Barnstorm

Last week I shared with you a precursor, Mrs. J. H. Philpot. I've learned a little more about her since then. "J. H." stands for John Henry, MD, whom one Mary Isaline, née Needham (1852-1925) married in 1877. They lived in London, had a daughter, and a 20-year friendship with South African freethinker and feminist Olive Schreiner (whose letters have been digitized); both Isaline and Olive worked toward's women's suffrage in Britain, but Olive thought Isaline a gossip. I know this from the inquiries of a Canadian lesbian poet blogger, who learned of Philpot's book from the enthusiastic recommendation of radical feminist Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology:

If the Searcher can find it, she should look at Mrs. J.H. Philpot, The Sacred Tree, or The Tree in Religion and Myth (London and New York: Macmillan, 1897). It is saddening to read in the author's preface: 'The reader is requested to bear in mind that this volume lays no claim to scholarship, independent research, or originality of view.... In so dealing with one of the many modes of primitive religion, it is perhaps inevitable that the writer should seem to exaggerate its import...' A Hag [a term of approbation for Daly] who peruses this book will see that it displays extraordinary scholarship, independent research, and originality of view. She will also find that it takes no great effort of imagination to grasp the circumstances under which this devoted author labored — conditions which drove her to apologize for seeming to exaggerate the importance of the Sacred Tree and of her Self. Since she does not tell us her own name, we are left with the quaint label, 'Mrs. J.H. Philpot,' signifying the burial of this courageous foresister. Her book contains many important illustrations of Tree Goddesses. She discusses christian 'adaptations' of the May Tree and of what came to be known as the 'Christmas Tree.' She causes the reader to reflect upon gynocentric origins of such biblical images as that of Yahweh speaking to Moses from the burning bush, pointing out that the sacred sycamores of Egypt were believed to be inhabited by such Goddesses as Hāthor and Nuit.

I'm not sure there's much more we can find out about the author of The Sacred Tree, and what led her to publish this (and only this) book when she did. If I have a chance I might ask a librarian about reviews. But the book clearly has legs.

One reader was a Thomas Barns, an Anglican vicar who was entrusted with the article "Trees and Plants" for the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, published in 1908. He has different axes to grind than Philpot. His trees are more abstract, not objects of any sort of sympathy. He certainly doesn't consider inviting them into his house. 

Philpot didn't take sides on debates over whether ancestor cults or animistic experiences are the source of tree veneration, owning that it was likely that the primitive worship of trees had more than one root (23). Barns is a partisan for the latter view, but in a particular way. The anthropologists arguing for animism saw it as an early form of a scientific engagement with the forces of nature, the first stage in an evolution which would lead to religion and beyond it. Not so Barns, whose view is thoroughly theological. 

 (454)

It's a grim story that he tells, although his account began in wonder:

(448)

Barns' narrative begins with this animistic principle of the unity of the divine spirit of life but early humans progressively move away from the divine into anthropomorphism. The start is positively Edenic: In the earliest stage the sacred tree is more than a symbol. It is instinct with divine life, aglow with divine light. It is at once the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (448) But it moves towards symbolism as the sacred groves planted by devotés come to seem the abodes of different gods. Barns' discussion of this putative stage, Trees many and lords many, evokes Paul's account of the history of idolatry (1 Cor 8:5-6).

Like Philpot's, Barns' account is full of the names of different kinds of trees but where for her they are weightless, for him their specificity is part of the problem. With the differentiation of the deity into the gods of the nations there came the differentiation of the tree into the trees sacred to the several gods (449), he writes, only a little later to assert that As the tree varied in species, the god varied in name (451). Once particular kinds of trees are associated with the deities of particular nations and these nations fight and expand, they come into conflict with each other, giving rise to the tree-demons. 

(452)

Barns goes on to discuss the tree of life and the tree of knowledge but all along trees are but material witnesses to human folly. He ends with a flourish of quotations from the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, ending in silent adoration before the Tree of Life who is no tree but divine wisdom sprung from the root of Jesse. (457)

It all makes Isaline Philpot's account seem positively celebratory of trees! All the particularities of tree cults and celebrations are for Barns detritus as humanity moves painfully from the prelapsarian presence of the divine back to the divine. This doleful history involves particular trees and the particular peoples relating to them but ultimate truth allows of no such material particulars. Philpot's book's title refers to a single Sacred Tree but his "Trees and Plants" all point beyond themselves to the blinding Sun of Righteousness.

Anyway, Barns makes liberal use of Philpot - except for her discussion of the "universe tree," to which he gives only a cursory glance. While trees seem to him radiant with divine light, this light is not theirs - something our first parents knew, or should have - and it is fatal frailty to dwell on the trees rather than the light. Compared to this, Philpot, open to the "spirit of vegetation," is a pagan tree-hugger, as Daly discerned!