Dances With Trees

Spiritual abandon and the archetype of the Sacred Tree

Photo by Yash Raut on Unsplash

I do not go to the forest seeking to lose myself, I go there when I am lost and need to find my way home again. When life feels overwhelming to the point of existential panic, I retreat outside. My small property is blessed by trees bordered all sides, some growing densely and some spaced wide apart, but holding us in either way. Yesterday I lay on the grass beneath the ancient maple tree I call Grandmother, alternately gazing up at her branches and pouring my troubled soul out onto paper. I was barefoot, wanting to feel as fully grounded as I could manage. It’s been usually wet for July, a passing cloud even spitting a few drops on me while I sat, and I was grateful that the grass was soft and green and welcoming, not dry and scratchy. For a while I closed my eyes against a bright ray of sun that had found his way through Grandmother’s towering magnificence. It was the most profoundly restful I have felt in some time. Why, I always wonder, did it take me so long to come here? She’s right here in my yard, I could do this every day. Why don’t I?

The archetype of the Sacred Tree may well be the oldest and most profound archetype of all. In the words of Judika Illes, author of Encyclopedia of Witchcraft: The Complete A-Z For the Entire Magical World:

There is an ancient, ancient primordial tradition of holy trees…Some of the oldest religious rites took place in sacred groves. These groves were sacred ground and places of oracular wisdom. Various deities maintained sacred groves of trees that shared their essence.¹

A. T. Mann, author of The Sacred Language of Trees, agrees:

Tree worship is among the earliest human traditions in all parts of the world, and is integral to the creation mythologies of many cultures. Trees are accorded special reverence because of their numerous uses, but also because of their obvious power both as living objects and potent symbols. In many cultures, trees are even symbols of humanity itself—of our aspirations to find higher meaning in the world, our need for grounding, and of our need to do the very things that trees do: provide shelter, integrate into the material world, remain consistent amid constant cyclical change, manifest stable growth, and procreate through seeds traveling far and wide across the land.²

Boom. That second one is a sentence I truly wish I had written. Except for the last bit, which strikes me as just a tad too “quiverfull” if you know what I mean…so let me rephrase: like trees produce seeds that scatter on the wind, I have a need to channel my creative energy, my most potent thoughts and ideas, and to send them forth into the world with the hope that a precious few might take root and grow, and help make the mind-garden of another person that much more beautiful and their air that much healthier to breathe. That is why I write. The rest of it is why I return to trees again and again.

Like the tree, I must grow down into my past, into my subconscious, into my ancestral heritage, into the selves I have grown out of and the selves that came before me, so that I can continue reaching up. Like the tree, my body wears the record of my years and experiences, every line and sag and stretch mark and grey hair another story that makes up the anthology of me; and like the tree, each one adds to my collective presence and depth of spirit. It feels important to remember that I am drawn to old trees and trees with a lot of character much more than I am to young, slender, “perfect” trees: they have nothing to teach me, so I greet them and pass by. Like the tree, I am constantly reaching up and up and out and out; reaching for the sky and my neighboring trees, and hoping that when they reach back it is with rain and a gentle brush in the wind, and not lightning or a fall that takes me down, too. Like the tree, I know that I am safest, when the storms come, if there are others close enough to lean against so nobody breaks.

This idea of the tree as self, according to psychologists such as Carl Jung, is integral to our collective subconscious.³ But, to the Ancients the archetype of the Sacred Tree meant much, much more. In The Sacred Language of Trees, Mann explores many such myths from around the world, but one of the most powerful originated with the Mayan peoples. Mann describes the import of their Sacred Tree mythology this way:

Their four-directional Sacred Tree, also identified as a calabash or ceiba tree, is a symbolic and mythic intersection of heaven and earth, and is also a representation of the intersection of the plane of the Milky Way galaxy and the plane of the ecliptic, the path along which the sun, moon, and planets move through their cycles. Their profound cosmology was centered on this astronomical feature, and they were able to locate it in the night sky. This shows that the power of the Sacred Tree is one that goes far beyond that of a symbol or myth. It is no less than our orientation within our galaxy⁴.

This idea of the tree as humanity’s existential lodestar is so powerfully omnipresent in our collective subconscious that it has survived every religious turnover of the ages and is still present in our iconography around the world to this day. Take, for example, the evolution of the modern Judeo-Christian faith. Before Yahweh there was Asherah, She of the ancient groves that the biblical patriarchs and prophets were ever so fond of cutting down in order to assert their power. Asherah groves were typically acacia trees where the women gathered to perform the sacred rites of the Goddess. Even Jacob, father of the twelve tribes of Israel, employed a fertility rite which seems clearly connected to this goddess in Genesis 30:25-43, when he places striped branches in the water troughs for the sheep to look upon when they were breeding, thereby increasing his flock and enriching himself (striped poles such as these are symbols of Asherah). But even as the groves were being cut down, Asherah was brought indoors: both the tabernacle and the ark of the covenant were probably made from her sacred wood (the actual wood used in the tabernacle is not known for sure, but the ark is described as being made of acacia wood covered in beaten gold). Illes explains:

For centuries, the Kings of Judea repeatedly installed, then removed and destroyed these pillars, only to have them installed once again. Although Asherah is frequently painted as a Canaanite goddess, one of the foreign deities the prophets accused the Children of Israel of whoring after, archeological evidence suggests otherwise. Lady Asherah was also an indigenous Hebrew goddess. Her image spent more time in the Jewish temple than outside; every time she was removed, someone eventually replaced her until the destruction of the First Temple.⁵