Why do some have faith in holy trees or stumps in the shape of the Virgin Mary? Holy trees are linked to rebirth and healing, and ‘otherworldly’ apparitions also have a lot do with this world

FOR YEARS A TREE grows, in that unobtrusive way trees have. One day a passing human sees something in the tree: a vision. Suddenly the tree is a celebrity. There are reports of healings and miracles and lottery wins. A row erupts between devotees of the tree and sceptics who want it burned or pruned or decommissioned. From the pulpit the parish priest denounces the whole idea of apparitions in trees and pronounces such things to be the result of ignorance, dodgy theology or superstition.

Does it sound familiar, this story? Isn’t it a dead ringer, in fact, for what went on last summer at St Mary’s church in Rathkeale,

Co Limerick, after a tree stump was described as being in the image of the Virgin Mary? Okay, there were no miracles in Rathkeale – not even a lottery win – but there’s plenty of evidence, online and elsewhere, of a slanging match between devotees and sceptics while, right on cue, the institutional church distanced itself from what it regarded as an error in spiritual transmission. It was, we all felt at the time, a peculiarly Irish story – perhaps embarrassingly so.

According to a newly published book, however, tales of holy trees are pretty common. They can be traced not only right across the Mediterranean but back in time as well, as far as classical Greece and beyond; and they feature all varieties of tree, from laurel to walnut, myrtle to oak and cedar.

The author of Holy Trees and Other Ecological Surprises, Lucy Goodison, is interested in how our relationship with the natural world has been influenced by cultural factors, and how this has affected our spiritual development. An archaeologist whose special subject is the Aegean Bronze Age, she discovered her first "holy tree" by accident while doing fieldwork on prehistoric Minoan remains.

A former documentary film-maker who left the BBC to get involved in community politics, Goodison isn’t a holy-tree devotee, but nor is she a dismissive sceptic – which is what makes the tone of her book so interesting. She presents case histories of rituals that have been conducted around trees from Minoan times to the present day. She also describes her personal experiences as she carries out research in Cretan cafes and Portuguese mountain villages – and also in Willesden, a northwestern suburb of London where “the crowded living conditions and heavy traffic would not now encourage you to think of trees, let alone rural visions of Our Lady”.

Why does any of this matter? As Goodison points out in her introduction, our relationship with the natural world is no longer a decorative extra, something of concern only to poets, visionaries and dreamers. “We are now aware,” she writes, “that trees in particular play a crucial role in preserving ecological balance. Scientifically, we know that they are the lungs of the earth. Spiritually, they have become a symbol of respect for the values which are being destroyed in the exploitation of the environment, a symbol of protest against the damage being wreaked on the earth.”

However, sentimental tree-hugging is not the answer. Goodison is not impressed by the antics of “jolly men with beards and silver tankards in bottom-smacking mood” or “women dressed in robes who describe themselves as witches or priestesses of an old Celtic nature religion”. Many of these “new” approaches to nature and spirituality, she says, are the old approaches made over and dressed up in different outfits; some of them, indeed, represent the ancient human desire for political power, written in runic script.

"People often go to these things with a lot of ego invested," Goodison tells The Irish Times. "They want to be leaders or shamans or gurus. And, also, people tend to go 'back to nature' with a lot of modern preconceptions in tow. To approach nature afresh, in the 21st century, means to question those assumptions."

Goodison draws on an intriguing range of references, from Van Morrison to Jim Morrison, Carl Jung to the Kabbalah, to question as many assumptions as she can.

She is motivated, she says, by a spirit of inquiry. In fact, her book suggests that if we could set our beloved assumptions aside and rediscover our capacity for openness, and the ability to be surprised, we might learn a lot.

It’s hard to pinpoint when people started seeing things in trees. But a 3,500-year-old bronze plaque from a cave on the island of Crete, unearthed by the archaeologist Arthur Evans in 1896 and now held at the Ashmolean Museum, in Oxford, shows a human figure with a bird, a fish, and clear depictions of the sun and moon. In the centre of the scene is what looks like a leafless Christmas tree. Nobody really knows what it means, but Goodison suggests a cosmology in which trees were revered in their own right. “To honour the tree itself rather than a personified deity linked to the tree means to relocate the divine in the physical world,” she writes. “It means acknowledging that the tree is not a god or an archetypal symbol or a carrier of human projections but a living organism like ourselves with all the miraculous qualities that implies.”

In the 21st century, Cretans still pay their respects to a tree at the foothills of the Asterousia mountains that is said to have healing properties. Healing is a repeated motif in stories about holy trees. What’s also remarkable is how many of the “apparitions” associated with trees are of female saints or goddesses. That, Goodison observes, is because “other-worldly” apparitions have a lot to do with this world. Many of the visionaries are marginal, vulnerable and female. Ivana Ivankovic, one of the Medjugorje visionaries, was a 15-year-old girl who was grieving the recent death of her mother; the Fatima children were starving. Such patterns don’t explain away the visions, says Goodison; rather, they give information that may help to understand the phenomena.

Instead of dismissing the stories out of hand, she feels, it’s more constructive to listen to the claims people are making and ask why they’re seeing those particular visions. “I’m very interested in people’s experiences over generations,” she says. “And it seems to me very narrow minded to reject them just because they’re not experiences that we’ve had. They’re not an accepted part of our consensus culture at the moment – so we say, ‘These people were deluded, or superstitious, or foolish.’ Actually, the experiences themselves served a purpose for people. They formed a connection to the natural world. Often, they’d use them for healing in a situation where they had no access to doctors or medicine.”

In her book Goodison looks at themes of resurrection and rebirth, which surface over and over in stories of a dead branch or staff being planted in the ground only to “miraculously” put forth buds and branches. This motif plays a role in the foundation of a Christian site at Glastonbury, in England, where Joseph of Arimathea is supposed to have planted his hawthorn staff on Wearyall Hill to mark his arrival in Avalon. It also turns up in an Irish legend associated with St Brigid; some wooden altar steps are said to have burst into leaf when she became a nun.

These tales exaggerate only a little, the author remarks, the process whereby something dry and apparently lifeless, such as a seed, can, if planted, create life, leaves and fruit.

At a time of impending ecological disaster, the metaphor is hugely appealing. But even as it makes the case for radical change in our attitude to, and relationship with, the natural world, Goodison’s book sounds a warning: radical change is difficult. Is she an optimist when it comes to the survival of the human species? “Oh,” she says. “It’s so hard to say, isn’t it? Personally, I’m an optimist – because I have to be. You have to look at what’s best in human nature, and you have to hope that it will win through; even though, in various situations in the past, it hasn’t. That’s the only workable position, isn’t it? To look at what’s good and to hope that people will be able to find it. And be able to resist the vested interests which, frankly, often impede our progress in moving towards a more environmentally aware way of life.”

Holy Trees and Other Ecological Surprises, by Lucy Goodison, is published by Just Press, £12.99