I wish I could find the reference (because I feel a little silly here). But somewhere on the web there is an explanation of why certain types of wood are important, and it comes from Harry Potter. Voldemort's wand is made of Yew wood. If I can find it, I will come and back and post it.
Why are yew trees used in cemetaries?
Its not that they are used in cemtaries or churchyards, but the church was built where the yews grew, as the yew was a place of worship long before christianity. Yew trees are the longest living trees in the world.
Reply:So yew know where to look for them when yew feel the urge to get rid of your boss.
Very poisonous, so don't go eating the berries!
Reply:The practice was started by the Celts, the Yew was their symbol for eternity because a Yew tree lives for so long (thousands of years).
Reply:Yew trees live to a great age and so symbolise eternal life
Reply:The yew's reputation has been for long life and its due to the way in which the tree grows. Its branches grow down into the ground to form new stems, which then rise up around the old central growth as separate but linked trunks. After a time, they cannot be distinguished from the original tree. So the yew has always been a symbol of death and rebirth, the new that springs out of the old.
Both Druids with their belief in reincarnation, and later Christians with their teaching of the resurrection, regarded the Yew as a natural emblem of everlasting life. Its capacity for great age: enriched its symbolic value.
Reply:Were they there first?
The Yew, which once was probably once the dominant forest tree in Europe is now most familiar to us as "the graveyard tree". The poet Tennyson echoed the old belief in Brittany, that the roots of the tree reach out to the mouth of every corps when he wrote:
Old Yew, which graspest at the stones
That name the under-lying dead,
Thy fibres net the dreamless head,
Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.
The people of Selborne were able to see this with their own eyes, when the ancient yew in St. Mary's churchyard blew over in a terrible gale at then end of January, 1990. It exposed quite a few bones, some of which were tangled up in the root ball. I guess that they may well have grown in and out of skulls, being a bone with several orifices, as was the belief in Brittany. Archeologists were called in to collect these human remains to protect them from dogs and other creatures on the prowl. They were allowed to use this rare opportunity for an archeological dig, after which the rudely disturbed skeletons would be reburied. It was established that the remains of as many as 30 people had been resting beneath the mass of roots.
There has been much heated discussion and many opinions expressed as to why the Yew is so often found in churchyards. Some say it is the deep-dark green, almost eerie and shady presence of the tree. Other say because it is the tree of death, due to its poisonous chemistry, or that it was put in churchyards, where it would not be accessible to life-stock to grow wood for longbows. Christian scholars have associated it with Christ as 'the tree of the cross' or with the theme of resurrection.
However, the evidence is now overwhelming that the Yew was the archetype of "The Tree of Life" to people all over Europe eons before Christ was born.
A tree of the Yew family (which is itself at least 200 million years old) is the one living creature who, 'barring acts of God or man', is biologically able to live indefinitely: forever! It is difficult to imagine for us, for whom 80 years of consciousness is a long, long time, what it is like to be a Yew. It is not surprising therefore that, for long millennia, visionary and sensitive people have turned to the Yew sensing it can teach us about eternity and immortality and that its Spirit is, in spite of its toxicity as a plant substance, a miraculously healing Spirit. The Yew has served the Earth since prehistory and it has always served us as human beings by providing a Spiritual presence, which is as close as we can get, in tangible physical matter, to the concept of God and Eternity.
The Yew was the original Church a presence beyond our own dimensional experience.
Before churches were ever build, the Yew itself was 'the Church', the sacred tree or grove where mortal people could go and be in a spiritual aura , which put us in contact with both the magnificence of the Life-force, as well as the mysteries beyond. Being in the presence of a Yew gives us an opportunity to get in touch with so many things which can not be expressed in words, but which can be felt, about the eternal source from which we all come and to which we shall one day return.
One of the many extra ordinary qualities of the Yew is its ability to rejuvenate itself and there are many reports of old haggard and injured yews which decennia later suddenly decide to resurrect themselves and begin sprouting again and put on new growth.
Lots of ancient churches were build on old Pagan Sacred Sites where people used to come since memory began and 'partake' in the Yew's presence. There is no doubt that ancient people were sometimes buried near the Yew, if this could be arranged, or that ashes were brought to the Sacred tree, as it was a Gateway to the Otherworld, where the Ancestors are. This practice made it also possible for Pagan people to have a point, where they could get in touch with the collective wisdom of generations of ancestors, who 'had merged' with the tree spirit. An early form of 'logging in' to a virtual world, you might say!
The idea of the Yew as a gateway is reinforced by the fact that all older Yews form hollow trunks, which can easily be seen by poetic minds as an entrance to the Otherworld.
The lives of ancient people in the temperate zones were marked by seasonal and other natural cycles, such as those of the moon and sun, and their spirituality reflects this deeply. Nature was their sacred book. The unique quality of the Yew is that it represents the dimensions beyond these cycles, because it simply does not seem to be dominated by the cyclic changes everything else is subject to, apart from its flowering and fruiting. It follows therefore that it was seen either as the still centre of the Life force, the 'Axis mundi' (meaning: the centre of the world) or as being related to the dimensions beyond this world.
Traditions of the Yew in connection with churches:
The new Christian religion, introduced to this country by its Roman invaders and colonisers, had a hard time trying to establish itself. Most ordinary people, deeply steeped in their local nature-religion traditions, did not take to 'this foreign cult' readily, judging by Roman Laws which put hefty penalties on possessing and displaying 'Pagan Idols'.
It took well over a thousand years to 'christianise' Britain and even by the end of the Middle Ages the Old Nature Religion had to be forcibly repressed, for example through the horrendous witch hunts, which these days would be classed as genocide (9 million people, mostly women, were killed or tortured by representatives of the Church) and 'ethnic cleansing" (except the cleansing was based on religion rather than race). In order to save 'the heathen souls', early evangelists often preached under the Sacred Yews and build their churches near to it, either in order to gain respectability for the new religion by association or by trying to replace it. St. Patrick, for example, build his first church near a Sacred Irish Tree, thought to be a Yew. And so it was, that Yews and Churches lived side by side, and it became an acceptable practice to plant yews in the churchyard, even long after the original spiritual significance of the Yew had been forgotten.
We owe Alan Meredith a great debt for his tireless work in proving that many of the Old Yews in churchyards really are much older than the churches. I wholeheartedly agree with his view that these trees are monuments, no less than a Cathedral, and that they should be venerated as such. The fact that they are far more ancient, as well as alive, makes them all the more special.
It was a common tradition to bury people with a spray of Yew in their grave. This practice presumably originated in the desire of grieving relatives to give their loved ones the closest thing they could think of as a guide to the Otherworld.
In Pagan Ireland Yew staves were used as an aid by gravediggers to measure corpses.
It was also common practice in many parishes up and down the country to carry Yew branches in processions on Palm Sunday, as well as decorating the church with Yew sprays on this occasion. Willow branches have also been used for this purpose, especially where Yew was not available.
The Tree of Immortality: Other Yew traditions
Landmarks:
Yews were often used as landmarks, for example to mark boundaries, roads and paths, on ridge ways, on blind springs and so on. They were of course eminently suitable for this purpose, because of their longevity and because, as one of the very few native evergreen trees in this country, their dark-green foliage could be spotted and easily identified from far away.
Yews in the centre of territory:
Yew were also often planted at the centre of a tribal territory, which often served as a gathering place for clan meetings. The Fortingall Yew (see above) is one such example. Another is the Ankerwyke Yew near the Thames River in Buckinghamshire. Alan Meredith has shown, to the satisfaction of many historians, that this was the place were the historical Magna Carta was signed after 9 days of talk between King John and the Barons of England, who had many complaints about the way the country was run. Britain has never had a constitution and the Magna Carta is the closest thing we have to bill of rights.
A quarrel over a Yew tree was the cause of the Battle of Mag Mucrama, as told in the Irish myth of "The Yew Tree of the Disputing Sons" (a well documented tale of which there are at least two versions in existence). CaitlĂn Matthews, a renowned researcher into the Celtic Tradition, gives the following commentary: "It may be thought strange for princely warriors to fight over a tree, but the ancient trees of Ireland were focal points of tribal meeting and were thought to possess memory and have the power of witness. Trees were central emblems of tribal continuity."
Reply:I am sure there is another explanation, but yew trees roots don't dig very deep.
Reply:Yew wood is excellent for making bows, being straight-grained and hard. But yew berries were reputedly poisonous, so the trees were not welcome where they may have been eaten by livestock.
Reply:I believe it is something to do with them being evergreen and that they live for a very long time. Its the whole idea of life after death I think.
Reply:The roots give off a special enzyme that stop corpses turning into zombies.
I guess they don't have many Yew trees in Raccoon City.
Sorry, I'm being silly.
It was the Druids who worshipped round them or something and the Christians built the churches next to them in the hope of converting the druids to Christianity.
Reply:yew wood is good under compression and expansion relative to outer or heartwood, thus is used for bow making, it is one of the longest lived trees living thousands of years and having large girths some of the largest there are..as to why in church yards...not sure...but there must be some significance..good question
Reply:Historically they were intended to protect the graveyard from witches. You will notice that there are often trees either side of the gate / entrance to prevent the witches from entering the graveyard.
I was really interested in this and looked it up and actually foudn reference that witches used yew tree in their 'brews' according to shakespeare and it was considered sacred by Hecate- the queen of the witches however I also found this article
http://www.bucksfreepress.co.uk/news/loc...
which is strangely from the local paper in the area I grew up in so I guess this was definately a local belief.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment