It's only just hit me. Mircea Eliade says nice things about trees: "the tree came to express everything that religious man regards as pre-eminently real and sacred.” But I hadn't connected this, which comes in the third chapter of The Sacred and the Profane (149), the chapter summarizing Patterns in Comparative Religion, to the thematics of the more influential preceding two chapters on "sacred space" and "sacred time."
In the former, "Sacred Space," Eliade argues for humans' existential need for "orientation," something furnished only by an "irruption of the sacred" which creates a "center of the world." Without a center (or centers: there can be many), there's nothing but the "chaos of relativity" - as modern man adrift in a "desacralized" world knows. Preeminent among centers are the "axes mundi" of sacred mountains and "cosmic trees," the models for all the smaller-scale centers of temples and dwellings. The Sacred and the Profane famously tells of an Aboriginal tribe whose sacred pole, carved from a gum tree, broke and, unable to continue living, lie down to die (33) - a story as famously debunked in Jonathan Z. Smith classic "The Wobbling Pivot."
The second chapter, "Sacred Time," summarizes the argument of The Myth of the Eternal Return. Its upshot is that time is a corrosive force, something all but modern people know. "History is suffering," he writes in Myth. Accordingly the ritual systems and myths of almost all religions know the world must be regularly refreshed, indeed recreated.
Well, who offers an axis mundi and also recreates the world every year? Only trees do! Uniting the upper and lower worlds Yggdrasil-style, "the tree represents – whether ritually and concretely, or in mythology
and cosmology, or simply symbolically – the living cosmos, endlessly
renewing itself" (Patterns, 267). (Well, trees are just trees, just as stones and mountains are just stones and mountains, but when they present themselves as "sacred" are loci of experience of the really "real"; the "sacred" is always "camouflaged" in the "profane." But still, sacred space and sacred time together?!
Eliade's thought is passé, at least among scholars of religion. We distrust his universalizing "comparative" method and hear fascist echoes in his criticisms of modern life and thought and whispers about "the pre-eminently real and sacred." But beyond the academy his ideas continue to appeal. How much oxygen should I give them in my book? I don't believe in the sort of universal religiosity he peddles, and am at pains to argue that different species of trees are widely different and have accordingly meant widely different things to people through their relationships with them.
But the idea of the cosmic tree, triangulating sacred space and sacred time, seems to point to something worth pondering. If not a fact about trees, this frisson of "sacred time" and "orientation" might register a fact about some of us, a frisson worth cultivating or overcoming.
