Yet it must be remembered that the further back we go to the primæval age of one language and one religion, the more obscure becomes our medium of vision. We see that tribes intermingled, exchanging and distorting traditions of their gods; that migrations disturbed the local force of legends; that the time for celebrating the birth of Spring in the far South or East became sadly misplaced when transplanted to the North; and that, finally, the deep reverence and strange tales attached to trees, flowers, and minerals, being too deeply seated to perish, were fed by being transferred to other objects more or less similar. Thus Christmas, derived from the old heathen Yule or Wheel feast of the Seasons and of Time, and which, like all feasts, was founded in the celebration of the revival of Spring, was actually held at last in mid-winter. So the holly and ivy, expressive of the male and female principles of generation, and of the great mystery of reproduction and revival most in force during the Spring, were substitutes for other symbols--possibly the fig leaves, lettuce, and roses which in milder climes had at that season been employed to set forth the loves of Venus and Adonis--of reviving and of receptive nature.
The most striking illustration of this transfer of earnest religious devotion to such objects is furnished by the ASH TREE. In the far East, men had, during the course of ages, learned to attach extraordinary significance to trees, which, growing, decaying, and dying like man, yet outliving him by centuries, seemed, like animals, to be both far below and yet far above him in many of the conditions of life. In those glowing climes the Banyan was regarded as the tree of trees, and the mighty centre of vegetating life. Hence it was worshipped with such deep reverence that even in modern botany we find it named the _ficus religiosa_; and it was called by the earlier Christians the Devil's Tree, in accordance with their belief that all heathen rites were offered to Satan. For it was beneath the Banyan that Vishnu was born, and under it that Buddha taught his sacred lore; it is in it that Brahmins love to dwell; it is the living, green cathedral of GOD--the leafy cloister of sacred learning, ever holy, ever beautiful, never dying. Like GOD and NATURE, it is ever re-born; it falls drooping to earth to take fresh root, and is, on that account, as well as from its immense size, a wonderfully apt symbol of God renewing himself--of revival and of eternity. It is named from some saint, whose soul is believed to flit through its solemn shades, nay, to animate the tree itself: no wonder that in the laws of MENU it was made the sacred, never-to-be-injured monument of a boundary.[1]