Lament for a slain tree

The ancients thought trees were sacred; so do we.

For hundreds of years a majestic sycamore grew in a dip a in the rolling hills near Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland. This week a teenage vandal cut it down with an electric saw. The huge outpouring of grief and anger indicates a sense of a terrible sacrilege having been committed, akin to the sadness one might feel at the wanton slaying of a huge, benign animal.

The deep sacredness of trees, groves, and forests was expressed in quite tangible terms in classical antiquity. Trees were thought to have divine souls, personified as feminine spirits called dryads. The olive tree was so important to Athenians that, in their foundation myths, a tree took precedence even over the sea. They were said to have chosen the goddess Athena as their patron, over the sea god Poseidon, because she planted an olive tree on the Acropolis: olives were central to the Greek diet and valuable commodities for trade and export, while the wood and oil had a host of uses.

Trees were objects of respect and veneration for the Romans no less than for the Greeks. Cato the Elder, the Roman statesman of the second century BC and writer on agriculture, instructed that no tree be cut down without a sacrifice first being made to the gods who dwelled in them, their genii (the root of the word ‘djinn’ – tree djinns were one form in Arabic lore). Cato preserves the ancient form of words:

Si deus si dea es quoium illud sacrum est: Be you god or be you goddess, to whom this place is sacred… I offer solemn prayers to you in sacrificing this pig in atonement, so that you may be favourable and gracious to me, my family, household, and children.

In the first century BC the Roman poet Ovid told the story in his Metamorphoses of the old lovingly married couple Baucis and Philemon, in return for whose piety the gods granted their wish that they might die together by turning them into trees. Ovid follows this with yet more powerful story, a version of the ancient Greek myth of Erysichthon (pronounced ‘Ery – sick – thorn’), King of Thessaly, who impiously orders the sacred grove of Demeter (Roman Ceres), goddess of the harvest, to be cut down. When his retainers refuse to do so, Erysichthon takes an axe and chops it down himself. The dying dryad of the grove lays a curse on him, whereupon Ceres punishes him with insatiable hunger. The more he eats, the more he is tormented by hunger, and in the end he gruesomely resorts to eating his own body:

His hunger burned him with increasing strength.

He gnawed his flesh, and rent his limbs asunder

to feed his body, as it shrank in turn.

The story of the human being who destroys his environment and himself through greed and wantonness is a fable for our times. In this case Ovid’s poetic fury at the destruction of the sacred tree feels as powerful as our response to the senseless destruction of the majestic ancient sycamore in the gap at Hadrian’s Wall.

You can read a longer version of this article by following this link: https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/death-of-a-sycamore/