Aggeritur tumulo tellus; stant Manibus aræ,
Cæruleis mostæ vittis atraque cupresso.=
Suetonius again tells us how the tumulus of the divine Augustus was carefully planted; and the manner in which he notes the fact seems to me to argue that some special importance was attached to the ceremony. The acacia is one of the most sacred trees of Egypt; and Egyptian monuments, with their usual frankness, show us a sarcophagus from which an acacia emerges, with the naïve motto, “Osiris springs forth.”,
An incident which occurred during the recent Sino-Japanese war shows how easily points of this sort may be overlooked by hasty writers in formal descriptions. One of the London illustrated papers printed an account of the burial of the Japanese dead at Port Arthur, and after mentioning the simple headstone erected at each grave volunteered the further statement that nothing else marked the place of interment. But the engraving which accompanied it, taken from a photograph, showed on the contrary that a little tree had also been planted on each tiny tumulus.
I learn from Mr. William Simpson that the Tombs of the Kings near Pekin are conspicuous from afar by their lofty groves of pine trees.
Evergreens, I believe, are specially planted upon graves or tumuli because they retain their greenness throughout the entire winter, and thus as it were give continuous evidence of the vitality and activity of the indwelling spirit. Mr. Frazer has shown in The Golden Bough that mistletoe similarly owes its special sanctity to the fact that it visibly holds the soul of the tree uninjured in itself, while all the surrounding branches stand bare and lifeless. Accordingly, tumuli are very frequently crowned by evergreens. Almost all the round barrows in southern England, for example, are topped by very ancient Scotch firs; and as the Scotch fir is not an indigenous tree south of the Tweed, it is practically certain that these old pines are the descendants of ancestors put in by human hands when the barrows were first raised over the cremated and buried bodies of prehistoric chieftains. In short, the Scotch fir is in England the sacred tree of the barrows. As a rule, however, in Northern Europe, the yew is the species specially planted in graveyards, and several such yews in various parts of England and Germany are held to possess a peculiar sanctity. The great clump of very ancient yews in Norbury Park near Dorking, known as the Druids’ Grove, has long been considered a holy wood of remote antiquity. In southern Europe, the cypress replaces the yew as the evergreen most closely connected with tombs and cemeteries. In Provence and Italy, however, the evergreen holme-oak is almost equally a conventional denizen of places of interment. M. Lajard in his able essay Sur le Culte du Cypres has brought together much evidence of this worship of evergreens, among the Greeks, Etruscans, Romans, Phoenicians, Arabs, Persians, Hindus, Chinese, and American nations.
Sacred trees, especially when standing alone, are treated in many respects with the same ceremonial as is employed towards dead bodies, mummies, graves, sacred stones, sacred stakes, and carved idols or statues. In other words, the offerings to the ghost or god may be made to the tree that grows on the grave just as well as to any other of the recognised embodiments of the indwelling spirit. Darwin in the Voyage of the Beagle describes how the Indians of South America would greet with loud shouts some sacred tree, standing solitary on some high part of the Pampas; libations of brandy and maté were poured into a hole at its base to gratify the soul of the deity who dwelt there. One of these tree-gods had a name, Walleechu. The Congo people, again, put calabashes of palm-wine at the foot of “trees treated as idols.” In other cases, blood is smeared on the tree; or oil is offered to it. Mr. Duff Macdonald’s Central Africans kill chickens at the foot of the “prayer tree,” and let its blood trickle down to the roots. Oldfield saw at Addacoodah fowls and many other articles of food suspended as offerings to a gigantic tree. Sir William Hunter mentions that once a year at Beerbhoom the Santals “make simple offerings to a ghost who dwells in a Bela tree.” In Tonga, the natives lay presents of food at the foot of particular trees which they believe to be inhabited by spirits. I need not multiply instances; they may be found by the hundred in Dr. Tylor and other great anthropological collections.
Furthermore, the sacred tree is found in the closest possible connection with the other indubitably ancestral monuments, the sacred stone and the idol. “A Bengal village,” says Sir William Hunter, “has usually its local god, which it adores either in the form of a rude unhewn stone, or a stump, or a tree marked with red lead”; the last being probably a substitute for the blood of human or animal victims with which it was once watered. “Sometimes a lump of clay placed under a tree does duty for a deity; and the attendant priest, when there is one, generally belongs to one of the half-Hinduised low castes. The rude stone represents the non-Aryan fetish; and the tree seems to owe its sanctity to the non-Aryan belief that it forms the abode of the ghosts or gods of the village.” That is to say, we have here ancestor-worship in its undisguised early native development.
I may mention here in brief that, as we shall hereafter see, this triple combination of stone, log, and tree forms almost the normal or invariable composition of the primitive shrine the whole world over.
The association of the sacred tree with actual idols or images of deceased ancestors is well seen in the following passage which I quote from Dr. Tylor: “A clump of larches on a Siberian steppe, a grove in the recesses of a forest, is the sanctuary of a Turanian tribe. Gaily-decked idols in their warm fur coats, each set up beneath its great tree swathed with cloth or tinplate, endless reindeer-hides and peltry hanging to the trees around, kettles and spoons and snuff-horns and household valuables strewn as offerings before the gods—such is the description of a Siberian holy grove, at the stage when the contact of foreign civilisation has begun by ornamenting the rude old ceremonial it must end by abolishing. A race ethnologically allied to these tribes, though risen to higher culture, kept up remarkable relics of tree-worship in Northern Europe. In Esthonian districts, within the present century, the traveller might often see the sacred tree, generally an ancient lime, oak, or ash, standing inviolate in a sheltered spot near the dwelling-house; and the old memories are handed down of the time when the first blood of a slaughtered beast was sprinkled on its roots, that the cattle might prosper, or when an offering was laid beneath the holy linden, on the stone where the worshipper knelt on his bare knees, moving from east to west and back, which stone he kissed when he had said, ‘Receive the food as an offering.‘” After the evidence already given, I do not think there can be a reasonable doubt, in such a combination of tree and stone, that we have here a sacrifice to an ancestral spirit.