Dæmon in the Wood; The Ritual Fallacy

Arthur Evans’ Tree of Aniconic Divinity
page two

Since it served no evident practical purpose, Evans supposed that this type of unroofed enclosure around a tree was cultic. He called it an ‘hypaethral sanctuary,’ and reasoned that if the enclosure was cultic, then the living tree enclosed within it was sacred. He observed that where the workmanship in these depictions permitted identification of the enclosed trees’ species, as it did on his steatite fragment from Gypsades (Fig. 7), they were often figs. One might object that such an enclosure around a fruiting tree need have no other intention than the mundane practical one of keeping hungry goats away from the tree, like the ruder African fences in Figures 10a and 10b.

Fig. 10a. A young fruit tree fenced against the casual
nibbling of passing goats.

Fig. 10b. A fence that failed marks the place where the sapling died.

There were both domestic and wild goats aplenty on Crete in the Bronze Age, and they were undoubtedly just as destructive of young trees then as they are today. But an enclosure to protect a new tree from goats need not be so elaborate a piece of masonry as that shown in the Mycenaean and Minoan portrayals. And other features of those scenes bespoke cult too. The devout attitude of the anthropomorphic figures who face the trees as on the sealstone from Ligortino (Fig. 9), or the ritualistic postures of other figures such as those on the gold signet from Mycenae (Fig. 8) seem to denote some manner of cult.

Evans knew of several species of trees besides the fig which were sometimes ‘sacred’ in the Aegean Bronze Age: palm, plane-tree, cypress, and grape-vine. Later, in classical Greece, the oak and the black poplar also figured in cult, while in ancient Italy the cornel and beech were used ritually, together with the oak and fig. Among the Semitic neighhours of the Mycenaean world, there were in addition the Hebrew mulberry and acacia, and later the Arabic gharcad. So Evans was well informed about the standing, green trees of ancient Mediterranean cults.

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