The carrying of the sacred branch in solemn procession formed the essential feature in some of the most important religious festivals of Greece. At the Daphnephoria, held every nine years at Thebes in Boeotia in honour of Apollo, the chief post in the procession was held by the Daphnephorus, or laurel-bearer, a boy chosen for his strength and beauty. He was followed to the temple of the god by a chorus of maidens, also bearing branches and chanting a processional hymn, and was regarded for the occasion as the priest of Apollo, who himself bore amongst his many other appellations that of Daphnephorus, because he had brought the laurel to Delphi and planted it there.[104]
At the Pyanepsia and the Thargelia, two important Athenian festivals, the Eiresione, a harvest wreath of olive or laurel bound round with red and white wool, and hung with the choicest first-fruits, was borne about by singing boys, while offerings were made to the gods.[105] A vine branch with the grapes upon it gave its name to another Athenian festival, the Oschophoria, or grape carrying, held in honour of Dionysus. A race between chosen youths formed one of the events of the festival, the competitors running from the temple of Dionysus to that of Athena, with boughs in their hands.[106]
Apart, however, from these important festivals, the use of wreaths or branches was a familiar incident in the daily life of the Greeks, bearing with it always a sort of religious significance. The bringer of good news was rewarded with a wreath; the guests at a feast were crowned with flowers. No gift to the gods was complete without its floral accompaniment, and their statues were often hidden under the wreaths brought thither as the most acceptable offering.
It can scarcely be doubted that this lavish employment of blossom and leaf as the expression of a religious emotion originally sprang from reverence for the tree as the favourite home of a god. The Greeks, with their instinctive love for all things beautiful, naturally pushed this graceful custom further than other races. But the ceremonial use of branches and flowers was common throughout the East. The Chaldaean sacred texts mention the use of “green branches” in religious ceremonies.[107] At the Feast of Tabernacles the Israelites were enjoined to “take the boughs of goodly trees, branches of palm-trees, and the boughs of thick trees and willows of the brook, and rejoice before the Lord.”[108] The Apocrypha mentions the “festal olive boughs of the Temple.”[109] In Persia and Armenia it was customary to bear a branch when approaching the god. In Egypt Isis was worshipped with sprays of absinthe, palm-branches were carried in funeral processions, and lotus wreaths usually worn at feasts, whilst in the Assyrian sculptures illustrious persons are frequently represented holding a flower.[110]
However little benefit the votaries of trees and images derived from their observances, apart from the subjective strength and solace that flow from every act of worship, there was at least one tangible service their gods could render them—the right of sanctuary and asylum. For the sacred tree, sharing as it did in the protective power of the indwelling deity, offered an inviolable refuge to the persecuted and the god’s forgiveness to the sinner who implored it. To have touched it was regarded amongst the Greeks as equivalent to having touched an altar or statue of the god. A branch of it, entwined with the consecrated fillet, assured its bearer from persecution. Hence a possible explanation of the legend of the young Dionysus standing secure amongst the branches of the sacred tree whilst the flames raged around him.
Fig. 23.—Sacred laurel of Apollo at Delphi, adorned with fillets and votive tablets; beneath it the god appearing to protect Orestes.
(From a vase-painting, Bötticher, Fig. 2.)
Frequent references occur in the Classics to tree-sanctuaries. The Amazons, defeated by Hercules, found a safe asylum beneath the holy tree at Ephesus, which was worshipped both as the symbol and temple of Artemis, before her statue was set up in the tree or her temple built around it.[111] Herodotus relates how Cleomenes, having burnt the sacred grove of Argos, together with the five thousand conquered Argives who had taken refuge there, was visited by the gods with madness for his act of sacrilege.[112] Orestes, in his flight from the Furies, is represented on a Greek vase as seeking refuge beneath Apollo’s laurel.[113] The god appears out of the tree to succour him and scare away his pursuers. The cypress grove on the Acropolis at Phlius in Peloponnesus was another instance. Fugitives from justice on reaching it became inviolable, and escaped prisoners hung upon its trees the chains for which they had no further use,[114] just as the modern cripple, whose limbs have been freed from the prison of his palsy, dedicates his crutches to “our Lady of Lourdes.”
CHAPTER III
WOOD-DEMONS AND TREE-SPIRITS
In nearly all parts of the world, as at nearly all periods of history, we find evidences of a belief in the existence of wood-spirits and tree-spirits, which, however they may differ in outward form, are strangely similar in their general characteristics. It cannot be asserted of all these beings that they were regarded as the actual spirits of individual trees, connected with them as closely as a man’s soul is with his body, but it is emphatically true of some of them. To the class of wood-spirits as a whole belong certain at least of the jinni of Arabia, the woodland spirits of Greek and Roman mythology, and the wild men and elves of European folk-lore, besides the tree-inhabiting spirits of various uncivilised races. Though not always sharply demarcated from the gods, they differ from them, as a rule, in being regarded and spoken of generically, and in not having stated relations with man. Their alliances are rather with trees, plants, and animals, whose growth and prosperity are often believed to be under their protection, and their presence is often assumed to be expressed in natural phenomena, in the mysterious sounds of the woods, and in the fury of the storm. To man they are frequently unfriendly, and numerous observances, still practised in uncivilised parts, have arisen from the belief that it was necessary to propitiate their favour.