Sacred Trees in Folk Tradition

From the ash at the centre of the Norse cosmos to the oak at the heart of the Druid’s grove, from the banyan under whose shade the Buddha sat to the birch that the Russian peasant carries into the bathhouse, certain trees have been felt, in almost every human culture, to be more than wood and leaf. They have been thresholds, altars, oracles, and protectors. The pages gathered here trace that long relationship, from the cosmic tree of the ancient world to the small protective rowan above the door of a Scottish cottage.

The Cosmic Tree

The most pervasive of all tree images is the tree that holds up the world. The Norse Yggdrasil, the great ash, stands at the centre of the Nine Worlds; its roots reach to Asgard, Midgard, and Niflheim, and at its base the Norns draw water from the well of Urd to keep the world-tree alive. In India the ashvattha, the sacred fig, is a living image of the eternal Brahman; its descending roots are said to be the forms of the gods, and to know the ashvattha is to know the Veda. The Maya ceiba yaxche rose at the centre of the world, its roots in the underworld of Xibalba, its branches in the sky, and it was under such a tree that the Maize God was hidden at the beginning of creation. The Siberian shamans, in their cosmic journeys, climbed a world-pillar that took the form of a birch, an axis linking the lower, middle, and upper worlds.

The cosmic tree is always more than a plant. It is a diagram of reality, a way of picturing the relations between gods, ancestors, and the living. The body of the tree is the middle world of humans; its roots are the underworld; its topmost branches touch the dwelling of the gods. To cut such a tree is to endanger the cosmos. The missionaries who felled the great oak of the Frisians in 722 knew, as Boniface himself did, that they were performing a theological act. The Irminsul, the Saxon pillar-tree, was an axis of the world, and its destruction by Charlemagne in 772 was meant to be a death-blow to the older order.

The Celtic Oak and Its Kin

The oak of the Celts is the best documented of the European sacred trees, and it may be the most ancient. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century, describes the great oak groves of the Gauls, in which the Druids performed their rites, cut the mistletoe with a golden sickle, and sacrificed white bulls beneath the boughs. The word druid itself, as the oak in Celtic tradition explores in more depth, may mean no more than “oak-knower” — a person who could read the language of the tree and pass it on. The Irish place-names preserve the memory: Doire (Derry, “oak grove”), Cill Dara (Kildare, “church of the oak”), Cill Chainnigh (Kilkenny, “church of the church of Cainnech,” Cainnech being a saint whose name also belongs to an older oak-figure). The same word, in slightly different form, lies at the root of dryad and of the Old Irish druí.

The oak was not the only sacred tree of the Celts. The yew, with its red heartwood and its long life, was the wood from which the long-bow was made, and yew groves were often planted in churchyards, where they survive to this day. The rowan, whose red berries the highland Scots hung above the door to keep the witch from entering, was a tree of protection. The alder, the willow, the holly, and the hazel all had their place in the older lore. The hazel in particular was the tree of wisdom: its nuts were the food of the salmon of knowledge, and the salmon that swam in the Boyne carried the wisdom of the world in the spots on its sides.

The Bodhi Tree and the Ashvattha

Outside Europe, the cosmic tree takes forms that are at once familiar and strange. The Bodhi tree of the Buddha is a pipal or sacred fig, a relative of the Indian ashvattha and, in fact, a kind of ashvattha itself. The Buddha sat beneath such a tree at Bodh Gaya, and the spot is still marked by a descendant of the original. Cuttings of that tree have been planted across South and Southeast Asia, and the ceremony of the Bodhi tree is one of the great recurring acts of the Buddhist year. The tree is not worshipped; it is honoured, as the place where enlightenment was attained. Its cousin, the ashvattha, is the most sacred of trees in the Hindu tradition, and the Bhagavad Gita says that the eternal Brahman is the ashvattha with its roots above and its branches below, the leaves of which are the Vedas.

The same fig tree appears in other contexts. The banyan, with its descending roots that become new trunks, is a kind of forest made of one tree, and in many parts of India and Sri Lanka a village banyan is the centre of public life. The wedding tree, the council tree, the tree beneath which the dead are mourned, may all be the same banyan. To cut one is to break a village in two.

The Irminsul, the Donar’s Oak, and the Saxon Pillar

The continental Germanic peoples held a different tree in special reverence: the Irminsul, a great wooden pillar that stood for the world-axis, just as Yggdrasil did in the north. The Irminsul was sacred to the Saxon tribes, and it was the centre of their most holy site, the Eresburg, on the hill above the modern town of Marsberg. Charlemagne’s destruction of the Irminsul in 772 was a deliberate attack on the symbolic order of the Saxons, and it is remembered in the Saxon chronicles as a wound that never quite healed. A similar wooden pillar, of uncertain name, is remembered in Old English poetry, where it is sometimes taken to be the cross of Christ and sometimes the older world-pillar of the pre-Christian faith.

The Donar’s oak, felled by the English missionary Boniface at Geismar in 722, was a great oak sacred to the thunder god Donar (the continental form of Thor). The wood of the oak was, by Boniface’s account, used to build a chapel dedicated to St. Peter, and the symbolic substitution was deliberate. The same pattern — pagan tree, Christian saint — can be seen in the Donar’s oak at Fritzlar and in many of the great yews that stand in English churchyards. The trees that survived the Christianisation of Europe were often those that were rededicated to a saint, and the older cult is sometimes still detectable in the strange customs that have gathered around them.

The Christmas Tree, the Maypole, and the Yule Log

The Christmas tree is one of the more recent sacred trees of the European tradition, but its roots go deep. Its ancestor may be the paradise tree of the medieval mystery plays, an evergreen hung with apples on the feast of Adam and Eve. By the sixteenth century, in the German lands, the tree was set up in the house, and the apples had become the glass balls of later centuries. Martin Luther is sometimes said to have introduced the candle-lit tree, walking through a forest under a sky of stars. The tree came to England with Prince Albert in the 1840s, and from there to the English-speaking world. In every form, the Christmas tree carries the older message of the evergreen — that life continues through the death of the year.

The maypole is a different tree entirely. Set up on the first of May, it is a stripped young tree or a tall pole, hung with ribbons that are woven by dancers in two opposing circles. The maypole is a relic of older spring rites, in which the new growth of the year was welcomed with a tree that stood for the union of the sun and the earth. The custom was suppressed by the English Puritans in the seventeenth century and revived, in many villages, in the late nineteenth and twentieth. The Queen of the May, the Jack-in-the-Green, the green man of the medieval churches — all are part of the same old pattern.

The Yule log, by contrast, was a fragment of an old tree rather than a new one. A great log, often of oak or ash, was dragged into the house at Christmas, laid on the fire, and slowly burned through the twelve days. The ashes of the Yule log were scattered in the fields for fertility, or kept against lightning. The custom is older than the Christian Christmas and may be a survival of a winter solstice rite in which the sun was helped through the longest night by the burning of an old year’s log.

The Elder, the Rowan, the Willow, the Birch

The smaller trees of the European folk tradition carry their own lore. The elder, common in cottage gardens, was the home of the Elder Mother, a spirit whose permission had to be asked before the wood was cut. To cut an elder without asking was to invite illness, especially in children. The same belief is found across northern Europe, and the elder was the basis of a folk medicine that used its flowers and berries for fevers and inflammations. The rowan, or mountain ash, was hung above the door of house and byre to keep the witch out; its red berries were a token of protection, and a rowan cross made on May morning was carried in the pocket for luck. The willow was the tree of mourning in much of Europe, and to plant a willow by a grave was to ease the passage of the dead. In Slavic lands the willow was also a tree of the water spirits, and the rusalki braided wreaths of willow on Ivan Kupala night.

The birch, finally, is the tree of renewal. Its silver bark and its spring sap made it a symbol of the return of life after the long winter, and the Russian peasant still takes a birch switch into the bathhouse, for steam and for the gentle sting that brings the blood to the skin. The birch was the tree of the Russian maiden at the spring festival of Semik, when the green birch was carried into the village, dressed in female clothes, and mourned as a sister. The custom is recorded from the eleventh century and has not entirely died.

Ritual Uses of Wood

The sacred trees of the world were not only looked at. They were also used. The yule log was burned; the maypole was danced around; the rowan was cut for protection; the oak was felled for ship-building and for the great beams of cathedral and hall. The custom of the felling-ritual, in which a tree was asked for pardon before it was cut, has been recorded from the Iroquois, the Russian peasants, the Japanese carpenters, and the Welsh woodmen alike. The wood itself, once felled, was marked with the same care: the beam that was raised into the roof of a barn in the Alps was the centre of a small ceremony, in which it was greeted as the new lord of the building.

The same is true of the tree of the cross. In Christian legend, the cross of Christ was made of wood from a tree that had once been a child of the forest, and the story of Seth planting a branch from the tree of knowledge in Adam’s mouth, which grew into the tree of the cross, is one of the most beautiful of the medieval legends. The tree, in this telling, contains the whole of human history from the garden to the resurrection. The image, in different keys, recurs in many traditions: a single tree that holds within its rings the fate of the world.

Sacred Trees in Folk Tradition

In this section

The Oak Tree in Celtic Tradition

Yggdrasil, the World Tree