Page:Frazer (1890) The Golden Bough (IA goldenboughstudy01fraz).djvu/80

58 the Germans the oldest sanctuaries were natural woods. However this may be, tree-worship is well attested for all the great European families of the Aryan stock. Amongst the Celts the oak-worship of the Druids is familiar to every one. Sacred groves were common among the ancient Germans, and tree-worship is hardly extinct amongst their descendants at the present day. At Upsala, the old religious capital of Sweden, there was a sacred grove in which every tree was regarded as divine. Amongst the ancient Prussians (a Slavonian people) the central feature of religion was the reverence for the sacred oaks, of which the chief stood at Romove, tended by a hierarchy of priests who kept up a perpetual fire of oak-wood in the holy grove. The Lithuanians were not converted to Christianity till towards the close of the fourteenth century, and amongst them at the date of their conversion the worship of trees was prominent. Proofs of the prevalence of tree-worship in ancient Greece and Italy are abundant. Nowhere, perhaps, in the ancient world was this antique form of religion better preserved than in the heart of the great metropolis itself. In the Forum, the busy centre of Roman life, the sacred fig-tree of Romulus was worshipped down to the days of the empire, and the withering of its trunk was enough to spread consternation through the city. Again, on the