Forest two

CLBA JOURNAL 2005

The Sacred Forest: Part Two

Judith Hoch, Ph.D.

Orunmila and the Sacred Iroko Tree

...Tradition protected sacred forest sanctuaries in nearly every ‘native’ tradition, and respect for sacred groves lasted for millennia until western Europeans spread across the globe after 1500 A.D. Today in Greece, there are a few old trees still associated with Socrates and Plato, while giant trees, all over the pre-Christian world were the teachers and masters of great beings such as Orunmila and the Buddha. Slavic peoples worshipped spirits of nature and the woodlands. In the Caucasus Mountains, each community had its own sacred grove. German tribes had sacred forest sanctuaries, and sacred places defined ancient Roman and Greek landscape including sacred groves and springs. Hindus, Greeks, and ancient Europeans, in common with Lucumi olorisha, associated each god with a different tree. Maori people in New Zealand believe that Tane Mahuta, the tallest tree, gave birth to all forms of life.

In many non-Christian traditions, a sacred tree is found, a pillar standing between heaven and earth, which is a living column of support for the skies. Trees replenish our atmosphere with oxygen so in a literal sense, they are support for the skies. Trees also anchor water resources, create habitat for every type of species, give immense quantities of fruits and nuts for food, and provide material for building and fuel. Many medicines derive from their leaves, bark, and roots. In acknowledgement of their dependence on their ancestral trees, ancient peoples everywhere worshiped in sacred groves. These old growth trees did far more than nourish people who gathered near them to celebrate seasonal rites. These trees conserved natural habitats and inhabitants from sky to earth, maintaining the life affirming connection between people, nature, and spirit. For thousands of years, probably since the time of our primate ancestors, trees were sacred and respected spiritual beings in their own right.

Why did sacred groves everywhere disappear? “Due mainly to the rise of dogmatic religions like Christianity and Islam, which advocated... eradication of ‘pagan’ practices, the tradition of maintaining sacred groves and sacred trees vanished from most countries.” (1) Sacred groves vanished without a trace in Europe, America, Central Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Clerics built churches and mosques where sacred groves once grew. Christian priests branded sacred trees and groves part of the ‘satanic’ and ‘pagan’ practices of indigenous, non-Christian peoples. The ceremonies and worship once carried out in the forest became dangerous and illegal. People’s connection to nature faded as worship and ceremony came inside under the watchful eye of Christian clerics.

During centuries of colonization, Christians took these ideas to nearly every corner of the earth, cutting the forests in their wake, yet they tried to compensate for the sacred grove’s lost magic by imitating it within the church. Christian churches and temples imitated the tall straight trunks of sacred groves in their supporting columns of marble. Stained glass created the colored light of a cool, green forest making the interior of a church shadowed and quiet like a grove. However, before the Greek or Hindu, Christian or Muslim gods had temples, people worshipped in nature among the tallest groves of old trees, by the river, by the sea. Trees united people with nature and gave a feeling of connection to the divine source of life...

In the sacred grove, all species connect during worship. In the out of doors, it is not easy to separate oneself from birds, insects, wind, sky, animals, earth, or rain. Worshipping in a grove puts a human being into the way of everything else alive in nature. Spiritual entities reveal themselves to people looking intently for them in the forest. Many poets, shaman, and other nature mystics have seen beneficent spiritual beings in or around trees. Anyone who thinks a tree doesn’t have anything to say to her or him may not have spent enough time in the forest listening.

Under the Sacred Tree

The Lucumi have a story, which says that a sacred tree taught Orunmila, Odu divination. It is interesting to note that trees also taught the Druids in early Britain an alphabet, which was primarily a system of divination. The giant sacred tree called iroko taught Odu divination to Orunmila, the Orisha most associated with Ifa. Like the Buddha, Orunmila, found enlightenment under a sacred tree. I’ve adapted this story of Orunmila and the sacred tree from Raul Canizares who learned it in Cuba. (2)

Orunmila and the Sacred Iroko

Obatala, the creator of humans, came to earth and projected himself into two people, a female called Yemmu, and a male called Oddudua who lived together. The two people were one, but they were able to act independently, and Yemmu could bear children conceived by herself and Oddudua.

Ogun, one of Yemmu and Oddudua’s sons, was the favorite of his mother. Oddudua, his father, became jealous of the relationship Yemmu had with their son, Ogun. With a lover’s jealous trick, Oddudua discovered Yemmu and Ogun making love to one another. In fury, he cursed Yemmu’s next born son. The cursed son, born to Yemmu and her son Ogun, was Orunmila.

When Orunmila was born, Oddudua ordered Yemmu to bury her baby alive. Mothers find a way to save their children, and Yemmu buried her son Orunmila’s body only up to the neck, at the foot of the sacred Iroko tree. Orunmila was immobile in the earth, but alive, his head above ground, looking at the sacred tree. The cursed son had a unique destiny and this was it, the only way he could fulfill it. Yemmu buried Orunmila in the earth looking only, and forever, at the tree standing over him like a mother, and a master.

The Iroko tree did act as both mother and master to Orunmila. While frozen in the earth, yet thriving and alive, Orunmila learned the secrets of divination, Far from disabling Orunmila, this arduous apprenticeship made him the greatest babalawo, ‘father of secrets,’ and people came from everywhere to have him read their destinies and find remedies for their misfortunes. With the wisdom of Odu, life might be happier. Many people came and sat with the famous diviner buried in the earth and were guided by his revelations.

When Oddudua, the father of Orunmila, heard about his son, the great diviner whom he once cursed, he came to see him. When he saw Orunmila buried in the earth, he was distraught, and ordered the earth to free him. To his surprise, Orunmila did not want to leave the earth or the shadow of the Iroko tree, his true mother.

Oddudua said, “Do not worry, Orula, for Iroko will always be with you.” He pointed to the Iroko tree with a ray of light, and a wooden divination board appeared, which Orula accepted. It is in this tray that Orula and his descendents cast Ifa while sitting on the ground.

Orunmila or the shortened, Orula, child of gods, buried in the earth, knew the state of meditation that ‘passes all understanding.’ The master iroko tree taught Orunmila to understand the entire web of humanity through the insight of Odu. When the iroko finished teaching Orunmila, he was a master of divination sought after by everyone. Only a few special people can undergo such rigorous initiation and survive. In fact, I thought this story was only metaphor, that in fact, no Afro-Cuban or African practice included actual burial in the earth as part of an apprenticeship with an ancient tree, until I read Malidoma Some’s, Of Water and the Spirit. Some’s account of his men’s initiation, in Burkina Faso, describes his burial in the earth and enlightenment at the foot of an old tree, where a beautiful green goddess spirit of the tree appears to Some and reveals the essence of divine love to him. Some’s and Orunmila’ stories, more than any others I’ve read, remind me how we’ve lost the wisdom and strength of nature and our native tree ancestors.

When the Buddha was enlightened, he, like Orunmila, had to leave his wealthy family to seek awakening in the forest. The Buddha waited, sitting quietly in meditation day after day, under the bodhi tree, without moving. This bodhi tree, a member of the ficus family, literally gave enlightenment to Buddha when he could not find it any other way. Buddha had already undergone six years of ascetic withdrawal with no success, until one day, he decided to sit down under the tree until he was enlightened. With the tree’s help, enlightenment came within weeks. One day, with the bodhi tree’s assistance, the Buddha saw that the nature of life, ruled by the mind, is suffering, and he learned several methods for dealing with it. His simple insight under a tree has grown into temples, monks (including the Dalai Lama) and thousands of manuscripts.

Somehow, in all the centuries that followed the Buddha’s awakening, the importance of the bodhi tree’s teaching took second place to Buddha himself as a teacher. We forget that the bodhi tree, not Buddha, was the great teacher who granted enlightenment, and that the tree is oblivious to who sits underneath it. Anyone of us, not only a Buddha, can find the same truths through time spent in contact with an ancient tree, whether it is a bodhi, an iroko, or any other ancient tree.

Orunmila’s insight under the iroko was similar to the Buddha’s insight. Orunmila learned the primary Odu from the sacred iroko tree, and the Odu are lessons in relieving human suffering. While masters, like Orunmila, the Buddha, and African shaman, gain first hand knowledge directly from nature, the rest of us unwisely depend on translation of their insights to ease our suffering. The sacred and wise world tree nurtured many of our sages across the earth, and gave people the gift of divination. The ‘Tree of Life’ contains the wisdom of the Kabala, but long before the development of mystic Judaism, the sacred tree was the container of spiritual knowledge at least 9,000 years ago in pagan European societies. Druids, mystic Jews, Buddhists, Maori people, and Lucumi practitioners, to name only a few religions, owe their sacred wisdom to trees. Each Lucumi practitioner owes a debt to trees for the gift of Odu, herbal remedies, and spirit and ancestral blessings. Each olorisha can find great enlightenment by praying and meditating beneath old trees. No one should depend entirely on babalawos or oriates for inspiration. First hand experiences in nature are very important for olorisha practicing nature centered Lucumi.

Cutting the sacred trees destroyed and changed ancient religions forever. Yoruba people once got from the forest in Nigeria, what their descendents in Miami now buy in botanicas, the shops that sell some ingredients needed for Lucumi ceremonies. ‘Ah, this is convenient,’ we say, forgetting all that is lost when we become consumers of spirit rather than experiencers of spirit. Although people are able to buy dry herbal ingredients, they cannot buy the living magic of the forest, nor do they know or have need of, the large body of cultivated and wild plant knowledge, praise poetry, and personal spiritual practice that people possessed when approaching living sacred forests. Today’s Lucumi practitioner does not have the skills in nature that her ancestors had. Over the whole earth, few indigenous stands of forest remain. However, it is only there, in these scattered remnants of our last ancient groves, that the story of the sacred iroko tree and Orunmila might take place again, or that a living tree master might reveal even greater knowledge to another aspirant.

The story of Orunmila is an archetypal story because it contains characters and situations common to the stories of many other cultures, and has something deep to say about human nature. The Jungian idea, that archetypes enable people to react to universal situations in the same ways their ancestors did, is a fascinating one with intriguing hypotheses. For instance, the destruction of the planet, especially the forests, has occurred since mainly Christian and Islamic peoples dislodged the ancient oracular systems based in nature revelation, like Ifa and the merindilogun, the I Ching, the Druid tree alphabet, Norse runic divination, and others, which guided human behavior. Have we insured the death of the planet because we’ve lost part of the natural information that guides our souls to awareness of our stewardship responsibilities on earth?

Many of our pagan ancestors knew the language of trees and of the earth, and could communicate with them. Sacred groves were protected everywhere by custom in ancient Europe until Christians cut them down. Groves of trees are sacred, living temples, which support the web of life. Every system of enlightenment seems to require confinement, isolation, sensory deprivation, and stillness to receive the treasure of the Tree of Knowledge. Every spiritual path needs a teacher, and the sacred Tree, was perhaps, the greatest of all. We are moving too fast today, to hear what the earth and the trees have to tell us. However, a couple of hours of quiet sitting beneath a tree can yield unexpected and sweet spiritual treasure. During that time, subtle seeds from the tree embed deeply in the soul, to develop and bloom when ready.
Several nights ago, lying on my back half sleeping, I felt myself sinking beneath the earth. My body spread out long and wide like roots everywhere beneath the soil. Giant rainforest trees with straight strong trunks began to grow out of my chest, belly, arms and legs. My heart and ribs felt full, relaxed and proud of the great trees standing inside my body. Suddenly, an old Aboriginal woman, with short hair, and dressed in a wrapped bark cloth, stood above me beside the trees and signaled to me under the earth. "Come," she said, gesturing to me as if I were to enter her world. My fear of death and of suffocation in the earth vanished. I felt comfort, joy, and anticipation...

References

(1)“Sacred Groves and Sacred Trees of Uttara Kannada,” by M.D. Subash Chandran Madhav Gadgit, in Lifestyle and Ecology, edited by Baidyanath Saraswati, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi, 1998 web publication, p3.

2) Raul Canizares, Cuban Santeria: Walking with the Night, Destiny Books, Rochester, Vermont, 1999, p.58-9.

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