[T]he tree represents - whether ritually and conceretely, or in mythology and cosmology, or simply symbolically - the living cosmos, endlessly renewing itself.
(trans. Rosemary Sheed [London: Sheed and Ward, 1958], 267)
Patterns offers the pleasure of the encyclopedic polymath, moving weightlessly across time and space to surface unexpected commonalities. While protesting that it’s all really bafflingly complicated, Eliade regularly reassures us that it's actually all quite simple. Helpfully he provides a summary of the main "grouping" of "vegetation cults":
(a) the pattern of stone-tree-altar, which constitutes an effective microcosm in the most ancient stages of religious life (Australia; China; Indochina and India; Phoenicia and the Aegean);
(b) the tree as image of the cosmos (India; Mesopotamia; etc.,);
(c) the tree as a cosmic theophany (Mesopotania; India; the Aegean)
(d) the tree as symbol of life, of inexhaustible fertility, of absolute reality; as related to the Great Goddess or symbolism of water (Yaksa, for instance); as identified with the fount of immortality (“The Tree of Life”), etc.;
(e) the tree as centre of the world and support of the universe (among the Altaics, Scandinavians, etc.);
(f) mystical bonds between trees and men (trees giving birth to men; the tree as the repository of the souls of man’s ancestors; the marriage of trees; the presence of trees in initiation ceremonies, etc.);
(g) the tree as symbol of the resurrection of vegetation, of spring and of the “rebirth” of the year (the “May” procession for instance, etc.) (266-67)
Each of these is divided into several sections, which overflow with examples and bleed into each other. A type is introduced and immediately needs to be reasserted as the assembled examples don't quite dovetail. Is this scholarly candor on Eliade's part or gaslighting? He claims to have followed the evidence - and on an unprecedented scale - rather than working with an a priori definition of religion. Eliade writes from the position of one who has discerned the "patterns" modern scholars, whose impoverishing historicism occludes the experience of the sacred, don't even realize are there. His method, I suppose, tries to teach us how to see the wood for the trees - or at least to see as he sees.
Vegetation cults, above all, must be interpreted in the light of the original bio-cosmological conception that gave rise to them. That they appear so various is often [/] merely an illusion of modern vision; basically they flow from one primitive ontological intuition (that the real is not only what is indefinitely the same, but also what becomes in organic but cyclic forms), and converge towards one object – that of assuring the regeneration of the powers of nature by one means or another. (314-15)
That move to unity, wiping out all the historical specificity it claims to honor, is part of what's knocked Eliade out of syllabi. In a recent reflection on Patterns in a series of articles on "Undead Texts," Laurie L. Patton summarizes the critique nicely:
[F]or the more historically minded scholars, Eliade’s transhistorical treatment of the modality of the moon eclipsed all particular references to the moon, at particular moments in history by particular people. The symbolic moon erased the real moon occurring in real contexts. (Public Culture 23:2 [2020]: 385-96, 391)
These methodological criticisms were given further urgency as we learned of Eliade's early fascist sympathies. His pseudo-theological paeans to the sacred and its contrast with the disenchanting imperatives of "Semitic" thought now appeared not just wrong but dangerously so. (The last few years I taught Eliade in "Theorizing Religion" it was to wonder what made his fascist simplifications so appealing to the US of the Cold War but also of the counterculture - and, if you let it, to anomic today, too.) Still, Patton thinks Eliade - especially the Eliade of Patterns - endures in the shadows, recalling
the long conversations I have had with colleagues who whisper in small confessions that they still read it or that they still like it even though they do not cite it. This alone is fascinating to me—the way in which one has to both own and disown an intellectual legacy. (392)
Patton is conflicted, or intrigued, too, musing that the search for universals (she calls it "comparative" and "form") might have potential to be as radical and moral an act of social responsibility and justice as a turn away from it (390). She winds up commending Patterns for the ways it is more like Eliade's literary works than the theoretical works, an enjoyable experience of artifice (393).
Patton may be thinking precisely of the way the detailed cases Eliade enumerates in Patterns don't quite congeal, revealing the pathos of his perhaps unscholarly quest for an underlying order beyond the painful illusions of history. (His novels' protagonists are all on this quest.) This hide-and-seek method can be quite seductive.
"In the midst" of Paradise stood the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and God forbade Adam to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge: "...for in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death." [Gen 2:9, 17] Yet God makes no mention of the Tree of Life. Is this last simply the same as the Tree of Knowledge, or - as some scholars believe - was the Tree of Life "hidden" only to become identifiable and therefore accessible at the moment when Adam should snatch at the knowledge of good and evil, or, in other words, wisdom? I am inclined to this second hypothesis. (287)
Eliade explains that he's inclined to this hypothesis because "immortality is not easy of attainment" but I think he's inclined also because his understanding of the phenomenology of religion is all about hidden and lost things. Eliadian "hierophanies" (manifestations of the sacred) are always "camouflaged" in the profane. Nothing we experience in this world of evanescence is ultimately real - but sometimes it can express or signify or imply it.
This goes for all the trees conjured up in Patterns, too, which are as eclipsed by Eliade's account of them as the actual moon is by his symbolic moon.
No tree or plant is ever sacred simply as a tree or plant; they become so because they share in a transcendent reality, they become so because they signify that transcendent reality. (324)
For Eliade, trees are venerated when and were they are because of the "power" they express - but this is not an arboreal power. In their verticality and the way they grow new leaves each year (his symbolic trees are all deciduous), they "represent ... the living cosmos" but this cosmos is somehow beyond the world of actual life!
None of the emblems attached to trees can be interpreted in a naturist sense for the simple reason that nature itself was something quite different in Mesopotamian thought from what it is in modern thought and experience. We need only remind ourselves that to the Mesopotamians, as to primitve man in general, no being, no action that means anything has any effectiveness exceptin so far as the being has a heavenly prototype, or the action reproduces a primeval cosmological one. (273)
"Primitive" and "primeval" for Eliade aren't terms of derision but of purity. Unlike "historical man," the primitive man (a k a homo religiosus) wanted to live in the real, and knew it to be something requiring constant regeneration through rituals which abolish inevitably corrosive time.
This makes trees (well, "trees") especially signficant, for in them, more than anything else in our experience, we witness that what is truly "real," what is "indefinitely the same," needs to be cyclically recreated over and over, "endlessly renewing itself." This "living cosmos" has no growth - only regrowth. The trees Eliade likes are already fully grown, "world trees" linking - vertically of course - all the levels of reality. But the one who truly understands them religiously also knows that they are not ultimately real either. His discussion of May Tree rituals, involving cutting and burning of trees (and people too), is extensive, but most revealing here is his commending of the "Indic" views which describe a world tree - and the need to uproot it. He quotes approvingly from the Bhagavad Gita [xv. 1-3] one of several places in Indian tradition where the non-ultimacy of the trees we know is implied by the "world tree"'s being "inverted."
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"It is said that there is an indestructible tree, its roots above, its branches below, its leaves the hymns of the Veda; whoever knows it knows the Veda also. Its branches increase in height and depth, growing on the gunas; its buds are the objects of sense; its roots spread out from below, bound to actions in the world of men. In this world one cannot perceive the shape, nor the end, nor the beginning, nor the expanse of it. With the strong weapon of renunciation, one must first cut down this asvattha with its powerful roots, and then seek the place from which one never returns..." (273-74)
The sage and mystic know that this tree isn't "indestructible" after all, and learn to "cut the tree at its roots" and leave the "cosmos" altogether. While his evidence points in many directions, Eliade darkly suggests that only "Semites" think to seek immortality in this world rather than to transcend it. (He thinks Christianity is, or ought to be, cyclical and sacrificial, about incarnation and resurrection.)
I'm not sure what to make of Eliade's strangely ambivalent celebration of the sacredness of trees, but I'm tempted to let students wrestle with it. Seeing the ways in which arboreal life ultimately remains hidden from Eliade might challenge us to ask ourselves whether we can really engage them as persons rather than symbols...
