The Swedish conception of the tree-spirit is very similar. He also delights to lead astray those who intrude upon his forest domain. The well-known tendency of man, after losing himself, to wander round and round until he regains his starting-place, is attributed to the wood-spirit. He looks like a man when you meet him, but touch him and he shoots to the height of the loftiest tree. You cry out in terror, and he laughs “Ha, ha!” Hunters seek the friendship of these lords of the forest, for he who stands well with them never misses his aim.[148]
The wood-demon of the Russians, Ljeschi, calls to mind both classical and modern traditions. He is of human form, with the horns, ears, and feet of a goat, his fingers are long claws, and he is covered with rough hair, often of a green colour. He can assume many forms, and vary his stature at will; in the fields he is no higher than the grass, in the woods as tall as the trees. Sometimes he is like a man, clothed in sheepskins, and often, like the cyclops, with only one eye. Like other wood-demons, he announces his presence in the storm and the wind. He springs from tree to tree, and rocks himself in the branches, screeching and laughing, neighing, lowing, and barking. He delights to mislead the traveller and plunge him in difficulties. However unfriendly to man, Ljeschi is on good terms with animals; all the birds and beasts of the wood are under his protection, and the migrations of squirrels, field-mice, and such small deer are carried out under his guidance. The peasants are at pains to propitiate him. In the province of Olonitz the shepherds offer him a cow every summer, to secure his favour for the herd; elsewhere the hunter gives him the first thing he shoots, leaving it for him in an oak-wood, or places a piece of bread or pancake strewed with salt upon a tree stump. There are certain ways of conjuring his presence and his aid by means of birch-twigs, or by uttering a given formula while standing on a tree-stump, from which it would appear that he is thought of as dwelling in these vegetable fragments.[149] The Russians also believe in female wood-spirits of terrifying appearance, but they are of less importance than the male.
In the folk-lore of the Finns the spirits of the woods bear a more benign character. The chief of them, “Tapio,” is termed “the gracious god of the woodlands,” and is represented as very tall and slender, with a long brown beard, a coat of tree moss, and a high-crowned hat of fir leaves. His consort is Mielikki, “the honey rich mother of the woodland,” “the hostess of glen and forest.” The neighbouring Esthonians have their “grass-mother” who, besides presiding over the home-field, is also queen of the woods.
It is not perhaps singular to find that the traditions with regard to wood-spirits current amongst contiguous peoples should exhibit such a strong resemblance to each other, but when almost exactly the same conceptions are met with in such distant parts as Japan and South America, we can only conclude that the human mind, wherever it exists, is similarly constituted, and, granted the same phenomena, falls back upon the same ideas to explain them.
The Tengus of Japanese legend have many of the characteristic marks of the wood-spirit. They dwell in the topmost branches of lofty trees, are skilled in the language and lore of animals and plants, and are a terror to untruthful children. They have the body of a man, the head of a hawk, with a long proboscis, and powerful claws on their hands; on their feet, also provided with claws, are stilt-like clogs a foot high. They are hatched from eggs, and in their youth have feathers and wings.[150]
A traveller in Peru only sixty years ago found the tradition of a living wood-ghost, who dwelt in the darkest part of the forest, the haunt of night-birds, and issued forth to decoy the Indians to their destruction.[151] The idea of a wild man of the woods also exists in Brazil. The Indians call him Curupira, and attribute to his agency all such forest sounds as they cannot understand.[152]
Some of the foregoing traditions present a glimpse of the transition towards a later and more highly developed conception, in which the many spirits once believed in become generalised into a single “spirit of vegetation.” It is not indeed contended that this belief is necessarily destructive of the earlier. Indeed it is possible that in the loosely working mind of the peasant the two conceptions may exist side by side. The many interesting ceremonies and observances which arose out of this generalised conception will be dealt with in a later chapter.
CHAPTER IV
THE TREE IN ITS RELATION TO HUMAN LIFE
Having dealt with the Tree in its connection on the one hand with gods, and on the other with spirits of more equivocal attributes, we have now to consider a series of myths and traditions wherein it was regarded as entering into a still more intimate relationship with man. Sometimes it was represented as the source from which the human race originally sprang, sometimes, conversely, as the object into which the soul might retreat after death, or into which an individual might be transmuted, body and soul, by some miraculous agency. In other cases the life of a particular tree was held to be bound up with that of an individual or a community, and lastly, in a still larger conception, the tree came to be very widely regarded as the embodiment of the spirit of fertility, the especial patron of the field and flock.
To the modern mind, which claims to have deciphered Nature’s scattered hieroglyphs, and finds a genealogical document even in the evanescent wrinkles on a baby’s foot, the idea of man taking origin from a tree will seem in the highest degree fantastic, but to the primitive intelligence it probably presented no greater difficulty than the extraction of the new baby from the parsley bed does to the modern child. The early inquirer may well have found in it the most natural answer to the eternal riddle, “Whence came our first parents?” the most plausible solution to the strange problem of man’s separate existence upon the globe, supplying the necessary link between him and the great mother-earth, which supported and fed him while alive, and received him again into her bosom when dead. Speculation apart, however, the solution would appear to have commended itself to many different inquirers, for the belief that the human race took its first origin from trees is met with in the mythology of the most widely separated races.