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A harden’d Oak ; his shoulders are the same,
And Oak his high exalted head became.
His hundred arms, which lately through the air
Were spread, now to as many boughs repair.
A sevenfold bark his now stiff trunk does bind ;
And where the giant stood a tree we find.
The earth to Jove straight consecrates this tree,
Appeasing so his injured deity.
Thus Oaks grew sacred, in whose shelter plac’d.
The first good men enjoy’d their Acorn feast.”
To do full justice to the legendary lore connected with the
Oak, it would be necessary to devote a volume to the subject:
the largest, strongest, and as some say, the most useful of the trees
of Europe, it has been generally recognised as the king of the
forest,
“ Lord of the woods, the long-surviving Oak.
An emblem of majesty and strength, the Oak has been revered
as a symbol of God by almost all the nations of heathendom, and
by the Jewish patriarchs. It was underneath the Oaks of Mamre
that Abraham dwelt a long time, and there he erected an altar
to the Lord, and there he received the three angels. It was
underneath an Oak that Jacob hid the idols of his children, for this
tree was held sacred and inviolable (Gen. xxxv., 2—4). Under the
“ Oak of weeping,” the venerable Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse, was
interred. The messenger of the Lord that appeared to Gideon
sat beneath an Oak ; and it was a branch of one of these trees that
caught the flowing hair of Absalom, and so caused the death of
King David’s beloved son. The Oaks of Bashan are several times
mentioned in the Bible, and in the sacred volume we are informed
that the Israelites worshipped and offered sacrifices beneath the
shadow of Oaks which they considered as sacred (Hosea iv., 13 ;
Ezekiel vi., 13 ; Isaiah i., 29).
The ancient Greeks attributed the deluge of Boeotia to the
quarrels between Jupiter and Juno. After the rain had ceased and
the water subsided, an oaken statue became visible, eredted, it is
supposed, as a symbol of the peace concluded between the king of
the gods and his consort. The Oak was thought by the Greeks to
have been the first tree that grew on the earth, and to have
yielded for man Acorns and honey, to ensure nourishment and
fecundity. They called it, indeed, the mother-tree, and they
regarded it as a tree from which the human race had originally
sprung—a belief shared by the Romans, for we find Virgil speaking
Of nymphs and fauns, and savage men, who took
Their birth from trunks of trees and stubborn Oak.”
Acorns were the first food of man, and there is an old Greek
proverb in which a man’s age and experience are expressed by
saying that he had eaten of Jo v e ’s Acorns. Some of the classic
authors speak of the fatness of the earliest inhabitants of Greece
and Southern Europe, who, living in the primeval forests, were
p fa a il 1901*©, L e g e i^ / , anil ISijric/, 46 5
supported almost wholly upon the fruit of the Oak , these primitive
people were called Balanophagi (eaters of Acorns).
Homer mentions people entering into compacts under Oaks as
places of security, for the tree was highly reverenced by the
Greeks, and held a prominent place in their religious and other
ceremonies. The Arcadians believed that by stirring with an Oak-
branch the waters of a fountain near a temple of Jupiter, on Mount
Lycius, rain could be caused to fall. The Fates and Hecate were
crowned with Oak-leaves ; and a chaplet of Oak adorned the brow
of the Dodonaean Jove.
The Pelasgic oracle of Jupiter, or Zeus, at Dodona, was situated
at the foot of Mount Tamarus, in a wood of Oaks, and the answers
were given by an aged woman, called P e lia s : and as pelias, in the
Attic dialea, means dove, the fable arose that the doves prophesied
in the Oak groves of Dodona. Respeaing the origin of this oracle,
Herodotus narrates that two priestesses of Egyptian Thebes were
carried away by Phcenician merchants : one of these was conveyed
to Libya, where she founded the oracle of Jupiter Ammon ; the
other to Greece. The latter remained in the Dodonsean wood,
which was much frequented on account of the Acorns. There she
had a temple built at the foot of an Oak in honour of Jupiter, whose
priestess she had been in Thebes, and here afterwards the oracle
was founded. This far-spreading speaking Oak was a lofty and
beautiful tree, with evergreen leaves and sweet edible Acorns (the
first sustenance of mankind). The Pelasgi regarded this tree as the
tree of life. In it the god was supposed to reside, and the rustling
of its leaves and the voices of hire s showed his presence. When
the questioners entered, the Oak rustled, and the Peliades said,
“ Thus speaks Zeus.” Incense was burned beneath the tree, and
sacred doves continually inhabited i t ; and at its foot a cold spring
gushed, as it were, from its roots, and from its murmur the inspired
priestesses prophesied. The ship Argo having been built with
the wood of trees felled in the Dodonaean grove, one of its beams
was endowed with prophetic or oracular power, and counselled the
hardy voyagers. Socrates swore by the Oak, the sacred tree of the
oracles, and consequently the tree of knowledge.
The Romans regarded the Oak as sacred, and the chosen tree
of Tupiter, who was sheltered by it at his birth. Thus Lucan
mentions “ Jo v e ’s Dodonaan tree,” and Ovid, in alluding to the
primitive food of man, speaks of Acorns dropping from the tree of
Jove. The Oak, says Virgil, is
“ Jove’s own tree
That holds the worlds in awful sovereignty.
For length of ages lasts his happy reign,
And lives of mortal men contend in vain;
Full in the midst of his own strength he stands,
Stretching his brawny arms and leafy hands ;
His shade protects the plains, his head the hills commands.”
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