Striking Evidence of Tree Worship

Traces of ancient tree worship turn up where most people seldom expect it. Thus John Stewart Collis writes: “If, after having been to a museum and examined the extraordinary and rather frightening Chaldean symbols of tree-worship of 4000 B.C. [?], we then enter the Christian medieval edifice of St. Mark’s at Venice, we will see embedded in the walls a number of sculptured slabs on each of which a conventionalized plant, with foliage rendered in truthful detail, is set between two fabulous monsters, the whole making a design which can be traced back to the signs and symbols of tree-worship as exhibited four to six [?] thousand years ago by the Chaldean Semites.”—The Triumph of the Tree.