The Tree that Binds

In the United States, most of us are either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants. With the exception of Native North Americans, it is hard to claim any sort of connection to the land that goes back more than a few hundred years. There is much to admire and learn from the intimate connections that indigenous peoples maintain with land. It has caused me to want to seek my own deep connections to place and land. Could the fact that Americans per capita are the largest consumers, waste producers and carbon emitters on the planet have anything to do with our disconnection from a deep and spiritual sense of place? I'll leave that one for the dime store philosophers and bar stool cognoscenti to needle out.

The idea of sacred trees and sacred groves is a common one that can be found in the stories of virtually every culture on the planet. From the biblical Tree of Life, the Bodhi Tree of the Buddha, or the Guernica Oak pictured above, sacred trees are a commonality that bind humanity together, evoking not only a shared past, but the necessity of a shared future. If we return to connect individually and collectively with our shared pasts, it could help us create a better future. You don't need to celebrate the solstice, dance naked or wear goat leggings to believe in the idea of a sacred tree. Modern new ageism has shrouded the idea in a sometimes weird cloak of popular culture. Whatever your heritage or belief system, there is probably a sacred tree in there somewhere.

In an academically verbose, yet slim volume The Sacred Tree: Ancient and Medieval Manifestations, Carol Cusak examines the religious function of sacred trees in comparative Indo-European contexts, from the Celtic shores of Europe to the ancient stories of India. The smilarities of stories regarding sacred trees and their interconnections between cultures come forth in this book.

Within the Indo-European framework, the myths of Scandinavia are the best recorded due to the late date of conversion to Christianity in those countries. Christianity supplanted the traditional orally transmitted belief systems with very little being recorded regarding what came before. Though many things were incorporated into religious traditions and remain as often unrecognized vestiges of the past.

The texts recounting Norse mythology, recorded in Iceland during the Middle Ages give us some of the best documentation of Norse belief and the sacred tree Yggdrasil. Yggdrasil, the World Tree, sits at the center of the nine worlds of Norse belief. It simultaneously supports the three levels of the nine worlds, while also in essence being the world itself.

As part of this cosmological way of viewing the world, traditions of connecting to a landscape persisted up until at least the late 19th Century in parts of Scandanavia. On farms in Norway and Sweden, a tree was often planted in the center of the yard. In Norway this was called a tuntre and Sweden a vardtrad (guardian tree). As Douglas Hulmes of Prescott College writes even in this contemporary age, these trees are often treated with respect. He writes: "The caring for the tree demonstrates respect for ancestors‟ spirits that were/are believed to reside in the tree, and is a moral reminder of caring for the farm or place where one lives." Knowledge of this traditional practice, like so many others is quickly disappearing with modernity.

Historically, the tree would serve as a representation of the center of the world of Norse cosmology. References in other sources refer to the layout of a farm reproducing in physical form a "map" of the cosmological belief system with the vardtrad (representing Yggdrasil). I would like to know more about this fascinating way of connecting the physical landscape to a spiritual one.