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Updated: May 28, 2025
The World-Ash, generally called Yggdrasil's Ash, is one of the most interesting survivals of tree-worship. Thence come three maids, all-knowing, from the hall that stands under the tree"; and as a sign of the approaching doom she says: "Yggdrasil's ash trembles as it stands; the old tree groans."
The worship of each of these three is in itself a great subject, and we can do no more than mention the leading views which appear to have entered into them. Mannhardt in his Feld- und Waldkulte and Frazer in The Golden Bough have studied the survivals of tree-worship in the local customs of the peasantry of Europe.
Each represented a Tree of Life, the beginning and end of all things. Tree-worship was condemned by the councils of Tours, Nantes, and Auxerre, and in the XIth century it was forbidden in England by the laws of Canute, but these edicts seem to have had little effect.
This tree-worship may have taken a dark form when associated with the Draconian one; or opposed, as in Judea, to a purer faith; but in itself, I believe, it was always healthy, and though it retains little definite hieroglyphic power in subsequent religion, it becomes, instead of symbolic, real; the flowers and trees are themselves beheld and beloved with a half-worshipping delight, which is always noble and healthful.
Traces of tree-worship occur in Africa, and Sir John Lubbock mentions the sacred groves of the Marghi a dense part of the forest surrounded with a ditch where in the most luxuriant and widest spreading tree their god, Zumbri, is worshipped.
The same writer further adds that in Italy traces of tree-worship, if not so distinct and prominent as in Greece, are nevertheless existent. Romulus, for instance, is described as hanging the arms and weapons of Acron, King of Cenina, upon an oak tree held sacred by the people, which became the site of the famous temple of Jupiter.
Turning to India, tree-worship probably has always belonged to Aryan Hinduism, and as tree-worship did not belong to the aboriginal races of India, and was not adopted from them, "it must have formed part of the pantheistic worship of the Vedic system which endowed all created things with a spirit and life a doctrine which modern Hinduism largely extended ."
Frazer's theory that the Baldr-myth is a relic of tree-worship and the ritual sacrifice of the God, Baldr being a tree-spirit whose soul is contained in the mistletoe. They are rather proofs of antiquity. Apparent contradictions whose explanation is forgotten often survive in tradition; the inventor of a new story takes care to make it consistent.
Fergusson in his elaborate researches has traced many indications of tree-adoration in Germany, noticing their continuance in the Christian period, as proved by Grimm, whose opinion is that, "the festal universal religion of the people had its abode in woods," while the Christmas tree of present German celebration in all families is "almost undoubtedly a remnant of the tree-worship of their ancestors."
Similarly, in reviewing the old Teutonic beliefs, we come across the same references to tree-worship, in many respects displaying little or no distinction from that of the Celts. In explanation of this circumstance, Mr. Keary suggests that, "The nature of the Teutonic beliefs would apply, with only some slight changes, to the creed of the predecessors of the Germans in Northern and Western Europe.
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