Forlong - Rivers of Life

Fig 1.—THE FICUS INDICA or BANYAN, with Idols sketched from Nature.
CHAPTER II.
TREE WORSHIP
THERE is no doubt in my mind that the first breathings of the human souls were
manifested naturally, not I think on a desert hill-side, the trackless ocean, or amid
the dark monsters and creeping things in caves and caverns, but under the sweet shade
and shelter of one of nature’s most lovely objects—the Sacred Tree or Grove; especially
do we here in the East understand how loved its refreshing shades are; when
escaping from the furious rage of another but a later god, the weary pilgrim,
labourer, or traveller throws himself down for rest to body, eye, and soul, amidst
the cool green darkness of the grove.
Are not sacred groves, the grand old gnarled oak, the wide-spreading beech of
Europe, the holy elm of Korásán, or far grander Banian of India, the theme of much
of present and of ancient poetry and history? The grove is call the “retreat
beloved by gods and men,”—on the tree also hangs the, to us, mere refreshing “fruit
of the gods,” but in the times I am speaking of, there hung the principal part of
the food on which the infant race depended, for they knew nought of the stored laid
up in soils and seas for a higher stage of their growth.
The tree was “a thing of knowledge, and of good and evil,” and later, in “the
loved god Homa” of Vedic times, long ere Jewish fathers could have recorded Jewish
myths, was perhaps as often the source of evil as of good; though doubtless as Homa’s
fumes ascended into the human brain, it was thought by the infant race to be not only
the tree of knowledge but of life. As the great Spirit-God Homa, God under various
names, created many of the might gods seen in the early stages of my Stream, so
from the loves of Bacchus and of Jupiter sprang many mighty ones in the later ages
of Grecian faith and poetry. From the most ancient times, as Æneas tells us, “the