objects; but," she continues, " it cannot be used only in this restricted sense; you want the whole of his grand theory of animism wherewith to describe the religion of the West Africans. For, although there is in that religion a heavy percentage of embodied spirits, there is also a heavier percentage of unembodied spirits-spirits that have no embodiment in matter, or only occasionally embody themselves in matter." Again: "To the African there is, perhaps, no gap between the conception of spirit and matter, animate or inanimate. It is all an affair of grade, not of difference of essence; the African will point out a lightning-stricken tree, and tell you that its spirit has been killed. In every action of his daily life he shows you how he lives with a great, powerful spirit-world around him." He is in the Neolithic stage of culture as regards his religious ideas, though the tools and implements of his daily life proclaim him to be in the Iron Age. Again, she says that "the higher form of the Fetish idea is Brahmanism," and quotes the following beautiful lines to illustrate her meaning: "God of the granite and the rose, Soul of the lily and the bee, The mighty tide of being flows In countless channels, Lord, from Thee. Its glory flames in stars and suns." (Miss M. Kingsley, 'West African Studies,' pp. 96, 102, seq.) The study of Dr. Evans' Mycenæan Tree- and Pillar-cult,' in which he describes and illustrates his remarkable discoveries in Crete, shows that at the period to which his finds belong the worship of Sacred Trees and Pillars was the predominant factor in Mycenæan religion, as a mere glance at the extent of the objects depicted which present this feature is sufficient to prove, consisting, as they do, of cylinders (like the Chaldæan), lentoid gems, crystal and gold signet rings, and other articles innumerable; and it had reached that stage in which the sacred tree and its cognate pillar represented the numen of the indwelling divinity. As Dr. Evans says: "This dual cult is, indeed, so wide-spread that it may be said to mark a definite early stage of religious evolution" (as we have seen, it is not the earliest). "In treating here," he continues, "of this primitive religious type, the cult of trees and pillars, or rude stones, has been regarded as an identical form of worship." (We have seen how this appears in the customs belonging to May Day, and in much so-called folklore-cf. Tylor, 'Primitive Culture,' ii, pp. 160 seq., and 215 seq.) "The group," he goes on, "is, indeed, inseparable, and a special feature of the Mycenæan cult scenes is the constant combination of the sacred tree with pillar or dolmen. The same religious idea-the possession of the material object by the numen of the divinity-is common to both. The two forms, moreover, shade off into one another; the living tree can be converted into a column" (as in the case of the May-pole) "or a treepillar, retaining the sanctity of the original. No doubt, as compared with the pillar form, the living tree was in some way a more realistic impersonation of the godhead, as a depository of the divine life manifested by its fruits and foliage. In the whispering of its leaves and the melancholy soughing of the breeze was heard, as at Dodona, the actual voice of the divinity. The spiritual possession of the stone or pillar was more temporary in its nature, and the result of a special act of ritual invocation." (For the corresponding ideas of the early Hebrews, cf. Gen. iii, 8, and xxviii, 18.) "In India," he proceeds, "this worship is best illustrated to-day; and in the Druidical worship of the West the Tree divinity and the Menhir or stone pillar are associated in a similar manner, and lingering traditions of their relationship are still traceable in modern folklore. To illustrate this we have to go no further afield than the borders of Oxfordshire and Warwickshire. Beside the prehistoric fence of Rollright the elder tree still stands hard by the King Stone, about which it is told that when the flowery branch was cut on Midsummer Eve, the tree bled, the stone moved its head.'" (Evans, loc. cit., pp. 8, 9.) I have quoted Dr. Evans at some length because the positions which he upholds are those which form the thesis of this paper, and because his discoveries in the Minoan palace at Knossos and elsewhere in Crete have proved to be among the most valuable and interesting of the results of recent archæological spade-work, and have succeeded in bringing to light a flood of evidence as to the life and thought of the people of the Mycenæan Age, which, previously to his investigations and those of Dr. Schliemann at Troy and Tiryns and Mycenæ itself, had been wrapped in the impenetrable mists of prehistoric antiquity. There is thus no doubt that Dr. Evans' discoveries at Knossos prove that in the second millennium before Christ, as the Cretans were then passing into the Bronze Age, so, under the influence of Egypt, and of Phoenicia, derived from Babylonian sources, they were passing, or had passed, into the second stage in Tree-worship described below. The representations of altars with sacred trees, and aniconic pillars, prove that, as with the Babylonians, Phoenicians, and Hebrews, the tree and pillar have become the abode of deity, and are no longer regarded as themselves inherently divine. The same idea is seen as universally prevalent on Assyrian and Chaldæan cylinders and bas-reliefs, in Egyptian representations of the Ba, or soul, receiving the lustral water from a tree-goddess, in a Mexican manuscript, in the Bodhi-tree of the Buddhists, in Greek representations of Dionysus and Apollo and Artemis, with the sacred tree and the laurel branch and the olive spray. On an imperial coin of Myra, in Lycia, the bust of the goddess is represented in the foliage of the tree, and in the Christian cathedral of St. Mark's, at Venice, the same idea may be seen surviving as ornament when its significance has been lost, for there we find, "embedded in the walls, high above one's head, a number of ancient sculptured slabs, on each of which a conventionalised plant, with foliage most truthfully and lovingly rendered, is set between two fabulous monsters, as fantastic and impossible as any to be met with in the whole range of heraldry."* *For this and some of the preceding references I am indebted to 'The Sacred Tree,' by Mrs. J. H. Philpot, where also illustrations may be seen. Representations of the sacred tree, or trees, are also found in Norman sculpture on the tympana of doorways, as at Ashford, in Derbyshire; or on fonts, as at Burnham Deepdale, in Norfolk; though these, as well as, perhaps, those at St. Mark's, may be more directly derived from the story of Paradise in Genesis, with its sacred trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the speaking Dragon-serpent. Mention of this, however, at once reminds us that we have in that story the later Hebrew version, purified and adapted to moral ends, of ideas of world-wide prevalence, which were as common in China as they were in Egypt and Chaldæa, which are found in Greece in the shape of the tree which bore the golden apples of the Hesperides, guarded by the Dragon, slain by Heracles, and which are seen in their latest living significance in the Yggdrasil tree of Eddas, already referred to. Whether the stone set up "for a pillar" by Jacob at Bethel and the stones set "for a witness at Gilgal belonged to the same stage of development may be uncertain, but at least we may see in them a testimony, conscious or unconscious, to the old connection between Tree- and Pillar-worship, and the association of tree and pillar, apart or, as usually, together, with the presence of the divinity. The patriarchs, from Abraham downwards, erected their altars beside the giant oaks or terebinths, just as amongst the Canaanites every altar to the gods had its sacred tree beside it; and when the Israelites established local sanctuaries under their influence, they set up their altar under a green tree, and planted beside it as its indispensable accompaniment 66 |