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 The leaves of the Beech are arranged
carefully so that all will get some light, but very little filters between them.
The only plants, which will
successfully grow under mature Beeches are the Beech seedlings, which can
tolerate heavy shade. Again (from the Pagan storytellers view) it is tempting to
make the comparison with the missionary zeal, which the more dogmatic branches
of the Christian Church have tended to display: Only its own kind will be able
to thrive in the environment it controls.
Thus the Beech, as a species, has a tendency to become a hermit. One who
can live alone, who can create his/her own eco-system. The main exception is an
essential symbiosis (mutual dependency) with certain fungi. These fungi grow a
network of mycelium (thread-like tubes) on and into the roots, which feed
nutrients from the soil to the conducting vessels of a tree's sapwood. This
rises as crude sap throughout the tree and to the leaves.
The tree uses this sap and sunlight to form starchy compounds (carbohydrates), a
process called photosynthesis. The fungi receive a part of these starchy sugars
for fuel and energy, because they can not produce it themselves, as they do have
any chlorophyll themselves to be able to photosynthesise.
Similarly, it could be said that a
saint (or any spiritual institution) needs some form of symbiosis to take care
of their daily need for physical sustenance from the Earth.
The canopy of a Beech wood can be so dense that is is not only shade out the
sun, but it can also stop much of the rain from reaching the ground. The force
of a heavy rainfall will obviously be broken by the many layers of leaves and
will reach the forest floor as a gentle, incessant drip from the many leaves.
However, in gentler showers, the water can lie on the leaves, only to be
evaporated again when the sun comes out and this can leave the woodland floor
quite dry, although the humus made by the leaf fall every year will of course
help it to retain some degree of moisture.
Metaphorically speaking water equals emotions and fertility. From the ancient
story teller and myth makers point of view this process indicates that the
emotions in this spirit are not always earthed.
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Books and learning have
traditionally been always closely associated with the Beech. Due to its dense,
even grain and short fibres, and maybe also for the spirit, which people
perceived the tree to have, it was singled out as the wood of choice to inscribe
writing on.
Originally this was predominantly a magic act, engraving sacred knowledge and
request onto the heart of God/dess. However, many ancient people, steeped in the
old Nature religions, thought it on the whole wiser that sacred knowledge should
be preserved in the heart of people, rather than in graven images. Many of the
first Nation tribes in America, brought up in an oral culture, felt this very
strongly too when the white men arrived with his 'magic' books. So it is likely
that ancient 'Beech books' would have only been made in special or exceptional
circumstances.
In many North-West European cultures
the word for 'book' and 'Beech' was originally synonymous, because thin slices
of Beech were used to engrave our first books on. Branches may also have been
used to inscribe the Germanic/Scandinavian runic alphabet, and the German word
for 'letter' (such as A, B, C as opposed to correspondence) is to this
day 'Buchstabe'', which literally means a 'Beech stave''.
It is ironic, and maybe not
co-incidental, that even today the Beech is the very tree which many people feel
compelled to make their mark upon. The smooth bark seems to invite people to
carve their initials on it. Many courting couples, seeking the privacy of the
woods for romantic intimacies, have carved hearts and their names on the trunk.
Magic marks to make blissful moments into a lasting alliance or vandalism? The
tree responds with growing a protective callus formed of cork. As the tree
grows, the scar grows with it and the heart grows bigger.
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When we look at the spirit of the Beech
wood through the eyes of our Pagan Ancestors, whose predominantly oral culture
was threatened and often forcefully suppressed by the new Christian
spirituality, it is possible that the lack of vibrant folklore connected with
this tree was due to the fact that they began to associate the tree with the new
culture, which was forced upon them.
The intimate connection between
Beeches and books may have played an important factor in this association.
With the event of Christian culture far more emphasis was placed on knowledge
derived from books, instead of the oral tradition and personal experience of the
old Nature Religion traditions. The Bible is of course a major example of this
phenomenon, but the early monasteries spend a great deal of time collecting
knowledge and producing and copying hand-written books.
The Beech provided therefore a
closely fitting metaphor for the new regime: Once it has a secure foothold, it
can be a very expansive, dominating species, leaving little room for anything
else to flourish. It allows a few spring flowers early in the cycle. It casts a
dense, majestic, but gloomy shade during the summer-feast of life. The ecology
it creates favours the production only of its own seedlings and symbiotic fungi.
The wildlife in its its bows is reduced mostly to 'vermin', except for a few
little birds and the odd intellectual, like the Jay.
The glory of its autumn foliage seems to anticipate the reward of heaven in the
here-after. The dead leaves clinging onto the tree in winter, may have been
another poetic reminder of the emphasis in the new culture on the importance of
life after death.
Imagine: you are a
nature-worshipping tribal native in Britain with a poetic, metaphorical mind in
the days when Christianity first starts to colonise your land and your people.
You have always learned your wisdom and your stories from the living landscape.
You look around you in the landscape for an analog to try and understand what is
happening. The Beech forests provide such an analog. They were an almost perfect
symbol to tell the story of a new invading civilisation. In the British Isles
there was the additional coincidence that the Beech forests flourished in the
millennia around the birth of Christ.
The fact that the beech had such an elegant, aristocratic appearance would have
enhanced your reluctance to embrace the tree any longer, since it was
historically often the squires and the noblemen who first pledged allegiance to
the new faith in return for favours and then required the commoners to follow
suit.
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We never learned at school just how
much this was resented by the ordinary people. We were never made aware of the
fact that many hundreds of years were necessary to achieve the gradual
destruction of our native spirituality in the period we call "The Dark
Ages". We were never told that it took nothing less than the heart chilling
fear, which the witch hunts and the inquisition finally instilled across
nations, to make the common people finally submit and deny their complete
symbiosis with Nature in favour of a relationship with God in heaven.
My maternal Grandmother made me
dimly aware of just how much our ancestors much have resented the missionaries
and the new culture. She lived in the town of Leeuwarden, the provincial capital
of the Dutch province of Friesland. This area was in ancient times a stronghold
of Friesian tribes of Scandinavian origin. They have their own language, which
is closer related to the Scandinavian, rather the Germanic languages.
My Granny was a gentle loving woman, a member of the Baptist Church, who led a
fairly average middle-class life. She was by no means an anarchist or an
eccentric. Her husband was an incorruptible policeman, who was killed in the
war, because he refused to cooperate with the Germans. Granny was very proud of
his profession.
Yet, every year she celebrated the anniversary of the murder of St. Boniface (an
intrepid, passionate Christian missionary with little love for the Nature
religions) by the natives of her hometown. She always presented me with lemonade
(a great treat in those days) and cakes to celebrate the day.
Eleven long centuries after the
event, she used to say to me: "That arrogant nitwit believed he knew
everything better than we did, but we got him! And we send his soul to the
heaven he was always preaching about."
Unfortunately my interest in historical dates was non-existent in those
primary-school days, but I think she told me this 'great' event happened in AD
853 or 854. I have also forgotten the actual day of the year. In retrospect I
regret that I never took the chance to ask her, before she died, from whom she
learned about "Bonifatius", as she called the unfortunate evangelist.
I never gave this extraordinary yearly event much thought at the time. I just
enjoyed my treat and my Gran's unusual passion in relating the story. This
passion was only comparable to her disgust for 'the Germans', who killed her
husband. I can't recall that she ever expressed much other political or social
opinion.
For longer than a millennium, the
Friesian people somehow kept their profound resentment for this missionary and
his 'new' religion alive. In spite of the fact that for the last few centuries
generation upon generation had shared the same Christian faith, the old trauma
of being forced to reject the native spirituality was still remembered.
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The Church has never willingly
encouraged tree worship or tree-lore, nor a living relationship with the trees.
Wherever the common people's need to pay respect to - and celebrate Nature was
irrepressible, it was incorporated into the Church calendar. The Midwinter
Solstice became Christmas, the Spring Equinox became Easter, the Harvest
festival was christianised and Halloween became All Soul's Day and All Saint's
Day and so on. The people's need to relate to a female Goddess, as well as a
male God, was satisfied by re-introducing her in the form of the Virgin Mother
Mary, carefully stripped of any association with carnal activities, in spite of
the fact that the Bible mentions the fact that Jesus had brothers and sisters.
"People of the Middle Ages often viewed God as their persecutor and Mary as
their defender. "(Barbara G. Walker, page 604 "The Encyclopedia of
Women's myth and secrets").
Gradually, the trees were reduced from living spirits to little more than
timber sources.
Some of the ancient lore was passed
on by oral tradition through a long line of country folk, albeit sometimes in a
Christianised form to make it more acceptable to the 'authorities'. Much of it
is missing, as is the case with the Beech. The only way we gain regain what was
lost is to stop thinking of trees as merely timber and amenity. All the world
would benefit if we are able to relate to trees fully once more: as our friends,
our providers, our healers. But especially as creatures who have their own lives
to lead and their own role to fulfill in the community of Earthly beings. Once
we understand that, we will hopefully stop sabotaging their many contributions,
and work side by side with these giant plants rather than merely exploiting
them.
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Summarizing we have to conclude that
most of the truly ancient lore connected with the Beech has been lost and that
it seems likely that the spirit of the tree became increasingly associated with
the new Christian spirituality which focused on heaven, rather than being rooted
deep in the Earth. It became connected with the age of expansion, elegance,
learning from books, rather than from life. The enormous reference for the
spirit in matter was from now onwards increasingly replaced by a requirement to
worship pure spirit and to reject matter and the flesh as mere temporary shells.
This went hand in hand with the replacement of a deep faith in the cyclical
nature of the Universe by a belief in an hierarchical, more linear progression.
Loving our bodies, the beautiful physical world around us and participating in
its seasonal changes always used to be seen basically as an act of worship (or
celebration) of God/dess or multiple Gods and Goddesses.
Now these things became increasingly frowned upon and people were told to deny
the temptations of the flesh in exchange for a glorious vision of the
here-after.
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Beautiful as they are, Beech woods
are relatively dark, colourless and sombre places in the summer.
Wilfred Gibson expresses this aerie mood as felt by a lone traveler in his poem
"In the Forest":
Unflinching I have borne the brunt
of spears -
Yet, under these dark boughs that writhe and twist,
My heart is a wren's heart when she hears
The litch-owl called through the evening mist,
And falters cowed, a thing of fluttering fears,
Before some shadow-plumed antagonist.
Quaking I ride, yet know not what
I dread:
Naught stirs the boding silence but the sound
Of beechmast crackling 'neath my horse's tread,
Or some last leaf that flutters to the ground;
And long it seems, since, roofless and blood-red,
The sun in seas of night-black boughs was drowned.
Many writers have commented on the
similarity of mood between the great cathedrals and these dark woods with their
huge rising grey columns holding up a noble intricate roof of trussed branches,
which may have inspired the builders and craftsmen who practiced sacred
architecture.
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 However, after all this, it must of
course also be said that on a hot summer's day, a mature Beech tree offers a
wonderful cooling and refreshing repose and in the autumn they are a truly
glorious sight to behold.
As a child I loved walking under Beech trees, every step a pleasure wading
through the brown bone dry rattling leaves, eyes keen to spot the spiky fruits
and its shiny seeds.
V. Sackville-West expresses similar sentiments in her poem "Beechwoods at
Knowle":
How do I love you, beech-trees, in
the autumn,
Your stone-grey columns a cathedral nave
Processional above the earth's brown glory.
I was a child, and loved the
knurly tangle
Of roots that coiled above a scarp like serpents,
Where I might hide my treasure with the squirrels.
I was a child, and splashed my way
in laughter
Through drifts of leaves, where underfoot the beechnuts
Split with crisp crackle to my great rejoicing.
Elegant Beech tree, 'book-tree',
with your expansive spirit, I have made many comparisons between you and our
modern North-West European culture, yet I must conclude with emphasising one
outstanding difference between you and this culture. You leave the soil in
better heart then when you found it!
You know how to balance the 'books' truly and return it all to the Earth in the
end.
We can learn much from you.
Beech tree, we honour thee!
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