TREE-WORSHIP 41 



woodlands are the descendants of trees that 

 were worshipped as gods. 



The ceremonies of Christmas and May-Day 

 have come down to us from the days of tree- 

 worship. The birth of Christ is celebrated at 

 the time of the winter-solstice, not because He 

 was born at that time of the year, but because 

 the Church found it advantageous to supersede 

 with such a festival the pre-Christian rejoicing 

 that the turn of the year had come, and that 

 the sun, rising daily higher in the heavens, 

 would bring on first the spring-time and then 

 the summer. The earlier reason for rejoicing 

 was not in fact wholly superseded; and we 

 still retain some of the forms of it, and many 

 of us the spirit of it, even though the season be 

 now primarily associated with the sun of right- 

 eousness arising with healing in his wings. 



Many an old myth, such as the Egyptian 

 one of I sis mourning for Osiris, and the Greek 

 ones of Demeter mourning for Persephone and 

 Ariadne for Theseus, show that the fall of the 

 leaves in autumn, the winter bareness of the 

 trees, and the fading of the flowers, were 

 likened to or accounted death ; and that the 

 spring-time renewal was regarded as a new 



