Sacred Trees II: Lightning-Struck Wood and the Rowan
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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And hey, everybody, I got to apologize right here at the start for my voice and my brain possibly today. I am wrestling a pretty nasty cold, but we're plowing right through. And today we're going to be talking about a topic. We're actually returning to a topic we talked about a couple of weeks ago, the subject of sacred truth.

trees. In that previous episode, Rob, you talked about the giant sequoia of Western North America, arguably the largest tree in the world, depending on how you measure. And we talked about the history of how people regarded these massive plants with reverence. And I ended up talking about the Ohia lehua tree of Hawaii and a lot of interesting, beautiful ways that it interlocks with Hawaiian religion and traditional practices.

In some cases, it's the physical embodiment of a god. In other cases, it's like a tree beloved by the gods in storytelling and so forth. But when we were researching that episode, we thought, man, there are so many interesting angles on sacred trees that we could come back to. So that's what we're doing today. Here's a new installment. I'm sure this is something we'll probably return to again in the future. Yeah, and it's a good month for it since we're into December here and a lot of December holiday traditions center around a sacred tree.

I guess one of the things I think we both encountered it in the last episode, especially in this episode, is the thing about sacred trees is that it's never just a case of like, oh, well, you know, there's this tree around. And at one point, there's a group of people that thought it was sacred and then they stopped. You know, no, the trees have have been around a long time and human cultures enter into these areas where these trees grow, develop these ideas about them and grow.

build upon those ideas, pass them down and the trees remain. And so you start pulling the threads on some of these beliefs and, you know, those threads connect across different peoples and, you know, into neighboring territories. And in

And oftentimes they're as far flung as a particular, you know, it's the range of a tree species itself. So before long, you realize, oh, well, this isn't necessarily just a look at one particular tree and or one particular folk belief or mythology. But you can easily touch upon like a dozen different folk beliefs and mythologies concerning the same tree. Mm hmm.

Which is to say, we're not going to pull all those threads today. We're going to pull some of those threads, and we're going to find some, I think, some very tantalizing, very interesting things to say about a couple of different topics related to sacred trees. That's right. So to kick things off today, I wanted to explore something interesting I came across in a book recently.

The book is called European Paganism, the realities of cult from antiquity to the Middle Ages, originally published in the year 2000. I think the edition I was reading was from maybe 2013, but from Rutledge Press by an author named Ken Dowden, who was a professor of classics at the University of Birmingham in the UK.

This is a book about the religious practices of European cultures before the introduction of Christianity, and then also those pagan religions interacting with Christianity once it was introduced. And these religious beliefs and practices were, of course, not all the same, though there are some themes that kind of emerge repeatedly. So you can kind of make some rough generalizations about pre-Christian European paganism, but they don't apply in every case.

And one is that a lot of pre-Christian European religions saw sacred dimensions in the features of the physical land like rocks, waters, and of course trees. But there are many different ways to understand the sacredness of trees. Now, Downen actually begins this section of the book saying,

with an ancient passage describing something that's a little bit of field, but I thought it was so interesting I wanted to throw it in here. It's describing one way of showing appreciation for trees that's kind of hard to classify. It doesn't seem exactly right to call it a religious practice, but it definitely goes beyond like, oh, look at the poplars. They're so nice. This is a translated passage from Pliny the Elder that reads as follows.

On a hill called Cornei, in the suburban part of the land of Tusculum, there is a grove in ancient reverence dedicated by Latium to Diana. And that would be, by the way, Diana, goddess of the hunt of wild animals and the moon, sort of a wilderness goddess, the ranger of the party.

Pliny goes on, The foliage of the beech forest is sheared as though by topiary. In it an exceptional tree was loved in our times by Passienus crispus.

Twice consul, the orator, later more famous thanks to his marriage with Agrippina, through which he became the stepfather of Nero. He was in the habit of kissing and embracing it. Talking about the tree. Kissing and embracing it, not only of lying under it and pouring wine over it.

literal tree-hugging here. Yes. So this tree is interesting in the example here because it is, in one sense, a literal sacred tree in a religious sense. It's part of an ancient sacred grove. And I guess one thing we could talk about is a distinction between sacred trees as in like a type of tree or a tree species has a religious significance within a particular culture.

Versus an individual tree, like this tree right here has religious significance of some kind. Versus a collection of trees have some kind of religious significance, a sort of expanded version of this tree right here. This forest right here has significance. And there are a lot of those in pre-Christian European religions, sacred groves, sacred forests.

throughout the continent. But so in this case, it is a particular sacred grove, a forest of beech trees that are in honor of the goddess Diana. So these are the trees of Diana, the goddess of the hunt. But this Roman politician isn't necessarily worshiping Diana. I don't know, maybe he is, but it's not discussed in the passage here.

He's not just honoring the sacred forest as a whole in its relation to the goddess Diana. It sounds like he is in erotic love with one particular very special tree.

Hard to think of a parallel to this. I just thought it worth mentioning. But anyway, from here, Dowden goes on to a section where he sort of thinks about the implicit logic of our relationship to trees, especially in our desire to think of them as persons, as like a symbol of a person or as containing the essence of a divine person.

And he notes an interesting parallel between trees and humans, which has been observed by a number of scholars of religion. It's not unique to this book. And that parallel is in the form of posture.

Humans are mostly unique in the animal world for our verticality. What appears to physically differentiate humans from other animals is that we are a column, a standing straight up compared to most other animals, which tend to position their bodies in a more horizontal fashion.

You can think of a few little counterexamples here and there, but for the most part, this does really hold true. Humans appear to be different from all other animals in that we stand straight up. And what makes a tree different from a bush or a shrub or lots of other plants is that it is also a tall vertical column. So it's true of both trees and humans that we take the form of a vertical column. We grow taller as we age, and when we die, we fall down. That's a good point. Yeah.

So with this kind of knowledge just sort of operating in our minds all the time, it seems very natural to think of the tree as the sort of human analog within the alien kingdom of plant life.

Except, of course, trees grow much larger than humans and are much tougher than humans and often live for hundreds of years. So in a sense, you can think of them as something that has always been here. So it's, I think, quite natural to start thinking of them as like super humans, super persons. They are gods.

Yeah, yeah, these are great points. Yeah, it stands tall like a human, it has that verticality, and then lives before and after us and on this different time scale than we are. So that's just sort of one theory as to why we're sort of primed to see godhood in the form of trees. But Dowden also emphasizes that many trees are integrated into religion first.

not simply by their nature, not by being trees, but in a specific sense by being connected directly to myth or to history, as in like this plane tree at Delphi was planted by Agamemnon, and that's why it's special. Or when Io was transformed into a cow by Hera and tied to a tree, it was this olive tree right here.

Or this tree was the source of Herakles' first oak leaf crown. Or this tree is where Helen of Troy was hanged after she fled to Rhodes. So in those cases, you might say that these physical existing trees are sacralized by way of intersections with stories. I don't know whether those are like sort of founding ethnic stories, like founding histories of a people or a nation, or myths about the gods.

On one hand, you have a physical object that is right here right now, this tree we're all looking at. And on the other hand, you have the story we all know. And so by connecting the two, the tree, the physical object makes the story more real and the story makes the physical object more meaningful.

Yeah, yeah. Like eventually we'll come around to talking about the Bodhi tree in this series. The Bodhi tree, of course, in Buddhist traditions is the tree under which the Buddha sat when he attained enlightenment. You know, it is the place where it happened. So, yeah, we see versions of that in various different myths and religions.

But one example I really wanted to focus on for a minute because I thought it was so interesting was something Dowden brings up in this chapter. That is the idea of a sacred tree struck by lightning. Dowden writes that the ancient Romans had a practice of enclosing a tree after it was struck by lightning. So like after a tree was hit by lightning, that it would be subject to a type of sacrificial or religious immurement, right?

The enclosure for a tree would sometimes be what this author identifies as a puteal, P-U-T-E-A-L, plural would be putealia, which usually refers to a wellhead. So this would be the raised stone structure around the opening of a water well. Now, in the case of a water well, usually you have a wellhead raised in part to prevent the well from simply being a hole in the ground that people can fall into. You know, it's like a wall for safety.

In ancient Rome, these wellheads were often made of marble and decorated with carvings or with bas-relief. I've got a picture from a wellhead in Venice for you to look at here, Rob. So you can see, you know, there's a cap on it right now. I think it's an iron cap. I don't know what the original material of the cap would have been, possibly iron, you know, hundreds of years ago or thousands of years ago as well.

But in this case, you know, you could open it up and imagine looking down into the well. But then down on the wall around it, we've got, I don't know, some kind of creepy dancing god babies who are throwing around some. What do you what do you think that is? Is that grape leaves or olives or something? Yeah, some sort of like wreaths and leaves. Yeah, yeah.

But as Dowden says in this chapter, sometimes a puteol would be built not around a water well, but around a tree or really any spot that had been touched by a bolt of lightning. Uh-huh.

So a lightning-kissed location like this was called in Roman times a bidental. And I was reading about this in an older source from the Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities by William Smith from the 19th century.

This reference book goes into sources from ancient history describing what the bidental was and what its religious significance was. And so it says that the bidental was named after the fact that you would sacrifice a sheep here after lightning struck. It would be a two-year-old sheep called a biden, which means two-toothed, biden, like dental, bidental.

And the sequence would go like this. So lightning strikes somewhere and people witness it. And whatever was struck, be that a tree or a person or just the earth, whatever is

is there is, uh, buried in some cases burned in other cases, not burned, but is buried by priests in the ground in that very spot. So if you get struck by lightning and killed in ancient Rome where these, uh, these by dental, uh, priests are operating, you are not, your body is not transported to a cemetery and is not cremated. You are buried in the spot where you fell. Hmm.

And then the two-year-old sheep is sacrificed and added to the lot. And then that spot is in some sense sort of walled off from human contact. It is capped with an altar and then enclosed in some way by a fence or in some cases by a putail, a marble wellhead. And thereafter it is made taboo. No one may walk there. No one may touch it. No one may even look at it.

And if a person were to violate this taboo, like to remove the wellhead or the altar or in some other way violate the prohibition against treading there, they would be subject to swift, violent punishment by the gods. And this connects to the original action there. Lightning was often thought to be the weapon of the gods in ancient Rome, particularly of Jupiter.

So a place struck by lightning was both terrifying and holy. It was a sacred point of connection with divine power and a conduit of divine wrath. So as one example of a puteol which may once have covered a tree made holy by lightning,

Dowden mentions a fig tree attested in ancient sources in the area of the Comitium of Rome. The Comitium is an ancient public meeting space in the city center. And this fig tree was known as the ficus ruminalis, which literally means the ficus of suckling, though experts apparently debate whether that's its original meaning or how it should be understood.

But there are actually a couple of sacred objects said to be in the vicinity here. One thing is this tree, the ficus ruminalis. But there is also a stone which was said to have been cut in half with a razor and

by the ancient Roman augur Attis Navius. And the story goes that he cut the stone in half in a display of his powers when he is in the middle of rebuking a legendary king of Rome who was sort of arrogantly trying to expand his own glorification. Attis Navius was rebuking him and saying, like, you go too far, king.

And in their conflict, he's like, I better show how strong my divinatory skills are and the kind of power I can command. So I'm going to cut a stone, cut a whetstone in half with a razor. Oh, wow. I guess it worked.

It did, according to the story. So you've got this split stone here, and then you've got the ficus tree. And here, Dowden again quotes a passage from Pliny the Elder describing the site of the tree and the sliced rock. So Pliny, in translation, writes, "...a fig tree growing in the actual forum and comitium of Rome is revered sacred because of the lightning bolts buried there."

and still more to commemorate the fig tree under which the nurse of Romulus and Remus first sheltered those founders of empire at the Lupercal.

It is called Ruminalis because it was beneath it that they found the she-wolf offering her rumus, that is what they used to call a breast, to her babies, a miracle commemorated nearby in bronze, as though the wolf had of her own accord crossed the comitium while Adasnavius was acting in his role as augur. Nor is it without significance when it dries up and must, through the efforts of the priests, be replaced.

So I thought this was interesting in that the way Pliny tells the story, the way he understands it at least, this fig tree is in part sacred because of an intersection with legend, like we mentioned earlier. So much like you might say this tree was planted by Agamemnon, in this case you would say this tree is the site where Romulus and Remus were nursed by Wolfmother.

And then also by proximity to the site where Adas Navias split the stone, that's another connect, an intersection with legend. But then according to Pliny, it's also sacred because lightning bolts are buried beneath it. Hmm.

And then here, Dowden also mentions a possible connection of the legend of the ficus ruminalis to the interesting sort of botanical fact that the fig tree produces a sap-like secretion, which I believe is part of an anti-predator strategy that is said to look like milk. So like if you wound a fig tree...

The ficus will leak out this white milky substance that is said to be quite bitter and I think is supposed to deter things from munching on it. Yeah, we used to have a fig tree and yeah, I can attest to this.

And so Dowden's saying, you know, so you have a place where, according to these ancient texts, you have a stone, which is interesting because of its shape. It's like a split stone. And then you also have a tree, which has interesting just sort of biological features. This tree appears to leak milk.

and then can be kind of attached to myths. And so he writes, quote, the tree is tended and when necessary renewed by the priests. If it is surrounded by a puteol, then originally this may have been understood as a place where lightning had struck and the whetstone, that's the stone that was apparently split in the story, the whetstone might have been considered a thunderstone. Wow, this is all really fascinating to me, especially when you think about the idea that the whetstone

The world tree in myth is often situated as this thing that connects earth to the heavens and lightning as well is this momentary connection between earth and heaven that leaves like a physical sign.

You know, we see it and then we can, if we can find where it hit, we have evidence of this contact between lightning and the earth, between storm clouds and the earth, but on another level between the divine and the mundane world.

Totally. And, you know, one thing I like is the kind of ambiguity of the, is this good magic or bad magic? You know, that you can have a place where a tree is struck by lightning and it becomes in some sense sacred, but it seems to me rather, uh,

there's a kind of ambivalence like is this a place that is cursed and dangerous and will hurt you or is this a place that is in some way blessed and is showing off the power of the gods or God's power in a way that can be celebrated and sacralized there's almost kind of a U-curve right places like this places so sacred or it is so cursed that it essentially amounts to the same thing and that is no trespassing sorry you can't visit you can't touch it music

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Well, that is all really fascinating. And another cool thing is that it does lead directly into the tree that I'm going to talk about here, the Rowan tree. I was looking at several different sources on this, one of which was, I didn't spend a lot of time with this source, but there was an older article titled The Folklore of Trees by Lizzie M. Hadley. This was published in the Journal of Education back in 1894. And it's a very short little article.

Kind of wordy write-up, touching on various sacred ideas of trees. But the Rowan tree is mentioned in passing, and just a few ideas connected to it are thrown out, including the idea in some European traditions that the tree grew from a place where lightning struck. That's like the origin of this tree. Mm-hmm.

That would be interesting in that. So remember the phrasing Pliny uses is that lightning bolts are buried there where the tree is. So it's like when lightning hits the ground, it's almost like a seeding of the ground, like it plants something when it hits. And so you could imagine, well, if what it's planting is some kind of seed, what grows, it could be a type of tree. That's right.

So why did I pick the Rowan tree? Well, I recently had the opportunity and the privilege to go on a little tour of Wales with my family. And I was enraptured by the haunting beauty of its rolling hills, these dramatic valleys, and in some cases, hilltop ruins of which there are ghost stories about.

So I thought, well, I should cover a tree that is sacred within Welsh traditions. There's obviously going to be a lot of overlap with other sacred trees in the British Isles and so forth. But yeah, I wanted to pick something that had significance in Wales.

And I realized I was already talking a little bit about Welsh tradition and mythology on the monster fact. And I should go ahead and drive home if anyone's not familiar. Wales is a country in Western Great Britain. It is part of the United Kingdom, but it boasts its own distinctive culture and language. We've touched on Welsh mythology before, which, of course, shares various ideas with other cultures of the British Isles. But I don't know if we've ever really stopped to just talk about

the idea of Wales and Welsh tradition and Welsh language in any degree of detail. Maybe we have, and I forgot about it, but I just wanted to bring it up again. So again, it's the Rowan tree or Sorbus Occuparia, also known as the mountain ash, though it is not closely related to either true ash trees or

Or a particular tree, this is Eucalyptus regnans. This is a plant that you find in Australia, so obviously a good ways away from Wales and Europe. But that one is sometimes called a mountain ash, but it is not related to the tree we're talking about here. No, the rowan tree is actually a tree or shrub of the rose family. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah.

So according to the UK's Woodland Trust, which has a nice little overview about the species here, a rowan tree can reach heights of 15 meters or nearly 50 feet in height. The tree's bark is smooth and silvery gray. And the leaf buds are purple and hairy. I included a close-up image here for you, Joe, but everyone out there, if you do a search, you can find like rowan tree buds. You'll see these. And yeah, it has this, as is often sometimes the case with like the little details, especially with budding trees.

of trees, you know, there's almost like a velvety appearance to it. It almost doesn't look like tree flesh, but more like, uh, you know, it's like part of a deer growing out of the tree or something. I was going to say like a, like a little fallen's ear. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, when the leaves develop, it's going to have these serrated leaflets in groups of five to eight. It produces white flowers, which following pollination develop into vibrantly scarlet berries. Sometimes I've seen various photographs and, of course, you know, color variations.

details of color kind of vary depending on the exact photography in question. But yeah, sometimes they look more scarlet. Sometimes they look a little more orange, but it's a vibrant color. And yeah, you can get into a discussion about what is red, what is orange anyway. At any rate, it's bright. It catches the eye. And that's going to be important as we proceed.

And how long do they live? Well, a rowan tree apparently can live for upwards of two centuries, according to the Woodland Trust, though a source I'm going to cite in a minute put it more at about 150 years. But at any rate, you know, not the longest lived tree by any stretch, but still they tend to live longer than humans. So they still have that kind of like, you know, mythic connotation. They stand outside of our short time on this earth. Always been here. Yeah. Yeah.

So they're native to the cooler parts of the Northern Hemisphere, mostly Western and Northern UK. That's one, or at least that's one of the key areas that, where they grow. And that's where we're going to be talking about here. So you'll find them not only in Wales, you'll find them in the Highlands of Scotland. And they're pretty far flung.

Another source I was looking at was a Journal of Ecology write-up on the species. This was by Olivier Rasp et al.

titled just Sorbus Occuparia L. And this article pointed out that while the British Isles are certainly a place where you can find them, they're present through most of Europe, from Iceland to northern Russia, though not into Arctic Russia, down into Spain, Portugal, Italy, Macedonia, Greece.

And it seems limited by poor drought tolerance and a necessity for a short growing season and a cold requirement for the bud burst. Hmm.

This source also, this is the one that puts the age at more of like a 150-year range. So I'm not sure if it's 150 or 200. It depends, I guess, where you want to fall on that. But it's also been pointed out that the sorbus species here seems to have perhaps originated in Southeast Asia and gradually spread. Hmm.

Another interesting thing to think about trees in terms of having a sacred nature is that, of course, we make use of trees. We do things with trees. Trees produce wood that we may use for various purposes depending on the quality of the wood. They produce leaves. They produce berries. They produce flowers and so forth.

So they are also this like font of materials that we might make use of. And I guess you don't always know exactly how that's going to fall. Like, you know, there are plenty of examples of cultures where

the things that make the mundane world possible are in and of themselves sacred, you know, be it a food product or whatever. Like, just because you interact with it every day, it doesn't mean that it can't be sacred. It may be very sacred within a tradition because it is part of your survival. Mm-hmm. Yeah. But then, of course, our lives are full of things that we don't really give sacred connotations to because they are just part of the mundane world. So what do humans use it for? Well, the wood...

of the Rowan is usable. Apparently it's hard and tough, but not super durable. And my understanding of this is that basically it means you maybe wouldn't want to build a house out of it or use it for like really, um, like high stress, uh, you know, situations. You wouldn't build a car out of it. Well, yeah, I guess so. Yeah. But on the other hand, it's not like, uh, it's super fragile, like because you can make furniture out of it.

craft works, and even tools. So it's like, I guess it's not so fragile that you couldn't make a tool out of it. But just again, I guess maybe not a house, though perhaps there are examples of such usage as well. But that's what the sources were saying. And as far as the berries go, I think we were talking off mic earlier, you asked me, well, can people eat the berries? Apparently so. Now, I want to add the caveat here.

Anytime we're talking about eating berries, please do additional research before you eat berries. But my understanding is that they are edible for humans.

but they are quite tart. And that means that jam is one of the most common culinary uses of the berries. You know, so, you know, typical jam making scenario, usually there's a lot of sugar added or some sort of sweetener added. There's a, you know, a reduction taking place. So there are a lot of steps in place to take something that is otherwise quite tart and make it consumable and, you know, and

and appealing to the human palate. So cooked Rowan, thumbs up, raw Rowan, question mark. Right. But on the other hand, the sources I was looking at, they did say that, you know, the Rowan berries have long been a part of the human diet. There's evidence from like southern Sweden from around 6,000 years ago that gives us evidence that, yeah, like people have been eating the Rowan berries. So as to, I didn't get into details about

uh you know ancient preparations of rowan berries if they were cooking them or if they were just eating them raw um but it seems like when you get into more modern uses and uh not even just modern but like you know last several centuries people were generally talking about taking the rowan berries and doing some sort of culinary preparation to get them to a place where we enjoy them yeah

Sadly, I did not know to look out for Rowan Jam while I was in Wales. So I don't know if it's something I could have purchased or tried if I'd been looking for it. I did a quick look around the internet and I'm not even sure you can get it in the States. So I'm not sure. If you have tried Rowan Jam,

and or you are familiar with all the things you can do with Rowan berries, do reach out to us, email us. We'll have that email at the end of this episode, and we will gladly share your Rowan berry experience in a future edition of listener mail. Hey, in fact, this connects to a project that's been on my mind lately. I, I have never made jam at home, but for some reason I've got a hankering to make homemade raspberry jam.

Not exactly sure why, but it's in my mind and it's not going to leave until I do it. Jam makers, write in, let us know what are your tips. How do you make the best jam? All right. Now, according to RASP in that paper I referenced earlier, if you go to, if you look around in Poland, the fruits there are used to flavor vodka.

Now, another source I was looking at does mention a Welsh spirit. This is in a book titled Rowan by Oliver Suffolk, 2023. This is a Recteon book. I think they have a number of books related to different species. I've referenced at least one of these, a book on squid in the past on the show. But there's apparently a traditional Welsh spirit called Recteon.

Diod Griavol. And this was made by steeping crushed rowan berries in water. Though I have to add here, nobody offered me Diod Griavol while I was in Wales. They offered me beer. They offered me cider. But they did not offer me this. So if you have experience with this spirit, do reach out to us on this matter as well.

All right, so there's a ton of more botanical information we might get into with the tree that is, you know, ultimately this far flung. And there are a lot of cultural interpretations of the plant that we're not going to get into because we're dealing with so many different cultures across a considerable period of time here. But one of the really interesting things about them is about the tree itself is that it is considered a sacred tree.

And it's considered a sacred tree not only in Wales, but throughout the British Isles and, of course, into Europe as well, mainland Europe. The berries seem to be a key part of the tree's sacred appeal. That bright color, that red, that scarlet, sometimes looking more like a deep orange in some of the photos I'm looking at. At any rate, this is a color that stands out. It catches the eye. And we know that it resonated well.

with people in this part of the world going way back.

In fact, this is something that Suttle brings up in his book. You know, if we look to the Red Lady archaeological find, we see the importance of the color red. This is something that actually came up during my tour. This is an upper Paleolithic partial male skeleton that was found buried in Wales. And the bones are dyed, not with rowan berries, but with red ochre.

but it does give it this red coloration. The remains, I believe, are dated to about 31,000 BCE. And Suthill here, in citing this, says that it stands as, quote, indication of the early sacramental importance of the color red in northern Europe.

So just a little taste of the importance of red in the region. Though I think we can all sort of speak to the experience of seeing red. You know, if we see red in nature, it stands out to us. It calls to us. It is communicating something to us, certainly about the natural world, but perhaps about the unseen world as well. It's a high salience color in nature, as opposed to, you know, your browns and greens, which are more kind of background. Yeah. ♪

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AT&T. Connecting changes everything. And so in Wales and throughout the British Isles, one of the most widespread folk traditions concerning the Rowan is its ability to keep evil away. Particularly, certainly in later interpretations, getting into the Christian era, is the idea that it will keep away witches and it will stand as a deterrent to witchcraft. So

it has a long-standing role in protective magic. Amulets made out of Rowan or somehow incorporating Rowan wood or other elements of the tree, these have been employed as charms against witchcraft. Though,

ironically, as Southwell points out, this was itself considered witchcraft by the church. You know, so you get this weird, you see this, of course, you know, all over where the Christian church was also dealing with, you know, folkloric traditions and over, you know,

pagan religion, religious ideas, is that they're warning them about the dangers of the devil. And then they're like, well, this devil thing seems pretty serious. Of course, I'm going to use all the tools in my toolbox. And then the church is saying, no, not all the tools, only the tools you get here.

This reminds me of in October, we did a couple of episodes about the demons of ancient Mesopotamia. And we were talking about the demon Pazuzu, which features in the story, The Exorcist, of course, written from a Catholic, Christian, Catholic perspective.

in which this demon is sort of the devil, one of the denizens of hell, a servant of Lucifer. But in fact, looking into it, we found that Pazuzu was often used as a protective entity against worse demons in ancient Mesopotamia. So yeah, one person's guardian angel is another person's devil, I guess.

So, yeah, it's worth driving home there. Apotropaic magic is ancient. It has been a part of human culture since time out of mind. And the use of Rowan-based apotropaic magic also naturally predates Christianity in the British Isles. But it comes into sharp focus, according to Soffel, during the age of the Reformation.

solidifying in this perceived modern struggle between the Christian faithful and witches in league with the devil. And of course, we've talked about witchcraft persecution before, and it is interesting how

you know, it's easy to think about witchcraft persecution. You think Monty Python and the Holy Grail. You think firm Middle Ages. And a lot of what we talk about when we talk about the persecution of quote-unquote witches, which often boil down to the persecution of non-Christian ideas, of people who didn't fit in, of women in general. This

was largely more of a renaissance idea. You can really tease that apart in various ways, but it's not so much, to use a popular description, it's not so much a part of the demon-haunted world, but as the world is illuminating and there's a need to find those demons again. Like, no, there's less darkness. There's less place for me to imagine the demons and I need to see them. Anyway, we could go on and on about that.

Or you could see it as a kind of lashing out at an attempt to get control during times of disruption and disorder, which, you know, was certainly going on in Europe during the reformation. You know, there's, so there's undermining of the traditional dominant institution. There are schisms and factions and wars that follow. And, uh, and you know, there's all the kind of chaos that comes with that and people are trying to get control and they demonize somebody to make sense of everything. Yeah. And, um,

And then on another level, it's worth noting that, okay, so it comes into sharp focus here, and certainly there's a lot of writing in this time period that references it, as people are using Rowan then as an amulet against the devil and or witches in the service of the devil. But of course, again, it's an old practice. People are pulling out old practices, even as this, you know,

modern threat is um explained to them and uh in you know in the pre in pre-christian times uh and even into christian times of course because you know different belief systems can can and often do stand alongside each other it's not always devils and witches you're trying to keep at bay sometimes of course it is the fairy folk uh the the original uh unseen threats

And, you know, we talked in our episodes from, I think, the year before last, we talked about elf shot. We talked about the idea that these invisible folk are out there potentially targeting your cattle, your livestock with invisible missiles that will make them sick.

And so there's this longstanding tradition then of using Rowan to ward off not only magical harm to your home or, you know, your family and so forth, but to prevent magical harm to your livestock. And not only livestock, but like your milk, animal products that might be corrupted by the invisible fairy folk, that they might...

harm like the crucial element in the milk and either make the milk bad or, you know, or not nutritious or make butter making impossible all due to magical attack. I recall passages about this in the secret Commonwealth of elves, fauns and fairies, which if you've never looked into that, that's that's a great

cool historical book. It's from the late 17th century, sort of an anthropological study done by a, uh, a Scottish priest named Robert Kirk, uh, is from, uh, the 1690s. And he went out and like, talk to people about what they believed about like elves and fairies and stuff. And, uh, and I recall a concern of it being that elves were gonna, we're gonna come make your cows milk sour. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and that means, you know, not only, uh, what might they make the milk, uh,

taste bad, they might like destroy something very beneficial about it and they might prevent you from using it in other products and so forth. So it's like it's, you know, it was seen as a sensitive time right after the milk has been collected. And yeah, you have to, you have to apply these protections and that might mean rowing wood, rowing berries and so forth.

By the way, reading about this, it was also pointed out, this is in the Southwell book, but I've seen this pointed out elsewhere as well, is that if you take a rowanberry, pluck it from the tree, and you look at where the stem was attached, you will see what is sometimes described, I think, with a fair amount of flourish, as a cross. It

not really a cross. It looks more like a star. I've also seen it described as being pentagram-like. Again,

It's vaguely like a star. I think it's maybe a stretch to say it looks like a pentagram. But still, I guess it does have a novel shape. I don't know. I think we see this in a lot of berries and fruits and so forth. I've never looked at one myself, but you've got the pictures here and I'm looking at a five-pointed star. Yeah. When I look at it next to an image of a pentagram as presented here, I'm like, OK, I guess I can see it.

But all of this, you know, all of this energy around the Rowan, these traditions of the Rowan tree having some sort of sacred protective property to it. This continues again to hold sway during Christian times. And Rowan trees were then planted, for instance, in Welsh graveyards and church shards to ward away evil.

And this is another case where I wish I had known to look out for one of these trees because I got to roam around in a Welsh graveyard at one point and it was, you know, it was very neat. I was looking at frozen spider webs. It was pretty fascinating. But I didn't know to look for these trees.

So maybe there was one there doing all this protective work, and I just didn't know about it. The Woodland Trust website also points out that they're often situated in front of homes in Ireland. And then in various traditions where you want to protect that milk, you might have some sort of an implement made from rowan wood that is used to stir the milk. So like a direct interface between the sacred wood and the substance you were trying to protect from the fairy folks.

Interesting. Yeah, to prevent the milk from curdling, for example. Also, the Woodland Trust website mentions the idea of also having a pocket charm made from rolling wood to protect against rheumatism. So, you know, there are various uses for it. Also using it to make divining rods. So,

You know, you can get into various examples of where the wood is used. Maybe it's used in a tool to make a tool. And maybe that tool is, you know, less a practical tool and more of a supernatural tool to, you know, find things hidden in the earth or to magically stir your milk to protect it.

I guess one of the other things worth noting about the Rowan tree, though, when you start talking about like where it's planted and its protective properties, is that, again, it is a it's a widespread tree and it is widely planted. They point out as a street or garden tree. So there are going to be plenty of examples where a Rowan tree is just around. And it doesn't mean that someone's, you know, protecting the local coffee shop or gas station. There just happens to be a Rowan tree there. So I don't know. I guess one has to...

avoid getting too too into the idea of them being planted strategically to protect against evil but it but on the other hand it does seem like it was at least in some instances definitely planted as a form of protective magic it couldn't hurt I mean you don't want to be at the gas station and have an elf shooting in and souring your gas exactly

And I also want to throw this out just to provide a direct quote about the consumption of rowan berries. The Woodland Trust does write, quote, rowan berries are edible to humans when cooked. They are sour but rich in vitamin C and can be used to make a tart jam. So I'd say let's leave it at that then. That sounds good to me. Look up how to cook rowan berries before you eat them.

And then I should also point out, I mean, there are obviously, we don't have time to go into all of this, but I was reading a little bit about how there also are medicinal properties to the berries, often used as like a laxative, you know, usages like that. So, you know, there are going to be various traditions in these different European cultures that also involve uses for rowan berries and so forth that are going to help with some sort of ailment. Mm-hmm.

So again, we get into the idea of the sacred tree is this thing that may have symbolic power, but then also it has these various mundane uses that may also take on qualities that are sacred. It may have medicinal uses that could also take on qualities that are sacred as well.

Can't think about the word Rowan without thinking about the name Rowan. You can't think about the name Rowan without thinking of who am I going to say? Am I going to say the Mr. Bean guy? No, I'm thinking of the wicker man. That's the name of the kid that the detective is looking for. Oh, well, that that I haven't looked into it, but that that can't be an accident, right? I mean.

That seems like a film that was very concerned with folkloric traditions and so forth. It would be a mighty coincidence. Yeah. The kid wasn't named, like, Bill. We may have to come back to The Wicker Man on Weird Al Cinema at some point. Yeah, that's a big one. A favorite at our house. That's the full car royalty right there. There's a lot of great Christopher Lee out there, but that is peak Christopher Lee. Yeah.

All right. Well, we're going to go ahead and close out this episode. Again, this is a series we'll likely come back to in the future. We already have some notes about some other sacred trees. So, you know, be on the lookout. And if you have any suggestions for future sacred tree episodes, write in and let us know. Likewise, as we said, if you have experience with anything we discussed in this episode or feedback on it, we'd love to hear from you.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. If you're on Instagram and want to follow the show, find us at stbympodcast.

Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

♪

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