Cultus Arborum: A Descriptive Account of Phallic Tree Worship (1890)

As such, this book intentionally seems to relish missing the forest for the trees, offering hundreds of examples from religious history connected only by the soft logic of association. A sense of this volume’s eclectic breadth can be seen in the table of contents: “Invocation of Tree Gods”; “Origin of Groves”; “Persian bushes”; “The ‘Ash Faggot Ball’ of Somersetshire”; and “Universal Sacredness of the Oak”, to take examples almost at random. At times, the montage pace of the author’s quest produces dizzying, if unconfirmable, results. Tracking the oracular trees of the Sun and Moon, as described in a fictional fourth-century letter from Alexander the Great to Aristotle, the author ferrets out their supposed location from the Pseudo-Callisthenes and John Mandeville’s Travels (ca. 1350). He speculates that one of these specimens might have been a cypress tree “said to be 1,450 years old, and to measure 33 ¾ cubits in girth” near Kashmar, Iran, grown from a paradisical shoot brought down to Earth by Zoroaster, which was felled by al-Mutawakkil in the ninth century and transported to Baghdad on rollers by thirteen-hundred camels. In his footnote-chasing foray, the author elevates hearsay to a literary style.

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