Gods of Love and Ecstasy by Alain Danielou

Author:Alain Danielou
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inner Traditions Rochester
Published: 2014-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

Sacred plants and trees

The cosmic principles revealed in the mineral and animal world, and the world of the gods, are equally expressed in the vegetable world. There is a subtle correspondence or analogy between certain plants or trees, certain gods, certain animals, and certain aspects of the human being. There are noble and vile plants, beneficent and harmful trees, plants which are friends and plants which are enemies of man. Some plants nourish man and transmit to him a vital or intellectual force. Others provoke states of intoxication or ecstasy, and still others, death. Nearly all remedies and poisons come from plants. In the harmony of the world, there exists a vital bond between the vegetable species and all aspects of life itself. From plants we assimilate the vital principles which correspond to the three fundamental tendencies of nature: the power of concentration and intellectual development (sativa); the power of organization and action (rajas); the power of explosion, which is the force of the passions, of eroticism, birth and death (tamas). Man lives in symbiosis with certain plants (wheat, rice), and animals (the cow, and goat). Following the principle of the apparent inversion of values, which is peculiar to Tantrism, the tamasic powers – poisons, drugs and passions – are employed as a means of conquering the supernatural world, since by mastering that which normally destroys us we can vanquish death and attain immortality. Shiva is the incarnation of the tamas, the destructive and procreative principle of explosion, since it is through destruction that life is born and subsists.

Some plants and trees are, by their very nature, connected with what are called spirits or gods. They embody certain aspects of the divine. Hence there are certain sacred beneficent plants and trees which may serve as a means of contact with the invisible beings, since the effectiveness of plants is not only assimilated in the form of food, drugs and drink derived from them.

Since plants are in direct non-intellectual contact with the life which surrounds them and with the world of spirits through which it is animated, they can serve as intermediaries for communicating with the spirits themselves. Plants can immediately perceive our feelings and deepest thoughts and transmit them to the subtle powers which they embody, whose benevolence or hostility plays an important rôle in the development of our lives.

“The sacred tree, as the seat of natural power, the source of blessings and the cult-object of very different peoples, is common, or nearly so, to all races. It has kept its magical or symbolic value in the religious systems of the most varied societies . . . It was in the form, if not of a tree-god or tree-spirit, at least of a daimon whose vitality was in some way connected with that of the vegetable species, that the Athenians conceived of Dionysus, in whose honour the rites were celebrated by women . . . The complex of representation and religious emotion centred on Dionysus appears to be deeply influenced

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