Forlong - Rivers of Life

Tree Worship.
Abraham’s “Oak of Mamre” was known and long revered by the Saracens
as the “Dirpe,” and by the heathen as “Kuroo Threck,” or the dry tree. They
say that it existed frorn the beginning of the world, and used to be green and bear
leaves till Christ died, when it and all trees then existing dried up: that a great
Prophet will yet arise in the West who will miraculously cause this tree to bud
and blossom, and Saracens and Jews to embrace Christianity; of course we have such
oracular sayings denied elsewhere. A certain Friar Anselmo gravely tells us in 1509,
that “Abram’s oak of Hebron was then a tree of dense and verdant foliage. and has
been so ever since Abram’s days, i.e. for 3500 years; that the Saracens hold it in great
veneration and offer prayers to it, and adorn it with scraps of writing and cloths;”
another Friar, however, writes in 1283, that it dried up, but that a representative has
sprung up from its base. Now, though such is not after the manner of Oaks yet it is
very much after the way of Priests, not to let profitable shrines extinguish themselves.
I lately read in an “Indian Daily,” that some priests were specially admitted by the
British sentry over the Alahabad Fort gate one early murky morning, carrying a large
green Banian (ficus religiosa) bough, and that shortly after, it was announced to the
faithful that the sacred underground tree of Pra-Yag’s most ancient shrine had revived,
and was waiting to be worshipped. It is said that the dry trunk of Abram’s oak
existed up to the end of the seventh century A.C., under the roof of the church which
Constantine caused to be built over it. The sacred Mahommedan. city of Tabreez had
also its holy tree built over; so that both the “peoples of the book” vied in offering
adoration to man’s first faith, down to the fourteenth and fifteenth century A.C. One
set of stories tell us that a certain holy tree was the staff or pole of Mahomed, and
another that of Adam. Adam is said to have “got his staff on Saturday at twilight,”
after God had completed creation and was going to rest; this was just after telling
Adam to “be fruitful;” he handed it down to Enoch, and hence to all. the patriarchs,
but others say he gave it to Seth, and that “it was a branch of the Tree of Life,” i.e.
of the tree which gives life or generates. It was doubtless the “budding rod” of Aaron,
and later no doubt became our Glastonbury Thorn, which British Christian legend says
was the staff of Joseph of Arimathea! In the centre of the city of Vienna still exists
the sacred tree, to which the now mighty city owes its site, if not its very existence. It is
said of the Viennese that whether about to travel or in trouble, they still go to record
a vow, or offer a prayer, or bit of tinsel to the mysterious shrine.
Burton and others tell us of Tree vene.rntion all over Africa. It is death, there.
to injure holy tree, but nails may be driven in and votive offerings hung thereon.
The beautiful elm tree of Korasan is proverbially a barren tree, 1 which seems to
militate against the idea of its being the Decian Oak of Ceres, which the Serpent Deity
Erektheus cut down (Ovid’s Met. VIII 760.) Ceres’ representative daugbter Proserpine
was called after her, Deois, and was seduced, says Ovid, by Jupiter in the form
1 Schiltberger, quoted by Yule.
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