How Sacred Trees Work
First post—'Sacred Trees are Cathedrals'——Introducing the world to sacred trees in fifty (or more) posts
For the last decade I’ve been exploring the sacred tree, which, if you are familiar with the concept, is likely not exactly what you think it is.
The idea of the ‘world tree’ or the ‘tree of life/tree of knowledge’ is everywhere—from blockbuster movies like Avatar to your favorite esoteric instagram account—and sure, this well-known foundational motif of human belief plays into this series, but what I will be discussing here is something quite different, something much more concrete.
I’ll be doing my best to show you this largely neglected episode in the history of human religions. This is big, as I don’t believe this topic has been done justice before.
Pre-historic cave paintings are found all over the world, so are sacred trees
You may have read about universal aspects of ancient cave and cliff paintings.
Prehistoric cave paintings, found all over the world, (Europe, Africa, the Amazon) are more often than not eerily similar to one another, even when separated in time by gulfs of tens of thousands of years, and geographically as many miles apart. These caves have astonishingly similar elements in their respective symbologies, leading experts to suspect that there is a code involved in the most common symbols found. Like these caves, the sacred trees I’m talking about are also present world-wide. They also share many common elements across cultures and continents.
Hand prints from cave art found on three continents.
(photo credits, wikipedia: Indonesia, South Africa, Argentina)
Tree wrappings from South Korea (left), Scotland (middle), India (right).
(photo credits, author (left, middle), Wikimedia (right))
How uncanny it is that we encounter similar cave art traditions around the globe.
Unlike the great majority of the prehistoric cave (and cliff) symbols, many cultures still revere sacred trees and maintain a religion that has been built around them. In this series you will see that many of these cultures are minorities or sectarian communities within their societies. This likely plays into the fact they still maintain this little known, far-reaching practice.1
I will take on the sacred tree religion as I have found it. Today we have the privilege of still being able to speak directly to the people who practice this religion. I have been meeting them for ten years in my home away from home in South Korea—Jeju Island.2 I have spoken to them in many other parts of the world since.
I invite you to come along with me on this journey, in the spirit of an explorer, examining the common elements of a lost, yet seemingly universal cultural language. I do believe we can get a lot further with our work on the sacred tree religion than researchers will likely achieve with their speculative work on cave symbology analysis as full systems, such as here in South Korea, still exist. You will see that in most cultures remnants of this tradition are all around us.
Subscribe
Thanks for reading this far!
You can support this project by subscribing for free.
Unpaid subscribers will get everything from this series minus a few extras. Paid subscribers will get—an occasional essay or video post, extended articles, special offers on books, book lists for further reading and other fun things I come across.
Please subscribe!
Other Support
You can also support this series by buying a book— — —> This is my bookstore. I’ve done photo essay books on sacred trees and about where crows—yes crows—mix with shamanism, and a book of interviews with Jeju Island’s famed women sea divers.
Or if you’d be so kind——> Buy me a cup of coffee.
Another way you can support…
Do you happen to know a literary agent? Do you think they would be interested in the upcoming narrative non-fiction book on this topic? Please put me in touch!
And last but not least…
Do you have a piece of the puzzle?
I get messages and emails from around the world regarding sacred trees. If you have an anecdote, information from your culture or even a personal connection with a special tree you want to tell me about, please get in touch!
gripa22@yahoo.com
Ok.
Let’s get started.
The first thing you need to know is that sacred trees are cathedrals. (TLDR)3
Back when I was making documentary films about shamanism on Jeju-do, South Korea’s largest island, I spent a lot of time visiting shamanic shrines. One day, probably circa 2013, it must have been winter—I recall wearing a plaid jacket—I asked a friend if she thought the particular shrine we were visiting was a kind of church.
‘I think so’, my friend answered. She looked intently at the sacred tree, the trunk of which locals had decked in ceremonial Korean hanbok.
The shrine was dedicated to the divine protectress of Shincheon, the goddess known as ‘Maiden Hyeon’. Shincheon is a small seaside community on the southeastern side of the island. Like hundreds of other towns on Jeju, Shincheon has a sacred tree tradition.
‘People experience all kinds of thoughts and emotions in a place like this’. My friend, in her forties at the time, said that entering the shrine made her think of her deceased father.
Like other gods and goddesses on Jeju Island, Maiden Hyeon is ‘seated’ in the shade of a sacred tree. People visit this ‘seated’ goddess throughout the year to pray and make offerings.
A cathedral is also a ‘seat’
Gods and other celebrated ancestors like Maiden Hyeon, who are venerated for their exceptional experiences or the beneficent actions they performed during their lives, are said to be ‘seated’ or enthroned in shrines just as bishops (or martyrs and saints) are in cathedrals. The cathedral—from the Greek kathra—meaning ‘seat’ in some translations, later came to mean the ‘seat of the Bishop’.
Many cultures around the world envision that their gods are ‘seated’ or ‘enthroned’ in a place regardless of whether sacred trees are involved—from ancient Egyptian belief and Hinduism to West African traditions like those of the Yoruba. This aspect of ‘seating’ or ‘enthroning’ is also found in the Americas, including amongst the cultures of the West African diaspora.
Most of these ‘seated’ deities on Jeju Island reside in or around sacred trees.4
Chapels and altars
Just as cathedrals from various Christian traditions typically feature a number of chapels dedicated to various saints, shrines with sacred trees commonly include a number of altars where various gods or ancestors are venerated. Visiting chapels and altars, where one comes into contact with the divine, is basic spiritual hygiene for people from many faiths.
Take a look at the chapels of the Anglican Tewkesbury Abbey (Gloucestershire, England) and compare them to the various trees found in a shamanic shrine on Jeju Island.
In the shamanic shrine at Darakut near Jeju City, we find a tree and altar dedicated to the Goddess of Silver and Brass Cups. This goddess is charged with very much the same responsibilities, say, as her saintly counterpart from early Christian traditions, St. Margaret of Antioch.5
In the village Darakut’s shamanic shrine we also find the altar of a mountain god whose particular role is perhaps more closely aligned to that of St. Hubert.6 Both the Grandfather mountain god of Darakut and Hubert are charged with aiding in the forest life and the hunt.
Bonpuri—sacred myths
The ‘seat’ of an enthroned god or saint is also a place to tell stories.
Hagiographies are to saints what bonpuri are to sacred tree deities on Jeju Island—the origin stories of their specific divinity. Just as every saint needs a legend to show they merit greatness, the gods who reside in sacred trees also need theirs.
Why do we recite myths before the tree altars of gods at shamanic ceremonies?
A well-known Jeju shaman once told me that just like humans enjoy having their own stories heard, so do the gods. Reciting the god’s origin is also a way of uniting the community in front of divinity.
Many Christians of various traditions today seem unaware that saints are still believed to live in trees. I took this photo in Serbia a few years ago.
Other shared aspects of cathedrals and sacred trees
There are so many analogues that we could point to.
Sacrificial food and offerings, priests hearing confession, sermons, recitations, prayer, pageants, specialized ritual garb, sacred tools, incense burning, iconography, holy water, pouring libation, the ingestion of sacred sacrifices, the veneration of relics, miracles, personal visions, spiritual encounters…
We could list hundreds of common elements that tree shrines and cathedrals share.
I have used the cathedral for comparison to sacred trees in this post, first because it is familiar to most Westerners, and because there is a direct historical link between the two concerning the concept of ‘seating’ a deity which goes even deeper than we have yet discussed. Another reason is that the sacred tree is for its visitors as complex and beautiful as the crowning architectural achievement of Western culture, the cathedral. It might take a while to show you this beauty and its complexity, as much of it isn’t readily visible to us.7
What the cathedral makers build in stone, the visitors to sacred tree shrines build with their words.
We will return to the sacred trees as cathedrals concept later in the series.
Joey Rositano is an independent researcher, writer and photo book maker. He is the author of ‘Scattering’ and ‘The Sacred Trees of Jeju Island, journeys 2013-2023’. He’s working on an upcoming non-fiction book about sacred trees.
Find me on Instagram
Visit my website
Order a book or print from my bookstore
In my journeys I found that those I encountered that venerated sacred trees had no idea that people also did so elsewhere in the world. This was often the case even when meeting local academics and other culture experts.
On Jeju Island, a well known tourist destination in East Asia where I spent over a decade doing field research on weekends, sacred trees play their powerful game in every neighborhood.
I traveled the world, both physically and by pouring through papers, websites, books and whatever resources I could find, to seek out the remaining places that still maintain an original network of sacred trees in their communities like the one I explored for so many years on Jeju Island.
From the sacred zapis tree tradition of Orthodox Serbia to those of the indigenous Americas; from the sacred groves in the Zagori Mountains of Greece to the sacred shinmok of South Korea, I tracked down this phenomenon in order to uncover this rare but persisting cultural wonder. Now I will aim to bring it to light.
As I already stated, what I will do in this series of fifty steps (we may go over fifty) is illustrate common characteristics of this elusive tree religion.
The sacred trees here (I’m sitting at my computer just a kilometer from one of these trees) are very much the village churches, temples, synagogues, mosques—sanctuaries. People visit these arboreal sanctums on their own to meet the gods and they visit communally for religious ceremonies led by shamanic priests.
TLDR For now, know just as there are individual chapels where numinous beings give audience in the cathedrals and other religious sanctuaries well known to us in the West, shrines built around sacred trees also include individual altars dedicated to gods (saints, ancestors, other sacred entities) who heal. The idea of the ‘seated’ or ‘enthroned’ god or saint, etc, is common. Just as hagiographies of saints are shared in their chapels, similar myths are told about the inhabitants of sacred trees, and sometimes about the trees themselves.
Like Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian saints, the shamanic gods receive feasts on their respective holy days and are ‘seated’ much like Bishops—the inheritors of the apostles’ roles in the church—in their respective sanctuaries.
Who communicated with none other than Joan of Arc
St. Hubert, a proselytizer of pagans, likely encountered tree worshippers in his day.
There will be those amongst you who are from a tradition that practices an ‘original’ sacred tree religion or a syncretic tradition which incorporates the ‘original’ tradition.