Cultus Arborum: A Descriptive Account of Phallic Tree Worship

by Anonymous

Rubenus was a native of Essen in Germany, and entered the order of St. Benedict at Cologne in the year 1596. He was in Transylvania in the year 1588, and he there published theses concerning idolatry, dedicating them to Prince Sigismund Battori. He relates a thing which shews that Livonia was still infected with heathenish idolatry. Having received an order from his superiors to go to Dorpat, which is almost the outmost town of Livonia, in his way he passed through the sacred woods of the Esthonians. He saw there a pine tree of an extraordinary height and size, the branches whereof were full of divers pieces of old cloth, and its roots covered with many bundles of straw and hay. He asked a man of the neighbourhood what was the meaning of it; he answered that the inhabitants adored that tree, and that the women after a safe delivery brought thither these bundles of hay; that they also had a custom to offer at a certain time a tun of beer, and to throw a tun of it into the lake of Mariemburg when it thundered, and that they thought the thunder was the son of God, and that he was appeased by the effusion of that liquor. He desired they would bring him a good hatchet, for that which he had in his chariot was not sharp; and when they asked him what he designed to do with it, I will show you, said he, the weakness of what you worship. The Esthonians replied that they could not do what he desired without the utmost danger, and cried to him to take care of going under the tree, and if he did both he and his chariot would be taken up into the air. However, he made his horses go under it; and, taking his hatchet, in a devout manner he cut the figure of a cross on the pine, and lest that figure made by a man, whom they honoured with the appellation of the great temple of God, should increase their superstition, he cut a gibbet on the same tree, and, in derision, said—behold your God.

“There is no mistake,” says a writer in Fraser (1871), “as to our old Tree and Serpent faiths. Each hamlet (he is speaking of his visit to Ammer in Bavaria) has its Maienbaum—a long pole, one hundred feet or more in height, with alternate blue and white stripes coiling round it. The May-pole is intersected by seven or sometimes nine bars, beginning at about ten feet from the ground and running to the top, which is adorned with streamers. On these bars are various emblematic figures. The one at Murau had on the lower limb a small tree and a nail with circular nob; on the next a small house, a horseshoe and wheel on one side; a hammer crossed by a pair of pincers on the other, a broom, perhaps Ceres as a sheaf of corn; below this was seen the Lingam, with Maya’s symbols, the cup and cock or the bird of desire sacred to her. Elsewhere we see a heart, fire, pyramid, and inverted pyramid, anchor and water as in Egypt, and a circle pierced by a line, &c. Can any Phallic tale be more complete? We must be here content with our general knowledge that the Maienbaum was a Pagan object, and that its decorations were originally symbols of the gods and goddesses. Christian significance is given to all these; for as the priest could not efface the old faiths he told his credulous herd that this hammer is that which nailed Christ to the cross, that the tree is the conventional olive of church pictures, and that the cross, the cock, the cup and sacred heart are all connected with the “Passion of Christ.” The broom represents witches, and the horseshoe the corona or Mary’s head dress; it is also Maiya’s sign, and is there as a charm to hold witches at bay like the Ephod of old. He who may, I fancy, be taken as one great tree of life.

“On May-day it is festooned with branches, for the Bavarian peasants keep up, in many ways, the ancient reverence for sacred trees.

“When a house is finished it is consecrated by having a birch sapling stuck into the roof, and in a thousand tales the poor and ignorant are still taught to fear trees. One story says that before a large fir tree King Ludwig’s horse fell three times forward on his knees, and here he built a celebrated church, taking care that the fir tree should be in its very centre.”

“The most interesting feature of the Passion Play to me,” continues the writer, “was that nine young birch trees, reaching from floor to ceiling, had been set along the walls inside, at intervals of ten to fifteen feet. That the sacred tree of ancient Germany and even of ancient Greece, which has so long been held as a charm against witches, against lightning and other evils, should be here overshadowing Christian worshippers was curious enough. The enclosure was also surrounded by birch trees, regularly planted. Like our remote ancestors who worshipped Odin, we sat amidst the sacred grove. There are some remote corners of these mountains, it is said, where one who has a fever still goes to a birch tree and shakes it, with the words: ‘Birch, a fever plagues me; God grant it may pass from me to thee!’ and where one subject to cramp takes a broom made of birch switches into his bed. The presence of these trees is one among the features of the Ammergau Play which justify antiquaries in tracing its origin to a period far anterior to that with which it is connected in the records of the village. The story has often been told of how, nearly two and a half centuries ago, a pilgrim came to some sacred festival in the village and brought with him a plague which devastated it; how the people got together and united in a holy vow, that if their village were spared further ravages they would, every tenth year, represent solemnly the sufferings and death of Christ; and how immediately the scourge was removed, not another person dying even of those who lay sick when the vow was made. But though the villagers do not care to look beyond this story on their records, the legend itself suggests that there was already some festival there which had attracted the pilgrim who brought them so much woe. Professor von Löher informed me that there is some evidence, not only that somewhat similar dramatic performances occurred occasionally at Oberammergau before the period mentioned in the village tradition, but that even far away in Pagan times it was one of the spots where the people represented the deeds of their gods and heroes theatrically. It is well known that in many regions the early Christians avoided all interference with such Pagan customs when they found them preferring to substitute their own sacred characters for those of heathenism. There are probabilities, therefore, that the sacred birches which now surround the scenes of Christian story once witnessed the life and death of Baldur; or that later still, the birch boughs which the children now strew in the path of Christ as he enters Jerusalem, were once cast before the chariot of the Sun-god, to symbolize the fresh foliage with which his warm beams invested the earth.”

The same writer adds: “With the birch trees waving around, and these old symbols of once great religions before me, I felt thrilled by an impression of having reached a spot where the prehistoric religion could be traced visibly blending with Christianity.”

Tree and Serpent worship is the theme of many an ancient Greek myth. The destruction of the dragon Python by Apollo, who takes possession of the oracle which the serpent guarded; the conversion of Cadmus and his wife into serpents when they were regarded as objects of veneration; the story of the Argonautic expedition, which was undertaken to recover a fleece that hung on a tree guarded by a dragon; the strangling of serpents by Hercules; his adventure in the garden of the Hesperides, which reminds us of the garden of Eden, though with a different moral; his fight with Lernæan hydra; on the other hand, his intercourse with the serpent Echidna, through whom he is said to have become the progenitor of the whole race of serpent-worshipping Scythians; the keeping of serpents at Delphi and other places for oracular purposes; the serpent worship at Epidaurus, where stood the temple of Æsculapius and the grove attached to it; the contention between Athene and Poseidon for the guardianship of the city of Athens when the goddess created the olive, planting it on the Acropolis, and handed over the care of it to the serpent-god Ericthonius; the statement that when the Persians were approaching Athens the Athenians, though warned by the oracle, refused to leave their homes till they learned that the great serpent, the guardian of the city, had refused its food and left its place; the curious record concerning the descent of Alexander the Great from a serpent; the part which snakes played in the Bacchic cultus—all these tales show the tenacity of that early form of worship.

Fergusson adds to this summary of his words by an American writer:—“The traces of Tree Worship in Greece are even fuller and more defined than those of the Serpent Cultus just alluded to. As each succeeding Buddha in the Indian mythology had a separate and different Bo-tree assigned to him, so each god of the classical Pantheon seems to have had some tree appropriated as his emblem or representative. Among the most familiar are the oak or beech of Jupiter, the laurel of Apollo, the vine of Bacchus. The olive is the well-known tree of Minerva. The myrtle was sacred to Aphrodite. The apple or orange of the Hesperides belonged to Juno. The populus was the tree of Hercules, and the plane-tree was the “numen of Atridæ.”

We have now presented a view of this interesting cultus extending over the principal nations of the Eastern and Western worlds, and reaching from the remotest ages to modern times. In doing so, many curious legends and superstitious customs have been described upon the best authority, and, in most instances, upon the testimony of actual eye witnesses. The story must now stop as our usual limits have been reached; it will probably be resumed again in a future volume, which it is hoped will, in conjunction with its predecessors, form a complete exposition of the mysteries of what is called Phallic Worship.