The Sacred Tree
Sacred tree with its supporters, from St Mark’s, Venice.
Sacred tree with its supporters, from St Mark’s, Venice.
THE SACRED TREE
OR
THE TREE IN RELIGION AND MYTH
BY
MRS. J. H. PHILPOT
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1897
All rights reserved
vii
PREFACE
The reader is requested to bear in mind that thisvolume lays no claim to scholarship, independentresearch, or originality of view. Its aim has beento select and collate, from sources not always easilyaccessible to the general reader, certain facts andconclusions bearing upon a subject of acknowledgedinterest. In so dealing with one of the many modesof primitive religion, it is perhaps inevitable thatthe writer should seem to exaggerate its importance,and in isolating a given series of data to undervaluethe significance of the parallel facts from which theyare severed. It is undeniable that the worship ofthe spirit-inhabited tree has usually, if not always,been linked with, and in many cases overshadowedby other cults; that sun, moon, and stars, sacredsprings and stones, holy mountains, and animals ofthe most diverse kind, have all been approachedwith singular impartiality by primitive man, as enshriningor symbolising a divine principle. But noother form of pagan ritual has been so widely distributed,has left behind it such persistent traces,or appeals so closely to modern sympathies as theworship of the tree; of none is the study betterviiicalculated to throw light on the dark ways of primitivethought, or to arouse general interest in a branch ofresearch which is as vigorous and fruitful as it is new.For these reasons, in spite of obvious disadvantages,its separate treatment has seemed to the writer to becompletely justifiable.
ix
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
TREE-WORSHIP—ITS DISTRIBUTION AND ORIGIN
Primitive conception of the tree-spirit—Illustrations of the evidence for tree-worship:from archaeology, from folk-lore, from literature, from contemporaryanthropology—Earliest record of tree-worship, the cylinders of Chaldaea—Thesymbol of the sacred tree; its development—Meaning of thesymbol—Tree-worship amongst the Semites—Canaanitish tree-worship—Theashêra—The decoration of the Temple at Jerusalem—Tree-worship inancient Egypt—The sacred sycamores—Survival of the worship in theSoudan and in Africa generally—Osiris, originally a tree-god; comparedwith other vegetation spirits—Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, Dionysus—Thesacred trees of the Persians—Tree-worship still existent in India; evidenceof its ancient prevale                        
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