“Besides the monumental evidence thus furnished of a sacred tree, a Tree of Life, there is historical and traditional evidence of the same thing, found in the early literature of various nations, in their customs and popular usages.”[18]
The sycamore at Matarea in Egypt is still shown, which miraculously opened ionically to receive and reproduce the persecuted virgin when avoiding the cruelty of Herod.
Moor, the author of “Oriental Fragments,” while noting that it does not appear that the sycamore was especially a mystical tree among any ancient people, and that he does not see anything mystical or peculiar in it, says:—“but here may be traced another link connecting through distant countries the chain of mystery in this line of thought—that is, of the mysticism of clefts or ionic forms and transit and trees. Those beautiful and interesting objects of producing and reproducing nature connect themselves, in the mystic contemplative eye, with all that is beautiful and interesting, and poetical and profound. They point up to the heavens, they strike down to Tartarus, but are still of earth:—a Brahmanal triad expressed by the Sanscrit word bhurbhuvaswah—heaven, earth, sky—a vastly profound trisyllabic-mono-verbal-mythos; holding, like the mighty Aum, or Om, in mystic combination, the elementals of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva.”
The commendable delicacy, generally speaking of Mohammedans, and the prosaic nature of their religion, forbid sexual allusions in their writings, and without impugning their fastidiousness on that point—not indeed always observable even in the Koran—we find there, and in the commentaries, a connection of birth and tree not very unlike what has been told or shadowed respecting Juno Samia, or Latona, and the Hindu Samia.
In the nineteenth Sura or chapter of the Koran entitled “Mary,” much concerning the miraculous conception occurs. Having praised St. John, as a “devout person, and dutiful towards his parents; not proud or rebellious,” and invoked a blessing on him in these words: “Peace be on him, the day whereon he was born, and the day whereon he shall die, and the day whereon he shall be raised to life;” the prophet continues: “And remember the story of Mary when the pains of child-birth came upon her near the trunk of a palm tree.” “A withered trunk,” adds a commentator, “without any head or verdure; notwithstanding which, though in the winter season, it miraculously supplied her with fruits for her nourishment.” “And he who was beneath her,” continues the Koran, “called to her saying, shake the palm tree, and it shall let fall ripe dates upon thee ready gathered.”
Commentators differ as to whether it was the infant or the angel Gabriel who so called to the mother. They say “the dry trunk revived and shot forth green leaves, and a head laden with ripe fruit.”
The note in Sale’s translation says: “It has been observed that the Mohammedan account of the delivery of the Virgin Mary very much resembles that of Latona, as described by the poets, not only in this circumstance of their laying hold on a palm-tree (though some say Latona embraced an olive-tree, or an olive and a palm, or else two laurels), but also in that of their infants speaking.”
Amongst the trees held sacred in Egypt, the palm ranked highest; and for this reason, that species of tree was most frequently used in the sacred buildings of that country, as indeed they afterwards were in those of the Hebrews, not perhaps for the same cause: for that was connected with the Sabian idolatries, which the latter were taught to detest. The real source of the veneration of the former for palm trees, and of the general cultivation of that plant in Egypt, which abounded with noble groves of them, is alleged to have been the following: They thought the palm tree, which is affirmed by Porphyry to bud every month in the year, a most striking emblem of the moon, from whose twelve annual revolutions those months are formed. Whether or not there be any truth in this, it is not easy to say, but it has been remarked by Pococke, that many of the most ancient pillars in the Egyptian temples bear great resemblance to palm trees, and that their capitals are made in imitation of the top of that tree when all the lower branches are cut off; and possibly, he adds, the palm trees said to be cut in Solomon’s temple, might be only pillars, or at least pilastres of this kind. In his plate of Egyptian pillars may be seen various columns of this description, and a very remarkable one belonging to the temple of Carnack. Several of the capitals also in other plates bear an evident similitude to the expanded top of trees with their branching foliage cut off or compressed.
Captain Burton in his “Mission to Gelele,” says: “In the days of Bosman (1700) the little kingdom of Whydah adored three orders of gods, each presiding, like the several officers of a prince, over its peculiar province.
“The first is the Danh-gbwe, whose worship has been described. This earthly serpent is esteemed the supreme bliss and general good; it has 1000 Danh’si or snake-wives, married and single votaries, and its influence cannot be meddled with by the two following which are subject to it.