Is the forest my church, or is the church a forest?

On the establishment and liquidation of the sacred groves of antiquity, and the light and dark in forests, temples, and cathedrals.

Rich in trees, shadow-spreading …

Today, when many think of religious rites that took place in groves, the first group that comes to mind are Druids, because the insular Celts were known to have worshipped in sacred groves (nemeta). However, the use of sacred groves as places of worship was also widespread in the Greek and Roman worlds.

The Druid's Grove, Norbury Park: Ancient Yew Trees by Thomas Allom 1804-1872). Illustration for E. W. Brayley's A Topographical History of Surrey (London: G. Willis, 1850). Source of image: the Internet Archive edition from a copy in the University of Toronto Library. Web page here.

I have already brought up theme of sacred groves in a the first two articles in a three-part series. The first one discusses Diana's sanctuary and the rites of Nemoralia, and the second article covers the famous lore relating to the violent procedure for Diana's priest’s succession, and its long-lasting legacy.

Groves were specific, and distinct from wild lands and gardens because they were co-created by humans, gods, and the land and its spirits for the pleasure and benefit of all. Because they were such an excellent example of this cooperation, they were given prominence in literary as well as other arts. Homer never depicted a landscape that was purely naturalistic, just for the sake of documentation or as ornamental background, nor did he often mention gardens; rather, he described scenes where the free-willed land had been transformed and made fit by skilled human hands — through tekhnē.¹

Trees were understood by the ancients as essential to a sacred site: Marie-Luise Gothein argues in her immensely influential History of Garden Art that the grove — instead of the services held in temples — should be considered the main center of religious worship in Ancient Greece. The intertwining of trees with the concept of holiness was so central that, in his description of the sanctuary of Onchestos, Strabo complains that poets call all sanctuaries sacred woods — even if they contain no trees!

What did a classical sacred grove look like? Generally, they are described as “rich in trees” and “shadow-spreading,” and a spring is also frequently mentioned. The conventions that prescribed shade, coolness, sweet fragrance and an invitation to repose in a place set aside from mundane cares and activities go back deep in time in Mediterranean cultures. For instance, this set of motifs can be seen in Cretan and Mycenaean monuments featuring pictures of sacred trees in small stone enclosures, and even in the ancient Hebrew tradition of Asherah shrines.

However, these shaded sanctuaries did not only satisfy physical needs. Often, the special sacred tree stood between the holy spring and its altar, thus mediating — as an oracle — between the worlds of sky, earth, and underworld and worlds of sacred messages (connected to the Earth’s surface via water). In her work, Gothein provides examples of famous trees from Homer such as the lofty plane-tree next to the altar beside a spring where the Achaeans made sacrifice; the poplar-shaded grove of Athena on the road to Alcinous’ estate, where the altar stands in a meadow wherein flows a stream; and, of course, the renowned oracular oak at Dodona, whose rustlings were interpreted by priests as messages from Zeus, and from whose top Odysseus heard the voice of the Thunderer.²

Leonard Gaultier’s 1615 engraving Dodone. We will be reading about and seeing more circle dances later …

A pale echo of the idea of inspiration and wisdom coming from a sacred grove is still recalled in the phrase the “groves of Academe,” a reference to the site of the Platonic Academy, which was located in a sacred grove of olive trees.³ Close to Plato’s residence was a small garden with a temple dedicated to the Muses, and this is where he met with his pupils.

Plato’s Academy (mosaic) from the Villa of T. Siminius Stephanus in Pompeii. Wikimedia.

To clear a clearing

A forest, with its thick and unregulated growth was considered a primal state. Lands in this unaltered condition had to be treated carefully, and there were native spirits that had to be propitiated. Ancient cultures knew it was always polite to speak kindly to the spirits of a place when entering and causing possible disturbance — but in the case of establishing permanent structures, a little more appeasement was needed.  

We know more about this type of procedure from the Roman than the Greek context. In his book On Agriculture, Cato records a Roman ritual called lucum conlucare, "to clear a clearing," which was performed to ask permission to establish a lucus: an outdoor sanctuary located in a grove and dedicated to a deity. The deity was not considred autochthonous to the place, so an officiant would offer both apology and sacrifice intended to compensate any potential wrongs committed against the grove and its spirits when he asked permission to create the new shrine or temple.⁴

Whether thou be god or goddess (si deus, si dea) to whom this grove is dedicated, as it is thy right to receive a sacrifice of a pig for the thinning of this sacred grove, and to this intent, whether I or one at my bidding do it, may it be rightly done. To this end, in offering this pig to thee I humbly beg that thou wilt be gracious and merciful to me, to my house and household, and to my children. Wilt thou deign to receive this pig which I offer thee to this end. Source.

After it had been consecrated, the lucus was not only a place where formal rites would be performed by priests, but it also, according to Apuleius, served as a sanctuary where pious travelers could take a rest and make a vow or fruit offering before heading on their way.

Cato’s account of the polite and formalized act of establishing the lucus and of its powers to restore weary wanderers made such an impression on Henry David Thoreau that he commented in Walden: "I would that our farmers when they cut down a forest felt some of that awe which old Romans did when they came to thin, or let in the light to, a consecrated grove.”

Thoreau brings up an interesting point about light, because part of what Roman officiants were seeking absolution for was cutting trees to let in light. The shrine and its associated rites did not only require adequate space, but also regulation of how much light and shade were to be present. This is why there are both ancient sources and modern etymologies that derive lucus from a lucendo (letting in light). The concept of a space like this being defined by light that was encompassed by trees would persist over centuries and millennia, as the Old High German cognate lôh also refers to a clearing or holy grove.

Servius the Grammarian expressed the opposite view, saying that a lucus is non luceat (not illuminated), in what became a classic and even defining example of absurd etymology. However, there also exists the possibility that the “darkness” he was referring to was more than literal, and might be a metaphor for bloodthirsty rites in honor of deities who lusted for human deaths.

For example, M. Annaeus Lucanus (aka Lucan) writes in his Pharsalia⁵ around 60 CE:

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 from above ... gods were worshipped there with savage rites, the altars were heaped with hideous offerings and every tree was sprinkled with human gore. On those boughs ... 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 the rotten timber struck terror ... Legend also told that often the subterranean hollows quaked and bellowed, that yew trees fell down and rose again, that the glare of conflagrations came from trees that were not on fire,⁶ and that serpents twined and glided round their stems. The people never resorted thither to worship at close quarters but left the place to the gods. For, when the sun is in mid-heaven or dark night fills the sky, the priest himself dreads their approach and fears to surprise the lord of the grove.

Sounds like quite a rave!

But Lucan was not the only one who spread such tales: Tacitus wrote in his Annals “the Druids believed it a pious duty to slake their altars with the blood of captives and, by careful examination of human entrails, understand the wishes of their gods.”

It should be noted that these are Pagan authors — and not later Christian ones — blackening the reputation of other Pagans. Accusations of human sacrifice, cannibalism, and other “unnecessary” ritualized killing have been a standard othering trope for ages untold. And the Romans were wont to do this even when explaining proceedings right in the outskirts of Rome: for example, they considered the legendarily bloody rite of succession for Diana's priests at Nemi to be a foreign import, and they accused Christians and Jews, among other subject populations, of bloody excesses in their religions. Then the Christians, in turn, accused Pagans of various atrocities as a justification for forced conversions. colonization, enslavement, etc., and invented the blood libel to use against their Jewish neighbors.

As their faith gained hold, some early Christians at first adopted or appropriated the tree-shaded holy sites for their purposes, but after they achieved real hegemony they started taking axes to the shrines of those they had come to see as religious competitors, and canonized the individuals (e.g. St. Boniface, St. Martin of Tours) who authorized the vandalism.⁷ Then, after felling the sacred groves, these saints erected buildings where they worshipped a man who was hung up to die — on a tree.⁸

The Gardens of the Villa Borghese now occupy the site of the Gardens of Lucullus on the Pincian Hill. Picture Credit: Jean-Christophe Benoist. (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.)

Columns represent trees — and also female bodies

The columns used by medieval cathedral-builders had, of course, been adopted from Greek and Roman architecture, but their use goes a lot further back into the past. Leaving aside much more ancient cultures, such as the one at Göbekli Tepe, the classical Greek model for columns can be credited to the Minoans, who used whole cypress tree trunks, which they turned upside down. This inversion perhaps partook of symbolism of some kind, but it also had the practical effect of preventing re-growth. (This tradition of a symbolic inversion would be lost over time, as the word “capital” is derived from the Latin caput – head.) Early Cretan pillars, which were wider at the top than the bottom, had simple round capitals and were painted red and black.

Labyrinth of Knossos; a visualization by Laura Cadei at DeviantArt

The Mycenaeans would later put columns inside their megarons — the halls at the heart of their palaces. Then, in what would be termed the Classical period of architecture, from ~ 500 BCE to ~ 500 CE, there were certain styles for columns and other coordinated architectural elements that became predominant in the Mediterranean region. These were the “orders” of architecture, which featured well-defined and harmoniously coordinated elements such as pedestals, columns consisting of a base, shaft, and capital, and the entablatures supported by the columns. The most famous orders are Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, but there are also Tuscan and Composite styles.

Sometime between 30—20 BCE, the Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius wrote in the fourth volume of his De Architectura libri decem [Ten Books on Architecture] that human genders and life stages are represented in the classical orders of columns.

·        Doric columns exhibited the “proportion, soundness, and attractiveness of the male body.”

·        Ionic columns suggested matrons, illustrating a “woman’s slenderness.” In addition, he wrote, the fluting on the column’s shaft mimics the folds in their chitons, and “draped volutes on either side” of the Ionic column’s capital resembled “curled locks.”

·        Corinthian columns resembled the “slenderness of a young girl,” which, he said, reflected the style’s [alleged] origins in the story a maiden from the Greek city of Corinth who had died in her youth. After her burial, her nurse apparently gathered objects, that the girl had been fond of in life, and placed them in a basket on the grave, which she covered with a roof tile. Unbeknownst to the nurse, the basket was placed on top of an acanthus root and over time the tendrils and leaves of the plant grew up around the basket. When this was noticed by the ancient Greek sculptor Callimachus, who happened to pass by, he was delighted by “the nature and form of this novelty” and created columns for the Corinthians based on this model. (Source: O’Neill).

Photo 252682870 © Michelle Bridges | Dreamstime.com (purchased by the author)

Put the columns in two lines, and what do you get? Rows of columns would be described — for millennia — as resembling a forest.

There is one more type of column that was popular in Greek and Roman architecture: caryatids. These are columns or pillars that are shaped like women. Vitruvius had some interesting – yet very wrong – ideas about them, and I will explore the fascinating history of caryatids in a forthcoming publication.

Jugendstil caryatid on Bognerstraße in Vienna. Photo 31868886 | Caryatid © Ginasanders | Dreamstime.com

Byzantine architecture can be considered a transitional stage between Classical Antiquity and the Gothic style. Churches and basilicas inherited the domes of Roman buildings, set up as high as possible over (often) a Greek-style cross floor plan. The natural and artificial interior light were amplified by golden mosaic, which – in combination with other sacred arts – created an otherworldly ambience. The lines became more sinuous and naturalistic, which were considered inspiration for the later Gothic style.

Carolingian churches consciously copied this style, but the Romanesque architecture of the 11th and 12th centuries would be more massive, darker, and – in many cases – rather clumsy by comparison. (One of the reasons for this was the church and abbey buildings sometimes served double-duty as fortresses.) Many Romanesque columns are thick and squat — and when they aren’t, it’s often because the builders were using columns salvaged from old Roman buildings (spolia). Gradually, over a period of centuries, the buildings transformed into the more graceful Gothic style.

Forest clearance and cathedral construction in the European Middle Ages

In our age, when people say “nature is my church,” they often mean that they have a feeling of hushed reverence, of a growing awareness of a greater power than their minds can comprehend. This association is anything but accidental. In The White Deer: Ecospirituality and the Mythic, I discuss two opposing terms introduced by the theologian Rudolf Otto: the mysterium tremendum and mysterium fascinans, which represent the aspects of divinity that are beautiful and intriguing and terrifying/repulsive, yet inspiring aspects of divinity.

Forest Landscape, Anonymous (Frankenthal School, attributed to Pieter Schoubroeck's studio), early 17th century.

A forest, or a proper sacred grove contains both kinds of mysteries.

A church is a sort of wood. A wood is a sort of church. They’re the same thing really.
- Susanna Clarke, The Wood at Midwinter

Both forests and churches have complex effects on our minds and emotions, most likely for evolutionary reasons. Perhaps there is even such a thing as “lost forest syndrome,” which is a form of solastalgia, or something like a lost psychic limb.

Susana Corvilla Arroyo writes:

The awe inspired by church architecture is, in large part, inspired by elements that make the building’s interior resemble a forest, or artificial grove.
we have lost direct memories of experiences in ancient forests, as they could have our ancestors when we lived yet the forests that covered the land, but the instinctive memory still lingers. The only thing is that we confuse the architectural cathedrals with the living forests …

But the stimuli and reactions are unmistakable.

… we feel life where there is none because we confuse the apparent shape of the building with the true nature of the forest, where it does exist life to be sensed, where we do are part of the everything with which we merged chemically by the aromas, oxygen, soil, moisture, where all the senses do  come absolute meaning, and hearing, smelling, touching, it is vital…

Or such as that experienced fullness to look up, to see the light come, seeing the pillars and columns extend from their shafts to the nerves of the vaults… Our eyes see mortar and stone, our subconscious, trunks, branches and protective leaves. Among them our life has found refuge for thousands of years, shelter, and delight. The light filtered by the colors of the seasons throughout each year, comes to us as a blessing, not to die of thirst and unprotected in the open fields.

Even details like the freshness, the protective penumbra, places of contemplation … (Source: "Cathedrals, Sacred as a Forest".)

The logic behind turning groves inside out was that Pagan rites were held outdoors, while Christian ones were inside buildings. Pagan temples focused on their exterior presentation, because the interior – where the statue of the deity was housed – was reserved only for priests and other authorized persons who could keep the deity supplied with offerings. The temple building would usually be located within a sacred enclosure called a temenos, which featured a special tree, perhaps a grove, and a spring – and the deity’s sacrificial altar. This land was open to the public, and it is where most ceremonies would be conducted – outdoors, in front of the temple.

Did ancient Pagans “worship nature”? No; not in such simple terms. As I suggested above, it would be more accurate to say that they often idealized a harmonious partnership between human and other-than-human forces, for the benefit and delight of all.

Christian worship, on the other hand, was conducted inside churches. This meant Christian architects wanted to make the religious experience indoors as absorbing as possible. There would be elements that were familiar (the feeling of being in a place that felt like other sacred sites) and unfamiliar (the new lessons about sin, salvation, saints, etc.) Creating simulacra of outdoor sanctuaries was effective for reasons that were probably equally cultural and biological.

The indoor/outdoor inversion was made (nearly) complete when Abbot Suger reconstructed the Basilica of Saint-Denis near Paris using new architectonic and stylistic elements which would only much later be called “Gothic.” These provided architectural models that would be emulated across Europe for the next several centuries, and conceptual models that still resonate in many minds today.

The 12th century cathedral of St. Denis (Wikimedia).

These architectural developments were taking place outside of what we might think of as a particularly dramatic chapter in Europe’s landscape history: the midst of the intensive liquidation of the old forests in both the British Isles and the Continent. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, Europe’s vegetation cover was only interrupted occasionally by land cleared around monasteries, villas, villages, and fortresses. These islands were relatively isolated amidst elements of nature, but gradually an imperative to cut, burn, and dominate took hold. The forests “had to” be cleared, not only for economic reasons — timber, charcoal, pasturage, and agriculture — but also for spiritual ones in the new religious order.

Man Cutting Down a Tree on Which he Sits, from Pierra Sala’s Petit Livre d'Amour, 16th century. British Library. Dang! He’s cutting down the very last tree in that place.

Forests (as well as deserts and mountains) were liminal zones that signified both food and death, and shelter and threat, but literature from the Middle Ages and Renaissance periods usually skewed the representation of these lands toward the more threatening side of the spectrum. Uncultivated lands were increasingly considered by literati as ugly, treacherous, and inhospitable; moreover, they were not only inhabited by wolves, bears, and wild boars, but also witches, wild men, evil spirits, and other eldritch oddities.

Dante’s Divine Comedy opens with the lines:

Midway upon the journey of our life
  I found myself within a forest dark,
  For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
  What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
  Which in the very thought renews the fear …

… which is as good a characterization as any of what became an archetype in Western language and literature: dread of the forest, a sentiment whose echoes we hear in phrases like “she’s not out of the woods yet” even today.

Inferno, Canto 1: Dante in the Savage Wood, illustration by Gustave Doré for The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (1885).

As the Middle Ages progressed, European forests were reduced from a defining feature of many ecosystems to much smaller refugia. The Domesday Book, a survey of England commissioned by William the Conqueror, reported that 90 % of the country’s lowland natural forest had been liquidated by 1086 — and most of the remainder was to disappear in the next 250 years. The forests of France were probably reduced from 30 mil­lion hectares to 13 million hectares between 800 and 1300; in Germany and Central Europe, perhaps 70 % of the land was forested in 900 but only about 25 % of this remained by 1900. England, France, and Germany had been stripped of their woodlands to such an extent that by around 1550 in England and the 1600s in Continental Europe, it became necessary to switch to coal as a fuel source. Source.

Monasteries, which were often founded as isolated “cities of God” within a wilderness, were responsible for lot of clearances, along with aristocratic land owners (though the aristocrats also liked to leave at least some woods standing so they had nice places to go hunting).

Forests’ shady inhabitants

Hey? You looking for me?

Authorized visitors to forests (noble hunting parties, game wardens, woodcutters, etc.) would have had to face the possibility of encountering bandits, fugitives, and criminals, poachers, smugglers, lovers pursuing illicit trysts, and all sorts of other renegades who might be haunting the woods, representing greater or lesser threats to the groups that controlled medieval and Renaissance society.

But humans were not the only beings who were feared: increasingly, nature spirits were understood as dangerous: tricksy at best, diabolical at worst. Folk and fairy tales still told of boons to be won in dealings with these beings, but the overculture looked upon them with suspicion and disdain.

A “wild man” costume depicted in an illustrated volume of carnival costumes from the mid-16th c. This is the type of being made famous in the story about Iron John in the Grimms’ collection of tales. (He also bears more than a passing resemblance to figures such as the Green Knight in the Arthurian tales and to images of “madmen” such as the Biblical King Nebuchadnezzar.)

These spirits, or the stories about them, were not only concerned with helping virtuous protagonists. One would have to expect, that like Gilgamesh’s adversary Humbaba, and gumberoos, hidebehinds, and other beings that protect ancient forests, which I wrote about in "Civilizing Heroes vs Trees", a large part of their agenda was protecting the forest from conquering heroes and lumberjacks. The aura of liminality, mystery, and even fear of things that are both dark and holy — the mysterium tremendum — was one of their best means of defense.

As Jonathan Onyekwelu of the Federal University of Technology Akure in Nigeria tells Yale Environment 360: “Danger is often intrinsic to the aura of sacred groves,” and — in reference to the protection of groves from those who would exploit and destroy them — “the most potent form of sacred grove protection is fear.”

Yet, despite all the deforestation, the shady, spooky, and eldritch beings were never entirely banished, and they were even moved indoors with the rest of the forest. While forests were being cut and Gothic cathedrals installed, and the primary sites of worship were moved indoors, and as the traditional woodland spirits were recast as bogeys, strange and fantastic beings ranging from “wild men” and Green Men, impossible beasts, and sheela-na-gigs were incorporated into church exteriors and interiors. Perhaps, the idea of an artificial forest that was not populated with such beings unthinkable, or at least unacceptable. Or, perhaps, it would have felt less sacred.

Strange beasts on the cathedral exterior in Lleida, Catalunya, Spain. Photo 119110536 © Kaplan69 | Dreamstime.com (photo purchased by the author)

As Alejandra Oliva wrote, on X, “It’s said, probably apocryphally, that the builders of Notre Dame inserted gargoyles and carvings in nooks and corners of the church no worshipper could ever, would ever see, just for the sheer delight of the carving, just because God would see. A forest is like this also.”

Sacred Circle, by Bev Doolittle. Doolittle is a master at illustrating the subtle relationships between people, animals, and landforms. Her artworks can be found here.

Surely, among the reasons the forests had to be cut down was that it was undesirable that anyone would seek boons from beings like Iron John. It was frowned upon to ask for any favors outside of the feudal system (later, the emerging capitalist order) or the dispensation of the Church and its saints, and as time went on, such dealings were increasingly characterized as diabolical. But another consideration is that when one is immersed in woodland there is a blurring of boundaries between the rights and powers of human and nonhuman beings, as is evidenced in countless folk and fairy tales. In the forest, one is only part of the environment, and certainly weaker and more foolish than the sum of the surroundings. There, relationships must be negotiated, and nothing can be truly taken for granted — a view that was annoying or inconvenient in the face of dogma positing that Man was “King of Creation.”

Those who set policy and gave shape to European culture for over a millennium offered the ersatz refuge of a cathedral as a replacement for the forests they were despoiling. But the “trees” represented in cathedral columns were stylized, frozen, fruitless. And some of the most distinctive features of Gothic architecture, such as pointed arches, were not only incorporated for practical reasons, but because they pointed up and away from the earthly realm of gardens, groves and forests up toward Heaven. For medieval Christian architects, the materials used for building, and the earthly forms they represented, were subordinate to the divine, but — if skilfully used — they could serve as a vessel and conduit for godly purposes between the present time and the Revelation.

Like the Ancients who established their sacred groves, Abbot Suger was sensitive to the psychological effects of light. He believed his lighter church⁹ would "brighten the minds" of his congregation, leading "to the true light, where Christ is the true door." Source.

Gothic cathedrals usurped the sense of awe that makes each individual feel herself to be a small, yet integrally connected part of a whole scene, and plugged it into the cosmic drama of Creation, Fall, Revelation, and Salvation. The substitution of an artificial for a natural habitat for worship, while not entirely satisfactory, was workable because it presented just enough of the right stimuli to bamboozle churchgoers:

Even during the Church’s heyday, language sometimes preserved nostalgia for the old forests. We find this, for example, in the Irish tale of Mad Sweeney (Buile Shuibhne), and in the Welsh phrase Dwi wedi dod yn ôl at fy nghoed, which means "to return to my senses / regain my equilibrium" — but, more literally — it’s "to return to my trees." Source.

But the Church didn’t want anyone returning to trees and forests. That was where humanity had its beginnings (in Eden, a beautiful grove).

And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:9, KJV).

Adam and Eve, of course, were disobedient, and they were driven out of their gatherers’ paradise. Going at least as far back into history as Sumer, literature commissioned from centers of political and military power usually worked under the assumption that people are organized from urban centers.¹⁰ This is why the Christian heaven is usually described and illustrated as a bright skyscape, or a city made of precious metals with pearly gates and inhabited by throngs of God’s worshipers.

The Hebrew priestly tradition that had first displaced idols from wooden statues (when the Biblical patriarchs cracked down on the worship of Asherah and the use of her sacred images — asherim). The Jews had already been worshipping in temples since ca 957 BCE, thus centralizing worship that had previously taken place at smaller sanctuaries and rural altar sites. This tradition naturally influenced the Christians, who — unlike the Jews — felt a strong mandate to spread their faith, and to remove people from their groves into cities and buildings.

Yet, even the afterlife can’t entirely function without trees. As we see in the architectural and linguistic traces of Christianized cultures, the transfer was never complete, and even in the faith’s most rarified realms there still had to be a a tree that served as an intermediary figure granting the sustenance, healing, eternal life, and wisdom. While it doesn’t seem to have a garden, orchard, or forest, according to two verses in Revelation, the Tree of Life is located in Heaven. But unlike in Pagan faiths (or even like the burning bush episode in Exodus), this tree was not a place for a deity to manifest itself or communicate messages. The privilege of enjoying its fruits and leaves were a boon for those who had been obedient and faithful: their approval as individuals worthy of partaking was the message conveyed, and the tree probably saved God from having to distribute the benefits in some other way.

Heaven Tree of Life, by Mindlessmajid on DeviantArt.

Make sure to subscribe so you won’t miss any posts! I’ve been quiet for a while, as I work on the caryatid project, but I hope to share that and several more with my readers in July and August.

1. For a little more context, see John Scheid's remarks, which touch on the Ancients’ perception of wild land, which, however, had to be touched by human hands in order to enable encounters with gods or other numinous beings:

” …the romantic reading of nature does not correspond to that of the Ancients. The spectacle of intact, impressive and, so to speak, original nature aroused a certain fear among the Ancients, certainly, but this fear did not provoke mystical ecstasy. On the contrary, the thrill awakened reason and completely rational religious reactions. The deep forests, swamps, unfathomable lakes and high mountains located outside of inhabited spaces were considered chaotic, ugly and terrifying, they attracted no one. Only natural phenomena included in human space could provoke fruitful emotions: the respectful fear they aroused led to a reflection concerning the order of things.

Let us examine the testimonies of Seneca and Pliny that everyone has invoked since the beginning of the 19th century. Like their contemporaries, Seneca and Pliny consider the sacred woods in their majesty as untouched, dark, deserted, sterile places, in other words as non-artificial realities, not created, not maintained and not inhabited by man … ”

Taken in combination with Gothein’s insights about the depiction of landscapes in Homer, we can make out a preference for loose-reined stewardship of these areas, which were sweetened by a harmonious commingling of wild, human and divine forces.

2. According to some sources (e.g. Herodotus), the shrine at Dodona was the oldest and/or most respected Greek oracle (or second-most-respected, after Delphi).

If we want to go back to Crete, the archaeologist Caroline Tully claims “the religion of prehistoric or ‘Minoan’ Crete involved the cultivation of an intimate relationship with a literally living, numinous, landscape,” and, in an chapter she published in the Routledge Companion to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World, she suggests that depictions of ritualists shaking trees (e.g. on Minoan seals) may illustrate a means for provoking prophetic messages in the leaves’ rustling (i.e. dendromancy). Extract here.

(On the other hand, other interpretations are also possible. I cited Tully in my article Civilizing Heroes vs Trees saying that the figures in agonistic poses who are pushing and pulling at them may have been demonstrating aggression and dominance over the natural world.

3. Illustrations, and translations with commentary here. Plato established his Akademia around 387 BCE. The school was located outside of the city walls of Athens, but the olive grove it was situated in had been sacred to Athena and/or the Dioscuri since the Bronze Age. (It is said that the trees were grown from cuttings taken from the sacred olive on the Acropolis.) The Academy’s name was taken from the original owner, Academus, who was a mythical hero. Aristotle taught there for a while, until he established his own Lyceum, and the school was eventually forcibly shut down by the fanatical emperor Justinian in 529 CE.

The road to the Akademia was lined with gravestones (monuments to past great minds), and the premises hosted sporting tournaments and Dionysian processions, which puts me in mind of some of the supplementary functions of American institutes of higher education.

4. The lucus — a small wooded area consecrated to a divinity — is usually distinguished from the silva (natural forest) or the nemus, which in Latin poetry was often a place thought to be conducive to poetic inspiration. Entrance to a lucus might be severely restricted, sometimes even under the penalty of death for trespassers. A fourth term, saltus, usually implied a wilderness area with varied topographical features. See Wikipedia’s glossary of Roman terms relating to religion.

5. Translated in 1905 by Sir Edward Ridley, available here.

6. Trees on fire? Exploding trees? Sounds like the work of gumberoos? What are they? Find out in this article:

7. The original definition of hubris was not quite what we mean when we use the word today: excessive pride, presumption, or arrogance. In the ancient Greek context, it usually referred to violence for the purpose of humiliating or degrading the target, typically for pleasure or gratification. These are crimes that would now fall into the categories of assault and battery, sexual assault, or the theft or vandalism of public property or the property of religious institutions. The vandalism at Stonehenge would be an example of it — and so would the felling of sacred groves.

8. Some scriptural texts, and some traditions, hold that he was crucified on a living tree rather than a wooden cross. You can find a discussion here, which also covers the strong possibility of crucifixion on a stauros (σταυρός - an upright stake or pole without a cross-piece). Since "tree" was sometimes used interchangeably with "wood," the possibility that the “tree” was a dead beam remains in play alongside the possibility that it was a living tree that could have also been a stauros with or without a detachable cross piece. Sacre bleu - it’s Schroedinger’s cross! Further theological interpretation then ties the tree/wood that Jesus was nailed to with the other most important tree in the Bible: “The only way we can now eat of the Tree of Life in the new garden, the Paradise of God, is by believing in Jesus Christ, the righteous, who died on a tree for the guilty.”

Jesus, the Life (John 14:6), died on the cursed tree to provide an opportunity for the cursed to believe in Him and gain eternal life by eating the fruit from the Tree of Life.

9. There were important epistemological distinctions between the concepts of lux, lumen, and splendor — words used to describe light with varying levels of metaphysical attributes. While lux refers to the natural light emitted from the sun, lumen is light as it interacts with the material world, and splendor is reflected light. For Suger and those who followed in his footsteps, the point was not to simply flood the entire church with as much light as possible but to harness lux, lumen, and splendor in specific ways. Source.

Tim Cleary, Tracery. Bronze, 2016. Source.

10. The primacy of urban organization goes back at least as far as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Read more here: