Accepting the omen he kisses the sacred tree, falls asleep beneath it, and wakes to find that the ants have been miraculously changed into men, the famous Myrmidons.[219] Again, it is related by more than one author that when the good ship Argo was built, Athena introduced into it by way of amulet a beam hewn in the grove of Dodona, which in the subsequent voyage constantly gave the Argonauts warning and advice.[220]
At the famous oracle of Delphi the tree played as intrinsic, if not so predominant, a part as at Dodona, its function being shared by the fissure in the earth and the sacred spring, which testify to the chthonic origin of the oracle, whilst the use of the sacred tripod has been thought to connect it with the class of fire oracles.[221] There is evidence that a laurel-tree grew beside the oracular fissure in Gaia’s time,[222] and, according to tradition, the earliest temple of Apollo was a hut of laurel boughs erected by the god’s own hands.[223] And later on, when the original tree had disappeared and the fissure had been enclosed in the Adytum, the entrance to the latter, as well as the tripod on which the Pythia sat, were hidden in fresh laurel leaves whenever the oracle was given, and the priestess having chewed laurel leaves and crowned herself with a wreath of the sacred plant, waved a laurel branch while chanting her ecstatic utterances. Every ninth year, moreover, a bower of laurel branches was erected in the forecourt of the temple. It is uncertain how far Apollo’s close connection with the laurel may have originated from Delphi, but it is a fact that in later times his oracular function was inseparably bound up with the use of that tree, and the laurel became the recognised instrument of prophecy (per lauros geomantis). And at Delphi, when the laurel trees had disappeared, the oracle ceased, for the messenger sent by the Emperor Julian to reinaugurate it received for answer, “Tell the king that the cunningly-built chamber has fallen to the ground; Apollo no longer has bower, or inspired laurel, or prophetic spring; vanished is the talking water.”[224]
To pass briefly over other examples of tree-oracle, in Armenia the fire-priests were wont to interpret the will of the god from the movements observed in the branches of the holy plane-tree at Armavira.[225] The Chaldaeo-Assyrians read the future in the rustling of the leaves of the prophetic trees.[226] At Nejrân, in Yemen, the Arabs professed to obtain oracles from the spirit who inhabited a sacred date-palm.[227]
In the Sháh Námeh, Firdausi, working no doubt upon an ancient tradition, tells how Sikander, or Alexander the Great, consulted a tree-oracle in Persia.[228] “From thence he proceeded to another city, where he was received with great homage by the most illustrious of the nation. He inquired of them if there were anything wonderful or extraordinary in their country, that he might go to see it, and they replied that there were two trees in the kingdom, one a male, the other a female, from which a voice proceeded. The male tree spoke in the day and the female tree in the night, and whoever had a wish went thither to have his desires accomplished. Sikander immediately repaired to the spot, and approaching it, he hoped in his heart that a considerable part of his life still remained to be enjoyed. When he came under the tree a terrible sound arose and rang in his ears, and he asked the people present what it meant. The attendant priest said it implied that fourteen years of his life still remained. Sikander at this interpretation of the prophetic sound wept, and the burning tears ran down his cheeks. Again he asked, ‘Shall I return to Rúm and see my mother and children before I die?’ and the answer was, ‘Thou wilt die at Kashán.’”
Amongst the Romans other forms of augury appear to have taken the place of the old tree-oracles and reduced them to comparative insignificance. The most important of those that remained was the prophetic ilex grove upon the Aventine hill, sacred to Faunus and Picus. Hither the applicant came, fasting and meanly clothed, and having crowned himself with beech leaves, sacrificed two sheep to the deities of the grove, and laying himself down upon their pelts, awaited the counsel of the gods in his dream.[229] There was another grove oracle of Faunus at Tibur by the Albunean spring,[230] and at the neighbouring Preneste, where the oracle of Jupiter was held in great repute, the oracle lots were fashioned from the wood of his sacred oak.[231] At the more sequestered Tiora Matiena the tree-oracle appears to have dwindled into a mere vestige, the responses being given by a woodpecker perched upon an oaken column.[232]
To tree-omens, as distinguished from tree-oracles, the Romans attached much importance, and they possessed several treatises dealing with such portents. The family and community tree described in the last chapter had a certain oracular character, and foretold in its own fortunes the prosperity or adversity of those whom it represented. The withering of the laurel grove of Augustus was held to portend the death of Nero, and with him the extinction of the Augustan house and its adopted members; the fall of Vespasian’s cypress foretold the death of Domitian. If the sacred tree attached to a sanctuary were uprooted by the wind, it was a clear proof that the deity had withdrawn his protection, and unless the tree upreared itself anew, his worship at that spot was discontinued. The Sibylline books contained explicit instructions with regard to these eventualities and were invariably consulted in every such case. Innumerable instances of these tree-omens are given in classical literature.[233]
The legends of trees which spoke intelligibly belong rather to myth than to history, but they were quite in accordance with the ancient belief that any tree which contained a tree-soul, were it the spirit of a god or only that of a dryad, might express itself in words. Thus the spirits inhabiting the three trees of the Hesperides gave advice to the wandering Argonauts. Philostratus relates that at the command of Apollonius a tree addressed him in a distinct female voice.[234] When Rome was invaded by the Gauls a voice from out of the grove of Vesta warned the Romans to repair their walls or their city would fall.[235] And after the battle in which Brutus and Aruns Tarquinius slew each other, a powerful voice from the neighbouring grove of Arsia announced that the victory lay with the Romans.[236] A later instance is that of the gharcad tree which spoke to Moslim b. ‘Ocba in a dream, and designated him to the command of the army of Yazīd against Medina.[237]
It has already been mentioned that the responses at Dodona were sometimes interpreted from the oracle lots kept in an urn that stood upon a sacred table beneath the tree, and the same form of divination was also apparently in use at Delphi,[238] whilst at Preneste it was the sole method employed. Indeed this outgrowth of the tree-oracle was in common use throughout the ancient world. There is a probable allusion to it in Ezekiel xxi. 21. The Scythian soothsayers were wont to divine by the help of a number of willow rods, which they placed upon the ground, uttering their predictions as they gathered them up one by one. They also practised divination by means of the bark of the linden-tree.[239] Amongst the neighbouring Alani, in Sarmatia, women foretold the future by means of straight rods cut with secret enchantments at certain times and marked very carefully.[240] The Germans used to divine by means of the fragments of a branch cut from a fruit-tree, which they threw on to a white cloth.[241] The omen sticks of the Druids, frequently referred to in the Bardic poems, were probably rods cut from a fruit-tree and marked with mystical emblems.[242]
It is not easy to define the exact connection between these oracle-lots and that strange survival, the divining-rod, but it may be taken for certain that the belief in the efficacy of the latter is “a superstition cognate to the belief in sacred trees,”[243] and that the idea underlying both the oracle-lot and the divining-rod was that they were animated by an indwelling spirit, probably by the spirit of the tree from which they were cut. We know from Pliny and Pausanias that the earliest images of the gods were made of wood, and that the Greeks, Romans, and other pre-Christian nations worshipped stakes or peeled rods of wood, painted, or dressed, or roughly carved in the semblance of an anthropomorphic god, and supposed to be inhabited by a divine essence. It was probably by a similar mode of reasoning that the spear, the sceptre, the staff of the general, the standards of the army, the herald’s wand, the rods of the flamens, the lituus of the augur, and the truncheon of the constable came to be symbolically representative of power and inviolability, the primitive assumption being that they retained some of the divine spirit resident in the tree from which they were cut.[244] From a similar parentage sprang the popular custom of striking men, cattle, and plants with a green switch (Lebensrute) at certain seasons of the year in order to make them fruitful, an observance of which so many instances have been collected by Mannhardt. “It was the tree-soul, the spirit of vegetation,” he concludes, “communicated by means of this switching, which drove away the demons of sickness and sterility and evoked fruitfulness and health.”[245] The divining-rod is, if one may say so, first cousin to the “life-rood.” Each represents and embodies a different function of the supernatural—the one its procreative, the other its prophetic attribute. The divining-rod is the meagre survival of the once renowned tree-oracle.
It may seem strange that in this positive age there should exist people calling themselves educated, who believe that a stick cut from a hazel or thorn-bush may in the hands of a specially endowed person possess a magical power of revealing the secrets of the earth. But so it is. There are in this country at the present hour some half-dozen professional experts, who claim the faculty of discovering unsuspected springs of water by means of the divining-rod, and furnish well-attested instances of their success. It is not necessary to discuss the credibility of their assertions or to formulate a theory to account for their success. The subject of the divining-rod concerns us only in so far as it is a vestige—a poor and atrophied vestige—of the magic eloquence once associated with the sacred tree. It is impossible to say when the use of the divining-rod first originated. It is mentioned in the Vedas, and is well known to have flourished amongst the Chaldaeans and Egyptians. But in those early days the function of the magical rod was not restricted, as it was later and is now, to the search for water or buried treasure. The Greeks and Romans found many uses for it. Cicero speaks of providing for one’s wants, quasi virgulâ divinâ, ut aiunt. It was a familiar instrument in the hands of the British Druids, and is still largely employed in China. Mediaeval writers speak of it as being in very common use among the miners of Germany.[246]