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First, then, trees or tree-spirits are believed to give rain and sunshine. When the missionary Jerome of Prague was persuading the heathen Lithuanians to fell their sacred groves, a multitude of women besought the Prince of Lithuania to stop him, saying that with the woods he was destroying the house of god from which they had been wont to get rain and sunshine.
The pretence of throwing the victim chosen by lot into the Beltane fire, and the similar treatment of the man, the future Green Wolf, at the midsummer bonfire in Normandy, may naturally be interpreted as traces of an older custom of actually burning human beings on these occasions; and the green dress of the Green Wolf, coupled with the leafy envelope of the young fellow who trod out the midsummer fire at Moosheim, seems to hint that the persons who perished at these festivals did so in the character of tree-spirits or deities of vegetation.
Hence at the festival of the Thesmophoria they were thrown, along with pigs and other agents or emblems of fecundity, into the sacred vaults of Demeter for the purpose of quickening the ground and the wombs of women. Like tree-spirits in general, Attis was apparently thought to wield power over the fruits of the earth or even to be identical with the corn.
The sloping way was through groves and woods, and over grassed slopes, and around queer rocks; and there were flowers with stories in their hearts, and trees holding tree-spirits. Pigeons cried korup-korup; and doves sobbed owao, owao and cicada wheezed and fluted and tinkled. All those who wait for absent dear ones make, if they can, a pilgrimage to the peak called Dakeyama.
"Explain to me. I don't understand. I know so little of him. What is the subject?" She hesitated; then chose her words as if for a beginner; "It is the Blessed One preaching to the Tree-Spirits. See how eagerly they lean from the boughs to listen. This other relief represents him in the state of mystic vision. Here he is drowned in peace. See how it overflows from the closed eyes; the closed lips.
The tree-spirits, in the nature of the case very numerous, were not distinguished by individual names, as the trees were not so distinguished. The spirits resident in the divine trees invoked in the Vedas are powerful, but have not definite personality, and it is hard to say whether it is the tree or the spirit that is worshiped.
Some of the Ljeschie are spirits of the corn as well as of the wood; before harvest they are as tall as the corn-stalks, but after it they shrink to the height of the stubble. This brings out what we have remarked before the close connexion between tree-spirits and corn-spirits, and shows how easily the former may melt into the latter.
But if the victims the human Balders who died by fire, whether in spring or at midsummer, were put to death as living embodiments of tree-spirits or deities of vegetation, it would seem that Balder himself must have been a tree-spirit or deity of vegetation.
Thus there arose tree-spirits, river-spirits, and other similar extrahuman beings. It is convenient to employ the term 'spirit' as the designation of the soul in a nonhuman object, isolated and independent, and regarded as a Power to be treated with respect. The term is sometimes used of a disembodied human soul, and sometimes of a deity resident in an object of nature.
But, as we have seen, the power of blessing women with offspring is a special attribute of tree-spirits; it is therefore a fair presumption that the burning effigy over which the bride must leap is a representative of the fertilising tree-spirit or spirit of vegetation.
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