Holy grove

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Holy Grove (painting by Arnold Böcklin , 1882)
Platonic Academy in Athens (2008)

A holy grove (from Old High German hagan "thorn bushes": enclosed space) is an old name for a sacred small forest ( grove ). In antiquity, sacred forests are documented in Greece and the Roman Empire , and also in the so-called Barbaricum (in northern, central and southeastern Europe). They were used for prayer and sacrifice . In many ethnic religions , village communities maintain a sacred forest near their village, sometimes also in connection with graves and ancestor worship or other rituals (compare funeral forest ).

Antiquity

Greece

In Greece, sacred groves (αλσος) were dedicated to certain gods, but also to nymphs . In Dodona in Epirus Zeus prophesied from a sacred oak . The oldest evidence of sacred groves comes from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey . Here groves are described that are dedicated to Athena , Poseidon , Apollon , Aphrodite and Zeus. The grove can consist of poplar trees and usually contains a spring . They don't seem to have been fenced off. According to Wickham, the spring symbolized the earth mother Gaia and the surrounding forest the sky god Uranos . Since the 5th century BC The teaching gardens of the philosophers on the outskirts of Athens , whose most famous Academy was Plato's , seem to have imitated these sacred groves; they too usually contained a source. Sacred groves could be used for burials, for example after the battle of Marathon .

Sacred groves of Aphrodite have been archaeologically proven in Cyprus since the late Bronze Age , so in Kition . At the Hephaestus Temple in Athens , planting holes for trees have been archaeologically proven.

Romans and Roman Empire

On Roman coins , the temple of a city goddess was sometimes depicted between two trees, which could suggest a sacred grove (lucus or nemus). These groves are described as shady ( lucus a non lucendo ). A rex Nemorensis from Aricia is known as the priest of Diana .

Hadrian and Cicero imitated the Greek gymnasia in Hainen. According to Maureen Carroll, the Temple of Venus in Via Marina in Pompeii stood in a sacred grove, but there is no archaeological evidence.

Celts

A sacred grove in honor of the mother goddess Noreia in the municipality of Frög in Austria (2015)

Sacred groves were called nemeton by the Celts . They are passed down through inscriptions and place names. The latter can be found in France, Spain and England. According to Richard Dunn, the use in England may in some cases have extended into Roman times.

Germanic peoples

In his work Germania, Tacitus mentions a sacred grove belonging to the goddess Nerthus on an island in the Baltic Sea where human sacrifices took place. In chapters 9 and 39, too, he describes the establishment of sacred clearings and groves, in which animal and human sacrifices are offered by the emissaries of several tribes. The grove may only be entered in shackles in order to express the power of the deity as a subject.

The Germanic tribes decorated the groves with, among other things, noble spoils of war. In the year 16 the Germanic Marshal Prince Mallovendus showed the Roman general Germanicus the legionary eagle of Legio XVII , which the Germanic peoples had conquered during the Varus Battle , in a neighboring grove. The legionary eagle of Legio XVIII , lost in the same battle, was found in 41 in a grove of the Chauken by Aulus Gabinius Secundus . Furthermore, Tacitus reports of groves that were dedicated to the goddess Tamfana and the god Donar .

Worldwide

Sacred groves are known from many parts of the world and still serve sacred purposes today. Sacred groves are documented in the history of Armenia . In Africa they were examined in Tanzania , in Nigeria there is the sacred grove of the goddess Osun (a protective deity). In the West African region of Senegambia , the Mandinka ethnic group practices the Kankurang rite of initiation in sacred forests, which are continuously being lost through conversion into cultivated land.

In northeast India , more than 100  village communities of the indigenous, autonomous people of the Khasi maintain sacred forests for village deities and in some cases as burial sites, which are also recognized by the state as natural forest reserves . In the Indian state of Maharashtra , the continuing importance of sacred forests has been studied.

In ethnic and neo-pagan circles in Germany in the 1920s, “sacred groves” were set up as burial sites (see funeral forest ).

literature

  • Susan Alcock, Robin Osborne : Placing the Gods: Sanctuaries and Sacred Space in Ancient Greece. Oxford, Clarendon Press 1992.
  • Maureen Carroll-Spillecke: The Gardens of Greece from Homeric to Roman times. In: Journal of Garden History 12, 1992, 84-101.
  • Elisabeth Krenn: Sacred groves in ancient Greece. Origin, meaning and function. in: Friederike Bubenheimer, Ioannis Mylonopoulos u. a. (Ed.): Cult and function of Greek sanctuaries in archaic and classical times. German Archaeological Association, Mainz 1996, pp. 1–10.
  • Fritz Graf : Grove. In: The New Pauly (DNP). Volume 5, Metzler, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-476-01475-4 , column 82 f.
  • Rod Barnett: Sacred Groves: Sacrifice and the Order of Nature in Ancient Greek Landscapes. In: Landscape Journal 26, 2007, 252–269 (full text) (PDF; 7.0 MB).
  • Patrick Bowe: The sacred groves of ancient Greece. In: Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes. An International Quaterly 29, 2009, 235-245.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Duden online : Hain. Retrieved February 27, 2019.
  2. ↑ Sappho, Patrick Bowe: The sacred groves of ancient Greece. In: Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes. An International Quaterly 29, 2009, 235.
  3. ↑ Homer , Odyssey 19, 296-299.
  4. ↑ Homer, Iliad 23:138.
  5. ↑ Patrick Bowe: The sacred groves of ancient Greece. In: Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes. An International Quaterly 29, 2009, 235-245.
  6. ^ Louise Wickham: Gardens in history, a political perspective. Oxford, Windgather Press, 2012, 16-17.
  7. ^ Louise Wickham: Gardens in history, a political perspective. Oxford, Windgather Press, 2012, 17.
  8. ↑ Maureen Cartoll-Spillecke: The Gardens of Greece from Homeric to Roman Times. In: Journal of Garden History 12, 1992, 85.
  9. ^ Patrick Bowe: Civic and other public planting in ancient Greece. In: Studies in the History of Gardens & designed Landscapes. At International Quarterly 31, 2011.
  10. ↑ R. Bottle: Forest and Tree in Religions. In: Forstwirtschaftliches Centralblatt 113, 1994, 5.
  11. ↑ Maureen Carroll: Exploring the sanctuary of Venus and its sacred grove: politics, cult and identity in Roman Pompeii. In: Papers of the British School at Rome 78, 2010, 63.
  12. ↑ Strabon , Geographika 5, 3, 12; Pausanias 2, 27, 24; Servius , Commentary on Virgil's Aeneid 6, 136.
  13. ^ Louise Wickham: Gardens in history, a political perspective. Oxford, Windgather Press, 2012, 17.
  14. ↑ Maureen Carroll: Exploring the sanctuary of Venus and its sacred grove: politics, cult and identity in Roman Pompeii. In: Papers of the British School at Rome 78, 2010, 64.
  15. ↑ R. Bottle; Forest and tree in the religions. In: Forstwirtschaftliches Centralblatt 113, 1994, 5.
  16. ^ Richard Dunn: Four possible nemeton place-names in the Bristol and Bath area. In: Landscape History 27, 2005, 17-30.
  17. ^ Richard Dunn: Four possible nemeton place-names in the Bristol and Bath area . In: Landscape History 27, 2005, 29.
  18. ^ Tacitus, Germania 40.
  19. ^ Tacitus, Germania 39.
  20. ^ Tacitus, Tacitus 2.25 ( online, with German translation ).
  21. ^ Cassius Dio , Römische Geschichte 60,8,7 ( English translation online ).
  22. ↑ Arthur Hambartsumian: The sacred Aryan Forest in the Avestan and Pahlavi text. In: Iran and the Caucasus. No. 13, 2009, p. 125 (English).
  23. ↑ Michael J. Sheridan: The Environmental and Social History of African Sacred Groves: A Tanzanian Case Study. In: African Studies Review. No. 52, 2009, pp. 73-98 (English; JSTOR 27667423 ).
  24. ↑ Kankurang, Manding initiatory rite - intangible heritage - Culture Sector - UNESCO. In: unesco.org. Retrieved June 16, 2019 .
  25. ↑ State complete list with 105 sacred forests of the Khasi (2018): Sacred Groves in Meghalaya. Envis Center, Ministry of Environment & Forest, Government of India 2018, accessed on February 28, 2019 (English; with literature from 1999 and 2006).
    Literature (2010): Rekha M. Shangpliang: Forest in the Life of the Khasis. Sociological PhD Thesis Shillong University. Concept Publishing, New Delhi 2010, ISBN 978-81-8069-667-1 ( excerpt in Google book search).
  26. ↑ Chandrakant K. Waghchaure, Pundarikakshudu Tetali et al. a .: Sacred Groves of Parinche Valley of Pune District of Maharashtra, India and their Importance. In: Anthropology & Medicine. Volume 13, No. 1, 2006, pp. 55-76 (English).
  27. ↑ Wolfgang Ribbe: Flag dispute and holy grove. Comments on national symbolism in the Weimar Republic. In: Dietrich Kurz (Ed.): From Theory and Practice of Historical Science. Festschrift for Hans Herzfeld. Berlin / New York 1972, pp. 175-188.