Good Valentine, be kind to me,
In dreams let me my true love see;[255]
or, if she were a Staffordshire lass, she probably preferred St. Thomas’s eve, and having placed a sprig of evergreen under her pillow, sighed—
Good St. Thomas, stand by my bed
And tell me when I shall be wed.[256]
To those who are new to the subject of comparative mythology these doggrels whispered by foolish country girls under the stress of a natural impulse may seem absurdly irrelevant. But to that science which strives to unravel the beliefs and ideas of long dead people, every vestige, every survival is important. The charms above mentioned did not spring, fully matured, from the brain of some peculiarly inventive dairy-maid. They have a long, long pedigree, and, like the zebra stripe which will sometimes appear on a purebred horse, they throw us back to an age when man believed that the world was controlled by spirits, and that he, like everything else, was but a puppet in their hands.
CHAPTER VI
THE UNIVERSE-TREE
One of the most interesting points in connection with tree myths is the wide distribution of the conception of the cosmogonic or world-tree, of which the Scandinavian Yggdrasil is the most familiar example. The idea is met with amongst the ancient Chaldaeans, the Egyptians, the Persians, the Hindus, and the Aryan races of Northern Europe, as well as in the mythology of China and Japan; and this community of tradition has been regarded by some authorities as pointing to a prehistoric intercourse between these widely-separated races, if not to their common origin.[257] But, apart from the fact that the same conception is also found in a rudimentary form amongst the aborigines of New Zealand and America, it is not difficult to imagine that it may have occurred separately to more than one inquirer. In short, “the idea of referring to the form of a tree the apparent conformation of the universe is one of the most natural methods of reasoning which can occur to the savage mind.”[258] The moment he began to concern himself with such questions, the primitive thinker must have asked himself why the heavenly firmament, with its sun and stars and the waters above it, did not fall to earth like everything else within his knowledge. His mind naturally demanded some prop or support to antagonise what in his experience was the unrestricted despotism of geocentric gravitation. The Egyptian explained the problem by representing the sky as the star-spangled body of the goddess Nu̔ît, who had been separated from her husband Sibû, the earth, by the efforts of Shû. In the mythology of the Maoris, Rangi, the sky, was forcibly separated from his wife, the universal mother, earth, by one of their children, Tane Mahuta, father of forests, who planting his head upon the earth, upheld the heavens with his feet.[259]
The fact that the celestial bodies were observed to revolve around a fixed point rendered it a necessity that this assumed support of the heaven should be of the nature of a central axis, upholding the sky-roof as the pole upholds a tent. To the inhabitants of mountainous countries, who saw the clouds resting upon the peaks, the idea of a heaven-supporting mountain no doubt presented itself as the most reasonable solution. Thus Aristotle, to quote Lord Bacon, “elegantly expoundeth the ancient fable of Atlas (that stood fixed and bare up the heaven from falling) to be meant of the poles or axle-tree of heaven.” To plain-dwellers, however, the tree was the loftiest object within their experience, and it may be conjectured that the idea of a central world-supporting tree was a product of the lowlands. In some cases the two conceptions were combined and the world-tree was placed on the summit of a world-mountain. It is interesting, however, to note that the earliest known version of a world-tree, pure and simple, comes to us from the fertile alluvial plain on the borders of the Persian Gulf. The account, contained in an old bilingual hymn, and probably of Accadian origin, represents the tree as growing in the garden of Edin or Eden, placed by Babylonian tradition in the immediate vicinity of Eridu, a city which flourished at the mouth of the Euphrates between 3000 and 4000 B.C.
In Eridu a stalk grew overshadowing; in a holy place did it become green;