The Life Tree and the Death Tree

The Life Tree and the Death TreeAuthor(s): Claire RussellSource: Folklore, Vol. 92, No. 1 (1981), pp. 56-66Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Folklore Enterprises, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1260252 .

Accessed: 17/06/2014 17:05

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Folklore Enterprises, Ltd. and Taylor & Francis, Ltd. are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve andextend access to Folklore.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.78.108.37 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 17:05:13 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=taylorfrancis

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=fel

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1260252?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Folklore vol. 92:i, 1981 56

The Life Tree and the Death Tree

CLAIRE RUSSELL

FOLK symbols, like dream symbols, can have many interpretations. I believe one particular set of meanings, namely those connected with kinship, has been neglected in the past, and I have begun to explore a number of specific images as kinship symbols, including the labyrinth, the tooth, the pre-Christian cross, and the tree. The tree in particular was the subject of a recent paper in this journal, and I shall begin by summarizing some of my findings in that paper, as a necessary introduction to my present subject, the tree of life and the tree of death, and their significance as symbols of kinship.1

I began my study of the tree symbol with two myths from regions far apart. In the familiar Eden story, there were two trees in the garden, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Lord God forbade Adam to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, making no mention of the Tree of Life. When Adam and Eve did eat the forbidden fruit, 'the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden.' In the Polynesian story of the Land of Matang, the men lived under a tree in the North, and the women under a tree in the South. Nakaa the Judge, who had planted the trees, summoned the men and women and ordered them not to play with each other during his absence on a journey. When he returned, he found they had disobeyed him, and expelled them from Matang. He allowed them to take one of the trees with them, but unfortunately they picked the women's tree, which was the Tree of Death, and left the Tree of Life behind in Matang.

From evidence about modern societies that practise simple farming, I was able to show that the fruit tree is the oldest form of property fixed to a place, and the theft of fruit the oldest form of crime in farming societies. Moreover, since fruit trees may last more than a generation, the fruit tree is the oldest form of heritable fixed property. Since it is important that fruit trees be cared for, it becomes important to control and certify kinship succession. Hence the fruit tree gives rise to the family tree. At this stage of cultural evolution, to ensure regular kinship succession, mating regulations begin to be connected with property. Mating regulations are broken in the myths, implicitly in Eden and explicitly in Matang. The Tree of Life in both myths, lost forever by the people chased away, may be said to represent the stable succession of inheritance, which ensures a kind of eternal life and renewal for the fruit-trees and the kinsfolk who succeed one another in tending and owning them. But where property can be handed down a lineage, so can knowledge and technique, and the myths may reflect not only the beginnings of real estate, but also the beginnings of monopoly of information. They may be telling of the expulsion of groups who



THE LIFE TREE AND THE DEATH TREE 57

tried to steal the knowledge of tree cultivation itself, or infringe the rules of mating and succession that buttressed such a monopoly, in ways I shall consider later in this paper. A kin group possessing such important knowledge would have a monopoly of eternal life, in the sense of a stable family succession linked to property, providing a continuity of influence over many generations.

From sheer similarity of form, the family tree is a natural metaphor for a branching pedigree. But the tree symbol is far more than a metaphor, and I went on to show its intensity and pervasiveness, and how the relationship between trees and kinship has been expressed in a great variety of beliefs and ritual practices all over the world. A few examples of this symbolism may serve to introduce the specific topics of the present paper.

The cult of sacred trees is virtually universal. They are widely associated with graves, and hence with dead ancestors. Sometimes the tree may be made to represent a whole kinship lineage of many people. A Mycenaean ring seal depicts a tree full of human figures; the ancient Prussians hung an oak-tree with drapery and little hanging images; figures and masks were hung up in trees in ancient Attica. Tribesfolk in China, Australia, southern Africa and the Philippines believe certain sacred trees to contain the souls of their dead ancestors; in the Philippines, when the leaves of these trees rustle in the wind, the ancestors are believed to be speaking. A more striking example of this is the legendary Speaking Tree, which I shall consider later in this paper.

But the tree may also be treated as a single ancestral figure. The bushes on the grave of Polydorus (in the Aeneid) bleed when plucked, and the hero's voice protests from the grave mound. In India a human head or mask of terracotta may be placed in a sacred tree, sometimes so skilfully as to suggest it grew there. In several folktales and romances, two trees grow from the graves of two lovers and intertwine, and Frazer has described the ritual, found in Germany and India, of marrying two trees to each other.

H. R. Ellis Davidson has shown how in northern Europe the 'luck' of a family is often associated with a special 'guardian tree,' which may form part of the fabric of a house, and how a similar importance may be attached to pillars, which were originally tree-trunks. Examples from other parts of the world show a close relationship between tree and pillar cults and imagery. Early attempts to classify experience always tended to confuse the categories and processes of human social life with those of the natural environment. Kinship is always at the centre of human social life, so one expression of the confusion of social and natural phenomena is the widespread concept of a cosmic pillar or tree at the centre of the universe. The connection of this cosmic tree with an ancestral lineage appears transparently in some tribal cosmologies. The Kogi of Colombia, for instance, envisage a great house that emerged from a world egg, and rested on the branches of a great tree, and here the ancestors of mankind danced.

Plant imagery is used in many societies to express kinship relations, and the concepts of plant and human lineage may be inextricably intermingled in a language. Among the Rotinese of Roti and Timor Islands, individuals and lineages are said to plant other individuals and lineages, and the same words are used for blood and sap, for skin and bark, for human appendages and leaves. The most striking relationship of an individual (let us say a male, and let us call him 'X') is with a male relative of his mother, ideally his mother's eldest brother, called his mother's brother of origin, or great root. This male relative and his



58 CLAIRE RUSSELL

wife supervise all ritual aspects of X's life, he is supposed to have planted X, and he owns X's person (including his 'sap') in exactly the same way he might own a fruit tree he has planted: if X accidentally hurts himself, he has to pay compensation to this mother's brother of his!

There are many examples in folktales and visual imagery of trees giving birth to babies, or in some way impregnating women. Conversely, the tree, evidently a family tree or lineage, may emerge from the body of a human being. For instance, a sealing from Harappa shows a woman upside down, with a plant issuing from her womb. In more or less patrilineal societies, the tree or other plant may emerge from the body of a man, as in the medieval image of the Tree of Jesse, in which the lineage of Christ rises, tree-like, with individual ancestors on its branches, from Jesse's loins. In Trees of Jesse and related imagery, the figure at the top of the tree is usually male (Christ), as well as the one at the root (Jesse). It does, however, occasionally happen that a woman (the Virgin Mary) appears at the top, for instance in the carvings on the South Door of the Romanesque baptistery at Parma. The presence of a woman at the top of the tree finds its last echo, perhaps, in modern times, with the fairy on the Christmas Tree. But it may well be the return of a much earlier image, as will appear from the story of the Speaking Tree.

I. THE SPEAKING TREE About the year A.D.300, somebody wrote a Life of Alexander (the Great).

This was not a factual biography, but a romantic tale, which was widely copied in the Middle Ages: in the words of W. W. Tarn, 'more than eighty versions of the Alexander-romance, in twenty-four languages, have been collected; they range from Britain to Malaya.'2 The original story contains an episode in which Alexander is shown, when in India, a sacred precinct with two trees that utter oracles, one at sunrise, noon and sunset, the other at corresponding times for the moon. The sun tree was hung with hides of male beasts, the moon tree with hides of female beasts; and Alexander was told that when burials occurred the dead were wrapped in similar hides. Plainly, then, the hides on the trees represent dead ancestors. Both the trees gave him the unwelcome news that he would be murdered by his friends in Babylon (where of course the historical Alexander died, either of malaria or of strychnine administered by his staff).3

The story was not only widely copied but widely illustrated. There are at least two fine illustrations of this episode, one a fifteenth-century Iranian miniature, the other a Moghul miniature from India. Each of these represents one speaking tree only; it is sprouting a large number of heads of different animals. In addi- tion, the Iranian tree sprouts one female human head, and the Indian one a number of whole female human beings. Medieval European maps of India showed this single Speaking Tree. In fact, this image in India goes back far beyond the time of either the Alexander-romance or Alexander himself. A sealing from Harappa shows a tree that sprouts animal heads, with a woman appearing in the midst of its branches--and it is just this image of the woman in the tree which may have returned in the way I described earlier.4

To understand all this imagery, we have to consider the evolution of human kinship. W. M. S. Russell and I have explored this at length elsewhere;5 here I have space for a bare outline only, without going into the evidence. The pre-




human kinship situation was probably very similar to that of macaque monkeys. In macaques, kinship grouping is exclusively matrilineal. The females form the permanent core of each band. Most of the males leave their native band for other bands fairly early in life, so there is a tendency to mate away from their mothers, and incest with mothers or sisters is in any case very rare. There are rudiments of a symmetrical mating relationship: when a band splits into two, the males of each 'daughter' band may cross over during the breeding season to mate in the band that does not contain their mothers.

This reciprocal arrangement may have become a regular system rather early in human cultural evolution. The pre-Christian cross is the oldest symbol in the world, being engraved on a pebble found in a Hungarian site carbon-dated to about 31,000 B.C.; 6 I have shown from later evidence that the pre-Christian cross can be a visual symbol of a symmetrical mating system, just as we speak of cross-breeding.7 By the end of the Middle Palaeolithic, therefore, human beings had probably developed a regular symmetrical mating system of the simplest kind: a tribe is divided into two segments (moieties), and males from each mate with females in the other. As in monkeys, a band would still consist of a permanent core of females, each remaining there for her life-time, and male mates coming across from other bands. However, at least by the later Upper Palaeolithic, when human beings are depicted wearing animal masks and disguises, there must have been a fairly complete development of matrilineal totemic tribal organization. There are many grounds for considering that these early human societies, like practically all recent ones (whether matrilineal or patrilineal), were male-dominated. In each band, at least one male would remain through life, the brother of the technically senior female in the kinship lineage, and he would obtain a mate from outside the band. Such a home-based male would effectively govern the band, and in particular would have important ritual functions, as he has in recent matrilineal tribes. Loosely and for con- venience, we may call him a priest. Again by modern analogy, he would often appear at ceremonies wearing a mask or disguise to represent the particular animal species associated with the totemic man-animal ancestor of the clan or kinship group. His 'foreign' wife may also have ceremonial functions (as we saw in the case of the wife of the Rotinese mother's brother), and masked women sometimes appear in Palaeolithic art, though there is a preponderance of masked males. However, it is to be noted how frequently the female is not symbolized at all, but represented as a woman, and this is how the core ancestral line of females in the band or clan is depicted. The enormous preponderance of female human figures persists well into the Neolithic. Later, of course, many societies (including all cattle-herders and most civilizations) evolved patrilineal systems, which generally retained much of the totemic culture, often with symmetrical mating arrangements which this time involved women marrying away from their mothers. But some of the older imagery and lore has persisted in the background of all later societies, whether matrilineal, patrilineal, or one of the many mixtures and compromises between them.

We can now see that the pictorial and literary versions of the Speaking Tree or Trees are two ways of representing the symmetrical kinship system. The single tree of the miniatures and the Harappa seal may be said to represent a single moiety, made up of a number of clans. Each clan is represented by a female human being-the core lineage-and an animal mask or head-the male



60 CLAIRE RUSSELL

priesthood, and the whole is represented, as usual, by a tree.8 In the romance, the coding is done in a rather different way. Here we have two

moieties represented, associated with the sun and the moon. If we imagine ourselves looking at the system from one side, i.e. from one moiety (say matrilineal), we will naturally think of one lineage (our own) as consisting of females, and the other (the 'foreign' one) as consisting of males: we are not concerned with our own males, who generally mate elsewhere, or with the other group's females, who stay with their own group. Hence the sun tree is hung with male hides and the moon tree with female hides. Exactly the same symbolic principle appears in the Land of Matang, where the males lived under one tree and the females under another. But that myth contained an additional element-one of the trees was the Tree of Life, and the other the Tree of Death. This is the image I shall try to decode in the remainder of the present paper.

II. THE LIFE TREE AND THE DEATH TREE Pairs of trees turn up in the mythology of many societies, and they can all be

traced back to the moieties of a symmetrical mating system, as can many other dual symbols.9 Sometimes there is no immediate indication that one is more desirable than the other. Two sycamores stood at the Eastern edge of the world where the sun rose, according to the Egyptian Book of the Dead.10 'The two trees spring from one seed,' runs a Buddhist verse, 'And for that reason there is but one fruit.' l According to a Tungus shaman, 'God created two trees when he created the earth and man: a male, the larch; and a female, the fir.'12 A symmetrical mating system may be based on four sections instead of two moieties, and this too has issued in many quadruple symbols.13 A carved stone altar from the Copper Age temple of Hagar Qim on Malta has a tree, growing from a pot, carved on each of its four faces.14 The Kogi tree-house where their ancestors danced, mentioned earlier, has four doorways; 15 the door symbolism can be explained by a comparative approach, for the Yao of Malawi use the term 'doorway' for a matrilineage.16

Usually, however, as in Eden and Matang, the difference between the trees is a matter of Life and Death. A Mixtec world picture shows four trees, two of which are definitely sinister, being guarded by the king of death and the god of the underworld, respectively.17 The pairs of trees often show this dichotomy quite clearly. 'The Babylonians had two trees, the Tree of Truth and the Tree of Life, at the eastern entry to heaven' (Roger Cook);18 it is clearly the 'moment of truth' that is envisaged here. Outside the Temple in Jerusalem stood the two pillars Jachin and Boaz, one green, the other dry.19 A Swedish Bronze Age rock engraving shows a ship with two trees on it and a human figure between them, who is looking towards and supplicating one of them.20 'How many trees are in Assal?' asks an old Irish riddle: 'Two trees,' is the answer, 'the green and the withered.'21 A miniature from a 12th-century European manuscript shows the Church as the Tree of Good, covered with virtues and made up of many tree species, and the Synagogue as the Tree of Evil, covered with vices and consisting only of the withered fig-tree of the Gospel (Matthew, 21, v.19).22 The Hawaians combined the two trees into one, standing at the entrance to the underworld, fresh and green on one side, dry and brittle on the other. 23




To understand all this, we have to return to the evolution of kinship. Human sacrifice is first attested at the end of the Upper Palaeolithic, during the population crisis associated with the change in climate and collapse of the specialized hunting economy: bird-masked figures supervise the strangling of human victims on a cave engraving at Addaura, near Palermo.24 Evidently it was the males I have called 'priests' who carried out the sacrifice, wearing ancestral totem masks and disguises, and this is fully borne out by later evidence.25 Now when human sacrifice and cannibalism developed, under the stress of population pressure and dietary limitations, 'they were often absorbed into the reciprocal arrangements characteristic of totemism,' with its symmetrical mating system.26 'The reciprocity of this stress system is well shown by early European chron- iclers' accounts of the now extinct Tupinamba of Brazil.'27 When Francis Huxley lived among the related Urubu people in 1951 and 1953, he was able to confirm many of the details, for the Urubu had similar customs until very recent times.28 Prisoners were taken in raids from a neighbouring group; they were married to their captors' women, and might live among them for as long as twenty years, being generally treated no differently from the rest of the com- munity. The arrangement was reciprocal: the prisoners could not escape and return home, for they were not welcomed back; instead, the other group would take prisoners from the first group, and marry them to their own women. 'Thus far the system is clearly a form of reciprocal intermating, as if between female- line totemic moieties. Similar reciprocal relations exist today among the Garos of Assam: a boy is normally kidnapped from one village and "married by capture" to a girl in a neighbouring village, where he spends the rest of his life.'29 Among the Tupi, however, the prisoner-husband was not usually allowed to live out his natural life. The Tupi had the same word for enemy and brother- in-law. In due course the time came when the prisoner-husband was ritually clubbed to death and eaten. He was speciously promised that after death he would become one with the ancestor of the group that killed and ate him. The priest-executioner, who wore a feather costume and imitated a striking hawk, had to avoid sexual intercourse for some time before the sacrifice. This suggests he had married a woman from the other group, who might take an opportunity to plead for her kinsman.

Whatever they were promised after death, the sacrificed prisoner-husbands were clearly in effect the less lucky of two lineages. The Basumbwa of East Africa tell of a youth whose dead father took him to the underworld. On the first morning after his arrival, the Great Chief Death appeared. One side of him was beautiful, the other covered with sores and maggots. While attendapts washed the diseased side, Death foretold all sorts of disasters to all who conceived, were born, worked or went hunting on that day. Next morning the attendants washed his beautiful side, and this time he had all sorts of blessings to offer. The father realised he had brought his son on the wrong day, and sadly told him to go home.30 This is one way of showing the difference between two groups of people, very differently treated by the priest-executioner (here represented by the Janus figure of Great Chief Death); but a much commoner symbolism for the two lineages is that of the Life and Death Trees.

The Life Tree in a matrilineal society was evidently the dominant group in the succession, consisting of the women and the high status male priests,



62 CLAIRE RUSSELL

brothers of women of high seniority. The Death Tree consisted of the low status males imported as husbands, essentially surplus labour that could be dispensed with by sacrifice (originally, no doubt, when food ran short-the number of sacrifices varied, and it is a reasonable inference that this was related to varia- tions in food supply). The complementary moiety had the same divisions. Now if a group's knowledge and skills were transmitted through high status males and high status females, it was important that these should remain with the group for life. The low status Death Tree males exchanged by the two moieties as husbands might be supposed to have no special knowledge. This kind of fundamental division of society between privileged and underprivileged obviously persisted long after the abandonment of human sacrifice, and formed the original basis for the later systems of slavery, caste and class. When societies became patrilineal, they might retain the symmetrical mating system, with the sexes reversed. With this change-over, the women who mated could be trusted with no special knowledge, since they would transmit it to another group. This may explain how it came about that high status females performing priestly tasks and having priestly knowledge, considered important by their society, had to remain virgins, like the virgin goddesses of learning, Athene and Minerva, or the real-life Vestal Virgins in self-consciously patrilineal Rome. Generally speaking, then, the Death Tree members of a society with skills and knowledge have tended to be unskilled and uneducated, and in a patrilineal society this became the lot of women generally, with rare exceptions who stayed at home and married within their own class and society, or remained unmarried. From considerations like this, we may suspect that the Life-and-Death-Tree dis- crimination about entitlement to education may still be spooking in the background to this day. Certainly we can now understand why the Tree of Knowledge was forbidden to those who were being kept from the Tree of Life.

The Death Tree may evidently to some extent correspond with a sex, hence in the Matang story the men lived under the Life Tree and the women under the Death Tree. But the Death Tree may also correspond with a class within one sex. Moreover, as societies became more complex, various elaborate asymmetrical relationships developed. In Malabar (now Kerala) in Southern India, for instance, the patrilineal Nambudiri Brahmins only allowed their eldest sons to marry within their caste; the younger sons (right up to the end of the nineteenth century) had a special kind of concubinage relationship with women of the matrilineal Nair caste, considered by both as socially inferior to the Brahmins.31 The Natchez Indians of Mississippi evolved an extraordinarily complicated system, based on four classes: Suns, Nobles, Honoured Men and Stinkards. The members of each of the higher classes had to marry Stinkards; the offspring of the females retained their mothers' ranks, but those of the male were each demoted one class from their fathers' ranks.32 In many ways, the situation in large modern societies is more complicated still, yet the original tree imagery has persisted into modern times.

With all this in mind, and remembering that the symbolism goes back to the practice of symmetrical human sacrifice under stress, we may now take a look at some more tree images. An excellent example of a Life Tree is the sacred tree at Heliopolis, 'on the leaves of which the god set down the names and years of the kings to serve as their annals,' thus firmly recording their Life Tree status.33 'Bouquets of life' from the Egyptian sacred trees, including the one at




Heliopolis, were presented to kings and nobles on festive occasions. 34 We still speak of the leaves of books, as if they were paper-trees, and we still give bouquets of flowers to -V.I.P.s on special occasions. Conversely, there are some macabre examples of Death Trees. In Hindu mythology, the primal cosmic human sacrifice is embodied in the udambara tree; as Francis Huxley has observed, this is the strangler fig, and such trees 'sprout in the branches of other trees and let down aerial roots that send up trunks of their own wherever they strike the ground, and their prodigious power of growth eventually strangles the tree that once bore them up'-here we have the Death Tree intertwined with and killing the Life Tree.35 There is a Quiche myth of a tree in hell made up of living heads of the dead.36 The Night Journey of the Prophet Mohammed to heaven and hell is depicted in splendid Turkish miniatures of the 15th century; he is shown the miraculous bejewelled Tree that stood in the centre of the Islamic Paradise, and the Infernal Thorn Tree planted in hell for the torment of the wicked, with a variety of animal heads sprouting from its branches.37 Here no female human beings are present (as they are in the Speaking Tree), but only the totemic masks of the torturers and executioners, for this is plainly the Tree of Death. This image, as I have shown, can appear in the dreams of a modern individual, for one of Freud's patients, when a child awaiting a Christmas Tree, dreamed instead of a tree with wolves sitting in it-threatening and punishing members of his family, coming no longer 'under family emotions, but under social emotions of terror and distress.'38

The Deati Tree people do not always submit patiently to their fate, as appears from a rather different, and very interesting, piece of symbolism. On a recorded television programme broadcast after his death, the sculptor and writer Michael Ayrton told of a Chinese tale of the people behind the mirrors who appear as our reflections. These people once lived in and ruled the world, till they were banished behind the mirrors by a wise Emperor, but they are always waiting for a chance to come out and take our places. Clearly this reflects the change in China from matrilineal to patrilineal arrangements, so that the Life and Death Trees were interchanged. It may be significant in this context (for writers are often in touch with folk-beliefs) that Cocteau brough a woman from behind the mirror in his film Orphee, and even that Queens are important on the other side of Lewis Carroll's looking-glass. T. C. Lethbridge has pointed out that the superstition of not looking at the new moon through glass 'has become a little distorted. Originally it meant that you must not see it in a looking-glass, for then it would appear to be waning instead of waxing and the fortunes of the viewer would wane also.'39 According to Plutarch, Osiris, the god of the Death Tree par excellence, was murdered just as the moon began to wane, and his enemy Set also found the coffin when hunting at the full of the moon (so just when it was on the turn), and cut the body into fourteen parts, corresponding to the days of the waning moon.40 The mirror story also leads one to wonder if the Life and Death Tree dichotomy is also connected with that of right and left. This was already extremely important in ancient Mesopotamia, where the artists cut seals with the human figures left-handed, to ensure their being right-handed on the impression;4' and it has been extremely important in virtually every known society since then.42 The Maoris, for instance, call the right side the male side and the side of life, and the left side the female side and the side of death.43

But the revolt of the Death Tree can also be expressed in the tree imagery



64 CLAIRE RUSSELL

itself. In the days of the first French Revolution, hopes of a new order-including new kinship arrangements-were commonly expressed by planting trees of liberty, as if to capture or replace the old Tree of Life; this practice spread from France to South Germany, where, for instance, the workers of the brewery at Darmstadt planted a tree of liberty in 1795.44 Long before that, during the aristocratic civil wars of the Fronde, in 1651, a social revolutionary society was launched at Bordeaux, which took an elm tree as its device.4 An alternative to planting a new tree is to pull down an old one. The English Puritans were believed (e.g. by Sir Robert Filmer) to be undermining the traditional family, and many of them did indeed have revolutionary ideas about family life.46 Hence it is interesting that a traditional tree, the Maypole, was banned by Parliament throughout England and Wales in 1644. At the Restoration, May- poles were restored, and 'on the first May Day after Charles II's return, an immense pole was set up in the Strand... It was 134 feet high, and was adorned with crowns and the Royal Arms, splendidly gilded, garlands and streamers and three lanterns which were lit at night' (Christina Hole).47 There it stood until 1717, when 'Sir Isaac Newton took it away to support the most modern and powerful telescope in the world' (Laurence Whistler).48 And with this new kind of cosmic tree I may suitably end this pair of papers on the tree as a kinship symbol. 49

NOTES

1. C. Russell, 'The Tree as a Kinship Symbol,' Folklore, 90 (1979), pp.217-234, where full documentation is given for the facts and generalizations in this and the next eight paragraphs.

2. E. H. Haight (transl. and introd.) The Life of Alexander of Macedon by Pseudo-Callisthenes (New York, 1955), pp.2-3, 8-9.

3. Haight, op.cit., pp.106-8. 4. R. Cook, The Tree of Life (London, 1974), Plate 33; R. Lannoy, The Speaking Tree (London,

1974), frontispiece, p.xxv, and Plate 7. 5. C. Russell and W. M. S. Russell, 'The Social Biology of Totetnism,' Biology and Human

Affairs, 41 (1976), pp.53-79; 'Kinship in Monkeys and Man. I. Matrilineal Kinship and the Social Unit,' Biology and Human Affairs, 43 (1978), pp.1-31; 'Kinship in Monkeys and Man. II,' in preparation.

6. K. P. Oakley, 'Animal Fossils as Charms,' in J. R. Porter and W. M. S. Russell (eds.), Animals in Folklore (Ipswich and Cambridge, 1978), pp.208-40, 276-81: pp.209 and 276, and Plate I, p.210.

7. Russell and Russell, op.cit. (1976), pp.67-8; C. Russell and W. M. S. Russell, 'Space, Time and Totemism,' Biology and Human Affairs, 42 (1977), pp.57-80: p.70.

8. W. M. S. Russell and C. Russell, 'The Social Biology of Werewolves,' in Porter and Russell, op.cit., pp.143-82, 260-69: pp.180-81.

9. Russell and Russell, op.cit. (1976), pp.74-5; (1977),_pp.69-70. 10. H. Kees, Ancient Egypt. A Cultural Topography (London, 1961), p.79. 11. F. Huxley, The Way of the Sacred (London, 1974), p.287. 12. J. Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (London, 1960), pp.256-7. 13. Russell and Russell, op.cit. (1976), p.75; (1977), pp.70-73. 14. D. H. Trump, National Museum of Malta, Archaeological Section (London, n.d.), p.24;

C. Kininmouth, The Travellers' Guide to Malta and Gozo (London, 1968), p.103. 15. Huxley, op.cit., p.154. 16. A. I. Richards, 'Some Types of Family Structure amongst the Central Bantu,' in A. R.

Radcliffe-Brown and D. Forde (eds.), African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (London, 1950), pp.207-51: p.232.

17. Cook, op.cit., Plate 6. 18. Cook, op.cit., p.24.




19. Huxley, op.cit., p.164. 20. P. Gelling and H. Ellis Davidson, The Chariot of the Sun (London, 1972), pp.59-61. 21. A. Rees and B. Rees, Celtic Heritage (London, 1973), p.350. 22. CoQk, op.cit., Plate 37. 23. Cook, op.cit., p.24; Campbell, op.cit., p.119. 24. Russell and Russell, op.cit., (1978), p.173. 25. Ibid. 26., Russell and Russell, op.cit., (1977), p.76. 27. Ibid. 28. Huxley, op.cit., pp.103-15; F. Huxley, Affable Savages (London, 1956), passim. 29. Russell and Russell, op.cit. (1977), p.77. 30. Campbell, op.cit., pp.118-19. 31. G. Woodcock, Kerala (London, 1967), pp.106-9. 32. R. Silverberg, The Mound Builders (New York, 1974), pp.170-72. 33. Kees, op.cit., pp.79-80: see also J. Lindsay, The Origins of Alchemy in Graeco-Roman Egypt

(London, 1970), p.171. 34. Ibid. 35. Huxley, op. cit. (1974), p.160. 36. S. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature (Helsinki, 1932), A671.2.3. 37. Cook, op.cit., Plates 25-6, pp.27-8. 38. Russell and Russell, op.cit. (1978), pp.179-81. 39. T. C. Lethbridge, Beyond Time and Distance (Lor don, 1974), p. 119. 40. Plutarch, Moralia, 354 A, 358 A, 367 E - 368 A. 41. G. Levy, The Gate ofHorn (London, 1948), p.237, note 2. 42. e.g. R. Hertz, Death and the Right Hand (transl. R. and C. Needham, Aberdeen, 1960),

passim. 43. Hertz, op.cit., pp.101-2. 44. A. Ramm, Germany 1789-1919 (London, 1967), p.31; see also E. Hoffmann-Krayer and

H. Bichtold-Stiiubli, Handworterbuch des Deutschen Aberglaubens (Berlin and Leipzig, 1930-31), 1.3, pp.22-3, s.v. Freiheitsbaum.

45. H. N. Williams, A Princess of Intrigue (London, 1907), pp.325-6. 46. I. Watts, The Rise of the Novel (Harmondsworth, 1963), p.146; C. Hill, The World Turned

Upside Down (Harmondsworth, 1975), passim. 47. C. Hole, A Dictionary of British Folk Customs (St. Albans and London, 1978), p.206. 48. L. Whistler, The English Festivals (London, 1947), p.140. 49. Besides the references given in these two papers, other sources for tree symbolism are:

G. Mase (ed.), The Book of the Tree (London, 1927), and two books by Wilhelm Mannhardt, Der Baumkultus der Germanen (Berlin, 1875), which influenced Frazer, and Wald- und Feldkulte (2nd edn., Berlin, 1905). There is much of interest about cosmic pillar imagery in: J. Irwin, ' "Asokan" Pillars: a Reassessment of the Evidence. Part IV. Symbolism,' Burlington Magazine, 118 (1976), pp.734-53.

Since completing the two papers, I have seen further illustrations. I have mentioned the tale of the people behind the mirrors, reflecting the transition in China from matrilineal to patrilineal kinship, for which, of course, there is other evidence-Russell and Russell, op.cit. (in preparation). Marriage laments collected in Hong Kong New Territories have been described recently by C. F. Blake, 'The Feelings of Chinese Daughters Towards their Mothers as Revealed in Marriage Laments,' Folklore, 90 (1979), pp.91-7. These laments are sung by brides for several days before marriage. 'The Chinese bride . . . likens her marriage to a death in Hell as she is handed over to strangers to whom she refers as "dead people",' an expression regularly used for 'the groom's side' in the laments. Blake compares the myth of Persephone ravished by Hades, developed in Greece at a time of similar transition from matrilineal to patrilineal kinship. When this takes place, of course, the former death tree lineage becomes dominant, and it is the bride who goes, in the words of the laments, to 'the house of the dead.'

I am grateful to John Irwin for calling my attention to a paper by S. R. G. Gyani, 'Identification of the So-called SUirya and Indra Figures in Cave No. 20 of the Bh-ajd Group,' Reports of the Prince of Wales Museum of West India, Bombay, 3 (1950), No. 1, pp.15-21, concerning Buddhist carvings of the period 150 B.C. to A.D. 100, including one of a tree laden with figures of beautiful women. Gyani relates this carving to a Sanskrit text, the DivyJvad7na, which tells of a king who encountered trees laden with 'heavenly damsels.' Both carving and story provide further examples of female human figures representing the core lineage on the kinship tree.



66 CLAIRE RUSSELL

Two sinister kinds of trees, the fetish trees of Africa and the suicide tree of India, may be worth exploring in terms of local kinship relations. In 1827, near Lagos, Richard Lander observed fetish trees hung with human limbs, surrounded by human heads, and beset by vultures, in a time and place of frequent human sacrifice; see C. Lloyd, The Search for the Niger (London, 1973), pp.107-8. The suicide tree of Prayaga is being studied by John Irwin, who kindly lent me the typescript of his forthcoming paper, 'The Prayaga Bull-Pillar: another Pre-Asokan Monument' (read at the Fifth International Conference of South Asian Archaeologists, held at the Museum fiir Indische Kunst, West Berlin, 3rd-7th July, 1979). He discusses (chiefly in terms of cosmic imagery) a tree at Prayaga (Allahabad) called the 'Tree of Life,' where pilgrims had been ritually committing suicide for a long time when the site was visited, in the 7th century A.D., by the famous Chinese Buddhist traveller Hsiian-Tsang, also known as Tripitaka, for whom see J. Mirsky (ed.), The Great Chinese Travellers (London, 1965), Chapter 3. It was surrounded by piles of human bones. Irwin mentions a passage of the Mahabharata (III, 103) that tells of thousands of pilgrims committing suicide at such sacred places in order 'to win a place in heaven,' pictured in priestly texts as a land of abundance and happiness, with an endless supply of beautiful women. This is reminiscent of the sacrificed Tupi victim being promised union after death with the ancestor of the group that killed him.

Human sacrifice of war captives on a quite unparalleled scale occurred in Mexico, and it is interesting that weirdly costumed priests, attended by totem animals (the eagle and jaguar knightly orders), cut down whole trees, in scenes depicted in the Mexican Codex Borgianus: K. W. Luckert, Olmec Religion (Norman, Oklahoma, 1976), pp.134-40, and Figures 51 and 53.

Finally I am grateful to Dr. H. R. Ellis Davidson for calling my attention to: D. E. Bynum, The Daemon in the Wood (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1978). Bynum has shown the importance of folktales in the transmission of symbolisms over long periods, and has analysed a complex narrative pattern found in folktales all over the world, in which trees play a central part. His examples bring out again and again the close connection between tree imagery and kinship and mating relations, and illustrate many of my special themes. For instance, in a tale from the Limba people of Sierra Leone, a girl kills her husband, and is pursued by men and boys from his village: when overtaken by one of them, she tricks him into climbing a tall tree, and then ride5 off on his horse, 'saying to him that he is a dead man "perched up there on the top twig" '. Bynum, op.cit., pp.337-9. I cannot now discuss Bynum's own interesting analysis of the pattern he has discovered, and will only mention that it usually concerns a contrast between living tree and cut wood, used to make some important tool or other object. I wonder if this may symbolize death tree people used as instruments. In the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh epic, just before meeting his vassal Enkidu for the first time, the king dreams of acquiring a useful axe, and when the monstrous Humbaba's tree is cut down, the defeated monster offers himself as a servant (e.g. Bynum, op. cit., pp.230-32). The Mayan epic, thePopol Vuh, tells how the first race of men were carved out of wood, and how their utensils revolted against them and destroyed them: D. Goetz, S. G. Morley and A. Recinos (transl.), Popol Vuh (Norman, Okla- homa, 1950), pp.88-93.



Date post:	20-Jan-2017
Category:	Documents
Upload:	claire-russell
View:	224 times
Download:	1 times

The Life Tree and the Death Tree

Documents