may dwell in trees remarkable for size and age, or inhabit sacred groves where the priest alone may enter.[1] Trees treated as idols by the Congo people, who put calabashes of palm wine at their feet in case they should be thirsty,[2] and amongst West African negro tribes farther north, trees hung with rags by the passers-by, and the great baobabs pegged to hang offerings to, and serving as shrines before which sheep are sacrificed,[3] display well the rites of tree sacrifice, though leaving undefined the precise relation conceived between deity and tree.
The forest theology that befits a race of hunters is dominant still among Turanian tribes of Siberia, as of old it was across to Lapland. Full well these tribes know the gods of the forest. The Yakuts hang on any remarkably fine tree iron, brass, and other trinkets; they choose a green spot shaded by a tree for their spring sacrifice of horses and oxen, whose heads are set up in the boughs; they chant their extemporised songs to the Spirit of the Forest, and hang for him on the branches of the trees along the roadside offerings of horsehair, emblems of their most valued possession. A clump of larches on a Siberian steppe, a grove in the recesses of a forest, is the sanctuary of a Turanian tribe. Gaily-decked idols in their warm fur-coats, each set up beneath its great tree swathed with cloth or tinplate, endless reindeer-hides and peltry hanging to the trees around, kettles and spoons and snuff-horns and household valuables strewn as offerings before the gods — such is the description of a Siberian holy grove, at the stage when the contact of foreign civilization has begun by ornamenting the rude old ceremonial it must end by abolishing.[4] A race ethnologically allied to these tribes, though risen to higher culture, kept up remarkable relics of tree-worship in Northern Europe. In Esthonian districts, during the last
