Trees and humankind have always had a symbiotic relationship.  Throughout the centuries, trees have offered us shelter from teh cold and the heat.  They have provided us with a multitude of nutritios fruits, leaves, flowers and roots for food and medicine.  They have given us wood with which to make our tools, weapons and toys, not to mention timber for houses, fences, boats and bridges.  But perhaps most significant of all, trees have provided fuel for fire, which, once it was tamed hundreds of thousands of years ago, became the engine of civilization.  Trees are our strongest allies.

The entire spectrum of human existence is reflect in tree lore through the ages:  from birth, death and rebirth to the age-old struggle between good and evel, and the quest for beauty, truth and enlightenment.

Our ancestors recognized that there is a vital balance in life:   you take and you give.  So they celebrated the forces of nature by offering them gifts, songs, prayers and blessings to revitalize the natural world--a world of which they felt themselves to be an intimate part.  Many cultures saw (and still see) everything in creation as imbued with spirit, which means that all living things are regarded as sacred.

Whatever our personal beliefs regarding nature spirits, and the question of whether God exists inside creation or only outside it, one thing is certain:  the ability to extend compassion to other life forms, to feel gratitude and give thanks for sharing in the miracle of life, to respect, if not to love, all fellow inhabitants of this planet, makes us better human beings and helps us to triumph over ignorance and greed.  The living wisdom of trees shows us that life is worth so much.

THE TREE OF LIFE

Native North Americans call trees "our standing brothers and sisters." Humans and trees share an upright, vertical orientation.  We walk, they stand.  We move and change, they remain the quiet centre of being.

According to many of the teachings of ancient wisdom, the universe comprises a spirla or circular movement around a central axis, the axis mundi.  And this centre pole has often been depected as the Tree of Life, or Univesal Tree.  Esssentially, the Tree of Life is an image of the whole universe, or at least of our planet, that embodies the ntion that all life is interrelated and sacred.  It portrays the universe as much more than a lifeless, clockwork mechanism that blindly follows the laws of physics; rather, it presents our world as a living, evolving organism, imbued with divine spirit.

The Tree of Life is a concept that can be traced back to Neolithic times.  From there it developed as part of the philsophy of most ancient cultures, whether it was early civilizations and city-states, such as those of Egypt, Persia and Greece, or tribal societies which remained closer to nature.

During the Bronze and Iron Ages different cultures developed their particular characteristics, their sets of moral and law codes, aesthetis, languages, customs, and so on.  And as part of the process, the ancient concept of the Tree of Life also evolved into a multitude of forms--for example, the Haoma tree in Zoroastrian Persia, the Tooba Tree atthe centre of the Islamic paradise, the World Tree Yggdrasil in Norse myth, 'Ex Chajim in Judaism and Ts'ogs-shing, the "Assembly Tree of the Gods" in Tibetan Buddhism.  And it appears elsewhere in world mythology under many more names.

However, one aspect of tree-related tradtions remained the same throughout the largely patriarchal ages, which followed teh Neolithic:   a clear sense of the female side of the divine.  The tree remained linked with thenotion of female deities and the ancient Mother Goddess.  For example, in the pre-hieroglyphic script of ancient Egypt, the word for giving birth is derived directly from the word for tree.  This was no coincidence.  The Tree of Life is the great mother of creation, all-encompassing, all-birthing, all-healing.  The tree symbolism goes back to a time that coincides with the worldwide cult of the Great Goddess.

The cosmic "womb" is also all-devouring, but only to transform life and rebirth it. In ancient cosmology, death is not a polar opposite of life, just an important part of the cycle.  Most peoples believed in reincarnation or some other form of afterlife.  An ancient druid saying that has come down to us from Gaul (modern France) states, "Death is nothing but a gate in a long journey."

The living wisdom of trees tells us that we are all traveling together through the cycles of life.

THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

In the Germanic languages, most terms for learning knowledge, wisdom and so on are derived from the words for tree or wood.  In Anglo-Saxon we have witan (mind, consciousness) and witige (wisdom), in English, "wits", "witch" and "wizard", and in modern German Witz (wits, joke).  These words all stem from the ancient Scandinavian root word vid, which means "wood" (as in forest, not timber).

A druid was a most knowledgeable person.  The word is made up from two Gaulish Celtic words dru (very, highly, most) and vid (knowledge).  And this very knowledge came from the woods, not only because a druid trained for up to 20 years in remote forest academies, but also because all original knowledge came from the trees.  (This does not threaten God's elevated position as the highest being:  God is the source, trees are but channels).  All ancient cultures, whether they prayed to one god or many, acknowledged trees asbeing able to elevate the human consciousness to higher forms of perception, and to receive messages from the higher planes (or the deeper Self). Hence the worldwide abundance of traditions of tree oracles and sanctuaries.  Some divine messengers, such as birds, might have wings, but most have leaves.

And the leaves of the Tree of Knowledge are the letters of the old sacred alphabet, which early humans plucked from the tree, and which gave them writing to enable them to preserve the word.  Writing was regarded as magical because it empowered the word to travel through, and even defeat, time.  Primarily, early alphabets functioned as systems for divination (for example, the Norse runes), with every symbol representing a certain aspect of the primeval life force.  An ancient Irish alphabet, the Ogham (pronounced "oam"), comprises 20 letters, each named after a local species of tree. Using such alphabets as tools, humankind began to write on birch bark, walnut or beech tablets, and to carve spells in yew, rowan and other woods.

In the 7th century B.C., the Buddha searched under a sacred pipal tree for the highest knowledge, the "ultimate and unconditional truth".  He found it.  The living wisdom of trees reminds us that learning starts with listening.

SACRED GROVES

The notion of the spiritual nature of trees had a very real effect on people and on the landscape.  ON every continent, certain trees and groves were protected as "sacred".  To different peoples of the world, different tree species represented the Tree of Life (for aspects of it), according to which species grew locally and -- as all species have different characteristics and qualities--which tree character resonated most strongly with the spiritual ideals emphasized by a particular culture.  For example, in  ancient Sumer it seems to have been the cedar of Lebanon; in pre-historic Persia it was the plane tree; and in Siberia the birch is the World Tree of shamanic tradition.

Most religions began beneath sacred trees.  A simple altar marked the sanctuary.  Later, a roof or enclosure might have been added, and eventually the sanctuary became a man-made temple.

A "sacred" status also has a very direct impact on ecology:  such a tree, or even aspecies, is protected.  For example, the persea was one of the sacred trees of ancient Egypt.  However, with the disappearance of the ancient religion, it lost its special status and became a source of timber and fuel in a hot country where trees are rare.  Sadly, by about 900 years later it was extinct in Egypt, and only a few specimens still survive today in Ethiopia.  In medieval Europe, almost the only ancient yew trees to escape felling and being made into longbows were consecrated trees that grew in churchyards.

SUSTAINABILITY

But people had to survive, and they needed the products of trees of all kinds.  Growing populations and increasing farming slowly changed the face of the earth.

Some contemporary writers have accused early civilizations of thoughtless deforestation and overexploitation of trees.  In fact, there is increasing archeological evidence that effective resource management was employed all over the ancient world.  The sustainable methods of coppicing and pollarding, which were once thought to have been introduced by the medieval metal, glass and salt industries to feed their vast charcoal requirement, has actually been shown to go back as far as the Neolithic.  Similarly, the lopping of branches for leaf fodder to feed livestock is a sustainable technique of ancient farmyard management.

An example of good ancient timber management is the cypresses Crete, which were highly valued by the ancient Minoans, but also exported to Egypt and Greece.  Yet these trees continued to flourish in Crete until the Middle Ages when the Venetians overexploited the cypresses; suitability as time for ships until they became extinct on the island.  But the exploding populations of Europe in the Middle Ages, with their large wooden cities that repeatedly burnt down and had to be rebuilt, created higher demands for wood than millennia of ancient cultures in the Near East had done--they used mud bricks, even to build palaces.  And any modern skyscraper requires more wood (for encasing the cement) than an ancient palace ever did.

Wood trade and construction in the Old World were part of everyday life, as they are today.  But in ancient times trees were respected as living beings with equal seriousness.  Around 3,500 years ago, an ancient Egyptian, Treasurer of Pharaoh Thutmosis III, led an expedition to find cedar timber in the Lebanon.  The inscription on his tomb tells how he made offerings, until -- from a source beyond our modern reasoning--he knew he had permission to take certain trees.  This is one of many ancient examples of respect triumphing over greed to ensure harmony with nature.