Tree Worship

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Tree worship — dendrolatry, from the Greek dendron, tree, and latreia, service or worship — is the veneration of trees and groves as holy: as the dwelling of a god, the body of a spirit, the axis joining the worlds, or the sacred made visible in living wood. It is among the most widely attested forms of religious life, surfacing across the ancient Near East, Europe, India, and far beyond, and it rarely appears as a separate cult so much as a thread running through many. The Latin vocabulary preserves the instinct exactly: a grove set apart for a god was a lucus, distinguished by the grammarian Servius from the silva, the wild forest, and the nemus, the wooded enclosure — three words for trees among which only one carried the charge of the sacred. To clear a lucus was not to fell timber but to disturb a presence.

The world-ash Yggdrasil, from Wilhelm Wagner’s “Asgard and the Gods” (London, 1886) — engraving by Friedrich Wilhelm Heine, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The trees themselves carry the meanings. A single great tree, set apart and hung with offerings, could mark the seat of a deity or the grave of an ancestor; a grove of uncut timber could be the god’s own precinct, where the axe was forbidden and the ground kept apart from ordinary use. What is held within the wood is never quite settled even by those who keep it. The tree may be the god, or the god’s house, or merely the place the god is most reliably met — and the same grove can answer to all three at once without anyone feeling the contradiction. Setting a tree apart was itself an act with weight: the same gesture of consecration that makes an altar holy makes a tree untouchable, drawing a line around the living wood that ordinary use may not cross. Where the worship rose to the highest devotion — the latria owed to a god alone, in the later theological vocabulary — the tree was no longer an object in the landscape but a focus of the whole religious life of a people.

The tree at the center of the world

Across many mythologies a cosmic tree stands at the center of things, its roots in the underworld and its crown in the heavens, gathering the planes of being onto a single living axis. The Norse Yggdrasil is the most fully described. In the Edda it is an immense ash whose three roots run to three wells — to Urðarbrunnr, the well of fate tended by the Norns who name what will be; to Mímisbrunnr, the spring of wisdom for which Odin gave an eye; and to Hvergelmir in the cold below, where the dragon Níðhöggr gnaws the root from beneath. An eagle keeps the crown, a squirrel runs the trunk carrying insults between them, and four stags browse the leaves: the whole cosmos is arranged as the traffic of a single tree, and its shaking is the shaking of the world. (See Yggdrasil for the figure in full.)

Comparable world-trees recur far from the North. In Mesopotamia a stylized sacred tree, flanked by guardian figures and crowned by a winged disc, is among the most persistent images in palace relief and cylinder seal, read by interpreters as a vegetal sign of cosmic order and kingly continuance — a stylization so abstract that the tree has become pure pattern, a lattice of palmettes and volutes, yet still recognizably a tree, still the thing that holds the world upright.

Winged spirits attending the stylized sacred tree, from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, c. 884-859 BC (Royal Ontario Museum) — via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Among the peoples of Siberia and Inner Asia the shaman’s world-tree links the upper, middle, and lower realms, its notched trunk the road the spirit climbs and descends; the tent-pole that rises through the smoke-hole and the ritual birch set up for the rite repeat the same axis on a human scale, so that the dwelling itself becomes a small model of the cosmos with the tree at its center. The figure is consistent enough that it is treated as a genuine pattern of the religious imagination — the mind reaching for a vertical that joins what is below to what is above, and finding the tree already standing for it — while resisting the older habit of collapsing every instance into one lost original myth diffused from a single source. Resemblance here is not descent. A tree that roots in the dark and flowers in the light is a thing the eye meets everywhere; it does not need to be inherited to be thought.

Particular trees, particular cults

Particular trees gathered particular cults. At Dodona in the mountains of Epirus stood what the Greeks held to be their oldest oracle, where Zeus answered through a sacred oak. The will of the god was read from the rustling of its leaves and the cooing of the doves that nested in it; the priests, the Selloi, went barefoot and slept on the ground, and Herodotus preserves the tale that a black dove flying from Egyptian Thebes had named the place sacred (Histories 2.54–57). That an oracle older than Apollo at Delphi should speak through foliage rather than vapor or verse keeps the oak itself, and not merely its god, at the center of the rite. The sanctuary grew up around the tree, not the tree around the sanctuary: the temple of Zeus came late and stood beside the oak, never replacing it, and even the bronze cauldrons ranged about it were set ringing as part of how the place spoke.

The sanctuary of Zeus at Dodona, with an oak planted in place of the ancient oracular tree — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In the grove and lake of Nemi, south of Rome, a priest of Diana Nemorensis guarded a sacred tree on pain of his life. He held the title Rex Nemorensis, the King of the Wood, and held it only so long as no challenger could break a bough from the tree, fight him, and kill him — a runaway slave who succeeded became priest in his place, until the next. It was this strange office, and the plucked bough, that James George Frazer set at the head of The Golden Bough (1890), the comparative study of magic, kingship, and the dying god that grew across later editions into twelve volumes and gave the modern study of mythology one of its founding texts and its longest-running argument.

“The Golden Bough” (1834) by J. M. W. Turner, the image Frazer set at the head of his study — Tate Britain, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Not every tree-cult was solemn or oracular. Dionysus, the Greek god of the vine, was also Dendrites, the god in the tree — worshipped in the form of an upright post or a pillar of ivy-wreathed wood, the deity of growth and sap before he was the deity of wine. The rite of bringing in a tree or bough at the turn of the season, decking it, dancing about it, runs through the popular festivals of Europe long after the gods that once explained it were gone; the maypole raised and ribboned in spring is the best-known survival, a felled tree set up and circled, its old meaning thinned to festival but its shape intact. These folk descendants are not the cult itself, but they show how durable the gesture is once the doctrine has loosened its hold on it.

Classical writers reported that the Celtic Druids held their rites in oak groves and would perform none without oak branches. Pliny the Elder, in the Natural History, records that they held nothing more sacred than the mistletoe and the oak that bore it, and describes a white-robed priest cutting the mistletoe with a golden sickle and the sacrifice of two white bulls (16.95). The word Druid has long been read — not certainly — as joining an Indo-European root for oak to one for knowing, the oak-knower, though the etymology is contested and the classical notices are few, external, and written by the conquerors of the people they describe. The oak that anchors the druidism of the ancient sources should not be confused with the eighteenth-century revival that later took the name; the grove-rite here belongs to Pliny and Caesar, not to the antiquarians who reinvented it seventeen centuries on.

“Druids Cutting the Mistletoe on the Sixth Day of the Moon” (1900) by Henri-Paul Motte, a nineteenth-century reconstruction of the oak-and-mistletoe rite — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

In India the reverence is unbroken and ancient. The pipal (Ficus religiosa) and the banyan (Ficus benghalensis) have been honored for millennia; pipal-leaf motifs appear on seals of the Indus Valley civilization in the third millennium BCE, and one Mohenjo-daro seal shows a figure within the forked branches of a pipal, attended as if in worship — among the earliest images of the cult anywhere. The hinduism of the Bhagavad Gita and the Katha Upanishad knows the Ashvattha, the cosmic fig figured upside down, its roots above and branches below, the visible world hung from an unseen source. And the tree under which Siddhartha Gautama woke became, as the Bodhi tree, an object of devotion in its own right; in buddhism the place of the awakening at Bodh Gaya is marked by its descendant, and a cutting carried to Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka about 288 BCE — the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi — is among the oldest living trees with a recorded planting date, tended now for more than two thousand years. Devotion here is continuous and unembarrassed: the pipal is circumambulated, watered, and wound with thread; its felling is hedged about with caution; and the same species that meditating ascetics sit beneath is the one the texts make the very image of the cosmos. The Jain tradition keeps its own canon of sacred trees, one assigned to each of the awakened tirthankaras. Across all three of the religions born on the subcontinent the tree is not a relic of an older stratum but a living focus, and the reverence owed it has never had to be recovered because it was never lost.

The Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi at Anuradhapura, Sri Lanka, grown from a cutting of the Bodh Gaya tree planted about 288 BCE — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The tree the prophets cut down

The Hebrew Bible preserves the practice mainly as something condemned, and the condemnation is its own best evidence. Its writers denounce again and again the worship carried on, in the recurring formula, on every high hill and beneath every spreading green tree, and the asherah — a sacred pole or stylized tree, set up beside the altars, often the altars of Baal — is ordered cut down and burned across book after book. The object appears more than thirty times. Scholars reconstructing the religion behind the polemic take the asherah to stand in some relation to the goddess Asherah, the mother goddess of Canaan long known from the texts of Ugarit, and read inscriptions such as those from Kuntillet Ajrud, which appear to invoke Yahweh together with his asherah, as a sign that the pole and what it signified were once at home within Israelite worship and not a foreign intrusion. Whether the asherah was a living tree, a planted pole, or a carved image, and whether its worshippers addressed the goddess, the sign, or the god beside whom it stood, the reconstruction leaves open — these are inferences drawn from a hostile witness and the spade, not the testimony of the worshippers themselves. The relentlessness of the polemic is the point: a practice condemned in every generation is a practice alive in every generation. The verdict of idolatry belongs to the prophets who framed it, one party in a long internal argument over how the divine might rightly be approached; it is their charge, not a neutral description, and what they were trying to displace was evidently dense, rooted, and old.

Scholarship and sources

The comparative study of tree cults begins, for the modern reader, with Frazer’s The Golden Bough, first published in two volumes in 1890 and expanded into a twelve-volume third edition between 1906 and 1915 before the single-volume abridgment of 1922; its method of stacking parallels from every quarter has been heavily criticized since, but it remains the work that made the sacred grove a subject (Project Gutenberg edition). The classical core for the Druidic oak is Pliny the Elder, whose account of the mistletoe rite is available in the Bostock and Riley translation through the Perseus Digital Library (Natural History 16.95). For the asherah and the biblical material, the scholarly reconstruction of the cult object and its relation to the goddess is surveyed in the Jewish Women’s Archive, which gathers the textual occurrences and the debate over object versus deity. The forest itself as a category of the religious and literary imagination is the subject of Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (University of Chicago Press, 1992), which traces the long Western ambivalence toward the wooded and the wild, including the Scriptures’ hostility to the groves of the nations. Behind all of these stand the primary witnesses — Homer’s barefoot Selloi, Herodotus on the doves of Dodona, Snorri Sturluson’s ash with its three roots — read now less for what they prove about a single origin than for the recurring shape of the impulse they record.

What the worshippers held varied as widely as the trees. Some addressed a god indwelling the wood; some a spirit who lived in it; some honored the tree as a sign of a power beyond it, and would have rejected the charge that they worshipped the timber at all. That distinction — between revering a thing and revering what it points to — is the hinge on which every dispute about tree worship turns, and it divides the inside of the practice from the outside of it. To the prophet felling the asherah, the pole and the goddess were one offense; to the one who set it up, the wood was a door, not a god. The same gap opens between idolatry and fetishism as accusations and the devotions they name from without — and the gap is one the outside is poorly placed to close, since it cannot see what the worshipper is looking through the wood toward. The one who keeps the grove answers the question by keeping it; the timber is honored, or the power it signs is honored, and which it is the tending shows better than any saying could.

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