THE NATURAL GENESIS

It has now to be shown, by a worldwide range of illustration, how the mount and the tree became two of the chief sacred types and figures of expression for the primitive and prehistoric man. Max Muller has remarked that when the Hindu poets exclaim 'What Wood, what Tree was it of which they (the gods) made Heaven and Earth?' this means; in the ancient language of religious poetry, Only of what material were Heaven and Earth formed?[1] On the contrary they speak according to the system of typology which was universal once and interpretable in all lands. It is the same language spoken by Homer when Penelope says to Ulysses: 'Tell me thy lineage, and whence thou art, for thou dost not spring from the ancient Tree nor from the Rock.'[2] Tree and rock, the stock and stone of all the olden worldwide fetishism.

Hesiod knew that the tree and the rock involved great mysteries. In the Theogony, the singer being bidden to sing of the race of the ever-living ever-blessed immortals, asks why should he begin by telling tales or blabbing mysteries concerning the sacred tree (oak) or the rock?[3] The 'Rock of Israel' was a type of the progenitor of that people. 'But,' says Max Muller, 'the Hebrews speak in a very different sense from that in which Homer speaks of the Rock from which Man has sprung.'[4] The answer is that the typology is the same wherever found.

When the son of the chief of the Bushmen who lived in the neighbourhood of the Moravian station at Glenadendal became a Christian, he told the missionaries that the Bushmen performed a kind of religious worship to two rocks, the one representing a male and the other a female. On going out to hunt they implored the aid of these deities to provide them with food. First they went to the male rock and struck it with a stick; if it sounded they believed the report [p.372] was heard in heaven and they would have success; but if they got nothing they repaired to the female rock, which they thought was inhabited by a malicious spirit, and beat it well, upbraiding it, saying; 'Why do you, by your hidden arms, cause all the game to be shot dead so that we can find none?'[5]

The rock or mount is also reverenced by the negroes on the Gold Coast, where it is called Tabora, the same type by name as the Mount Tabor, the Egyptian Tepr the point of commencement in a circle. The Zulus have the magical tree, and the rock with two holes which opens and shuts at the voice of those who know the secret[6]. The hereditary title of the Chief of Pango-pango, Samoa, is Maunga, the mountain; as was the Egyptian sen and the Hebrew tzer. 'Great Mountain' is the title of the supreme divinity of the Santhals. One of the New Zealand chiefs claimed the neighbouring mountain, Tongoriro, for his progenitor. 'This seemingly whimsical belief,' says Mr. Spencer, 'becomes intelligible when we observe how easily it may have arisen from a nickname. Do we not ourselves sometimes speak figuratively of a tall fat man as a mountain of flesh?'[7] True, but here, again, we have the same system of typology as in Africa, India, and Greece. The Mount and the Tree were primordial types of the genetrix, of Khepsh, of Ri (Ishtar) Hathor, Kêd, Parvati, and others. Primally it was the mount of the north, the birthplace of beginning. Tongoriro denotes the very lofty. In Egyptian sen is the mountain (or rock) and the chieftain, the head; in Hebrew, the god. The Maori Chief claimed descent from the olden rock or mountain. The mountain Maunga is named from mau, fixed, enduring: and the same word signifies a product of Earth. The chief was descended from the motherhood in its first form, that of Earth, which was represented by the mount and the tree. According to Paul, Hagar the mother of Ishmael was Mount Sinai, in Arabia. Therefore Ishmael was likewise the son of the mount as typical birthplace. It is also certain that Paul knew this symbolical nature of the Mount when he said it answered to Jerusalem, the 'Mother of us all.'[8]

The genetrix who was represented by the mount came to be called the great harlot and prostitute, on account of the early status of the mother. She is still identified by the rock or mount as the 'Bad Woman' of Hong Kong. This is the name of a particular rock on the hill near Wanchai that presides over the illicit intercourse of the sexes. Those who make money by immoral practices still offer her a share of their profits, and burn frankincense at the foot of this rock, which remains a monument of the motherhood as it was in the primitive sociology[9].

[p.373] The mythical heroes of the Parsees were born of the Mount Ushi-Darena, from which they are said to descend with the glory shining on their faces.

The Navajos claim the mount for their birthplace and attribute their deliverance from the underworld dwelling in the heart of it to the moth-worm that mounted and made a way out of the mountain when he found himself in a world all water[10]. The world all water was the heaven above; the moth-worm is a symbol of the breathing power. The Indians of Guinea venerate the tree and mount under the figure of a great rock that rises sheer up for fifty feet like the trunk of a gigantic stem; this is designated 'Pure-piapa' or the 'headless tree.'[11] In Plato's Timaeus the prototypes of our race are spoken of as being enclosed in, and developed from the great tree[12], which is not to be understood except by knowing the history of the tree as a type of the genetrix. The Lenni Lenape Indians relate that Manitou at the beginning floated on the water and shaped the earth out of a grain. He then made a man and a woman out of a tree. The Popul Vuh describes man as being created from a tree named the Tzité. Woman, according to the same authority, was formed from the marrow of a reed called Sibac[13]. The Hindus still ascribe genders to the bamboo, reed, or cane; and the female one contains the pith, the male the hard substance. The Sioux Indians have a myth of the primal man who stood for many ages with his feet made fast in the soil and growing like a tree. Near him grew another tree. A snake gnawed them off at the root, whereupon they walked away as human beings[14]. The serpent that gnaws at the root of the tree reappears as Nidhogg beneath one of the roots of Yggdrasill. But in neither instance can anything be made out of such statements until the typology is interpreted.

The Philippine Islanders narrate how the world at first consisted of sky and water, and between these there was nothing but a Glede, which, finding no place of rest, and being weary of flying about set the water at variance with the sky; this he did in order to keep it within bounds; and, to prevent its getting uppermost, he loaded the water with a number of islands to settle on and leave the sky at peace. Then mankind sprang out of a large cane with two joints that floated about in the water, and was thrown by the waves against the feet of the Glede which stood on the shore and opened the cane with its bill. A man issued from one joint, a woman from the other[15]. The tree or cane with two joints denotes the two sexes that were divided first at puberty. So Tin split the tree into man and woman. The one that split the tree or opened the cane represents a type of pubescence like the stone of Pundjel or the tortoise of [p.374] Fo-hi. Here it is the glede or hawk, a Kamite symbol of soul which as the soul of pubescence did divide to distinguish the sexes, or split the double-jointed cane in two.

As the three sons of Bor were one day walking along the sea-beach they found two stems of wood floating on the waters. Out of these they shaped a man and a woman. Odin breathed into them the breath of life; Honir made them to go, and Lodur caused them to speak, hear, and see. The man they called Ask (or Ash), the woman Embla. From these two descend the whole human race[16]. A tree was pointed out to the traveller Erman as an important monument of an early epoch in the history of Beresov. When the Ostiak rulers dwelt there in former times this tree was a particular object of adoration. It was a larch about fifty feet high, and its peculiar sacredness was connected with the singularity of its form and growth. For about six feet upward from the earth the trunk had divided into two equal parts and then united above in a single bole[17]. Thus the tree offered an obvious image of the doorway of life. 'Honour your paternal aunt, the Date-Palm (says Mohammed), for she was created in Paradise of the same earth as that from which Adam was formed.'[18]

The stake, that is a reduced form of the tree, still represents the first mother and the later ancestors in the sacrificial feasts of the Damaras; they stick this type of the tree and primal parent into the ground and offer the first portions of the feast to it.

The Veddas who dwell in huts made of bark live in a primitive form of the tree-ark, and their name for the house Rukula, means the hollow tree in Singhalese. The Tasmanians returned their dead to the mother's arms under this type, by burying them in a hollow tree.*

* The recent fall of an enormous puketea tree near Opotiki, New Zealand, disclosed the fact that the hollow interior from the roots to the first fork, about forty-five feet from the ground, had been filled with human bones. A confused heap of skeletons burst out of the butt of the tree when it fell. A local paper says: 'A more extraordinary sight than this monarch of the forest lying prone and discharging a perfect hecatomb of human skeletons can scarcely be conceived. Some are nearly perfect while others are mixed up in a chaotic mass of heads, hands, feet, and arms, indiscriminately. All the Maoris here seem to have been quite unaware of this natural charnel-house, and declare that it must have been filled long before their or their fathers' time. Indeed the appearance of the tree fully justifies the supposition that it must have been some hundreds of years since this novel family vault was filled with its ghastly occupants.'[19]

The hollow tree or gas was also a British coffin. The inhabitants of Thebes in the eleventh dynasty, many of whom are negroes, were buried in coffins formed of the hollowed trunk of a peculiar kind of tree, which is no longer met with except in the Sudan[20]. The tree of the birthplace is yet extant in Germany, north and south, as 'Frau Holda's Tree;' the common name for old decayed and hollow boles. A hollow tree in or overhanging a pool is still recognised [p.375] as the habitation of unborn children. A Hessian legend describes the genetrix Frau Holda as a lovely woman in front and behind a hollow tree with a rugged bark[21]. An ancient tree once stood on the Heinzenberg near Zell, which was the shrine of 'Our Lady' the genetrix. When the woodman cut it down it was said to utter its moan. At the present time 'Our Lady's' chapel stands on the same spot[22]. The chapel superseded the tree, and 'Our Lady' who was Holda once, is Mary now. It is the same in Egypt. There the sycamore is sacred to Hathor, the Egyptian Venus, who is styled 'Mistress of the Sycamore' at Maturea. In the Ritual the solar god is said to issue forth from the midst of the copper-coloured sycamore. The tree being employed as a type of the genetrix and birthplace (locality) in one. Maturea is named from mat an ancient name of An the place of birth, beginning and repetition, where the tree of the Two Truths grew in the pool of Persea, or the tree of life stood in the water of life. To this day the sycamore-fig of Hathor, one of whose characters and names is men (and this is likewise a name of her tree as the men or mulberry-fig), is pointed to at Maturea as the tree of Mary and her child. In the Arab traditions the divine child Jesus was also said to have been concealed in the trunk of the Gemaselt tree, a spider having spun its web over the entrance to hide him from his pursuers. The mother of Confucius is reputed to have been told in a dream by the Black Te that she should bring forth the divine child in a hollow mulberry-tree[23]. The elder tree is an especial type of Holda the old or elder mother, the Danish Uildmoer who, as herein maintained, is one with the Egyptian Urta, the bearer, and Irish Arth, the bear. The earth is of course one type of the bearer under the same name, but the tree would be first recognised as the yielder of fruit. The mother-tree in England is often reduced to the status of a gooseberry-bush, beneath which the babies are found, but it is still a bearer of fruit. The tree as a type of the birthplace will account for the custom of passing diseased infants through a split sapling or the cleft of a stem which, in some cases, may have signified a transference of the disease to a genius of health supposed to reside in the tree.

But primarily the tree typified renewal, and this was a symbolical mode of rebirth from the mother imaged as the tree. Such was the idea in the eschatological phase where the adult was regenerated and born anew in the mysteries, whether from the tree, the holed-stone, the ark, cow, or any other type of the rue des femmes, when the object was a moral or spiritual renewal. The tree was a type of healing when the rags and other tokens of disease were hung upon it by the sufferers praying for assistance. When the Khonds hung up the hands of their slain foemen on the tree it was a type of their deity [p.376] to whom they offered their trophies. In this aspect the tree is equivalent to the 'Hill-Altar' of the Jews, upon which they offered their propitiatory sacrifice. 'His own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree,'[24] is a continuation of the tree itself, which had borne the propitiatory offering on its living altar. But, in all the oldest mythologies the tree is a type of the motherhood, and the child is her branch. The Egyptian Rennut is the nurse, the rennu is her nursling, and renpu to renew, be young, is the name of the branch, shoot or plant, as the child of the tree. The genetrix as Hathor is portrayed in the tree or by the tree, and as the tree half human in shape. From this she pours out the drink of life and furnishes the food upon which souls are fed.

In one picture the deceased standing with his body on one side of the tree of life, and as a soul on the other exclaims, 'Oh, Sycamore of Nut, give me the water and the breath of lift which proceed from thee, that I may have the vigour of the goddess of vigour.'[25] He receives the water of life being of flesh and blood; breath of life as a spirit, both from the mother in accordance with the Two Truths, and in their earliest phase. Isis is said to have found the ark of Osiris exposed on the river Nile, containing the child, entangled in a thicket of heath or tamarisk, the Aseru, a form of the tree of life[26], which had entwined about the ark and child until both were completely enclosed within its trunk, now grown up into a stately tree. This tree which contained the invisible chest, or ark, and child, was made into a pillar to support the roof of a royal palace. Isis being informed of this went herself to Byblus. When she came there, she sat down hard by a well. Here she met with the ark-tree; 'she begged the post that held up the roof.' This tree, or pillar, she trimmed of its bushy heath, poured perfumed oil upon it and wrapped the trunk in fine linen, and thenceforth it was laid up in the Temple of Isis[27].

A similar myth of the tree and child is related of Krishna. One legend describes how he was transformed into the trunk of sandalwood, or the tchandana tree, and that after being planted in Yamouna, near Mathurea, it passed from thence to the holy waters of the Ganges, and these bore it to the shore of Orica[28].

In the north the ash, which is the tree of life in Egypt, is known as the 'Refuge of Thor,' because that tree caught and saved him when he was being swept away by the river Vimur, just as the child Osiris was being swept away, but was saved by the tree, inferentially as the type of a landmark.

So supreme an emblem of reproduction was the tree in India that the Buddha is fabled to have been incarnated some forty or fifty times under the tree-type, the tree of knowledge, wisdom or enlightenment.

[p.377] Maurice observes that 'it is a fact, not less remarkable than well-attested, that the Druids in their Groves were accustomed to select the most stately and beautiful tree as an emblem of the deity they adored, and having cut off the side branches, they affixed two of the largest of them to the highest part of the trunk in such a manner that these branches extended on each side like the arms of a man, and together with the body, presented the appearance of a huge cross, and in the bark in several places was inscribed the letter Tau.'[29] On the central upright stem he says they cut the word 'Taramis,' on the right hand branch the name of 'Hesus,' and on the left hand one 'Belinus.' Taramis represents the Daronwy of the Druids. Taliesin celebrated this tree as the great refuge from the flood. 'What tree is greater than he, Daronwy? I know not for a refuge around the proud circle of Heaven that there is a mystery which is greater.'[30] Belin, it may be remarked, is an inner African type-name for the young one, the new thing, the Rennu (Eg.).

The mother of Adonis was said to have been metamorphosed into a tree, and in that shape to have brought forth the divine child[31]. On the coins of ancient Crete the genetrix is portrayed, like Hathor or Nupe, in the tree[32].

In the Phrygian mysteries, called those of the mother of the gods a pine-tree was cut down every year, and the image of a youth was bound on the inside. This was on the first day of the feast of Kubele[33]. 'What means that pine,' asks Arnobius, 'which on certain days you bring into the sanctuary of the Mother of the gods?' This he identifies with the tree of the genetrix, beneath which the youth Attis laid hands upon himself, and which the mother consecrated in solace of her own wound[34].

The 'dark pine' that grew in Eridu was the seat, shrine, and couch, of the Akkadian genetrix Zikum. She who was the tree that bore the child as Tammuz or Duzi. 'In Eridu a dark pine grew. It was planted in a holy place. Its crown was crystal white, which spread towards the deep vault above. The abyss of Hea was its pasturage in Eridu, a canal full of waters. Its station (seat) was the centre of this earth. Its shrine was the couch of mother Zikum. The (roof) of its holy house like a forest spread its shade; there (were) none who entered not within it. It was the seat of the mighty mother.'[35]

In Egypt the sycamore-fig is the chief type of the tree of life from which the Great Mother, as Hathor, pours out the divine drink.

[p.378] Hathor was the sekhem, or shrine of the child, in the shape of the sycamore tree, also this type of the tree, genetrix, womb, shrine, and tomb may be traced back by name to inner Africa. The typical tree is the—

In this name the tes that is ideographic in the hieroglyphics supplies the t and s which permute in later language. Thus sekh (Eg.), liquid, drink, interchanges with tekh, drink, liquid, wine; to supply with drink; whilst the tsigmo in Kupa becomes tugma in Ebe. In Hebrew the typical tree as the saqamah (המקש) is the sycamore-fig-tree. Also we have a species of fig-tree called the sycamine in English. The fig is an emblem of the womb, the sekhem (Eg.), one of those feminine types like the pomegranate, the Persea fruit, or the lotus which contain their seed within themselves, and it is the fruit of the sycamore-fig-tree. In the African Gura the abode as a hut is the saguma. The Swedish skemma is a store-house for the fruits of the earth. In Egypt the sekhem had become a sacred shrine representing the mother; the abode of Horus in utero.

The Turks have a tradition that when Mary and the child were being pursued by the murderers whom Herod sent after them, they came to the tree at Maturea which having the power of opening and shutting, opened to receive the parents and saved the child[36]. In this legend the sekhem, or sycamore tree, becomes the Egyptian 'Sekhem,' which means the shut-place, and shrine. The typical tree of inner Africa, the sekhem of Egypt, Zikuni of Akkad, survives in the Koran as Al-zakkum, the tree of knowledge; but how different says the text, from the abode of Eden. Here it issues from the bottom of hell, and is planted solely for the torment of the wicked. The fruit of it resembles the heads of devils or serpents (for the word signifies both), so that it is still the tree of the serpent, and the damned are to eat of it and fill their bellies therewith, washing down the fruit with scalding liquor[37].

The Lord said, 'If ye have faith as a grain of mustard-seed, ye would say unto this sycamore tree, Be thou rooted up, and be thou planted in the sea; and it would have obeyed you.'[38] This may possibly contain an occult allusion to the tree of the motherhood which was superseded in the worship of the son; the tree of Zikum in Eridu, and of Hathor at Maturea.

The natural genesis of the typical tree is self-evident. Norden describes the sycamore-fig as a very tree of life in Egypt. He says the people almost live off it. This tree is always green and bears its fruit several times a year, without observing any change of season[39]. [p.379] Ficus sycomorus in Egypt sometimes measures fifty feet in girth. But equatorial Africa is the paradise of the sycamore tree, which grows there to a size befitting the roof-tree of the world.

Captain Cameron describes three vast specimens towering outside the town of Khoko which formed a prominent mark for miles around. One of these afforded ample shelter for 500 people who encamped under its branches[40]. Another type of the food-bestower is the Baobab or Monkey-bread-tree of Central Africa which sometimes attains a girth of thirty yards in the trunk. When it loses its leaves in the dry season, fruit the size of a half-quartern loaf is seen suspended all round it. The wood soon decays and most of the older boles are hollow like those of Frau Holda; these become reservoirs of rain, from which the natives draw water in the dry season, and in the day of need. A magnificent tree of life was the bread-and-water tree for man as for monkey. Its leaves are eaten by the negroes, and the apes are very fond of its fruit which has a slightly acid pulp. Now, one of the old folks' stories told by the Indians of Guiana says the Tree of Life was planted under the rule of Sigu, son of Maikonaitna, and in its stem was pent up the whole of the waters that were to be let forth according to measure and reckoning to stock every lake and river with fish. But, Warika the mischievous monkey forced open the magic cover that kept down the waters and the next minute he was swept away with all living things by the bursting forth of the deluge[41].

In this account we have the tree typified after the Baobab or monkey-bread-fruit tree of inner Africa, with its primitive cistern of water and pent-up reservoir of rain, supplying the type of a tree that contained the deluge. The negroes also make artificial cisterns of the large boles of decaying trees. The name of the Norse tree Yggdrasill, is said by Magnusson to signify the producer of rain[42]. Such a meaning has little application in northern regions, but in Inner Africa where the tree collects water and becomes a reservoir of nature or the mother, an Yggdrasill of wet in a burning land, it was indeed divine as the distributor of an element of life which it had caught in a myriad leafy hands held up to the passing clouds for their riches of rain. When we see Nupe or Hathor portrayed in and as the celestial tree offering the divine food and drink of souls, we have a late picture of the African looking up to the tree of sustenance, of water, and of life itself. So ancient then is this type of the motherhood that it reaches back to the time when the tree was the cradle and coffin of the race, and the bounteous breast of the mother herself leaning over the human infancy with its nourishment; when man, only a little ahead of the Soko, was born and lived in and on and underneath the tree. The natural type was first. The tree preceded any form of the carven image, however rude; consequently [p.380] there are African races with whom the tree has continued from the beginning, and the type has never passed into the domain of representative art. In Egypt where the type is sometimes found in all its phases, a sycamore tree with two arms is a form of the genetrix who became Hathor in the tree or as the tree personified. A sycamore with human arms is an illustration of the 19th chapter of the Ritual; this image of the two-armed tree being the tree, the cross, and the mother of life all united in one.

A great deal of nonsense has been written concerning the so-called 'tree-worship,' and 'tree-spirits.' But, the primitive man was not the diseased victim of subjectivity. The tree that is the African's wong did not become sacred at first because of any inherent 'spirit.'

Primally the tree produced food and was the support of life, the producer, the mother of life on the physical plane. It was the mother in the same sense that the mother was the cow, or the earth was the mother, because it was the source of food and drink in the human in fancy.

Sahagun says the Mexicans adored certain lulls on account of the compared with that of the early men who were glad if the hill or the rainwater which they collected[43], and the same reason is assigned by the aboriginal tribes of India for their worship of hills. But here the words worship and adoration are modern, and the sense is modern tree proved to be a cistern of water for their time of need. Typology shows their mode of representing this hill or tree was as the image of the mother who feeds the child from her breast and still earlier in her womb. Hence the Mount Tanga (in Mose) is the thigh. The primary motive for looking up to the hill or great tree was want of water and desire for fruit—the early man being frugivorous—the first sense of this source of supply; the moral and religious came afterwards. In looking to the hill and tree for sustenance, they had common sense and reason on their side, which is more than can be said for those who have continued the types as fetishes in the religious phase. The first perception was that of food, drink, and shelter. Hence the tree represented the nursing mother. The primitive man did not personify the inherent life of the tree as an object of adoration nor adore any abstract spirit of the forest. He did not conceive of a spirit first and then localise it in the tree. Animistic ideas belong to a later stage; to the metaphysics of savages in common with the 'feng shui' of the Chinese, the poetizing of the Greeks, and the modern interpretation of mythology.

Primitive animism was not spiritual in the current sense. What it was is evident from the genders of American and other early languages in which living things belong to the animate gender, and things dead, motionless or small and mean, belong to the inanimate gender. The motion of wind or lightning; the voice of thunder, the renewing life of the tree, these were animistic but not eschatological. Spirits were [p.381] not conceived as governing phenomena until the elements had been personified as spirits. The fruit evoked no gratitude to a giver that constituted the intelligence of the tree. Language is able to tell us what the tree was to the earliest human perception. It was the dwelling-place and the producer of food, and sometimes it had food on it; at other times none. This would excite expectation. The Ojibwa name for an object of veneration meaning 'My hope,' would particularly apply to a source of water in a burning land, and still remain an adequate expression when the one conscious cause of phenomena was postulated and worshipped in a later religious phase. The earliest form of gratitude would be a lively sense of future favours. These were bestowed at recurring intervals, and thus evoked or appealed to a sense of periodicity. The tree is one of the ideographs of time, and it bears the name of time itself. Our word tree is identical with the Egyptian teru (or tre), the shoot, branch, or tree of time, carried in the hands of Taht the reckoner of lunar time; and teru (Eg.) is likewise the name of time. This is the chief inner African type-name for the tree.

taro, in Legba.	atir, in N'goala.	tir, in Bavon.
tero, in Kaui'e.	tir, in Balu.	turi, in Timbuktu.
tera, in Mose.	atir, in Bagba.	daru, in Barba.
tir, and Atir, in Papiah.	tir, in Kum.	ntera, in Muntti.
tir, in Momenya.	atir, in Pati.

This type is continued in the Egyptian teru, Greek doru or drus, Welsh deru, and English tree. As food-producer the tree became the sign of a season and a teller of time. Therefore the tree that told was adopted as the symbol of a time. On account of its bringing forth fruit periodically, the tree was an intelligencer to men and a kind of primary intelligence. The tree that told became the tree that talked and gave forth oracles whether as the sacred palm of Negra in Yemen, or the prophetic oak of Dodona, the Ava-tree of the Polynesians, the tree 'Mirrone' of the Congo negroes or countless other sacred trees.

The fact is curiously conveyed in the account of the Antilles Islanders which was given by Friar Pane, who says that certain trees were supposed to send for the sorcerers and instruct them in the selecting and shaping of their trunks into idols for the temple where they became oracles[44], which is tantamount to saying that various trees had certain self-manifesting qualities which were best known to the learned in forest-lore, and these gave them a self-conferred sacred character.

The Siamese follow the 'spirit' of a tree (that which constitutes its essential character) into the boat made from its wood, and continue their offerings to it when it has assumed that shape. This 'spirit' we should call 'durability' as of oak; or 'lightness' as of teak the quality which constituted its especial character. With us the [p.382] 'spirit' of the Cinchona bark is quinine; but the modern medicine was a primitive 'spirit.' The ancient tree-spirits are now known as vegetable alkaloids. They have at last revealed their nature. To the early man they only made known certain effects. Still, inasmuch as they did make known they were acknowledged to be tellers, talkers, or intelligencers to men. This habit of self-revelation made the tree oracular to the early mind of man.

The dark side of phenomena being first consciously reflected, dread of an inimical influence would precede a mental recognition of the good. What to avoid would be the first lesson taught by the tree. The tree or plant that produced poison would naturally be considered the abode of a bad character, a power of evil, a tree noted for the malignancy of its indwelling inimical element or power. The African negroes of Senegambia, the Australian aborigines, the Karens of India, and North American Indians, alike seek to propitiate and appease the malicious demon of the tree that sends disease. This was primarily the poisonous tree. But the early man having found it out would simply not eat of it! He did not offer sacrifice to it any more than the dog gives thanks for the grass which he knows to be medicinal; whilst his mind had not yet attained the savage religious phase. The doctrine of early 'spirits' is well illustrated by the Bushmen. A caterpillar called n'gwa supplies a deadly poison with which they anoint the barbs of their arrows. The poison is fatal even to the lion. They are also said to cure the wound of this poison. They told Livingstone that they administered the n'gwa itself with fat[45]. 'The n'gwa wants fat,' they said; having found that fat or oil was an antidote. Now when the negro in felling the Asorin tree gives it the first cut the spirit of the tree is supposed to issue forth and chase him, whereupon the negro drops palm-oil on the ground and while the spirit pauses to lick it up the negro escapes. So the knife that made the cut has to be fed with fat to assist the wound in healing. The doctrine is the same as if the oil were applied to a wound as an antidote to the sting or poison, only the poison is represented as a devourer who has to be appeased by the oil. According to Bosman 'The trees which are the Gods of the second rank of this country (Hwida) are only prayed to and presented with offerings in time of sickness, more especially fevers, in order to restore the patients to health.'[46]

The Tree of Life originated in the tree that furnished food and drink. The Tree of Knowledge was the tree that told. This can be traced into the tree alphabets and other forms of the book. Hence the beech-tree is identifiable by name with the book-tree; its bark having supplied a kind of papyrus. But here the book and food are inseparable by name. In Egypt the buka is the palm-tree, the branch of which is the Book of Taht. Buka is also the palm-wine. [p.383] Buk modified into buh, is food, bread. The buka-tree furnished food with its fruit and wine with its liquor. Pekh (Eg.) is another form of the word for food, as in the English 'peck' for victuals. Bag (גב) is food in Hebrew; bhag, in Sanskrit; fagus, in Latin, is the beech-tree; φηγός, in Greek is the oak. Both meet under one name as the bearers of food, peck, or victuals. Fek (Eg.) is produce, plenty, and the food-producing tree is of various kinds which may be traced under one name. The food-tree is buko in Kanyop (Af.); the palm is the bukeem in Bola; bukiam in Sarar; bekiame in Pepel; and buka in Egyptian. The fig is a form of the same name, and in the African Filham, the ground-nut instead of the tree-fruit is the fukui. The corresponding name of the genetrix and giver of food in Egyptian is that of the goddess Pekh. To denote ancient descent Horapollo says the Egyptians depict a bundle of papyrus, and by this they intimate the primeval food; for no one can find the beginning of food or generation[47]. This is the papyrus roll or book. The root of the papyrus was eaten for food and the plant, like the lotus, is a form of the typical tree. It is carried in the hands of the mother-goddesses as the uat-sceptre of the genetrix who produced the food of the child's life in her own blood (the red food of source) and nourished it afterwards at her breast. Thus the book and food were both found in the papyrus plant, as they were in the tree. Such an origin as this will explain how 'eating the book,' as in Revelation[48], could be spoken of as synonymous with receiving knowledge. Many illustrations of this mode of eating of the Tree of Knowledge might be quoted and traced to the beginning of the tree as the producer both of food and information. It extends among the Africans and other races to the swallowing of the written letter as white man's medicine or fetish-food. The tree that told communicated the information first of all by means of its fruits and its juices.

Horapollo asserts that education was called sbo (Coptic for learning), i.e., seba, by the Egyptians, which, when interpreted, signifies sufficient food[49].

The primitive man did not begin by book-making but the later men developed the tree as a type of the intelligencer which became a book at last, and continued to be known by the same name. Primitive man did not eat of the tree and straightway personify it as the divine mother. But the tree gave food and drink as the mother does, therefore, it was the mother of life and so survived as a typical mother, exactly in the same way that the milch-cow, or goat, or ass was a mother, only the tree was first as it did not need to be trained or domesticated. It is noticeable that the palm-tree of the primeval world was the immediate precursor of man in the garden of earth. It was in the shape of the palm-tree that nature first gave her maternal milk to man, with such a dash of spirit in it as made him wink and [p.384] wonder, and feel like the farmer whose glass of milk had been slyly mixed with whiskey, and who on drinking it off exclaimed lustily, 'Lord! what a cow.' The toddy palm of equatorial Africa was a cow and a mother indeed! The palm-tree was not only an intelligencer but an inspirer of men; a strange illuminator of their dawning minds.

In Egyptian sukh (or uskh) is liquid, drink; sukha, the flood-time. This is our English suck; the Euskarian uisge, for water; Chinese, sok (suck); Latin, sugo; Sanskrit, sić for drink, wet, liquid, of liquor. But just as whiskey is a kind of uisge, the suck of the toddy is a natural sort of whiskey, and the mother's milk was found to be koumess, ready fermented, when drawn from the tree. In the Zulu Kaffir language the good wife who fills her husband's cup is designated his Zikisa. Zugia was a title of Juno. Now this root, zug, sukh, or sakh (compare English sack), denotes fermentation and spirit. Sakhu (Eg.) is to be fermented. Sakh is to inspire, illuminate, mental influence, the illuminator. Sekht (a name of Pekh) is a divinity of intoxicating drinks. Thus drink and divinity are found under one name, the first spirit as a mental inspirer being alcoholic. συκος is the Greek name of the fig-tree, from the fruit of which the divine drink was also made. This root, sk, is an inner African type-name for divinity; the deity or demon is

In some African languages there is but one name for God and Devil, as in Marawi, where both are called Tsoka. In the country of Kivo the intoxicating palm-toddy is named zogga. In Dahome the soko is a poison-tree. Both bear the name of the Spirit, which is a divinity in one language and a devil in others. Poison being one of the active principles first recognized because of its effect, that would identify the tree of death; and in opposition to this the tree that bore the good fruit was the Tree of Life. The typical tree has descended in the Hebrew Genesis as the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, that is, the tree as a natural intelligencer to men.

The 'Tree of Knowledge' in Egyptian is known as the kat. This is also the name of the feminine abode, the womb, and is a title of the genetrix as Kat-Mut. Another name of the feminine interior is identical with that of the fig-tree, which is kent (Eg.), a type of fertility, abundance, plenty. In several languages the female, or womb, and the sacred-tree have the same name, just as in English the pudendum femine is called a plum-tree. In Spain the plumtree furnishes an especial wood for images of the Virgin. This arose naturally from the mother being the bearer of the food. She was the Tree of Life. [p.385] Kat, the Welsh gwydd, in the Hebrew form ץג (getz), is the typical Tree of Life and of Knowledge planted in the Garden of Eden and this feminine type will show us how the tree is related to the Fall, because it bears two different kinds of fruit, one of which may be called good and one evil. The typical tree in Hebrew has preserved an inner African name, getz (ץג) being identical with

kedsi, in Nsa.	odsi, tree, in Opanda.
ketsi, in N'ki.	odsi, " " Eghira-hima.
kodsi, in Kore.	etse, " " Param.
ekedsi, in Boritsu.	itsi, " " Okam.
heitsi, tree-like, in Hottentot.	keti, " " Mfut.
yetse, tree, in Baseke.	kat, tree of knowledge, Egypt.
odsi, " " Yala.

In the Ananda Tantram[50] the aswatha or sacred fig-tree is identified with the yoni or uterus. In the Yoni-rupam[51], instructions are given for making the Bhagam Aswatha patra Vat, or fig-leaf-shaped vulva as an object of adoration in the cult of the Yonias, 'Let the cleft in the mons veneris be seven fingers wide, bulging out four fingers breadths, and downwards let it be shaped like the Aswattham,' (fig-leaf). The fig-tree, says Magnus, was the first to introduce purity of life among men[52]. Hence the Athenians called the fruit of this tree the guide or guiding-fruit[53]. This was a mystical Tree of Knowledge, which we shall find connected with the 'Fall.'

The Aborigines of Victoria have a legend of the tree and the introduction of death into the world. The first created man and woman were charged not to go near a certain tree in which a bat (Bon-nel-ya) lived. The bat was not to be disturbed. One day, however, the woman was gathering firewood, and she went near the tree in which the bat dwelt. It flew away and after that came death. Many among the Aborigines died after that[54]. It may afford a gloss on this in connection with the Fall to repeat Horapollo's statement that the Egyptians portrayed a bat when they would represent a mother as suckling and bringing up her children well; this being the only winged creature that has breasts and teeth[55]. Thus when the bat which taught how to nurse and bring up the children properly had deserted the Tree of Knowledge or Life, then came death into the world.

In the Polynesian Paradise there grew the 'Tabooed bread-fruit tree,' together with the sacred apple-tree. In old times the Hawaiian priests held that the tabooed fruit was in some way connected with the trouble and death of Kumu-honua and Lalo-honua, the primal pair whose fall is bewailed in ancient chants that describe the eating of the fruit, the breaking of the law and the bringing down of death. The 'tree-eaters' or 'tree-upsetters' were tempted to eat by the Moopela or Ilioha, an artful lying animal and mischief-maker; and [p.386] they were then driven out of the primal paradise by the 'large white bird of Kane.'[56]

Those who ate of the forbidden food and fell are mourned over in the native chant, as

The genesis of the legend would be in eating of a tree that poisoned or made the eaters of it ill, with later applications of the type.

The Hottentot deity, Heitsi Eibib, tells his son Urisip, the whitish one, not to eat of the raisin-trees of the valley. It is said that when Heitsi Eibib was travelling about with his family they came to a valley in which the raisin-tree was ripe, and he was there attacked by a severe illness. Then his young (second) wife said, 'This brave one is taken ill on account of these raisins; death is here at the place.' The old man (Heitsi Eibib) told his son Urisip (the whitish one), 'I shall not live, I feel it.' 'Thou must therefore cover me with soft stones.' And he spoke further, 'This is the thing which I order you to do: Of the raisin-trees of this valley ye shall not eat, for if ye eat of them I shall infect you, and ye shall surely die in a similar Way.' His young wife said, 'He is taken ill on account of the raisins of this valley, let us bury him quickly and go.' So he died there and was covered flatly with soft stones, according as he had commanded. When they had moved to another place and were unpacking there, they heard, always from the side whence they had come, a noise of people eating raisins and singing. In this manner the eating and singing ran:

The young wife perceived that the noise came from the side where the old man's grave was, and said, 'Urisip, go and look.' Then the son went to the old man's grave, where he saw traces which he recognised to be his father's footmarks, and returned home. Then the young wife said:

He did accordingly, and they came between the grave and Heitsi Eibib who, when he saw this, jumped down from the raisin-trees and ran quickly, but was caught at the grave. Then he said, 'Let me go, [p.387] for I am a man who has been dead, that I may not infect you.' But the young wife said, 'Keep hold of the rogue.' So they brought him home, and from that day he was fresh and hale[57].

Dr. Hahn says he has eaten the fruit of this so-called wild raisin-tree, and the result was an attack of dysentery. The natives, having no medicine, often succumb to such attacks. Hence the natural genesis of the type in relation to this particular tree that brought death into the world[58]. Dr. Hahn derives the name of Heitsi from heii, the tree, but admits that he cannot account for the 'ts.'[59] One meaning of it is 'to come.' This tends to identify Heitsi with the branch, which is his especial symbol. The tree itself is feminine. The child god is everywhere the branch, the coming one. This god, their first man, is continually rising again as the branch from the root; a primitive sense of the resurrection that might suit the modern agnostics. The imagery is also applied to the renewal of the moon, as well as of the human race. In consequence the green branch is still laid on the cairns of the dead, whether considered as the grave of their first man, who is renewed in them, or of their more immediate relatives. Of course, in a later phase, the ancestral tree or root is assigned to the male. Thus the root, and the grandfather become synonymous. When this root is personified it is as Khūnomab, the mimosa-root, of whom the lion says, 'Mimosa-root has killed me.'[60] Now a book of the origins is concealed in ibis, for the mimosa is the sensitive plant. One of their typical roots used as charms for protection and images of divine power is the giraffeacacia. The acacia is the Tree of Life in Egypt. The wood is so vital that when dried and planed down in doorsills, it has been known to sprout again. But the sensitive root offers a mental clue to the primitive thought. When they set fire to this root as they lie down for the night and murmur, 'My grandfather's-root, bring sleep on the eyes of the lion and leopard and hyena: make them blind that they cannot find us: cover their noses that they cannot smell us out;'[61] and when they give thanks to their grandfather's-root next morning on finding themselves in safety, and we remember this is the mimosa-root, the sensitive-root, we also can lay hold of it as a first link in a chain of that consciousness which culminates in apprehending or divining the mind beyond phenomena, to which the later human appeal is made.

Um Nga, in the Kaffir dialect, is the name of the mimosa-tree, and nga means to wish. It is the root of all that implies potentiality and forms the potential mood of the verb. Wishing by the sensitive-tree, then, is primitive prayer. So the Egyptians wished by the ankh, the life, the living one, when their nga was the king, or the still earlier knot, or the clasped (ank) hands.

[p.388] Heitsi Eibib, as divinity or spirit of the tree identifies himself, not only with, but as the tree when he says, 'I shall infect you.' Here we see the spirit of the tree communicating the knowledge of good and evil in the act of warning them against the evil, whereas the subtle Serpent or the sly Moopela tempts them to eat of the tree of death. Thus the spirit of the tree is demonstrably based on the quality of its fruit, and afterwards a motive is assigned to this as an active agent personified.

Alcoholic drinks were taken in the ancient mysteries to induce an abnormal condition and excite the power of prophecy and divination. In the Rig Veda the gods are said to get drunk and to obtain immortality by drinking the 'Immortal Stimulant'—amartyam madam. They all drink copiously the first thing in the morning, are drunk by midday, and dead-drunk by night with the third libation. Their followers also drink the soma-juice to attain the privileges of immortality and to know the gods; and in their consequent exaltation sing:

They felt the 'tulla intoon,' or supernatural ecstasy of the Finnish magician, in which he became the likeness of the spirit in possession of him.

Even in the Book of Deuteronomy[63] the Jews are commanded to spend their saved-up money in drink as an offering to the deity, which shows that intoxication was a religious rite with them as it was with those who grew immortal by quaffing the juice of the soma, the homa, or other types of the Tree of Knowledge. The Tree of Knowledge first supplied the divine drink, which was naturally fermented in the toddy-palm. The drink was elsewhere produced artificially from the various kavi-trees and plants, the vine, the homa, soma, fig, mistletoe, elder, raisin, and other sacred fruit-trees. The Mexicans made brandy from the pulque-plant, called the maguey, which is one of the agaves or kavis. The kavi drink was made by the Mangaians from the 'piper mythisticum,' and a root of this intoxicating tree was buried with the dead at Rarotonga to enable the spirit-traveller to make a fit spirit-offering to Tiki and obtain entrance into his dwelling[64].

The juice of the Hindu Tree of Life is called the ornaments of the Siddhas. The Siddhas are the perfected; the spirits of the Eighth Heaven, or the Height, which was first attained by primitive man, who mounted and entered by means of the intoxicating tree. Among the North American Indians we find the notion that immortality consists in [p.389] being eternally drunk, because drink supplied the type of a paradisiacal condition, and the dead-drunk were as spirits among spirits.

The story of the tree in the Hebrew Genesis has been told with this gloss: The serpent informs the woman that 'in the day ye eat thereof then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as Elohim, knowing Good and Evil. And when the Woman saw that the tree was good for food and pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the tree thereof and did eat,'[65] or partook of it in some way. And 'their eyes were opened.' The tree was to make them wise. The wise are the seers. The Persian Magi were the wise men. seers, clairvoyants, fortune-tellers, prophets, are called the wise. The wizard is the wise man, and the Elohim, as spiritual beings, say, 'Behold the man is become as one of us.' The tree had taught them the way to enter spirit-world, and the Elohim were the elementary spirits or gods of the earliest time and typology.

We are told by Plutarch that previous to the time of Psammeticus, the Egyptian priest-kings were not used to drink wine at all, nor to pour it out in a sacrifice as a thing they thought in any way grateful to the gods. On the contrary, they shed it as the blood of those who in ancient times waged war against the gods from whose falling down from heaven and mixing with the earth (compare the blood of Belus mixing in the same manner) they conceived vines to have first sprung; which is the reason, they say, that drunkenness renders men beside themselves, and makes them mad; they being, as it were, gorged with the blood of their ancestors. 'These things reported & Eudoxus in his Second Book of Travels, are thus related by the priests.'[66] There is a cognate tradition extant among the folktales of the Little Russians concerning the origin of tobacco, or 'the devil's herb,' as it is designated by the Raskolniks. Once on a time there was a witch-woman who is described as a heathen. She led men astray, and a voice from heaven commanded that she should be put to death. This was obeyed, and the enchantress was buried alive. Her husband planted a twig on her grave which grew up into the tobacco plant. The people plucked its leaves and discovered the art of smoking. They smoked and smoked until one day the smoke burst into flame, and they were all consumed[67]. In the Mexican legends the genetrix Magaguil or Mayaguil is represented as a woman who had 400 breasts (the Dea Multimammae), and on account of her fruitfulness the creative power changed her into the Maguey tree that is the vine of the country, from which the natives made their wine. This also identifies the Great Mother with the Tree of Knowledge as a producer of intoxicating drink[68]. The Egyptians described by Plutarch, had passed out of the primitive typhonian phase in [p.390] which inspiration was attained by intoxication. The giants, the opponent powers, are here identified with the fall from heaven, and wine with the cause of the fall. We still call wine the blood of the grape. The first wine in the mystical sense was the blood of the Tree of Life; and this was actually partaken of in the eucharist of the mysteries before it was commuted by the blood of the grape, or the fermented juice of other fruits. The Egyptians were in the position of total abstainers from wine because it was the symbol of the earlier source of uncleanness, lawlessness, and sin against nature; and representative of the daemons or spirits that were early and elemental, and therefore the 'bad' spirits of later thought. This reaction is especially characteristic of the Hebrew prophets, and is still more plainly set forth in the Parsee sacred scriptures.

The priests and prophets of the Devs are called by the name of Kavi in the Gathas. The Kavayas and Kavitayas are the ministers of evil, stealers of the understanding; typhonian in the evil sense. Kavi often occurs in the Vedic Hymns. In Sanskrit the root kavi supplies a name for the Kavya, as those who are possessed of the greatest understanding; endowed with the qualities of the sage, the prophet, the poet, and inspired seer. But it also denotes a 'female fiend.' By drinking the intoxicating soma-juice the power of Kavi may be attained[69]. In India the Kavis or seers were believed to be divine revealers to men, and were consulted as prophets. The word kavi is a revelation in itself. It is the Egyptian kefi or kepi which signifies the mystery of fermentation, heat, illumination, and spiritism of the alcoholic kind. It is applied to fertilization by the inundation; and kap in the Hok-Keen (Chinese) dialect likewise signifies imbibing to the full, to soak through; keep being a libation. Kep (Eg.) is Typhon. The ancient Iranians were worshippers of the genetrix; as the Devi Drukhs maliciously reminds Zaratusht. The term kavi was once an honoured name; a title of the most famous personages of Iranian antiquity, such as Kavi-Husrava (Kai Khusro) Kavi-Kavata (Kai Kabad) Kavi-Vishtaspa (Kai Gushtasp), and in its derived adjectival form Kâyanian was the designation of a whole dynasty of the ancient Bactrian rulers[70]. They wore the mighty glory which was peculiar to the Kavis, the Iranian heroes before the Zoroastrian times, the glory worn by Yima and Thraetaona, a celestial glory essential for causing the resurrection of the dead at the end of the world; a light of the life everlasting[71]. Kavasakha is the name given to those who are influenced by drinking the kava, and who are the enemies and despisers of the soma, the later and more sacred drink of India, sakha (Eg.) means illumined, influenced, inspired, and the kava-sakha are the illumined by fermented liquor. In one passage[72] the Kavasakha is called a Maghava. Indra is said to turn out the [p.391] Maghava who follows the Kavayas from his possession. The Maghava and Kavasakha are thus synonymous and in Yasna 51, 15, the Zoroastrians are designated Maghavas.

'Zarathustra assigned in times of yore as a reward to the Magizavas the Paradise where first of all Mazda himself had gone.'

'Kava Vishtaspa obtained through the possession of the spiritual power (maga) and through the verses which the good mind had revealed that knowledge which Ahura Mazda himself as the cause of truth, has invented.'[73]

The casting out (or transformation) of the kavi corresponds to the kindred change in Israel. Kep has a variant in sep (Eg.) for the spirit of wine; and this is the root of the Greek word sophia, which signifies wisdom and originally meant wine, as the juice of the grape; the vine being one of the trees of knowledge that were 'to be desired' to 'make wise'; the sap or juice is one by name with sapiens. Also, the Assyrian cuneiform characters which designate the 'vine,' or wine are traceable to the compound ges-tin in Akkadian, which means the Tree of Life.

The connection of the fetish idol with a 'spirit' is curiously shown in the religious rite described by Columbus who relates that the WestIndian natives used to place a platter on the head of the divinity. This platter contained the intoxicating cohoba powder which was snuffed up the nostrils by means of a double-branched cane[74]. In this way the gods inspired them through the powder.

Roman Pane also describes the native priest as coming to the sick man, and then putting himself in communication with 'spirits' by snuffing cohoba powder that 'made him drunk,' or induced the abnormal condition in which he saw with opened vision, and foresaw and divined, because in this state of trance he was talking with the 'cemis,' i.e., the dead; the khemu in Egyptian[75].

The spirit was first discovered in the powder of the fetish herb, hence tobacco became the Holy Herb because it inspired the seers; next, the spirit was discovered, by means of the powder, in the consequent ecstasy, delirium, trance or dream. Then it was believed that a window had been opened into another world, through which the medium conversed with the dead, who went on living, despite the evidence of the external senses. Primitive spiritualism was based on the trance-vision now called clairvoyance. As before said, the present writer has had many years' private experience of the abnormal condition which could be induced by the look, whether of a serpent or the human eye, a disk, a light, a looking-glass, by anaesthetics, narcotics, or by ecstatic sensation. In this trance the sensitive believed that she saw and talked with spirits, and observers also considered that other Intelligences than her own could commingle [p.392] with, and see and talk through her. Whether this be true or false or mixed, we have the means extant in our own day for studying such 'mysteries' of the past. The attempt to explain these abnormal phenomena on the theory of imposture is a shallow delusion, even if supported by all the foremost men of science living, and can but tend to their own discredit.

The tree as the mother of life, as the teller, and lastly, as the oracle or foreteller, was represented in certain rites by a living woman who was worshipped beneath its branches. Isaiah denounces the 'Sons of the Sorcerers' who 'inflame themselves with idols under every green tree.'[76] Jeremiah says of Israel, 'She is gone up upon every high mountain and under every green tree, and there hath played the harlot.'[77] This is termed committing adultery with stocks and stones; the stock and stone that represented the tree and the mount of the genetrix. According to Hosea they sacrificed under the tree 'because the shadow thereof was good.'[78] The reader must not suppose that mere congress of the sexes, natural or unnatural, is all that is meant by this harlotry under the tree, whose worshippers were they that 'Sanctified and purified themselves in the gardens behind one tree in the midst, eating swine's flesh, and the abomination and the mouse,'[79] and drinking the broth of abominable things, in a kind of eucharistic rite, incredibly primitive.* In the Hindu drawings an altar is portrayed beneath the tree; in one of these the 'medium' is being led to the altar[80].

* 'I will take his bloods (margin) out of his mouth, and his abominations from between his teeth,'[81] Compare the 'bloody wafer.'

This nautch woman or temple-hekeria (Gr. έταιρεία) is intoxicated for the purpose of divination. She becomes the Radha Dea to the spirit, a cup of wine, the wine of astonishment, is consecrated for the Sakteyas, and in her state of magnetic sleep, the divinity, in this case, of drink, inspires her to utter revelations[82]. By an effusion of the sacrament, somewhat after the manner of the cup of Charis in the eucharist of Marcus[83]. The female was the acknowledged inspirer of the male in the sexual sense, she was his Shakti. This is identical with the Egyptian sakh, to inspire, and sekhet, the double force personified as that of the female. The goddess Sekhet is designated the 'force or energy of the Gods, the astonisher of Mankind.'[84] Hers was the 'Wine of Astonishment.' That which was the allpotent charm of the primitive mind, the 'ur-hekau,' or great magic power in the hieroglyphics, remained the natural type of pleasure and paradise in the more spiritual phase—if the epithet may be allowed—of the erotic and uterine religion. The Sakteyas continued to worship the great magic power of the primitive man. They held that the spirit was of feminine origin.

[p.393] The pythoness who spoke with the belly-voice is often assumed to have been a ventriloquist. But the known facts show that the female professors of spirit-utterance were not supposed to give oracular responses with the vocal organs alone. Sellon describes the voice of an oracle that certainly could not be ventriloquised[85]. In various temples the adorers of the yoni believed that it spoke oracles. Clement Alexander, Arnobius and Theodoret, amongst others, mention the adoration of the yoni at Eleusis[86]; and this was considered by some to be the supreme oracle of the goddess Vach. This voice of the feminine oracle was the original of the Hebrew Bath Kol.

The survival of most primitive customs and superstitions amongst the Jews is proved by the denunciations of their teachers, and the prohibition of their later lawgivers. What the practices really were can only be ascertained by the comparative process.

We shall find that the tree, the pillar, and mount, are interchangeable as types of the motherhood and place of birth. The Paphian Venus was typified by a conical stone pillar, respecting the significance of which, says Tacitus, we are left in the dark[87]. It was identical with the pillar or pyramid of Isis-Sothis; a type that is masculo-feminine.

A conical pillar or stone called Lovekaveka was consecrated to a Fijian goddess, Lovekaveka, rear Thokova, Na-Viti Levu. It was a round black milestone with a liku, the female girdle of pubescence tied round the middle[88]. The Natchez of Louisiana likewise worshipped a conical stone[89].

Kubele was held to lie concealed as 'Mother of the Gods' in the Pessinuntian stone sent by Attalus, king of Phrygia, to the Romans[90].

The tree, the pillar, and the cross are all three combined in the Assyrian asherah or grove; a far more primitive form of which is found in the Hittite or Khetan hieroglyphics, where it is in the next stage to the pudendum muliebre itself[91].

It has been thought a confusion of metaphor when, in the First Epistle to Timothy, Paul likens the Church to a house and a pillar, as basis of the truth[92]. But, the pillar and house were both symbolically the same. Pillar, seat, mount, tree, or abode, was each representative of the motherhood, whose latest type was the mother Church. In a Greek myth described by Pausanias the tree, the mount, and the horn are confounded together[92a]. The garden of Dionysos contains a kind of Mount Meru which resembles a horn, it is called the Hesperian Horn, and produces the Golden Apples and every delicious fruit of the Tree of Life. This shows the phase of confusion in which the mythologists appear to be insane to their interpreters, who are innocent of eating from the tree of the ancient knowledge.

[p.394] Because of the birthplace the Tree of Life is likewise one with the mount and summit of the world called Paradise. Pardes, says Ibn Ezra, is a garden planted with one kind of tree[93]. We shall see that paradise and the tree are identical as the type of a world or a first formation consisting of the mount, the circle and cross of the four cardinal points.

So the Iranian 'Tree opposed to harm' the White Horn-Tree was planted in the Eden of Aryana-Vaejo, which was one with the mountain of the world[94].

The Jambu or rose-apple tree is an equivalent type with the Mount Meru. It stands on an island and the juice of its fruit was fabled to flow in a river of life. The soil of the banks of the river absorbs the jambu-juice, and in being dried by gentle breezes it becomes the gold termed Jámbunada of which the ornaments of the Siddhas are made[95]. This is the river of Eden that went forth to water the garden and encompass the whole land of Havilah, the land of the good gold.

The Jambu or Gambu is the Tree of Earth or jam (Sansk.) and its droppings make the earth or soil. This agrees with the kami tree, a gum-acacia in Egypt with which the name of kami is written as a type of the earth or soil that was actually shed in the Nilotic valley, as it was fabled to be shed by the jambu tree of the Hindu allegory.

The Egyptian Tree of Life stands in the Pool of Persea in Annu, the birthplace. This can be followed in the Parsee Bundahish:—

The tree of the 'First Day' and the fabled fount of Immortality are found together, and have one origin and significance. The one is identified with the very beginning of time, the first day. In the Ritual [p.395] the renewing pool is designated the 'Generator of Years.' The Tree of Life is portrayed in the monuments of Nineveh with the two waters flowing from it in keeping with the Egyptian Persea tree in the pool of the Two Truths.

The myth of the beginning found by the missionary John Williams among the traditions of the islanders of the Southern Seas relates that the heavens were so near the earth at first that men could not walk but were forced to crawl under them. 'This was found to be a very serious evil, but at length an individual conceived the sublime idea of elevating the heavens to a more convenient height. For this purpose he put forth all his energy, and by the first effort raised them to the top of a tender plant called Teve, about four feet high. There he deposited them until he was refreshed, when by a second effort he lifted them to the height of a tree called Kanariki which is as large as a sycamore. By the third attempt he carried them to the summits of the mountains, and after a long interval of repose, and by a most prodigious effort he elevated them to their present height.'[98] For this beneficent work he was deified as the 'Elevator of the Heavens.' The elevator of the heavens is also known as Maui in the Hervey Islands, and as Tane in New Zealand. He has been already identified with Ma-Shu, the upholder of the nocturnal heaven. Tane was also represented as a tree. Here the types of the tree and mount are both applied to the height of heaven. The Egyptian teve or tef is the papyrus reed which, like the cane, is a form of the typical tree of birth and beginning, especially from the waters of source. The Kaffirs derive their origin from the reed; and so popular is the symbol with the Basutos that they still fasten one over the hut to announce the birth of a child. Casalis tells the story of a prosaic-minded Basuto who acquired the nickname of 'Father Reed' because he made it his mission to go about denouncing the ridiculous belief that men could be produced from reeds[99]. The reed represents the genetrix and the great-grandfather. So in Egypt tef, the reed, bears the name of Tef, the Great Mother, and Tef, the divine Father. The reed itself is a hieroglyphic determinative of sems, the heir as it is with the Kaffirs. The teve, about four feet high, agrees with the tef or reed as a minor form of the tree. It was by means of the tree that the vault of heaven was lifted. The tree was the earliest 'strut' or support. By its branching the two halves were stemmed apart and the four quarters founded. By means of the tree space was first penetrated, ramified, divided, and configurated.

This tree of earth, the branches of which were hung with the clustered constellations, is found among the Kasia of Bengal, who affirm that the stars were once human beings but they climbed to the [p.396] top of a great tree whereupon others who were below cut the trunk in two, and they were left aloft in the branches[100].

The North American Indians preserve the tradition of a tree or vine which carried a whole tribe across the waters of the Mississippi river. They also have an account of their origin through climbing up the roots of a large vine from the interior of Mother Earth![101]

The tree type is employed by the Chinese in two characters, as the tree of earth and of heaven. In the celestial aspect its branches represent the twelve zodiacal signs, like the twelve-branched tree in the Book of Revelation[102]. As the tree of ti-chi or the earthly branches it is the horary of the Chinese twelve hours, equal to twenty-four of our time. This tree is also totemic, as the tree of twelve signs previously explained.

The Lenni Lenape Indians, who have twelve highest Manitous, were accustomed to set up twelve trees or posts in a circle in the middle of their council-house; these trees were then connected together at the top. Into this house of twelve trees twelve hot stones were rolled, sacred to the twelve spirits, four of which were the genii of the four corners of Heaven[103].

The Inscription of Nabonidus, king of Babylon, was found on four terracotta cylinders at the four corners of the Temple of the Moon at Mugheir, the Ur of the Chaldees. This is called the 'Temple of the Great Tree,' which was begun by Urukh, a king who lived long ago. The tree or mount was a figure of the pole and the ancient temples were sometimes built with a planisphere in the roof around the rooftree[104].

The starry heavens were taken indoors, and placed upon the astronomical ceilings of the temples of Egypt, Babylonia, and China; and now whilst looking up at the starry dome whether of the building or the heaven of night we for the first time understand what could be meant by a mountain which is said to surround the world, as does the Turkish and Arab mount called 'kaf.' Considered as a mountain this dome surrounded the earth just as did the water of heaven, the first figure of the firmament. This can be proved by the mythical Alborz (Persian) which is also a mount that surrounds the world. Of this celestial mount it is said that it has 360 apertures and every day the sun comes in and goes out through one of these[105]. Thus the celestial dome, the mount and tree, the pole and horn-point are identical.

The Apalaches of Florida said the sun had built his own conical mountain of Olaimi, which had a spiral path winding round it, and leading to his cave-temple on the eastern side, in which four solar festivals were celebrated every year[106]. In this instance the natural [p.397] mount occupies the place of the pyramid mound erected elsewhere. In the Ritual the mount of the seven stars and the four quarters supplies the type of a house on high, to which the soul of the deceased ascends, and is at rest. This abode is built by Sefekh-abu, whose name of the 'Seven-horned' shows that she represents the seven stars of the mount, or the seven constellations called the Seven Hills of Heaven. Here he sits in peace, or changes his quarters according to the direction in which the four winds blow. When the Assyrian gods are discussing their plans of future action after the revolt and fall, it is said of the race, 'In a circle may they sit,' and 'Let them plant the Vine'[107]—the new creation consisting of the circle and the tree. So the pippala is planted in Hindu districts as the sacred village tree, the 'Chaitya-taru,' the tree of the enclosure. It is still a custom with the Khonds, when a new village is founded, to first plant the sacred cotton-tree as a point of commencement, a central mark; and under this is placed the stone of the deity[108], the image of the mount. The tree, as a lotus-tree, stands in the seventh Mohammedan heaven, at the boundary beyond which no angels can pass, or the creature's knowledge extend[109]. Vast trees used to mark the boundaries of English counties. The great 'Shire-oak' stood at the meeting-point of the three counties of York, Nottingham, and Derby, and its branches extended into each like the typical tree of the three regions, in the triple division of the heavens. 230 horsemen could find shelter or shadow under the 'Shire-oak.' A most ancient maypole is mentioned in a charter by which the town of West Hatton, Lancashire, was granted to the Abbey of Cockers, and about the time of the reign of King John the maypole was a landmark that defined boundaries; this, it appears, superseded a cross—the typical Druidic tree[110]. Thus we find the maypole and cross interchanging as types. The words of the charter are 'Lostockemepull, ubi crux sita fuit recta linea in austro, usque ad Crucem super-le-Tunge.'[111] Kemble prints in his Codex Diplomaticus a charter of the date of 959, and in this one of the marks or memorials of a boundary line of land is called Frigedaerges-Tréow, or the tree of Friday, the day of Freya, or sacred to Freya, as a Doomsted and judgment seat[112]. At Hesket in Cumberland, yearly, on St. Barnabas Day, a court was kept for the whole forest of Englewood under a thorn-tree by the highway side, according to the very ancient manner of holding assemblies for judgment in the open air[113]. In front of the ground now occupied by St. Mary-le-Strand there once stood a cross, at which, according to Stow, 'In the year 1294 and other times the justices itinerant sat without London.'[114] The cross is a form of the Tree. The mount and the tree were likewise [p.398] interchangeable types of the judgment-seat in Britain. The ancient shire-moots and hundred-courts used to be held on the top of the dun, tor, or tut-hill; or under the oak of the shire; or beneath the apple-tree made sacred by the mistletoe—the tree of pure gold, the tree of the lofty summit, as the mistletoe was called. And because this was the tree beneath which covenants were once made and troth was plighted, the white-berried branch is still suspended overhead for the Christmas kiss; the 'Tree of the Summit' being a type of the celestial pole. In the Ritual the tree of the 'Two Truths' stands in the place of the 'Judgment Hall'; and on the tablet of one Tahtmes, a Memphite functionary of the eighteenth dynasty, we find a reference to the judgment under the tree. The text states that 'on the 30th day of the month Tibi' (December 16 in the sacred year), the 'day of filling the eye in Annu' (the birthplace), 'the great Inspectors (or judges) come out to the end of the dais under the trees of Life and Perseas.' This was the locality of the judgment, the place of examination. 'Having been questioned thou answerest in Rusta on the 3rd of the month Epiphi,'[115] or on the 17th of May, in the sixth month afterwards; the two times corresponding to the two halves of the heavens, the hall of the Two Truths, and the tree of heaven and earth, or north and south. The first tree was at the centre of the circle, like the pine in Eridu. An oak-tree standing near Weedon, in Warwickshire, is still pointed out as marking the very centre of all England. Next the type is divided into the tree of the north and south, to mark two points of reckoning and boundary. The tree was one in the Pool of Persea, in Annu. Then it is spoken of as two trees. 'I draw waters from the Divine Pool under the two Sycamores of heaven and earth,'[116] says the Osirian in the Ritual. This tree is deposited in the Egyptian planispherei along with the virgin mother, and may be seen in the decans of Virgo, where it shows as the tree of the north.

The Hindus personify a kind of pre-eval supreme being as Skambha, whose name signifies the prop, support, or fulcrum. He formed the first abode, he 'who, with a prop (skambha), held the two worlds apart, like the unborn.' He is typified as the tree; and the gods, who are all comprehended in Skambha, are his branches—or, rather, he is the tree-type impersonated in a masculine instead of the feminine form. Skambha is the fulcrum of the whole creation, as the tree, first of two branches and then of four. The two primordial branches are termed those of non-entity and entity, according to the theory that in the first age of the gods the existent sprang out of the non-existent[117]. Here it should be observed that this beginning is theoretical and metaphysical, whereas the actual beginning was in accordance with [p.399] observation. The makers of language and moulders of typology were not metaphysicians.*

* It is at times as satisfactory to get back to the simplest elements of the beginning as were the signs of the deaf mutes to the Chinaman who found himself in a European city where no one spoke Chinese.

The Egyptian nun, as phase or condition, place or point of commencement, is negative; it is identical with not and none. But it denotes existence in the negative condition of water, or the firmament considered as water, and enti (Eg.), or entity, which signifies the coming out of, is determined by the flower of blood or bleeding, and the froth and foam of water. These are the blood and breath (sen) of the Two Truths of being. The water, whether below or above, was a first form of phenomenal and elemental existence, and not a theoretical non-existence in the Vedic sense; and the blood was the mystical water of life. The natural genesis of Hindu thought is not to be found in the Hindu writings, but in a far earlier representation, and its myths can only be laid hold of by means of the primordial and physical origins, into which the later speculations have been read.

The Chinese system of feng shui, or the 'Breath of Nature' said to have commenced with the 'Absolute Nothing' out of which the 'Great Absolute' was evolved, begins phenomenally with the 'Two Truths' of water and breath, corresponding perfectly to the water and breath of the Egyptian mâti, water, or shui for shade and light. The female principle became the representative of non-existence, because it transformed into existence as breath. The two were essentially one, just as dew is condensed vapour and vapour is rarefied moisture[118].

So is it with the Hebrew writings. Rabbi Azariel, in his commentary on the ten sephira[119] tells us that he is following the opinions of the Kabbalist Theosophists in considering the deity to be purely negative, by divesting him of all attributes. The ayin or Ain-Soph of the Jewish Kabbalah, the boundless, endless, or timeless, is of a negative nature, and in a sense nonexistent. It has the negative nature of the Egyptian nun, that negation out of which creation came. But the Kamitic typology affords us tangible foothold once again in the vast void of metaphysical vagueness. It shows us the nun or abyss as the mother nature who produced the first seven elemental powers and formed, with them, the Ogdoad that was continued by the Jewish Kabbalah in which the first of the ten sephira or manifestors of the 'Ain-Soph' has seven other names, and the Ogdoad are designated היהא and תויח, the circle or pleroma of primordial powers. The Kamite nun or en, whence enti existence and Neith the genetrix, was not negative in itself but only in relation to other things—as the water is negative to breath. In one form the nun is the new inundation; in another it is the child, called the nunu, English ninny, [p.400] Italian ninna and nan, modern Greek ninion, which is negative because impubescent. So the nun and the nanny are negative compared with wife and mother. But the nun (Eg.), Irish nion, as the heaven or firmament was actual; so was nun, as the water or the infant. These were not non-extant. Hence nun (with its variants han and an) signifies to bring. The nun (Eg.), which is the firmamental water in the first vague stage, gives a name to nun or nin the fish in the stellar phase. Nun in Chaldee is the great fish; nuna in Syriac is the constellation Ketos. This shows the passage from the vague phase of water to a definite water-type in a constellation. The nun (nnu or nu) was heaven personified as the bringer of the water and the breath of life. And this mother-heaven, as bringer, had been the inner African mother from the beginning.

nna, ina, or na, is the mother, in Kabunga.	nnu, is the mother in, Yula.
nna, ina, or na, " " Dsalunka.	nne, " " Isoama.
nna, ina, or na, " " Kankanka.	nene, " " Isiele.
nna, ina, or na, " " Mandenga.	nne, " " Abadsa.
nina, " " Bola.	nna, " " Mbofia.
nna, " " Padsade.	nna, " " Mbofon.
nne, " " Bass.	ninge, " " Landoro.
ninu, " " Kra.	nina, " " Balu.
nande, " " Krebo.	nen, " " Bamon.
none, " " Anfne.	nene, " " Pulo.
nna, " " Gurma.	inna, " " Goburu.
nna, " " Koama.	enna, " " Okans.
nau, " " Bagbalan.	anen, " " Kanyop.

Nana, as person, is one with the mama, and kaka; as name it is from a primordial nga-nga, the earlier sound of na-na. The Kaffir nina is either her, his, or their mother. This was the mother at the head of the line of descent from whom the mother-name has been extended to the sense of nationality which is Um-Nina or Nini in Xhosa Kaffir. This type-name is also Vedic, as nana, the mother; nana is the Babylonian genetrix; nin, the Assyrian lady; nini, the mother in Malagasy. Mother and woman are often synonymous, and the woman in Africa is

The cow was another form of the bringer of the liquid of life whence the cow of heaven; and this bringer in inner Africa is

nina, the cow, in Gbese.	ningei, the cow, in Kise-kise.	una, the cow, in Timne.
nan, " " Koansa.	ningi, " " Kono.	ina, " " Mampa.
nnan, " " Bagbalan.	ningena, " " Soso.	nao, " " Legba.
enan, " " Anan.	nnara, " " Biafada.	no, " " Kaure.
nankuye, " Ashanti.	ana, " " Bags.	nao, " " Kiamba.

It was at this stage the No-people and the Nuther-speech were named as forms of the first, which was neuter, because undistinguished by sex. Nene, English, is neither, Egyptian nunter, or nuter, which [p.401] is potentially either in a second phase, as is the child, and was not nonexistent in the first. On account of this origin Nin is the Lord or Lady in Assyrian, and both the grandfather and grandmother are the 'Nni' in Javanese. Metaphysics, theosophy, and theology have everywhere perverted the ancient 'wisdom' by introducing their counterfeit coinage in hermeneutical interpretation, but the true types are uneffaced and yet extant as the original coins of primitive human thought, and to these we must trust, as our sole guides in the matter when the natural simplicities have been transmogrified into abstract spiritual or metaphysical profundities. Thus skambha can be followed to the root by means of the tree-type. The tree was one which bifurcated in the first or solstitial division of the circle above. It became fourfold as the tree of the four quarters. Hence the four regions are called the four arteries of Skambha. The word skamb in native lists is written skanbh[120]. This recovers the hieroglyphic prop which is the Egyptian skhen. Skhen (Eg.) means to support, sustain, and embrace, with the prop upholding the heavens as ideographic determinative. The prop skhen (Y) is a 'strut' with two arms. This, when portrayed in the human form, is the god Shu, who upholds the heaven with his two arms, which were also represented by the two stars of the solstices, the two lawgivers north and south, Kepheus and Cor Leonis. Further, the prop, skhen, was personified in the divinity named skheni, who is designated the Two Hands of Ra. In the solar litanies the two hands of Ra are said to be the god Skheni[121]. Skheni also denotes the embracer and supporter with the arms as well as the prop and sustainer; and skambha or skanbha is expressly said to embrace all things with his two arms, which represent entity and non-entity[122]. Skambha is identified with all that breathes and possesses soul and skhen (Eg.) signifies to give breath. Skhen and skhem are interchangeable as names of the abode of breath and being; and by aid of the form skhem we recover the feminine type of the shrine, the mother, who was zikum in Akkad, and whose symbol of the birthplace, the prop and support of being is the tree, the sekhem or sycamore of Hathor. Skambha then is reclaimed as the tree type which has been divinized according to the later cult in a masculine form, as skheni was personified in Egypt. It is the primordial type that proves the original unity.

The skambha prop becomes the pillar of stone, çkemba (in the Avesta), otherwise called the kata, which was erected for the dead[123].

Skambha and skheni make the sign of the cross with their arms extended, and may be figured as the prop of north and south, or the cross of the four quarters of the roof-tree of heaven, which is one with the roof-tree of the house. In English the prop, or roof, is the [p.402] sign-tree, and that is our skhen (or skanbha) of the human abode. The Mangaians have the dual tree, but it is applied to the mapping out of east and west. One, they tell us, was planted eastward, facing Mauke; one toward the west, facing Atiu. These were so tall they touched the skies, and their branches put forth and spread and bowed down with their load of fruit within the reach of men. Supernatural beings are said to have dug earth from the hollow of Anaoa and filled baskets, which they hung on the branches of the befriending trees that stooped down to receive them, and then rose up and strewed the soil over all the barren rock until the island was covered with vegetation. One-half of this beneficent work was done by the tree planted eastward, the other by the tree of the west[124]. This is a primitive mode of representing the formation of the garden of the beginning, or of making two boundaries in space. Anaoa also agrees with the valley of Annu in the Egyptian mythos, and with the Chinese Han-mun. These two trees are considered to be the bifurcation of Tane, the Polynesian and Maori form of Skambha, who is depicted as a tree growing head downwards and propping up the heavens with its roots, because he had to lie on his back and hoist them up with his feet. In Egyptian tahn is to force, to compel, with the determinative prop of the midway or divided heaven.

The Great Mother was the one in space who divided into two sisters above and below, or north and south, and who was also the goddess of the four quarters. The water of the firmament was one (the blue heaven), and it was divided into the two waters, north and south, and then into the four rivers of the four quarters. The mount and the tree follow the same law, and are divided to mark the two stations and the four stations. The tree is one and single as a type of the genetrix, the abode of being, the nurse of life. The tree is twofold, as the type of the being that bifurcates and stems the earth and heaven apart. The tree is fourfold, as the image of the four quarters, the tat-tree of Ptah, the tree of four branches shown to Zaratusht[125]. The tree is sevenfold, as a type of the seven constellations and the seven regions of a primeval order of things in the earliest time. The tree has twelve branches which bear their fruit monthly, as a type of the twelve signs of the zodiac. And finally, the celestial tree of the Kabbalists, copied by Kircher, has seventy-two branches, which represent the seventy-two demi-decans of the zodiac. This is called the tree of הוהי, and the type affords another proof of the feminine origin of Jehovah-genetrix.

It must be explained that the mythical mount and tree fulfil their types in the image of both sexes. The mount as birthplace was feminine at first, as the brû, navel, or mam, the mamma-shaped [p.403] hill, but the pen or ben is of a masculine nature corresponding to its name. The ben (Eg.) is pyramidal; and the pyramid and obelisk are both male symbols. The cave in the mount was feminine; the monolith erected on the top was masculine, the type being perfected in the blending of the two sexes.

Hence the triangle is feminine at the base and masculine at the apex. These two were represented in the Great Pyramid with its well of the water-source, the birthplace below, and the 'ben-ben,' or pyramid of fire above. These two are still combined in the feminine nave of the church and the masculine spire, as they were in the argha and its mast. By reading backwards we see that the tomb in the earth is feminine in type, and the stone erected above is masculine. This shows the simple nature of the cairn, consisting of an excavation and an erection; the within and without of the earliest thought; the hole in the earth having the feminine, and the conical pile of stones the masculine, likeness.

The Chinese still select a spot of ground for the burial-place of the dead just where the male and female features are most completely delineated in the natural configuration of hollow and mound which correspond to the uterine excavation and stone-erection of the cairn; the cave and pen of the mount; the nave and spire of the church. A similar conjunction also constitutes a luck-bringing site for the dwelling-place of the living[126].

The British 'combe' combines this dual nature under a perfect type. It unites both hill and hollow in one formation, hence the name is sometimes identified with the mount, as in black combe, and at others with the hollow.

Lichtenstein, who travelled in Outeniqua-land in 1803, records that the Hottentot grave consisted of a conical pile of stones some twenty or thirty yards in circumference at the base[127]. Sometimes these cairns were called the graves of Heitsi-Eibib, the deity who always rose again. He was their moon-god, and his periodic renewal is obviously related to the lunar phenomena applied to the dead. The phallus was buried in the tombs as a type of re-erection (the Kamite phrase for re-arising), and the monolith, or the conical pile of stones, was erected in the likeness of the male erector and establisher of existence.

The tree was also feminine at first; the Tree of Life and Knowledge in one; the central tree of all beginning with and derived from the motherhood. Then it became a dual type, which blended the sexes as twin producers. Finally, the Tree of Life was considered especially masculine, and the Tree of Knowledge was left to the woman who first ate its fruit. The hollow hole might remain feminine as the coffin; the root was assigned to masculine cause, and the branch was its product. The Khoi-Khoi still add the fresh [p.404] green branch when they lay the stone on the cairn, and the branch is held to spring from their grandfather's root.

When the Druids shaped the tree into the tau-cross, they were turning it into a masculine Tree of Life; and in the cross of the four quarters the tree had become prominently masculine. Hence it interchanges with the fourfold phallus, and both have one name as the tat (Eg.); and the cross within the circle (or in connection with the ru, the rosary, or other feminine figure) is the same symbol of the male Tree of Life twinned and blended with the female as the fourfold linga or the four-cornered swastika in the tomb, or the square that is figured with the circle in the American and British mounds. Perhaps the most primitively perfect type of this sexual duality is that which is figured in the Long-horned Cairn, the chamber of which has the shape of the uterus within, and the four horns at the corners correspond to the four-footed cross and the fourfold phallus without[128]. Thus, from first to last, the symbols retain and show the impress of nature's primordial mould.

It was at the top of the tree of heaven—the pole—that the Guaranis were to meet once more with their Adam, Atum, Tum, or Tamoi, who was to help them from thence in their ascent to the higher life. Here the Tree of Life becomes a tree of the dead to raise them into Heaven. So in the Algonquin myth the tree of the dead was a sort of oscillating log for the deceased to cross the river by as a bridge of the abyss, beyond which the dog—as in the Persian mythos—stands waiting for the souls of the dead, just as the dog stands at the northern pole of the Egyptian planispherei, and is depicted in the tree of the southern solstice—the tree of the pole which wars extended to the four quarters.

Nowhere could the tree type of the four divisions have struck deeper root than in our own land. It was the tree of virile vernal life all in flower as the maypole, the British bedwen; the tree of fruit built up with fruits for the festival of Harvest Home; the tree of the two equinoxes somewhat belated; it was the tree of fire at midsummer, and is still the fire-tree or illuminated tree of light when the Yule-log burned on Christmas Eve is transfigured by fire into the renewed tree of Christmas Day. The fire-tree is solstitial. Thus we have it all round. Moreover, as before said, the tree of these four times interchanges with the pyramid, a form of the mount of the four corners, and this equivalence of the types affords good evidence of the unity of origin for the total system here called typology, and shown to be Kamite.

On an ancient gem copied by Maffei the tree is engraved with four oscilla suspended from its branches[129]. This is an obvious form of the [p.405] Roman and British Christmas-tree, only the pendants are limited to the typical four, according to the gnosis that has been lost in England, which made it the tree of the four cardinal points. The tree, like the serpent, is a type by which numerous ideas could be expressed. As the serpent was an image of the revolving heavens, or of a polar constellation, so the tree was a fixed figure of station round which the starry serpent twined. This tree of heaven also served for the primitive thought to climb by, to mount, to make the passage from this life into the Paradise first planted on the top, at the centre where they saw the place of rest in the star-lit ocean always moving round. The seven stars of Ursa Major were observed to revolve around the tree or pole, and to make a circuit annually. This was the first circle marked out with the four cardinal points and assigned to her who was called the 'mother of the revolutions,' whose name of Teb signifies the first movement in a circle, she who had been the old typhonian genetrix as the abyss in space, and brought forth her brood of seven elementaries in Am-Smen, or Chaos. Four quarters were established by means of this constellation. The Chinese reckoned four seasons by its pointings to the south, east, north, and west in making the annual round. Four types were assigned to the genetrix in her starry shape of the Great Bear, which were representative of four elements. These were the hippopotamus for water, the kaf-ape for air, the lion for fire, and the crocodile for earth. The hippopotamus was given the ape's nose and lion's feet, and was depicted as a crocodile in her hinder-part. Thus the Great Bear north, the place of the waters, was the water-cow; to the south, the place of fire, she was the lioness; to the west, the swallowing crocodile of earth; and to the east, the ape of breath. In such a fourfold form she was the goddess of four elements and of the four quarters. These four types of the four quarters and elements once established might be varied, but have never been effaced to this day. Two of them are yet zod

belin, is young, in Kanuri.	belin, is young, in N'guru.
belin " " Munio.	belin " " Kanem.

dsigma, in Nupe.	tsugma, or tsugba, ín Esitako.	tagma, in Ebe.
tsigmo, in Kupa.	tsimo, in Gugu.

Tskuka, in Ibu.	Soko, in Nupe.	Sogei, in Kise-Kise.
Dsuku, in Isoama.	Soko, in Esitako.	Sokwo, in Nufi.
Dsuku, in Mbnfia.	Seakoa, in Puka.	Suge, in Susu.
Soko, in Basa.

nenu, in Gbese.	onya, in Vala.	anye, in Opanda.
nyonu, in Hwida.	onyui, in Isiele.	one, in Egbira-Hima.
nivonu, in Dahome.	unwai, in Ara.	nô, in Boko.
nyon, in Mali.	oniye, in Igu.	ne, in Bagrmi.