Stuff To Blow Your MindIn this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss some of the various sacred trees of the world, including the giant sequoias of North America and the ‘Ōhi‘a Lehua of Hawaii.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick.
And today's episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a travel episode. That's, of course a broad category that we're sometimes asked to consider. And since we've already done more specific episodes on say, the psychology of travel, like why do we travel, what does the travel do to the brain, and so forth, we decided to turn our attention instead to topics that invited travel. You know that maybe even sort of summoned an itinerary or a bucket list in the mind of the listener. Certainly get in touch with an actual travel agent or travel coordinator if you need a book flights based on anything we discussed here. But yeah, I mean, there are many reasons to travel. To visit friends and family, to take in culture and cuisine, to visit natural wonders, and of course to experience various ecosystems while we still can. And I was thinking about all of this during recent travels with my family and kind of landed on a focus for this episode. Sacred trees of the world, often old and or ancient trees that instantly set our minds and perhaps our spirits as well, into motion. I don't know if you've had this experience, Joe, when you've been around you know, big trees, old trees, novel trees, and so forth.
I'm a big fan of trees. I can easily get to thinking of trees as sacred just in their generic form. Like a forest is a place that feels like a church to me. You know, I like to be surrounded by trees. There's a part of me that feels a little I don't know, I get my hackles up a bit when there are no trees around, when I'm just in like an empty field. I don't know if that bothers you in the same way it does bother me. It really does, like I need some vertical things around me. I assume that's a fairly common experience. I don't know, but I have respect for their power as well. I don't remember if we ever talked about this on the show, but you know, there was a week last summer, not this year, but the year before where a huge old tree in our neighbor's yard fell down, took out the power lines, and it was like you know, it was a long time coming back from that. There was a large storm, and of course Atlanta has a lot of trees in it, so you know, things were falling down all over the place, many people affected. But yeah, it just kind of reminds you that there are there are these wooden gods all around you, these giant, giant beings that are alive and going through life cycles of their own. You don't always notice it, but some of them are young and growing, and some of them are old and ailing, and some of them are covered in parasites, and others are you know, getting stronger by the day. And there's a kind of plant drama that we miss out on because we're not really attuned to its frequency. It's happening usually on a timescale that we're not very sensitive too.
Yeah. Yeah, there's this sense that they are divine beings and you don't want to invoke their wrath, but also we benefit from their shade and their comfort, and you know, and they're just great to be around. We lost several big trees in the immediate vicinity here in part due to the recent storms, but also I think kind of the aftermath of those storms, I believe I was looking at an article in the AJAC having to do with, like, you know, insurance companies becoming more strict about large trees and overarching limbs and so forth for insurance policies on homes and so At any rate, there are a number of big trees that I'm just accustomed to seeing that are no longer there.
Yeah, when a big tree falls, when it falls naturally or when it gets cut down, you know, just because it's looming, I do feel that as a missing presence, and you know, it's like somebody has gone out of my life. You get used to the canopy and their presence. It does change the landscape. So yeah, that kind of thing actually does. It affects me a lot when trees are gone. But to come to the idea of sacred trees, when you suggested this as an episode topic, I thought it was really cool, and I thought it was also interesting how it can be taken a couple of different ways, right, because when you think of a sacred tree, you could be thinking of a specific tree, like maybe a really beautiful tree, or a really old tree, a really giant tree, a specific tree or specific grove of trees that people go to, and maybe that specific place has meaning to people, or you could be thinking about a kind of tree that has a kind of sacred significance in say a culture or mythology.
Yeah, exactly, there are various ways to think about it. And then we'll get into examples of how like the sacred nature of a given variety of tree or maybe even individual trees. You know, it can vary over time, it can certainly wane, and then it has to be relearned and so forth. So humans have a law history of seeing the sacred in trees. Certainly, tree symbols go way back. We have various examples of you know, the likes of world trees bridging Earth to the cosmos and so forth. So pretty much anywhere you go, especially if there are large trees of some sort there are there's there's gonna be some sort of tradition, and so you really could chart your travels based entirely on the big trees. To be clear, this is not quite what we do, but I now that I think back on it. Pretty much anywhere we travel, we often end up checking out really cool trees. You know, It's like it's it's often on the itinerary. If there's some sort of you know, nature based attraction. There's a good chance they'll be an interesting tree. So we have sought out trees in various travel destinations before, So in this episode we're going to look at at least a couple of examples of sacred trees of the world. We are not going to cover all of them. That would take far more than even a few episodes. But hey, if listeners enjoy our treatment here today, this is something we can perhaps come back to in the future. So for our first destination, I want to bring you to the western Sierra Nevada. This is in California here in the United States, to see the giant Sequoia trees, also known as the giant redwood. Specifically, the species we're talking about here is Sequoia dendron gigantium, and there are two related trees in the same subfan family, and I'll mention these as well. I think as we've received the coast redwood or coastal redwood or California redwood Sequoia simper veins. These are also giant trees. And then there's the don redwood or meta sequoia. This is the shortest of the redwoods, but I think still a big tree by most other measurements. So again, in their natural habitat, you'll find the giant sequoia on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountain range of California. As their name implies, they are among the largest trees in the world. There are several different ways to decide on how the honors of giant tree biggest tree are divvied out, But if you focus purely on raw height, trunk volume, limb volume, or bark thickness among currently living trees, the giant sacquoya is absolutely have it. Though to be clear, just over the last century, humans have cut down some trees of various species that would be considered the tallest today if they were still alive, and another caveat if those historic measurements were accurate to begin with.
Ah okay, so some people in the past were like, Hey, this might be the biggest tree ever. Let's cut it down to see.
Yeah, there's there's a long There are multiple examples of that that going on, you know, where it's a big tree, let's cut it down. We've got to we've gotta tell the rest of the country about this. The way to do that is to go ahead and cut it down and get a nice big sample on it and send it out. Let it travel around from city to city. Now, according to the National Park Service, the two largest giant sequoias in the world are the General Sherman Tree and the General Grant Tree. These are the names, obviously we give the trees. They didn't choose to be named after what are to them very recent human beings. Both of these can be found in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. I had the chance to visit these parks on a recent trip with my family. We went out to California. I got to experience these amazing organisms up close or as close as you know you're allowed to get to them. And as the National Park Service points out, these are I mean, it's like this with a lot of things in nature. It's this is the way it is with say, the Grand Canyon. You can look at a picture, but it's another thing to experience it. To be there and take in the vastness, the emptiness of it is just an entirely different experience. And it's absolutely the same thing with these massive giants sequoia trees. You look at a picture and yeah, they look big, but you're often seeing them next to other gigantic trees. There'll be people in the shot as well, but you can't always completely grasp how big they are. But when you're there, there's just no denying it. I mean, it is like this, we compare it to a cathedral, but it's even grander than that.
Yes, as far as I know, I've never seen a giant sequoia in person, but I have been to a coastal redwood forest, so not exactly the same, but very similar. Years ago, my wife and I we were visiting family on a trip to southwest Oregon, so we were in a fairly secluded area around the Rogue River Siskiyou National Forest in Oregon. One day we just drove down over the state border into northern California and spent the day walking around in the redwood trees. And yeah, absolutely marvelous experience. It's hard to know exactly how to describe it. I like your comparison to a cathedral rob not just in the more abstract sense that it feels sacred, but in kind of specific sensory qualities. There's a sense in which you feel enclosed, but enclosed in a kind of vast and powerful space, not like a small room, but like a cathedral. You know, there's a vaulted canopy over you, these trees going up so high. There's a sense in which sound is kind of changed in these forests. That also reminds me of the well, I don't know here, probably less like the sounds of a cathedral, which are a bit more echoey with all the stone. I think there's more damping of the sound in the forest. But still there's something in common there, kind of an ability to hear indistinct murmuring all around you, you know, just this just this kind of drone that lends itself well to achieving a peaceful state of mind. Also smells, I remember thinking, you know, there are smells of I guess just decomposing wood and all the normal things of life going on in this forest. That reminded me of the smells you might get in a church or in a high church kind of cathedral, like incense and stuff like that.
Yeah, no burning incense around these trees, by the way. Yeah, but yeah, these things are massive, like for example, the largest giants saquoias, are said to be as tall as twenty six story buildings, and to put that in you compare that to an actual building. The historic Flat Iron Building in New York City is twenty two stories tall, and unlike a skyscraper, these trees are alive and growing. Giants Saccoia Is, according to the NPS, produce roughly forty cubic feet or one cubic meter of wood each year, so they just continue to bulk up. And you know, you can compare that to like how many trees worth of wood it's growing per year. The General Sherman tree currently stands at two hundred and seventy four point nine feet tall, has a ground circumference of one hundred and two point six feet and a trunk volume of fifty five hundred and eight cubic feet. General Grant is a little shorter but has a slightly larger ground circumference.
I wonder why they named the bigger one after Sherman and the slightly smaller one after Grant. I guess Sherman the man was I assumed taller than Grant, just imagining from the way they look in pictures. I mean, I never seen him side by side.
They neither could take this as a slight. These are trees.
I'm just saying, Grant was his boss. They should have made the bigger one Grant.
The thing is like, not only do they dwarf us in space in size, but they also dwarf us in time. And I think that's another reason that it's easy to think of them in terms of the sacred. And these are giants that are especially long lived. They are thought to live more than three thousand years in some cases. The Grizzly Giant Tree, for example, this is one I also got to see. This one is in Yosemite National Park's Mariposa Grove. It's one that has this enormously thick limb coming out from the side of it, like it looks like the tree has developed a giant muscle arm and is about to flex. Like it's just it's on inspiring and a little frightening because it just doesn't it doesn't look stable. But it's been obviously it's been up there for a very long time. But this tree in particular is thought to be between two thousand and three thousand years old, according to the National Park Service. A twenty nineteen study put it at two nine hundred and ninety five years old.
That's funny precision. Shouldn't you just say three thousand?
I mean, I don't know you cross the line at that point, right, But I mean the exact estimated ages of some of these trees has varied over time, as you know. Sometimes it's been a lot, a lot greater and then they pull back on them. But just assuming that we're talking about two thousand, nine hundred ninety five years old, I mean, just think about that, this tree has potentially lived since what nine to seventy BCE, a time when pharaohs and Old Testament kings walk the earth, more than nine centuries before the birth of Christ, almost too millennia before the earliest known first contact between Europeans and Native North American peoples. You know, our lives, even the two hundred and forty eight year history of the United States is just a drop in the bucket compared to the life span of one of these wooden Leviathans.
Makes you want to ask it for advice.
Yeah, it doesn't have any advice to give, like, but you know, just keep growing. I guess it's its whole thing. And they're pretty. But yeah, these are just such fascinating trees. So we could go into great depth about them here, but I'm just gonna hit some of the high points. One of the big ones, of course, is they drop their lower branches as they grow, and this helps to afford them resistance against forest fires. And indeed, and I believe we've probably discussed this on the show before, wildfires are part of their life cycle. Their seed strategy evolved alongside periodic fires, so their closed cones hold on to their seeds for as much as twenty years, opening up when there's that hot, dry air outside brought on by wildfires. This allows the seeds to pop out and take advantage of those post fire soils and the openness of the post fire environment. Okay, and so they're impressive survivors on their own without humans protecting them or interfering with them, they got by just fine, and thus far they've also survived the dangers of human logging and other human cause problems in the environment. Part of this, to understand is because the giant Sequoia two didn't have as what was considered as high a quality of wood as some of the competing giants, which maybe helped prevent us from cutting them all down. But they remain endangered and protected to this day getting into the sacredness of it. You know, modern interlopers into these environments certainly would would connect with the sacredness of them. There's a sacredness that kind of builds up. So Europeans initially began to encounter these trees, and you know, individuals may have thought they looked impressive or you found something sacred and then but a lot of people just saw them as resources to be plundered. And then that begins to change over time. But you know, gets to the point where the General Grant Tree, for example, was dubbed the Nation's Christmas Tree in nineteen twenty six, and various dedications and proclamations have taken place in the presence of these trees, as if you know, it is like sacred American ground upon which you know one should be present, you know, where one might make something you know, official, and so forth, as if before the eyes of God or something. In fact, if you're looking for an example of like bipartisan unity in American politics, at least non contemporary politics, you can look to multiple examples of past US presidents at the very least expressing admiration for the great trees, which I guess you know, if I'm going to be cynical as far as politics go, I mean, it's it's a pretty safe bet to be like pro giant sequoia after a point, right, it would be a weird hill to die upon otherwise. And so you have past US presidents from both major parties that have expanded protection for giants aquoias. So I mean that's pretty cool, you know, I'll take that. Also worth noting that in May of nineteen forty five, more than five hundred United Nations delegates attended the first UN Peace Conference in San Francisco, and they gathered at Newer Woods National Monument, home to a number of these sequoia simper vans or coastal redwoods that we mentioned earlier, as well as some pretty great banana slugs, like go for the trees, but stay for the banana slugs and you know, the world peace.
One of my good family friends was a camp counselor somewhere out there, and it's like it was like a nature camp, and apparently they had some great songs about banana slugs the kids liked.
They're very impressive. Well, we took my son out there when he was a lot younger, and he really barely cared about the trees, but he was excited to see the banana slugs. And we got there early in the morning, and at first we did not see any banana slugs, and he was about to become very upset at having not seen them, and then luckily a park ranger showed us one, and then we were like, oh, okay, all was saved.
I think the thing is, you hear banana slug and you think it's just a name. Until you see it. You don't realize how much like a banana it's gonna look. Yeah.
Absolutely Now. Before the coming of the Europeans, the treaties were already held in high, even sacred regard, though they were not called Sequoias. The Europeans selected names seemingly derives from that of Cherokee polymath Sequoia, who live seventeen sixty seven through eighteen forty three, though this connection is sometimes contested. At any rate, the situation may be much like the name Yosemite itself, which is derived from actual names in the Miwok languages. But itself, the word Yosemite doesn't really mean much, you know, It's just like a composite word now, Who were the Miwok peoples. They were one of the native inhabitants of what is now northern California, and they practiced complex landscape and ecosystem management strategies to help ensure the the dominance of for them, key acorn producing trees. This is something you can learn about if you visit Yosemite. They have a lot of really fascinating stuff about how they would gather these acorns, process them, save them. It was a vital resource for them, and they would do things like engage in intentional burns to manage both vegetation and game, ensuring the acorns, but also this would tie into the management of game that they would hunt as well. And they reportedly, and this reporting tends to come from Europeans that were at the time at least looking to exploit exotic romanticism about Yosemite, they would say that the native peoples knew the giant sequoias as Wawona. Wawona is also the name of an historic hotel in Yosemite One. I've stayed at it a couple of times. It's a very interesting historic landmark. But as to what Wowona actually meant, Like you see counts that it is referring to the trees. There are also accounts that it is referring to owls or the sound the hoot of an owl as it is heard passing through a grove of these trees. And it does seem like there is some sort of connection between the owls and the great trees. They have a shared sacredness in the tradition, with the owl possibly serving as like a spirit guardian of the Great trees. So I was looking to read more about this, so I turned to a book titled King Sequoia, The Tree That inspired a nation created international park System and changed the way we think about nature, by William C. Tweed. This is a really interesting book. I definitely recommend this for anyone out there who wants a deeper dive into the history of this tree and how, and as the title indicates, the role it has played and sort of the changing attitude we've had towards the natural world in the United States. But he points out that prior to the Gold Rush of the eighteen forties in the eighteen fifties, the domains of the Great Trees were largely left alone by Europeans, including during the Spanish and Mexican period. Preceding the gold Rush, these areas have been mostly left alone to the native inhabitants of those regions. But then when the gold rush occurs, people come out looking for the gold, tearing up the land for the gold, and of course ultimately decimating indigenous populations and driving them from their lands. The author here points out that nearly all of California's native groups, including the Miwok, of course, understood the importance of fire to the ecosystem, as we mentioned earlier, and used it to manage vegetation and game. And this is interesting in that this is a lesson that Europeans and Americans would be very slow to realize, to realize that, yes, you can't just prevent all wildfires, you have to of course engage in strategic, small scale burns, in part because this is what the natural environment is accustomed to. Also goes into detail about the many steps that were involved in the near worship of these great trees in the early twentieth century in America. You know, it was very much a transition from past attitudes that against all these trees as mere resources to plunder like everything else, to this growing sense that these trees are special, and then that idea seems to sort of it's sort of like, once you pull on it, you begin to pull up these other ideas and you realize, oh, well, maybe it's not just the trees that are sacred, you know, it's the areas around the trees. Maybe it's the whole ecosystem that the trees are a part of. Maybe it's the natural world that is important here and should be conserved. However, he points out that sadly, in terms of what the indigenous people thought specifically about these trees, he said that we've lost quote most of the experiences, tales, and wisdom of the first peoples to have walked in the shadows and sunlit reflections of these mountain forests. But he still points out that from what we do know, from what was passed down and remembered, quote, they perceived the trees as they did everything else that surrounded them, as part of a complex web of existence that had spiritual value embedded in every element. And of course, if the Miwok saw the trees as part of a grander world of interconnected spirits in nature, then you know, perhaps we can see the giant sequoias and their ken as like the prime deities that again steadily helped to reveal the sacred aspects of nature to a wider American public. You know, that leads you know, early conservationists like John Muir himself to refer to the trees as the noblest of the noble race and noblest of God's trees. So I left this research, you know, wanting to know more about how indigenous people specifically thought about the great Sequoias, the giant Sequoias. It sounds like a lot of those traditions have been lost, but it is interesting how though those traditions were decimated and lost, there is this sense of sort of like rediscovering them in the history of conservationists in America, realizing that the trees should be protected and and should be conserved. But again that's it's very much a transition. There's certainly a phase in between there where we have a lot of like the cutting down of these trees or the drilling of great holes in them so you can drive an automobile through them. And I guess, you know, part of that is like we've got to show people how big these are. Let's put a car next to it. No, let's drive a car through it, you know, without fully realizing that, you know, how destructive that is.
I was just reminded of seeing that photo when you said it. I don't know how common that is. Is that something that happened to a bunch of trees or is it just like that one famous one, the driving the car through.
I mean, oh, I mean there there have been a couple of different examples of this. National Park Service actually has a has a page about this you can look up, called the Myth of the Tree you Can Drive Through and it covers, like some of a couple of the actual examples of trees that had been tunneled. One of the ones that they have pictured in this article is in the Suqua National Park and it's a tree that had already fallen and then they had dug out an area to drive a tree through. But unfortunately, like live trees were also tunneled. Yeah, the Wawona tree is one that they write in this article stood for eighty eight summers, but then eventually it fell during a severe winter between nineteen sixty eight and nineteen sixty nine. And part of this, of course, is that when you tunnel a tree, you weaken the tree, so there you go. Yeah, so it's not something that is currently done. Now. I want to add an important note on the Mewook people. We've been speaking about them in an historic context here, who they were when Europeans first encountered them, and what they lost in terms of life, culture, and then so stroll land because of that contact. But it's important to stress that the Miwook did not vanish, and they the indigenous people of central California, still largely reside there on five rancherias under tribal leadership, as well as elsewhere in California. Their access to ancestral lands in Yosemite, i'm to understand, has improved quite a bit in recent years, though there's obviously a long way to go there. So those are the giants squoias. So we have visited California. Where are we off to next, Joe?
Well, the tree I wanted to talk about is is one I've never seen in person before, but I think probably you have because you've been to the place it grows. So this is a tree that is found in Hawaii, and for centuries it has been an important part of Hawaiian culture, both in a practical sense as a source of wood used to make a variety of objects, but then also in a sacred sense. For its role in Hawaiian religion and mythology, this tree is known as the Ohea lahua. The scientific nomenclature is Metrocederos polymorpha. So I was going to start by trying to describe what an ohe lahua looks like, but that's a kind of complicated proposition because the species name, again is polymorpha, which means many forms or many shapes, and that is quite appropriate to describe this plant, which, depending on circumstances, can change the color of its flowers. They can be cherry red, that's the most common version you'll see, but also pink or even lemon yellow. It can change the size and shape of its leaves, and it can vary drastically in its overall size and growth pattern. So sometimes the Ohee la hua is a small shrub you might see projecting from a fresh black lava field, or sometimes it is a tree more than fifty feet tall in a dense forest of many of the same tree. So it takes many forms. It can be a shrub, can be a tree, and in its tree form, this species is the most abundant of Hawaii's native trees. Going back centuries, the wood of the Ohelahua has been used by the people of Hawaii, especially for sacred and religious purposes. It's been used to make tools like wooden beaters that are used for producing kappa, a traditional textile of Hawaii, but it's also been used to make things like statues for religious purposes, representations of gods and other spiritual beings. So Rabbi included some pictures for you to look at here in the outline. One thing that's very notable about the blossoms of the ohela Hua is that they have these many projecting stamens, so they can look kind of like a sea anemone.
Yes, yes, I do remember these. These are quite beautiful. And then you also share some images of the full sized trees with that are kind of I guess you might describe these as kind of like veining. There's a sense of like veining upward, or it's almost like the shape of roots growing into the sky. I don't know. This feels insufficient, but it's one of the one of the aspects of the forest of why that certainly resonated with me a lot when I was there be it, you know, in the botanical garden situation, or just driving, you know, across the islands. You just see these beautiful trees and they're just like they're unlike anything I'm accustomed to seeing back home.
Obviously. Yeah, it's funny because in a couple of the myths I was reading that incorporate this tree, the tree is described in some sense as like gnar oled or ugly, but in other cases it's regarded specifically for its beauty, and certainly the blossoms are always thought of as particularly beautiful. And I guess those two different ways of describing it come together in one of the last myths I'm going to get to in this section. But so, yeah, you can see a diversity of forms. If you look up images again, it's the Ohea lehua. There's some unusual characters in the Anglicized version of the name, but I think if you just type in O h I A l e h u A you can find it. But anyway, these forms include full sized trees with woody trunks, and also just these particularly lovely red blossomed shrubs that you see growing up from cracks in new volcanic rocks. Sometimes by themselves. They're known for beings among the first plants to sort of fill in and colonize an area that has newly been paved over by a volcanic eruption.
And that's always picturesque. It's like the hang in there baby signed with the cat, you know. It's like like, look at this, Even in the midst of of all of this volcanic desolation, there's re growth, Like this is a cycle we're witnessing here.
Yeah. So I was reading in multiple sources that the Ohee Lahua is a type of sacred tree within Hawaiian tradition. But what was interesting to me the more I got into it was the diversity of ways that this sacred status was defined. That there are so many different connection points between this species of tree and traditional stories and beliefs of the Hawaiian people, for example, gods and spiritual beings embodied by or represented by the tree. This is not a case where you will get one clear and unique association between one deity and one plant species. Instead, I've found so many stories in which this tree is the embodiment of or is associated with so many different named spiritual beings in Hawaiian religion. So I just want to list some of the things I've come across to give a sense of this diversity. One thing is I was listening to a video interview with a scholar, a professor named Kalna Silva, who is at the University of Hawaii, Hilo, who specializes in Hawaiian language and history, and he says that the Ohia Lahua is what he calls the physical manifestation of a couple of divine figures he names he Iyaka and Laka. So I went looking for more on these two connections. First of all, Laka is a name referring actually to multiple figures within Hawaiian religion. One is a goddess of the growing forest as well as well as of hula dancing, and another is a member of the assemblage of cou gods Ku gods, which I'll say more about in a minute. But this Laca god is also associated with hula dancing. So both of these associated with hula dancing, which you might have some awareness of as a form of dance, but it's not just a form of dance. One thing that's important to understand about hula is that it is narrative in so it's a dance that tells stories about Hawaiian history and mythology and so forth. The other entity that Silva mentions as being embodied in the tree is he Iyaka, who is an interesting figure, the daughter of the goddess Halmea and the god Kane, and also the younger sister of the volcano goddess Pele. So there is a famous story about the two sisters Pele and he Iyaka, which exists in apparently a lot of different forms. This will sort of be a theme today, many different forms, but I'll give an abridged summary of one form of the story. This form is hosted on the National Parks page for Hawaii Volcano's National Park. It starts off with Pele. She lives up on the volcanic mountain of Kilauea, and once Pele had a lover named Lohiao, who lived on a different island from her, on the island of Kawaii. Pele wanted to see her lover, but he was so far away, so she asked her sisters to go to the other island and bring him back to her, and only her youngest sister, he Iyaka, agreed. And while he Iyaka is away on this mission, Pele promised that she would take good care of what he Iyaka cared about the most, which was a sacred grove of Ohia trees and of he Iaka's best friend Apoe. Unfortunately, when he Eyaka got to the other island, she discovered that Pele's lover Lohiao, had died, so he Iyaka has to bring him back from the dead, which was no easy job. She has to go chasing after his spirit which has left his body, but she catches it, brings it back, and she's able to resurrect him. He Eyaka and the now revived Lohio make the journey back to Pel's Island, but with some stops along the way, in which he Eyaka has to defend against this guy being tempted to betray Pele with another woman. There's like a beautiful queen who has some history with Lohio, and he Iyaka has to win some kind of game to prevent him from from I think the prize that she would that the queen would get if she won is that Lohio would have to stay with her for a night. So he Iyaka is really going above and beyond. She raises this guy from the dead keeps him loyal to the volcano goddess, but Pele unfortunately gets paranoid and impatient her sister has not returned, so she gets angry and she burns down he Iyaka's precious Ohea trees, and then she also covers he Iyaka's friend Hapoe with molten lava, so she's very mad. This in turn makes he Iaka furious, so she and Lohioo go to Pele's volcano crater to face off against her, and there is a battle involving multiple parties and incantations and sorcery. Pele tries to compel some of her other relatives to attack them and to kill Lohiao, but they sort of hesitate, and in the end Pele herself kills her lover Lohiao out of rage, and then in revenge for this, he Iyaka she plans to destroy Pele. Her plan is she's going to break through the crust of the earth, flood the volcano with water, and snuff it out. But then at the last moment she relents and she does not extinguish her sister's fires with the water from below, and they make up and they get over their differences, but in the story you can see he Iyaka, this powerful divine heroine who has all these You know, she has magical powers. She can break through the earth to summon waters. She she can sort of like see things from afar like, she can sort of do everything. And the thing she really loves, things she cares about the most apart from her friend, is this grove of the ohia Lehua trees. Now I was reading in another source, according to a scholar named Beatrice Krauss, in a book called Plants in Hawaiian Culture from University of Hawaii Press. This is the twenty twenty one edition of the book. The Ohee Lahua tree is one, according to this book, one of the natural forms taken by Ku, who is one of the four major gods of Hawaiian religion. Ku, in his many manifestations, is a male god of war and politics, known as the Snatcher of land, but also represents farming and fishing and forests and a number of different things. So Ku is known to take a many animal shapes, including the Hawaiian hawk and the shape of a shark, but also plant forms, notably the Ohee Lahua tree. And so I was reading more about this in another book, a book called Hawaiian Mythology by Martha Warren Beckwith this was University of Hawaii Press. This is a much older book, but this was the twenty twenty one edition of it. And in this book she talks about how the Ohee Lahua tree form of Coup is one of what she calls the coup gods, which could be interpreted either as sort of subordinate gods who serve under Coup and are worshiped under his auspices, or derivative manifestations of Coup himself. And many of these are, in her words quote, functional gods of the forest or sea upon whom depended success in some special craft. So there are number of examples listed in this text. Beckweth identifies a god named ku Ohilaka as an example here, one of the many gods who was worshiped, for example, by canoe builders for playing some role in the construction of a canoe. In this case, he was, for one thing, a god of rain in the forest, but also the god embodied in the wood of the Ohee Lahua tree, which was one of the sources of hardwood building material available in the upland forest. Also you can hear the name Laca in Kuka ohel Laca. This is the male god Laka, which was one of the entities I mentioned earlier as a patron of the hula dance art form in which history and important stories were stored and then expressed. Now, beck With in her text mentions a really interesting story connecting this Laca, this version of the coup god Laka, to a particular cave in Hawaii and to the ohe Lahua tree. So she says that there's a particular cave in Hawaii where there grows a specific tree of this species, and that tree is the preserved body of Laca. Several things are said about this tree. One is that it only ever has two blossoms at a time, and the other is that if you snap a branch off of it, blood will flow from the wood. And then Beckwick goes on to tell the story of the tree. Up here is that I believe it's that Laka and his sister Kawa come to Hawaii to live with their spouses, Laka and his wife kaa Aw and Kawa with her husband in the uplands of the island. So here I'm going to read from Beckwith quote When the sister brings vegetable food from her garden to her brother at the sea, her stingy sister in law pretends that they have no fish and gives her nothing but seaweed to take home as a relish. In despair at this treatment, Kawa transforms her husband and children into rats, and herself into a spring of water. Her spirit comes to her brother and tells him of her fate. He visits the uplands, recognizes the spot as she is directed in the dream, and plunging into the spring, is himself transformed into the Lahua tree, which we see today. Oh wow, but it doesn't stop there. I was talking about the god cou earlier. Ku himself is said to be the husband of the goddess Heina and here this can also be confusing because there are apparently multiple divine figures referred to as Hena, but this is one of them, and Ku is the husband of the Heinah, who is associated with the ocean, the moon, and with female female fertility and motherhood. Now, Beckwith's book also lists the goddess Hena as a spiritual being embodied by the same tree, in this case as hina ulu Ohea, meaning Heina the growing Ohea tree. So this version of Hena plays an important role in the genealogies of Hawaiian gods as a mother, ancestor, and protector of other important characters who figure into various stories. But then Beckwith writes quote to both God and goddess, the flowering Ohea is sacred, and no one on a visit to the volcano will venture to break the red flowers for a wreath or pluck leaves or branches on the way thither. Only on return, with proper invocations, may the flowers be gathered. A rainstorm is the least of the unpleasant results that may follow tampering with the sacred Lahua blossoms. And then connecting to that, there's one more story that it's sort of along the same lines. I've seen this repeated in several places. Once again, this involves the fire and volcano goddess Pele as a jealous lover. So in this story, there's a gorgeous guy, a beautiful dude named Ohea. He's unbelievably good looking, and Pele falls in love with him, but he only has eyes for a different woman named Lahua. So when Peley's affections are spurned, she reacts with envious rage, and she transforms Ohea into a gnarled tree, an ugly tree with twisted branches. And so the woman Lahua mourns the loss of her lover. He's been turned into a tree now, But the other gods take pity on her, and they use their power to help sort of make things right, not fully, but they allow her to join him in form. So Lahua becomes the beautiful blossom that grows on ohea branches. This way they can be together for all time. But as one possible consequence of this story, if you pick the flower from the tree, you tear the lovers apart again, and then the tears of Lahua and Ohea will fall as rain.
Oh wow.
Now I mentioned that these trees are known for having hard, sturdy wood, and even in their smaller shrub forms, they're known for, you know, for flowing into apparently inhospitable environments. You know, there'll be some of the first plants growing out of the cracks in fresh volcanic rock after interruption. So that might kind of give the impression that these plants are invincible, but they are not invincible. In fact, currently Ohea lehua are threatened by a wide spread fungal disease. The phenomenon has been known as rapid ohea death or ro D, so named because it can appear that something happens to these trees and kills them very fast and like a matter of days. According to once ourst I was looking at, this is caused by a couple of species of fungus which are in the genus serato cistus. These fungi can harm the tree greatly, and it's thought that they harm the tree by stopping up the tree's vascular system. So like you know this, this tree has hardy roots that can reach down into you know, the cracks and rocks and so forth, and can access water wherever it needs to. But this plugs up the vascular system, so the water from the roots can't get up to the canopy, can't get up to the leaves and the tops of the trees, which of course is going to first turn them brown and kill the leaves and then ultimately kills the whole plant. And so there are conservation effort it's ongoing to try to understand this threat and counteract it. But this is something that that conservationists and and also just people to whom the Ohea Lhua has great cultural and religious significance are very aware of and having to deal with.
It's interesting you see this in various examples. You see this with the great sequoias as well. You know, we look at a tree and it doesn't even have to be a giant tree. You know, they're all they're often pretty big. They're often bigger than us. But you look at a tree and you can often think that by virtue of its size, by virtue of the pace of its existence, we think of them as being sometimes more rugged than they actually are. We don't think that human activities can harm them, can interfere them, so we do things like, you know, carve our initials into them, or tunnel holes through them for novelty automobile photographs and things like that, when in reality, you know they are often they're often very sensitive to their environment, and sometimes it comes down to details like for instance, I I didn't mention that the sequoia tree has you know, reasonably shallow root systems, and that's one of the reasons that when you're around them, there's a lot of emphasis given on staying on the path and not you know, walking up close to them, because you could damage these roots like the thing that is, you know, ancient and rough and tumble, and you know, we compare them to giants and grizzly bears. You know that there they are, in their own way, fragile, and you know we can do great harm to them. We can do great arm to the environment, and we have to respect it and care for it.
Trees, like us are both tough and fragile, and you have to understand the ways in which we are both.
But I love these these Hawaiian stories. I love these stories of transformation into trees. This is something you see echoes of in other traditions as well, sometimes you know, for more tragic effects, sometimes for haunting effect. But I imagine and it's probably one of the key mythological tropes. Like you have world trees, and you also have transformation into trees, people and gods and demi gods becoming the tree. And I guess maybe you see combinations of the two as well.
Yeah, what do you think, did we cover all of the sacred trees in the world?
Now? We left a few off? Sadly, yes, we only covered two. Fortunately they I think they're connected essentially by a direct flight from San Francisco to Hawaii. So if you want to turn this into a travel itinerary, this one's an easy one. But yes, obviously there are a number of sacred trees we didn't get to. I originally was going to talk about the body tree the sacred fig a bit in this episode, but obviously we ran ran out of time, So you know, consider this an unofficial part one. If you want to hear more about sacred trees in the world, let us know and we'll come back with another episode at some point in the future talk about the body tree and who knows what else. There are a number of great ones in terms of just big impressive tree, but also trees that have various roles within a given culture.
Yeah, there are so many. We could do a ten part series on this, and it often does get surprisingly interesting at how like the botany interacts with the legend and mythology.
Yeah, absolutely, all right, so we'll go ahead and close this one out, but yeah, let us know if you'd like to hear more. If you want to hear us speak for the trees some more, we can do so in the future. In the meantime, we'll just remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Fridays, we set aside most serious concerners, just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema and let's see any other thing we need to mention here. Oh, if you're on the Instagrams and you wish to follow us STBYM podcast, that's where you'll find us. Keep up with some of the episodes coming out. And we haven't mentioned this a lot recently, but hey, rate and review if you have the power to do so. Wherever you listen to us, give us a nice star rating. That helps you know, keep things nice and fresh. It's it's like putting some fresh flowers in the room, just freshen things up nicely, and so we do move ask you to remember to do that.
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