CHAPTER X
Religion in the Plant World
“Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth.”
—Byron
In a sense, the entire plant world is a beautiful and expressive worship of a bountiful and beneficent Creator. No creed which does not deny God will fail to see the silent but reverent adoration exhibited by His handiwork. Every tree which raises its brave crest toward the heavens, every flower which greets the warming sunlight with a smile, is a testimony to the omnipotence of divine law. Fully explain the wonders of a single blade of Grass, and you have solved the mysteries which underlie the universe.
Primitive peoples, who are always closely attuned to natural influences, early discerned the divine thread which runs through all plantdom. In their incessant search for God, they did not overlook His manifestations in the plants and flowers. Along with fire, water, stars, sun, moon, animals, birds and graven images, our wood-roving ancestors ascribed supernatural attributes to many trees and flowers. In various places and at various times, many different plants have been idolized as the material substance of an ethereal or spiritual being. Certain plant growths have been repeatedly designated as sacred, and even in the present day, untutored races have many plant superstitions. Tree worship was common among the Celts and Teutons. The present day Christmas tree is a relic of primitive tree veneration. Even the American Indians worshiped trees at times. Man has been groping for God all through the ages. His tendency has been to deify those elements and things which he did not understand or which contained mystery. As soon as he became acquainted with the causes of these mysteries, the supernatural collapsed into the natural and he went searching after new wonders to call God.
From the beginning of literature, the bards of every land have sung to and of the flowers; the prophets have used them as instruments for their sooth-saying; the believer in resurrection has cited them to prove a final resurrection for the souls of men; the reincarnationists have claimed in them a great evidence of the reincarnation of the soul; the atheist has tried to show through them the validity of his belief; hero and conqueror have found in them their crowns of glory and the poet has made them the theme of his pen. Yet the flowers bloom today much as they did on the hillsides of Greece and Babylon, and man, with all his century-accumulated wisdom, seems but to have seen the outer edge of their real lives.
The superstitious veneration of various flowers is an ancient and peculiarly charming expression of man’s innate appreciation of the beautiful. He who condemns as idolaters the flower-worshippers of ancient ages may well look upon himself with critical eyes. Which is the better: to pay tribute to the Creator through the adoration of his beautiful floral children or make cold, glittering gold the ultimate though unacknowledged goal of this earthly life?
It is interesting to notice, in reviewing the annals of flower-worship, that the most fervent and frequent examples are found in tropical countries. This is due, no doubt, to the luxuriance of vegetation in the hot countries, and the fact that, in most cases, flowers are in bloom there all the year around. Even one trained in a more rigid faith is tempted to strange reverence when he suddenly comes upon a great, glowing Orchid, squatting like some beautiful animal on the shaggy trunk of an aged tree. A Hindu is quite excusable when he becomes raptly worshipful while paddling through a floating sea of Lotus-Flowers.
In heathen mythology, “every flower was the emblem of a god; every tree the abode of a nymph.” Paradise, itself, was a kind of “nemorous temple or sacred grove” planted by God himself. The patriarchal groves which are prominent throughout Biblical history were probably planted as living memorials of the Garden of Eden, the first grove and man’s first abode.
Sacred flowers were common among the Greeks. The Anemone, Poppy and Violet were dedicated to Venus. To Diana belonged “all flowers growing in untrodden dells and shady nooks, uncontaminated by the tread of man.” The Narcissus and Maiden-Hair Fern were under the special protection of Proserpina and to Ceres belonged the Willow. The Pink was Jove’s flower, while Juno claimed the Lily, Crocus and Asphodel.