Thus we read in the Eddas that when heaven and earth had been made, Odin and his brothers walking by the sea-shore came upon two trees. These they changed into human beings, male and female. The first brother gave them soul and life; the second endowed them with wit and will to move; the third added face, speech, sight, and hearing. They clothed them also and chose their names, Ask for the man’s and Embla for the woman’s. And then they sent them forth to be the parents of the human race.[153]
Again, according to the Iranian account of the creation the first human couple, Maschia and Maschiâna, issued from the ground in the form of a rhubarb plant (the Rheum ribes), which was at first single, but in process of time became divided into two.[154] Ormuzd imparted to each a human soul, and they became the parents of mankind.
In the corresponding legend current amongst the Sioux of the Upper Missouri[155] one seems to catch an echo from the Garden of Eden. Here the original parents, like the trees from which they developed, at first stood firmly fixed to the earth, until a monster snake gnawed away the roots and gave them independent motion, just as in Paradise the serpent destroyed the harmony and mutual trust which united Adam and Eve.
The classical nations possessed a similar tradition. According to Hesychius it was believed by the Greeks that the human race was the fruit of the ash, and Hesiod relates that it was from the trunks of ash-trees that Zeus created the third or bronze race of men.[156] The oak was particularised as the favoured tree in another tradition. “Whence art thou?” inquires Penelope of the disguised Ulysses, “for thou are not sprung of oak or rock, as old tales tell.”[157] Virgil, too, speaks of
Nymphs, and fauns, and savage men, who took
Their birth from trunks of trees and stubborn oak.[158]
The Damaras of South Africa believe that the universal progenitor was a tree, out of which came Damaras, Bushmen, oxen and zebras, and everything else that lives.[159]
In other legends human beings are represented as arising from the tree as its fruit. The first book of the Mahâbhârata tells of an enormous Indian fig-tree from whose branches hung little devotees in human form; and an Italian traveller of the fourteenth century was assured by the natives of Malabar that they knew of trees, which instead of fruit bore pigmy men and women. So long as the wind blew they remained fresh and healthy, but when it dropped they became withered and dry.[160] A somewhat similar tradition was familiar to the Arab geographers, who tell of a talking tree growing at the easternmost point of the habitable world, which bore young women on its branches in place of fruit.[161] And even to the present day folk-tales of Saxony and Thuringia speak of children as “growing on the tree.”
In another class of origin-myths individual births are represented as taking place directly from a tree. Adonis came forth at the stroke of a sword from the tree into which his mother, the guilty Myrrha, had been transformed in answer to her prayers.[162] The Phrygian Attis, according to one version, was fathered by an almond-tree; while, according to another, his body was confined by Cybele in a pine-tree, from which on the return of spring he was born again.[163] The Khatties of Central India claim to be descended from a certain Khat, “begotten of wood,” who, at the prayer of Karna, an illegitimate brother of the five sons of Pându (heroes of the Mahâbhârata), sprang from the staff he had fashioned from the branch of a tree to assist him against his legitimate kinsmen.[164]
The above examples prove how widely the conception prevailed that human beings or man-like spirits might owe their first origin to the tree. In a later stage these crude myths were rationalised in three directions. In one the tree came to be, not the source, but the scene of a miraculous birth; in another its supposed connection with a human being was explained by a metamorphosis legend; and, thirdly, the tree came to be regarded as the symbol and minister of fecundity.