Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/233

Rh said to have stood in close proximity to the temple of the gods in the ancient town of Upsala, and the mythic tree called Glass, described as standing with leaves of gold before the hall of Sig-týr, or the Norse Zeus of Victory. On the whole, the oak would seem to have been the tree far the most closely associated with the supreme god of the Aryans. Thus in ancient Greece the mighty growth of the oak was regarded as symbolic of him. Not only was it a twig of oak that was used in the Greek ceremony of rain-making, but several celebrated oaks sacred to Zeus are alluded to in Greek and Roman literature: suffice it to recall the Trojan oak famed in the Iliad, and the words of Virgil in the Georgics, iij. 332, &c.:

'Sicubi magna Jovis antiquo robore quercus Ingentes tendat ranios.'

There were also at Dodona, one of the most ancient Greek seats of the Zeus worship, sacred oaks, the murmuring of the wind among whose branches and leaves was watched and treated as oracular; and sometimes the oak was something more than a tree merely sacred to the god or marking out the place of his abode: it was itself regarded as the seat of his divinity, as in the case of or  also at Dodona, of which Silius Italicus says, iij. 691:

'Arbor numen habet coliturque tepentibus aris.'

In the Celtic instances alluded to, no predilection for