In this, the third installment of our exploration of forest gods and sacred trees, we will be discussing sacred groves in both Gaul and northwestern Europe and their destruction by imperial powers bent on conquest. The axe wielding saints of the dark ages were preceded centuries earlier by their pagan Roman predecessors. While waging civil war in newly conquered Celtic Gaul and Britain, soldiers under the command of the renegade general Julius Caesar encountered the ancient groves sacred to the traditional Celtic religion and its oak-priests, the Druids. Groves and oak trees were sacred to the Roman traditional religion as well, being descendants of a common Indo-European heritage that held that the oak tree was sacred to the Thunder God in all of his various guises in the many countries where he was honored. In Rome, the Thunder God was Jupiter, in Greece, Zeus, and in Gaul and Britain, among the Celtic nations, he was known as Taranis, and by the peoples of the Germanic tribes in Modern Germany, England and Scandinavia, he was known as Donar, Thunor and Thor, respectively. In all of these cultures sanctuaries were made for him sacred in groves of oak trees. During the Roman Civil War of 49-45 BCE, Roman legionaries under the command of Julius Caesar discovered a Celtic temple grove in a forest near Marseille, in modern day France, while cutting timber for the construction of military fortifications during a siege of the fortified city of Massilia. The poet and historian Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, 39 CE-65 CE) gave the following vivid account in his epic historical poem, Pharsalia:
“A grove there was, untouched by men's hands from ancient times, whose interlacing boughs enclosed a space of darkness and cold shade, and banished the sunlight far above. No rural Pan dwelt there, no Silvanus, ruler of the woods, no Nymphs ; but gods were worshiped there with savage rites, the altars were heaped with hideous offerings, and every tree was sprinkled with human gore. On those boughs —if antiquity, reverential of the gods, deserves any credit—birds feared to perch; in those coverts wild beasts would not lie down; no wind ever bore down upon that wood, nor thunderbolt hurled from black clouds; the trees, even when they spread their leaves to no breeze, rustled of themselves. Water, also, fell there in abundance from dark springs. The images of the gods, grim and rude, were uncouth blocks formed of felled tree-trunks. Their mere antiquity and the ghastly hue of their rotten timber struck terror; men feel less awe of deities worshiped under familiar forms ; so much does it increase their sense of fear, not to know the gods whom they dread. Legend also told that often the subterranean hollows quaked and bellowed, that yew-trees fell down and rose again, that the glare of conflagration came from trees that were not on fire, and that serpents twined and glided round the stems. The people never resorted thither to worship at close quarters, but left the place to the gods. For, when the sun is in midheaven or dark night fills the sky, the priest himself dreads their approach and fears to surprise the lord of the grove.” (Lucan, Pharsalia, lines 399-425, translated by A.E. Housman.)
This account is embellished by Roman ethnocentrist sentiments and political propaganda, but it nevertheless gives us a glimpse into the emotional power the sacred site had on the Roman soldiers who were set on desecrating it, as well as the Druid priests that served there. The fear the soldiers must have felt upon encountering the numena of these foreign gods in their own temple is palpable in Lucan’s description. The Romans were an extremely religious people and the soldiers hesitated due to reverence, fearing to desecrate the grove, which was indeed the last part of the forest, according to Lucan, to fall under the axe. Until urged on by Caesar himself the disciplined Roman soldiers refused to fell the trees as ordered. Lucan continues his tale:
“This grove was sentenced by Caesar to fall before the stroke of the axe; for it grew near his works. Spared in earlier warfare, it stood there covered with trees among hills already cleared. But strong arms faltered ; and the men, awed by the solemnity and terror of the place, believed that, if they aimed a blow at the sacred trunks, their axes would rebound against their own limbs. When Caesar saw that his soldiers were sore hindered and paralyzed, he was the first to snatch an axe and swing it, and dared to cleave a towering oak with the steel: driving the blade into the desecrated wood, he cried: ‘Believe that I am guilty of sacrilege, and thenceforth none of you need fear to cut down the trees.’ Then all the men obeyed his bidding; they were not easy in their minds, nor had their fears been removed ; but they had weighed Caesar's wrath against the wrath of heaven. Ash trees were felled, gnarled holm-oaks overthrown; Dodona's oak, the alder that suits the sea, the cypress that bears witness to a monarch's grief, all lost their leaves for the first time; robbed of their foliage, they let in the daylight; and the toppling wood, when smitten, supported itself by the close growth of its timber. The peoples of Gaul groaned at the sight ; but the besieged men rejoiced; for who could have supposed that the injury to the gods would go unpunished? But Fortune often guards the guilty, and the gods must reserve their wrath for the unlucky. When wood enough was felled, wagons were sought through the countryside to convey it; and the husbandmen, robbed of their oxen, mourned for the harvest of the soil left untouched by the crooked plough.” (Lucan, Pharsalia, lines 426-452, translated by A.E.Housman.)
Several important attitudes toward trees and groves are revealed in this account, first; the Roman soldiers, even Caesar, the Flamen Dialis, the High Priest of Jupiter, hesitated to desecrate the groves, because of their own tradition of sacred groves, and second; the inhabitants of the besieged city rejoiced, expecting that the gods would avenge the sacrilege. As the poet says, ‘Fortune often guards the guilty’, and Caesar’s bloody war of conquest to fund his political ambitions continued apace. We will see the connection between deforestation, genocide and sacrilege, repeated over and over again throughout history, continuing to the present day, as the sacred forests of indigenous people all over the world continue to fall to fund the appetite of capitalism for endless expansion and raw materials.
The Celtic nations of Western Europe, conducted ceremonies and worship in woodland clearings with open sky all over the territories in which they lived. These ritual sites were called nemeton, or drunemeton, the latter word incorporating the Indo-European root dru, meaning oak. In the account of Lucan, only the priests, the Druids, were permitted to enter the hallowed grove to perform the ancient rites. Whatever those hallowed rituals may have been, have been lost to history because the Druids famously did not commit their teachings to writing. In enquiries of this type, so many questions as to the actual practices of the ancient pagan nations will remain unanswered, mostly due to the fact that history, as it is often said, is written by the victors. We have the records of the Roman conquerors and later hostile witnesses in the form of Christian apologists, aside from a handful of vague references of Greek geographers, such as Strabo, to tell us about the religion of the ancient Celts. Other sources include Irish myths, recorded by monks long after the fact, that give a record of the doings of gods and heroes, but tantalizingly little about the practices of the priestly class of Druids. We know more about the Germanic people whose confrontation with the imperial faith of the new religion was more recent.
In February of 313, with the Edict of Milan, the Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity and the union of Catholic Christianity with Roman Imperialism was begun. As Christianity began to spread in the territories of the Roman Empire, an increasingly intolerant attitude took hold in the newly ascendant religion, an attitude markedly different from the sentiments of the Teacher. Continuing the venerable tradition began by their Yahwist spiritual forebears in Ancient Palestine, the evangelists of the New Jerusalem began to vigorously and violently oppose traditional polytheism in the lands of the collapsing Roman empire, among the Germanic tribes that came to power in the former Imperial territories of the West.
As noted earlier, the Germanic speaking tribes of the North of Europe venerated trees and groves in much the same way as their Celtic, Roman, and Greek neighbors, as physical symbols of their deities, as if they were infused with the power of the gods themselves, and the groves where they grew in ancient majesty were the sacred temples of those who, according to Roman historian Tacitus, “do not think it in keeping with divine majesty to confine gods within walls or to portray them in the likeness of any human countenance. Their holy places are woods and groves and they apply the names of deities to that hidden presence which can only be seen with the eye of reverence.” (Tacitus, Germania, Chapter 8, translated by S.A. Hanford, p.109)
It has been said that Tacitus was one of the first historians to advance a sort of concept of the “noble savage”, an idealized view that more “primitive” peoples are somehow more virtuous and vigorous, brave and pious than their decadent “civilized” counterparts. Reading him, I can see this is true, and I confess, that my own view can be seen to fall under the same prejudice from time to time, and this is as good a place as any to address this. Firstly let me say that I believe that people have been much the same in all times and in all places, and that I don’t want to advance an overly idealized view of the polytheists of ancient Palestine, or the Celts, or the Norse or anyone else. History is not often a simple matter of heroes versus villains, all the parties involved were motivated by complex factors, usually political as well as religious. As with other turning points in history, that which was admirable about the old ways gets discarded in the embracing of new ways. Looking back from the vantage point of centuries, we wish to recall the admirable ways that we have forgotten in the heedless march of progress. As we discussed, the cosmic tree is watered by the well of Wyrd, of Fate, and this world has to be as it is right now, for whatever reason only the Fates know.
The Judeans, Romans and Christians all made important contributions to the world we live in today, many of them good and valuable ones, necessary to the world we live in today, which is in some ways safer and more peaceful than the world of the middle ages and antiquity. This is not the place to pass judgment on them. New ways become old, civilizations rise and fall, and many of yesterday's conquerors have become the conquered and the downtrodden, and new conquerors have arisen, new ways that make the systems of domination of the three groups of conquerors we have examined pale in comparison. The heathen and polytheist cultures we have discussed, while living closer to the natural environment, and having a strong spiritual tie with the land, were no angels either. They practiced slavery, human sacrifice, and large-scale warfare, and we certainly shouldn’t make them models for how to live in peace with our neighbors. I admire their animist worldview and their environmental sensitivity, and deep spirituality. Personally, in my heart, though, I stand against all systems of domination and wish to see a world where we integrate the best practices of our ancestors and with those of the present day in order to regain our connection to nature.
Between the last centuries of the first millennium and the first century of the second, Western Europe lost what remained of its indigenous tradition, due to the spread of Christianity at the point of the sword and the blade of the axe. After the pagan temples were sacked across the Greek and Roman world, the missionaries brought the faith to the Germanic Kingdoms of Northwestern Europe. In the manner of their Old Testament exemplars, they felled the sacred trees and groves, and destroyed the temples and cult centers. The Frankish and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had converted to Christianity by the 7th century, leaving the Germanic nations outside the Frankish fold, in Frisia, Saxony and Scandinavia still retaining their traditional heathen ways. In the year 724 CE an Anglo-Saxon missionary named Wynfrith of Crediton, cut down a massive oak dedicated to Thunor at Geismar in Hesse, in what is now Germany, and used the wood of the fallen tree to build a church on the site. Posterity remembers Wynfrith as Saint Boniface, apostle to the Germans. (Carol M. Cusack, The Sacred Tree: Ancient and Medieval Manifestations, p.94-96) The story of Boniface’s cutting of the sacred oak of Thunor may have been inspired by the 4th century story of the felling of a sacred pine tree by St. Martin of Tours. In both cases a miraculous wind intervened showing the power of the Christian God over those of the pagans. As in the case of the felling of the Druidical grove in Massillia, the native pagans would have been surprised by the fact that those who desecrated their sacred precincts went unpunished by the gods.
As we have seen, these trees were living symbols of divinity and of the entire cosmology of the pagans, when they were felled so easily, the reaction must have been one of shock and dismay, of the foundations of faith being shaken. Religious historian Carol Cusak’s book, The Sacred Tree: Ancient and Medieval Manifestations, has been very helpful to me in the writing of this chapter by emphasizing the paramount importance of sacred trees to the pagan peoples of Western Europe, as well as the devastating consequences of their loss. According to Cusak, “when conversion to Christianity is equated with conquest and the loss of independence and indigenous traditions, it is surely realistic to explore the likelihood that the conquering, colonizing culture systematically undermined the conquered people and that Christianity was ultimately accepted because the traditional Pagan religion was rendered inoperable and impossible as a means of preserving identity and providing hope for the future.” (Cusak, ibid., pp. 71-72) It was a devastating blow to the morale of the native people when their sacred symbols and places of worship were desecrated and destroyed.
In an action that was to have very far reaching and unintended consequences, in 772 the Frankish Emperor Charlemagne began an intensified war on the heathen inhabitants of Saxony. In the province of Hesse, the Saxons had a sacred wooden pillar called Irminsul that served as a focal point for religious rites, as an axis mundi and representative of the sky god, scholars theorize. As part of his campaign against the Saxon heathens, Charlemagne ordered the pillar destroyed, igniting a conflict that would last decades, centuries even. The resulting guerilla war of resistance against Frankish Imperial Christianity spread far beyond the borders of Saxony and neighboring Frisia, initiating attacks by the heathen Danes, allies of the Frisians and Saxons upon Christian settlements as far away as Lindisfarne, in Britain, ultimately igniting the Viking attacks on Christian England and the rest of the British Isles. In 841-842 according to a chronicler of the time, “that Norsemen and Slavs might unite with the Saxons, who called themselves the Stellinga (restorers) because they are neighbors and that they might invade the kingdom and root out the Christian religion in the area.” The conquered people joined forces, as Cusak tells us, “The Frisians and the Saxons, Pagan peoples living on the borders of the Frankish territories, sought to defend their identities through holding firm to their Pagan religion, and attempted to reduce the influence of Christianity in their lands by burning churches and expelling ecclesiastics, and defending their traditional political systems (kingship in the case of the Frisians, elected war leaders in the case of the Saxons.)” ( Cusak, ibid. p. 108) Ultimately the revolt was unsuccessful, and by the end of the ninth century most of Saxony had been converted and brought into the Frankish fold, the Holy Roman Empire, as it was then called. Making sacrifices at trees, springs or groves was punishable by fines as was not having one's children baptized, refusing unbaptism was punishable by death (Cusak, ibid. pp. 111-112)
The same pattern was repeated in the Christianization of the Scandinavian nations. When missionaries to Scandinavia, and recently converted tenth century kings such as Olav Tryggvasson of Norway, and Olav Haraldsson and Harald Bluetooth of Denmark outlawed paganism in their realms and instituted systematic repression of the old religion. The former Olav was legendary as a destroyer of pagan sacred sites, known as horgs, or open air stone altars. By the end of the 11th century, the process of official conversion was complete and what remained of the veneration of trees and other natural features went underground. (Anders Winroth, The Conversion of Scandinavia, p. 151, et.al.)
An interesting case for the survival of the veneration of sacred trees, post conversion is the poem The Dream of the Rood, some of which dates to the 8th century, and was inscribed in runes on the Ruthwell Cross in the village of Ruthwell, Scotland. The poem which is told from the point of view of the tree which was used to make the cross upon which Jesus was crucified. Recounting the sufferings of Jesus while he hung there as the saving sacrifice for humanity. Comparison with Oðinn hanging from Yggdrasil springs to mind. The tree is transformed, from instrument of death to tree of life. ( Craig Williamson, translator, The Complete Old English Poems, pp.254-258) The cross is identified with the Biblical Tree of Life in Christian symbolism in other contexts, such as this reference from the Syriac Christian work The Book of Cave of Treasures, “That Tree of Life which was in the midst of paradise prefigured the Redeeming Cross, which is the veritable Tree of Life and stands in the middle of the Earth.” (Wallis Budge, The Book of the Cave of Treasures, p. 63) The cross, and the Tree of Life with which it is identified is the Axis Mundi, the center of the spiritual cosmos, like Yggdrasil, and upon which the god is hung. As the Gnostic Gospel of Truth says, “He was nailed to a tree (and) he became fruit of the knowledge of the Father” (James Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Library, p. ) We will never know if whoever composed the Dream of the Rood was aware of the tales of Oðinn, or Woden, as his people had once known him, but what is sure is that the symbolism of the sacred tree as axis mundi continued in a post pagan context.
With this symbol which unites the Germanic symbolism of Yggdrasil, and the Edenic tree of Judaeo-Christian tradition, we have come full circle. The archetypes of the tree and the grove are universal and all pervasive symbols of the structure of the spiritual reality underlying our cosmos, and point to the presence of the divine in our everyday world. If every tree is somehow partaking of the archetype of the primal world tree then every tree is a dwelling place of the divine and is in some sense a theophany, a revelation. How do we as dwellers in the land, as cunning farmers, put in practice our newfound respect for the ordinary trees with whom we share the land?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Cunning Farmer to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.