Tree Ghosts
An Encyclopaedia of Occultism (1920)
Indian tree spirits. Says Mr. Crookes in his Popular Religion of Northern India . These tree ghoss are, it is needless to say, very numerous. Hence most local shrines are constructed under trees; and in one particular tree, the Bira, the jungle tribes of Mirzapur locate Bagheswar, the tiger godling, one of their most dreaded deities. In the Konkan, according to Mr. Campbell, the medium or Bhagat who becomes possessed is called Jhad, or 'tree,' apparently because he is a favourite dwelling-place for spirits. In the Dakkhin it is believed that the spirit of the pregnant woman of Churel lives in a tree, and the Abors and Padams of East Bengal believe that spirits in trees kidnap children. Many of these tree spirits appear in the folk-tales. Thus, Devadatta worshipped a tree which one day suddenly clave in two and a nymph appeared who introduced him inside the tree, where was a heavenly palace of jewels, in which, reclining on a couch, appeared Vidyatprabha, the maiden daughter of the king of the Yakshas; in another story the mendicant hears inside a tree the Yaksha joking with his wife. So Daphne is turned into a tree to avoid the pursuit of her lover." Tree of Life, The, and The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: Two of the trees planted by God in the Garden of Eden, which were believed by St. Ambrose to be of mystical significance. The former is understood to be the manifestation of God, and the latter of the worldly wisdom to which our human nature is too apt to incline.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The Encyclopaedia of Occultism was quoting William Crooke's 1896 survey of northern Indian popular religion, and most of what he described is still there: shrines under trees, the churel who haunts a tree after dying in childbirth, and mediums who go into possession trance. What has moved is the frame around it. The Victorian habit of collecting such beliefs as "survivals" of a primitive stage, which Crooke and his contemporary James Campbell shared, was abandoned by anthropology in the twentieth century, and the tree shrines are now studied less as ghost-lore than as sacred groves, patches of forest protected by religious prohibition that ecologists count as reservoirs of biodiversity. Some of the names have changed too: the Abors of the 1920 text are the Adi of Arunachal Pradesh, and the Dakkhin is the Deccan.
Written for this edition, 2026.