso.=

Suetonius again tells us how the tumulus of the divine Augustus was carefully planted; and the manner in which he notes the fact seems to me to argue that some special importance was attached to the ceremony. The acacia is one of the most sacred trees of Egypt; and Egyptian monuments, with their usual frankness, show us a sarcophagus 142from which an acacia emerges, with the na茂ve motto, “Osiris springs forth.”,

An incident which occurred during the recent Sino-Japanese war shows how easily points of this sort may be overlooked by hasty writers in formal descriptions. One of the London illustrated papers printed an account of the burial of the Japanese dead at Port Arthur, and after mentioning the simple headstone erected at each grave volunteered the further statement that nothing else marked the place of interment. But the engraving which accompanied it, taken from a photograph, showed on the contrary that a little tree had also been planted on each tiny tumulus.

I learn from Mr. William Simpson that the Tombs of the Kings near Pekin are conspicuous from afar by their lofty groves of pine trees.

Evergreens, I believe, are specially planted upon graves or tumuli because they retain their greenness throughout the entire winter, and thus as it were give continuous evidence of the vitality and activity of the indwelling spirit. Mr. Frazer has shown in The Golden Bough that mistletoe similarly owes its special sanctity to the fact that it visibly holds the soul of the tree uninjured in itself, while all the surrounding branches stand bare and lifeless. Accordingly, tumuli are very frequently crowned by evergreens. Almost all the round barrows in southern England, for example, are topped by very ancient Scotch firs; and as the Scotch fir is not an indigenous tree south of the Tweed, it is practically certain that these old pines are the descendants of ancestors put in by human hands when the barrows were first raised over the cremated and buried bodies of prehistoric chieftains. In short, the Scotch fir is in England the sacred tree of the barrows. As a rule, however, in Northern Europe, the yew is the species specially planted in graveyards, and several such yews in various parts of England and Germany are held to possess a peculiar sanctity. The great clump of very ancient yews in 143Norbury Park near Dorking, known as the Druids’ Grove, has long been considered a holy wood of remote antiquity. In southern Europe, the cypress replaces the yew as the evergreen most closely connected with tombs and cemeteries. In Provence and Italy, however, the evergreen holme-oak is almost equally a conventional denizen of places of interment. M. Lajard in his able essay Sur le Culte du Cypres has brought together much evidence of this worship of evergreens, among the Greeks, Etruscans, Romans, Phoenicians, Arabs, Persians, Hindus, Chinese, and American nations.

Sacred trees, especially when standing alone, are treated in many respects with the same ceremonial as is employed towards dead bodies, mummies, graves, sacred stones, sacred stakes, and carved idols or statues. In other words, the offerings to the ghost or god may be made to the tree that grows on the grave just as well as to any other of the recognised embodiments of the indwelling spirit. Darwin in the Voyage of the Beagle describes how the Indians of South America would greet with loud shouts some sacred tree, standing solitary on some high part of the Pampas; libations of brandy and mat茅 were poured into a hole at its base to gratify the soul of the deity who dwelt there. One of these tree-gods had a name, Walleechu. The Congo people, again, put calabashes of palm-wine at the foot of “trees treated as idols.” In other cases, blood is smeared on the tree; or oil is offered to it. Mr. Duff Macdonald’s Central Africans kill chickens at the foot of the “prayer tree,” and let its blood trickle down to the roots. Oldfield saw at Addacoodah fowls and many other articles of food suspended as offerings to a gigantic tree. Sir William Hunter mentions that once a year at Beerbhoom the Santals “make simple offerings to a ghost who dwells in a Bela tree.” In Tonga, the natives lay presents of food at the foot of particular trees which they believe to be inhabited by spirits. I need not multiply 144instances; they may be found by the hundred in Dr. Tylor and other great anthropological collections.

Furthermore, the sacred tree is found in the closest possible connection with the other indubitably ancestral monuments, the sacred stone and the idol. “A Bengal village,” says Sir William Hunter, “has usually its local god, which it adores either in the form of a rude unhewn stone, or a stump, or a tree marked with red lead”; the last being probably a substitute for the blood of human or animal victims with which it was once watered. “Sometimes a lump of clay placed under a tree does duty for a deity; and the attendant priest, when there is one, generally belongs to one of the half-Hinduised low castes. The rude stone represents the non-Aryan fetish; and the tree seems to owe its sanctity to the non-Aryan belief that it forms the abode of the ghosts or gods of the village.” That is to say, we have here ancestor-worship in its undisguised early native development.

I may mention here in brief that, as we shall hereafter see, this triple combination of stone, log, and tree forms almost the normal or invariable composition of the primitive shrine the whole world over.

The association of the sacred tree with actual idols or images of deceased ancestors is well seen in the following passage which I quote from Dr. Tylor: “A clump of larches on a Siberian steppe, a grove in the recesses of a forest, is the sanctuary of a Turanian tribe. Gaily-decked idols in their warm fur coats, each set up beneath its great tree swathed with cloth or tinplate, endless reindeer-hides and peltry hanging to the trees around, kettles and spoons and snuff-horns and household valuables strewn as offerings before the gods—such is the description of a Siberian holy grove, at the stage when the contact of foreign civilisation has begun by ornamenting the rude old ceremonial it must end by abolishing. A race ethnologically allied to these tribes, though risen to higher culture, kept up remarkable relics of tree-worship in Northern Europe. In 145Esthonian districts, within the present century, the traveller might often see the sacred tree, generally an ancient lime, oak, or ash, standing inviolate in a sheltered spot near the dwelling-house; and the old memories are handed down of the time when the first blood of a slaughtered beast was sprinkled on its roots, that the cattle might prosper, or when an offering was laid beneath the holy linden, on the stone where the worshipper knelt on his bare knees, moving from east to west and back, which stone he kissed when he had said, ‘Receive the food as an offering.‘” After the evidence already given, I do not think there can be a reasonable doubt, in such a combination of tree and stone, that we have here a sacrifice to an ancestral spirit.

Similarly, in the courtyard of a Bodo house is planted the sacred euphorbia of Batho, the national god, to which a priest offers prayer and kills a pig. In the island of Tjumba, in the East Indies, a festival is held after harvest, and vessels are filled with rice as a thank-offering to the gods. Then the sacred stone at the foot of a palm tree is sprinkled with the blood of a sacrificed animal, and rice is laid on the stone for the gods. When the Khonds settle a new village, a sacred cotton tree must be planted with solemn rites, and beneath it is placed the sacrificial stone which embodies or represents the village deity. Among the Semites, says Professor Robertson Smith, “no Canaanite high place was complete without its sacred tree standing beside the altar.” We shall only fully understand the importance of these facts, however, when we come later to consider the subject of the manufacture of gods by deliberate process, and the nature of t............