Chapter 4

Lastly, synonymous with haruc is the OHG. paro [[grove]], gen. parawes, AS. bearo [[grove]], gen. bearwes, which betoken lucus (5) and arbor, a sacred grove or a tree; æt bearwe [[at grove]], Kemble. 1, 255. ON. barr [[needles (leaves) of the fur or pine]] (arbor), Sæm. 109; barri (nemus) 86, 87. qui ad aras sacrificat = de za demo parawe (al. za themo we) ploazit [[that which he sacrifices in the grove]], Diut. 1, 150; ara, or rather the pl. arae, here stands for templum (see Suppl.).

Temple then means also wood. What we figure to ourselves as a built and walled house, resolves itself, the farther back we go, into a holy place untouched by human hand, embowered and shut in by self-grown trees. There dwells the deity, veiling his form in rustling foliage of the boughs; there is the spot where the hunter has to present to him the game he has killed, and the herdsmen his horses and oxen and rams.

What a writer of the second century says on the cultus of the Celts, will hold good of the Teutonic and all the kindred nations: Keltoi sebousi men Dioj keltikon iyhlh drij, Maximus Tyrisu (diss. 8, ed. Reiske 1, 142). Compare Lasicz. 46: deos nemora incolere persuasum habent (Samogitae). Habitarunt dî quoque sylvas (Haupts zeitschr. 1, 138).

I am not maintaining that this forest-worship exhausts all the conceptions our ancestors had formed of deity and its dwellingplace; it was only the principal one. Here and there a god may haunt a mountain top, a cave of the rock, a river; but the grand general worship of the people had its seat in the grove. And nowhere cold it have found a worthier (see Suppl.).

At a time when rude beginnings were all that there was of the builder's art, the human mind must have been roused to a higher devotion by the sight of lofty trees under an open sky, than it could feel inside the stunted structures reared by unskillful hands. When long afterwards the architecture peculiar to the Teutons reached its perfection, did it not in its boldest creations still aim at reproducing the soaring trees of the forest? Would not the abortion of miserably carved or chiselled images lag far behind the form of the god which the youthful imagination of antiquity pictured to itself, throned on the bowery summit of a sacred tree? In the sweep and under the shade (6) of primeval forests, the soul of man found itself filled with the nearness of sovran deities. The mighty influence that a forest life had from the first on the whole being of our nation, is attested by the 'march-fellowships;' marka, the word from which they took their name, denoted first a forest, and afterwards a boundary.

The earliest testimonies to the forest-cultus of the Germans are furnished by Tacitus. Germ. 9: ceterum nec cohibere parietibus deos, neque in ullam humani oris speciem adsimulare ex magnitudine coelestium arbitrantur. Lucos ac nemora consecrant, deorumque nominibus adpellant secretum illud quod sola reverentia vident. (7) Germ. 39, of the Semnones; Stato tempore in silvam auguriis patrum et prisca formidine sacram (8) omnes ejusdem sanguinis populi legationibus coëunt. est et alia luco reverentia. nemo nisi vinculo ligatus ingreditur, ut minor et protestatem numinis prae se ferens. si forte prolapsus est, attolli et insurgere haud licitum: per humum evolvuntur. (9) cap. 40: est in insula oceani castum nemus, dicatumque in eo vehiculum veste contectum. cap. 43: apud Naharvalos antiquae religionis lucus astenditur............numini nomen Alcis, nulla simulacra. cap. 7: effigies et signa (i.e., effigiata signa) quaedam detractae lucis in proelium ferunt; with which connect a passage in Hist. 4, 22: inde depromptæ silvis lucisque ferarum imagines, ut cuique genti inire proelium mos est. Ann. 2, 12: Caesar transgressus Visurgim indicio perfugae cognoscit delectum ab Arminio locum pugnae, convenisse et alias nationes in silvam Herculi sacram. Ann. 4, 73: mox conpertum a transfugis, nongentos Romanorum apud lucum, quem Baduhennae vocant, pugna in posterum extracta confectos; though it does not appear that this grove was a consecrated one. (10) Ann. 1, 61: lucis propinquis barbarae arae, apud quas tribunos mactaverant; conf. 2, 25: propinquo luco defossam Varianae legionis aquilam modico praesidio servari. Hist. 4, 14: Civilis primores gentis...........sacrum in nemus vocatos. These expression can be matched by others from Claudian three centuries later, Cons. Stilich. 1, 288:

Ut procul Hercyniae per vasta silentia silvae

venari tuto liceat, lucosque vetusta

religione truces, et robora numinis instar

barbarici nostrae feriant impune bipennes.

De bello Get. 545:

Hortantes his adde deos. Non somnia nobis,

nec volucres, sed clara palam vox edita luco est:

'rumpe omnes, Alarice, moras!'

It is not pure nature-worship that we are told of here; but Tacitus could have had no eye for the 'mores Germanorum,' if their most essential features had escaped him. Gods dwell in these groves; no images (simulacra, in human form) are mentioned by name as being set up, no temple walls are reared. (11) But sacred vessels and altars stand in the forest, heads of animals (ferarum imagines) hang on the boughs of trees. There divine worship is performed and sacrifice offered, there is the folk-mote and the assize, everywhere a sacred awe and reminiscence of antiquity. Have not we here alah [[temple]], wih [[idol]], paro [[grove]], haruc [[harrow]] faithfully portrayed? How could such technical terms, unless they described an organized national worship presided over by priests, have sprung up in the language, and lived?

During many centuries, down to the introduction of christianity, this custom endured, of venerating deity in sacred woods and trees.




ENDNOTES:

5. To the Lat. lucus would correspond a Goth. láuhs, and this is confirmed by the OHG. lôh [[meadow]], AS. leáh [[meadow]]. The Engl. lea, ley has acquired the meaning of meadow, field; also the Slav. lug, Boh. lutz, is at once grove, glade, and meadow. Not only the wood, but wooded meadows were sacred to gods (see Suppl.).  (back)

6. Waldes hleo, hlea [[the woods' shelter]] (umbra, umbraculum). Hel. 33, 22. 73, 23. AS. hleo [[shelter, protection]], ON. hlie [[?]], OHG. liwa [[shelter]], Graff 2, 296, MHG. lie, liewe [[foliage]].  (back)

7. Ruodolf of Fuld (863) has incorporated the whole passage, with a few alterations, in his treatise De translatione Alexandri (Pertz 2, 675), perhaps from some intermediate source. Tacitus's words must be taken as they stand. In his day Germany possessed no masters who could build temples or chisel statues; so the grove was the dwelling of the gods, and a sacred symbol did instead of a statue. Möser 30 takes the passage to mean, that the divinity common to the whole nation was worshipped unseen, so as not to give one district the advantage of possessing the temple; but that separate gods did have their images made. The view is too political, and also ill-suited to the isolation of tribes in those times. No doubt, a region which included a god's hill would acquire the more renown and sacredness, as spots like Rhetra and Loreto did from containing the Slavic sanctuary or a Madonna: that did not prevent the same worship from obtaining seats elsewhere. With the words of Tacitus compare what he says in Hist. 2, 78: est Judaem inter Syriamque Carmelus, ita vocant montem deumque, nec simulacrum deo aut templum, sic tradidere majores, ara tantum et reverentia; and in Dial. de Orat. 12: nemora vero et luci et secretum ipsum. In Tacitus secretum = secessus, seclusion, not arcanum.  (back)

8. This hexameter is not a quotation, it is the author's own.  (back)

9. Whoever is engaged in a holy office, and stands in the presence and precincts of the god, must not stumble, and if he falls to the ground, he forfeits his privilege. So he who in holy combat sinks to the earth, may not set himself on his legs, but must finish the fight on his knees, Danske viser 1, 115; so in certain places a stranger's carriage, if overturned, must not be set upright again, RA. 554. What is fabled of an idol called Sompar at Görlitz (neue lausitz. monatsschr. 1805, p. 1-18) has evidently been spun out of this passage in Tac.; the Semnones are placed in the Lausitz country, as they had been previously by Aventin (Frankf. 1580, p. 27), who only puts a king Schwab in the place of Sompar.  (back)

10. Baduhenna, perhaps the name of a place, like Arduenna. Müllenhoff adds Badvinna, Patunna (Haupts zeitschr. 9, 241).  (back)

11. Brissonius de reguo Pers. 2, 28; 'Persae diis suis nulla templa vel altaria constituunt, nulla simulacra': after Herodot. 1, 131.  (back)