Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/241

GROVE-WORSHIP. 227 literature, while the Hindu in private life plants the banyan and other trees and worships them with divine honours. Greek and Roman mythology give perfect types not only of the beings attached to individual trees, but of the dryads, fauns, and satyrs living and roaming in the forest crea- tures whose analogues are our own elves and fairies of the woods. Above these graceful fantastic beings are the higher deities who have trees for shrines and groves for temples. Witness the description in Ovid's story of Erisichthon: —

' And Ceres' grove he ravaged with the axe, They say, and shame with iron the ancient glades. There stood a mighty oak of age-long strength, Festooned with garlands, bearing on its trunk Memorial tablets, proofs of helpful vows. Beneath, the dryads Jed their festive dance, And circled hand-in-hand the giant bole.'

In more prosaic fashion, Cato instructs the woodman how to gain indemnity for thinning a holy grove; he must offer a hog in sacrifice with this prayer, 'Be thou god or goddess to whom this grove is sacred, permit me, by the expiation of this pig, and in order to restrain the over-growth of this wood, &c., &c.' Slavonic lands had their groves where burned the everlasting fire of Piorun the Heaven-god; the old Prussians venerated the holy oak of Romowe, with its drapery and images of the gods, standing in the midst of the sacred inviolate forest where no twig might be broken nor beast slain; and so on down to the elder-tree beneath which Pushkait was worshipped with offerings of bread and beer. The Keltic Heaven-god, whose image was a mighty oak, the white-robed Druids climbing the sacred tree to cut the mistletoe, and sacrificing

1 Boehtlingk and Roth, s.v. 'chaityataru.' Ward, 'Hindoos,' vol. ii. p. 204.

2 Ovid. Metamm. viii. 741.