[In the spirit of the season, I have put together the following blog on the mythology of trees. Enjoy!]
“I am Yggdrasill, the Ash-tree, the oldest living being. I am the largest and the tallest. My roots reach down to the kingdoms of death. My trunk reaches up to the heavens, and my boughs reach out to the Universe. My roots are watered by the Sacred Well, and from me come the dew that drops in the valleys. I am the bringer of life – I bring the fruits that you eat, the air that you breathe. The history of my buddings and my sheddings is the history of the earth itself – its past, present and future. In the rustling of my leaves you can hear the story of human existence from the ancient all the way to the new. I am Yggdrasill, the Ash-tree, the oldest living being.”
Once upon a time, many centuries ago, when all our ancestors were forest dwellers, they had an intuitive understanding of their connection to those forests. The quote above is from the old Norse myth of Yggdrasill, the ash tree, which is associated with the universal life force. Trees, as symbols of life, are at the centre of every country’s mythology: the cedar tree of Lebanon, the banyan tree of India and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. Trees have always been our most important symbol of growth, death and rebirth. For as long as humans have been on the earth, long before there were temples, there have been sacred groves of trees where people would gather to invoke the gods and observe religious rituals.
In ancient Ireland, people believed that trees were, somehow, silently cognizant. The most sacred of them was the hawthorn, and to this day, Ireland has laws against cutting those trees down. Recently there was a news story of road building plans having to be rerouted to avoid removing an ancient hawthorn tree. In Estonia, in 2011, a scandal erupted when a company began bulldozing one of the many protected groves of trees that for thousands of years had been a sacred gathering place. In Britain as well, the ancient people would emulate the shape of massive tree trunks by erecting narrow towers and standing stones in places of sacred energy. And in the Middle Ages, the Gothic monks evoked forest-like feelings of deep reverence by using tree-like pillars to bring their cathedrals to unprecedented heights. Here in the Pacific Northwest, the first nations honoured their connection to the natural world by transforming the straightest red cedars into totem poles. But none of these emulations could match the sacred energy of the trees themselves. And the main way we can experience that sacred energy is by regularly getting out and hiking among these ancient giants.
In Tolkien’s Middle Earth, the forest of Lothlorien is a forest of dreams, “where the trees in a golden light sing musically.” Near the end of the saga, when the hobbits return to the Shire, they find that the evil wizard, Saruman, has taken it over and has cut down all the trees, “destroying all that was alive and beautiful.” There, as in all mythology, the destruction of trees is associated with evil and the lust for power. In our world today, we don’t need mythology to show us the obvious connection between the destruction of the forests and the destruction of the planet. However, in our world, we have to ask whether there is any possibility that the forces of good might triumph over the forces of evil. Or is that something that happens only in the world of mythology?