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Speaking for the trees

The role of the materials that books are made of being of significance to the practitioner has something of a history. In ancient Egypt, prior to the use of the modern codex that we identify most commonly as books, they were known to create sheets of papyrus, glued together into sheets up to 100 feet in length. The oldest piece of papyrus we have evidence for dates back to the First Dynasty of Egypt, circa 3100 BC–c. 2900 BC, and inscriptions from the same time depict scribes with the appropriate tools for writing on papyrus as well.¹ Papyrus was not merely a tool for writing, though - It was a gift from the gods themselves; One that was adorned into their depictions, carved into their temples and otherwise held a special place of significance in their culture and their religion alike.² It was also under the protection of the papyrus plant that legends tell us Horus was hidden after the death of his father at the hands of Seth, kept safe under the guardianship of the plants not unlike like Dionysus and Zeus were once guarded under the protection of nymphs in their infancy in the stories told by the nearby Hellenic culture. The very texts themselves carried a sacredness for their association with such an important plant; A sacredness that would only be further emphasized by another notable god in the pantheon associated with writing and later syncrotized with the Greek Hermes to create one of the most influential spiritual movements in the western world - Thoth.

As time progressed, papyrus was in some places traded for parchment - Sheets made from the skin of young animals like lambs - and eventually into the pages created from the pulp of wood fibers that we are most familiar with today. Although it can be hard to tell exactly what trees are represented in the books printed for us in the modern day, given that they are often made from a mixture of a number of different types of wood, we still can connect with and appreciate the trees themselves for the part they have played in bringing us the magic contained within. Tradition attributed the invention of paper to the Chinese eunuch, Cai Lun, although it's likely that it predates him.¹ That said, we still have a significant thanks to give to him for helping spread the practice that we might enjoy books as we do in the modern day.

But with this change comes a question of the sacredness of texts. The magic once contained in papyrus of the Nile no longer lives in the hands of most scholars, who instead have shifted to this newer methodology for books. Does this mean that the texts are no longer sacred? That bibliomancy as an art is stunted by modernity?

To that, I give a resounding and perhaps even amused no.

As once the ancients once heralded the significance of the papyrus and its connection to the Nile, so too did many other cultures put significance on their own local flora, which provided for the people of those regions no less. The tree has long been a powerful symbol, connected to nymphs and gods alike. The god Dionysus, whose connections with various forms of vegetation are numerous, is specifically referred to as "the tree god" by Plutarch and, according to him, was worshipped throughout Ancient Greece as such.³ So, too, does Pindar speak of him as the one to make trees prosper. Of a particular importance to him is the pine; The pinecone is the top of the thrysus often paraded by the maenads and with which the god himself is often depicted in artwork across the ages. We do also see the tree being worshipped as the god himself, where after sitting on one, Pentheus received an oracle from Delphi that told him to worship it and the locals promptly carved the likeness of Dionysus into it. Although tracing the specifics of where each book gets its paper from and, therefore, the specific make-up of the trees used in production can be quite difficult, I did manage to find an article from 1957 talking about the paper industry that denotes the Southeast United states specifically for its significance to the pulpwood industry, bringing attention to specifically the southern pine as a major source of pulpwood at the time.⁴ In the modern day, paper comes from a range of sources, but the pine remains popular among them. If we follow this basic premise, the modern book contains the same spirit of Dionysus as does any of the plants associated with him, such as the vine.

But the pine, alone, is not the only source. Another tree we see used by paper manufacturing, particularly for how quickly it grows, is the poplar tree.⁵ In addition to the trees traditionally called poplar, there are some that belong to the same genus, such as the aspen and cottonwood trees, which are also sometimes used. The poplar has a special place in ancient mythology, where it is associated with the sun god. In the myth of Phaeton, the Heliades play a particular role as his nymph sisters who, while mourning his death, were changed into poplar trees along the very river that he was said to be his final resting place. There, they are said to cry tears of amber - A valuable and coveted crystal in the ancient world often associated with the sun due to it's brilliant color. The white poplar, a close relative of the aspen tree, was closely associated with the Oceanid Leuke, who was said to have been one of the nymphs abducted by Hades to the underworld, where she lived out the rest of her life and eventually was transformed into a tree that resided in Elysium. It also is associated with the hero Heracules, who was said to have worn the branches of the tree in his hair, its dual nature a representation of his victories both in the mortal realm and in the underworld. Through these associations of poplars with various nymphs, we then can assume a similar spirit is present in the trees used in our books, which also then carry the energy of those spirits in a vein similar to how it does Dionysus through the use of the pine. For practitioners that work closely with the sun god, with some of these various nymphs, with Hades or with Heracules - Or any similar mythology that incorporates poplar trees or any of the other various trees used in modernity - books may prove to be especially powerful tools.