The milk tree of the British Isles is the hazel. It contains a milky fluid in the green nut, which Highland children of a past generation regarded as a fluid that gave them strength. Nut-milk was evidently regarded in ancient times as an elixir like fig-milk.[120] There is a great deal of Gaelic lore connected with the hazel. In Keating's History of Ireland (Vol. I, section 12) appears the significant statement, "Coll (the hazel) indeed was god to MacCuil". "Coll" is the old Gaelic word for hazel; the modern word is "Call". "Calltuinn" (Englished "Calton") is a "hazel grove". There are Caltons in Edinburgh and Glasgow and well-worn forms of the ancient name elsewhere. In the legends associated with the Irish Saint Maedóg is one regarding a dried-up stick of hazel which "sprouted into leaf and blossom and good fruit". It is added that this hazel "endures yet (a.d. 624), a fresh tree, undecayed, unwithered, nut-laden yearly".[121] The sacred hazel was supposed to be impregnated with the substance of life. Another reference is made to Coll na nothar ("hazel of the wounded"). Hazel-nuts of longevity, as well as apples of longevity, were supposed to grow in the Gaelic Paradise. In a St. Patrick legend a youth comes from the south ("south" is Paradise and "north" is hell) carrying "a double armful of round yellow-headed nuts and of beautiful golden-yellow apples". Dr. Joyce states that the ancient Irish "attributed certain druidical or fairy virtues to the yew, the hazel, and the quicken or rowan tree", and refers to "innumerable instances in tales, poems, and other old records, in such expressions as 'Cruachan of the fair hazels', 'Derry-na-nath, on which fair-nutted hazels are constantly found'.... Among the blessings a good king brought on the land was plenty of hazel-nuts:—'O'Berga (the chief) for whom the hazels stoop', 'Each hazel is rich from the hero'." Hazel-nuts were like the figs and dates of the Easterners, largely used for food.[122]

Important evidence regarding the milk elixir and the associated myths and doctrines is preserved in the ancient religious literature of India and especially in the Mahá-bhárata. The Indian Hathor is the cow-mother Surabhi, who sprang from Amrita (Soma) in the mouth of the Grandfather (Brahma). A single jet of her milk gave origin to "Milky Ocean". The milk "mixing with the water" appeared as foam, and was the only nourishment of the holy men called "Foam drinkers". Divine milk was also obtained from "milk-yielding trees", which were the "children" of one of her daughters. These trees included nut trees. Another daughter was the mother of birds of the parrot species (oracular birds). In the Vedic poems soma, a drink prepared from a plant, is said to have been mixed with milk and honey, and mention is made of "Su-soma" ("river of Soma"). Madhu (mead) was a drink identified with soma, or milk and honey.[123]

There are rivers of mead in the Celtic Paradise. Certain trees are in Irish lore associated with rivers that were regarded as sacred. These were not necessarily milk-yielding trees. In Gaul the plane tree took the place of the southern fig tree. The elm tree in Ireland and Scotland was similarly connected with the ancient milk cult. One of the old names for new milk, found in "Cormac's Glossary", is lemlacht, the later form of which is leamhnacht. From the same root (lem) comes leamh, the name of the elm. The River Laune in Killarney is a rendering of the Gaelic name leamhain, which in Scotland is found as Leven, the river that gave its name to the area known as Lennox (ancient Leamhna). Milk place-names in Ireland include "new milk lake" (Lough Alewnaghta) in Galway, "which", Joyce suggests, "may have been so called from the softness of its water". A mythological origin of the name is more probable. Wounds received in battle were supposed to be healed in baths of the milk of white hornless cows.[124] In Irish blood-covenant ceremonies new milk, blood, and wine were mixed and drunk by warriors.[125] As late as the twelfth century a rich man's child was in Ireland immersed immediately after birth in new milk.[126] In Rome, in the ninth century, at the Easter-eve baptism the chalice was filled "not with wine but with milk and honey, that they may understand ... that they have entered already upon the promised land".[127]

The beliefs associated with the apple, rowan, hazel, and oak trees were essentially the same. These trees provided the fruits of longevity and knowledge, or the wine which was originally regarded as an elixir that imparted new life and inspired those who drank it to prophecy[128]. The oak provided acorns which were eaten. Although it does not bear red berries like the rowan, a variety of the oak is greatly favoured by the insect Kermes, "which yields a scarlet dye nearly equal to cochineal, and is the 'scarlet' mentioned in Scripture". This fact is of importance as the early peoples attached much value to colour and especially to red, the colour of life blood. Withal, acorn-cups "are largely imported from the Levant for the purposes of tanning, dyeing, and making ink".[129] A seafaring people like the ancient Britons must have tanned the skins used for boats so as to prevent them rotting on coming into contact with water. Dr. Joyce writes of the ancient Irish in this connection, "Curraghs[130] or wicker-boats were often covered with leather. A jacket of hard, tough, tanned leather was sometimes worn in battle as a protecting corslet. Bags made of leather, and often of undressed skins, were pretty generally used to hold liquids. There was a sort of leather wallet or bag called crioll, used like a modern travelling bag, to hold clothes and other soft articles. The art of tanning was well understood in ancient Ireland. The name for a tanner was sudaire, which is still a living word. Oak bark was employed, and in connection with this use was called coirteach (Latin, cortex)." The oak-god protected seafarers by making their vessels sea-worthy.

Mistletoe berries may have been regarded as milk-berries because of their colour, and the ceremonial cutting of the mistletoe with the golden sickle may well have been a ceremony connected with the fertilization of trees practised in the East. The mistletoe was reputed to be an "all-heal", although really it is useless for medicinal purposes.

That complex ideas were associated with deities imported into this country, the history of which must be sought for elsewhere, is made manifest when we find that, in the treeless Outer Hebrides, the goddess known as the "maiden queen" has her dwelling in a tree and provides the "milk of knowledge" from a sea-shell. She could not possibly have had independent origin in Scotland. Her history is rooted in ancient Egypt, where Hathor, the provider of the milk of knowledge and longevity, was, as has been indicated, connected with the starry sky (the Milky Way), a sea-shell, the milk-yielding sycamore fig, and the primeval cow.

The cult animal of the goddess was in Egypt the star-spangled cow; in Troy it was a star-spangled sow[131]. The cult animal of Rome was the wolf which suckled Romulus and Remus. In Crete the local Zeus was suckled, according to the belief of one cult, by a horned sheep[132], and according to another cult by a sow. There were various cult animals in ancient Scotland, including the tabooed pig, the red deer milked by the fairies, the wolf, and the cat of the "Cat" tribes in Shetland, Caithness, &c. The cow appears to have been sacred to certain peoples in ancient Britain and Ireland. It would appear, too, that there was a sacred dog in Ireland.[133]

It is evident that among the Eastern beliefs anciently imported into the British Isles were some which still bear traces of the influence of cults and of culture mixing. That religious ideas of Egyptian and Babylonian origin were blended in this country there can be little doubt, for the Gaelic-speaking peoples, who revered the hazel as the Egyptians revered the sycamore, regarded the liver as the seat of life, as did the Babylonians, and not the heart, as did the Egyptians. In translations of ancient Gaelic literature "liver" is always rendered as "vitals".

Cult Animals and "Wonder Beasts" (dragons or makaras) on Scottish
Sculptured Stones