Lucky Trees by Tom Lethbridge

© Tom Lethbridge 1965 [1]

We will go on to another facet of this study. My wife was entirely responsible for this and I doubt whether I should ever have thought of it. She remarked, when we were getting a meal, ‘Why do you think that some trees are considered unlucky?’ On my grunting that I had no idea, she continued: ‘Do you think you could find out with the pendulum?’

Her question opened an entirely new line of approach and I do not suppose that anyone has followed it. Whoever in these scientific days would ever believe for a moment that a tree could be unlucky? This was some superstitious nonsense, which could not possibly have any foundation in fact. Nevertheless the beliefs are most widespread. I have long grown up past the stage of scoffing at such things.

I started to recall what I could remember of folk-beliefs. Of course elder was most unlucky. You must never cut it down without asking its permission. You must never burn it, or somebody would die. An alternative version had it that you burnt the Devil and so presumably irritated him. So widespread are these superstitious beliefs that you might say that they are everywhere in the country. Elder was evidently believed to have an inveterate hostility to mankind.

Yet elder has its uses. Its flowers make a kind of bubbly wine sometimes likened to champagne. Its berries are mixed with various pies to add flavour. The yellow inlay in marquetry furniture is often elder. Incidentally elder when freshly cut stinks. Some say it smells of corpses.

Now rowan, mountain-ash, is just the opposite. From East Anglia to the island of Skye, I have heard rowan spoken of with great respect. A sprig of it over the door will keep evil magic away. A friend, who runs a pack of beagles, told me that when some disease struck them, which the vet could not cure, she surrounded the kennels with pieces of rowan and they recovered at once. I do not know whether the wood is used for any particular purpose, but my aunt used to make a good jelly from the berries.

Here were two common trees credited with absolutely different properties. Could there be any possible reason for these beliefs? I cut pieces from each tree and tested them with the long pendulum. Elder gave a male reaction and rowan a female one. The short pendulum indicated repulsion between elder and myself, while rowan showed attraction.

This started me off on a search for other samples. I cut a piece from Zeus’s own tree, the oak; and others from holly, thorn and elm. Oak, has, of course, been a most useful timber for thousands of years, but I was really thinking of the elm. Kipling was a good folk-lorist and not for nothing did he write:

‘Ellum she hateth mankind and waiteth till every gust be laid
To drop a limb on the head of him who any where trusts to her shade.’

But he had the sex wrong. The pendulum said that elm was male. Elm is not much used inland except for floor-boards and coffins; although there is some elm furniture and I have an old sideboard made of it. But from Kent to the Scilly Isles boats are still planked with elm. It builds very sturdy boats for beach work. Nevertheless elm is regarded with some suspicion.

Oak reacted to the female rate on the long pendulum and showed attraction on the short. Holly was weakly male and hostile. In all I tested fourteen trees. Six were male and indicated repulsion. Eight were the opposite as the table below shows.

Now from a botanical point of view this was all nonsense. Many trees are hermaphrodite and bear both male and female flowers. What sense could there be in what the pendulum appeared to be telling us? I took a branch of elder and pulled it to pieces. I had flowers, fruit, bark, pith and wood. I tested these separately. Only the wood was male and hostile. I have yet to think of a reason why this should be so.

Remembering the belief that, although elder was hostile, rowan was protective, I tried another experiment. I put a sprig of elder opposite myself and swung the short pendulum between the two. The pendulum went into a circular swing, indicating, according to the ideas I have already described for inanimate objects, that there was an obstruction to the flow of current between my field and that of another which I have guessed as being the earth’s field.

Then I placed a sprig of rowan beside the piece of elder. Immediately the previous gyrations stopped and a back and forth movement began. Therefore the rowan masked the elder’s obstructive power and restored a normal flow of current. The same thing happened when the long pendulum was used. The rowan obscured the elder’s male sex rate and the pair together became female. So rowan in the vegetable world has the same property as lead in the mineral one. It is what I have been calling an interrupter.

Thinking that magnetism probably had some say in this curious phenomenon, I placed a horseshoe magnet opposite myself with its ends open and swung the short pendulum. The pendulum gyrated. When the ends were closed, the oscillation began. In a sense then the rowan sprig when applied to the elder could be compared with a soft iron bar placed across the ends of a horseshoe magnet. If this comparison is permissible it looks as if these interrupters somehow close the electromagnetic fields around objects in the same way that the soft iron bar joins the ends of the horseshoe magnet and forms a closed circuit.

In any case we seem to see that if elder can exert any deleterious influence from its field, rowan can stop this. But it can only do so within the 29 inch radius of its field. Within this radius its femininity is too strong for the elder. Something of this situation appears to have been appreciated by less sophisticated persons than those of the present day. Somehow they learnt that rowan could close the gaps in their protection from hostile influences. How it could possibly do so we have yet to find out. It does not seem in the least credible, but very little in this study did when we began it.

The comparison with terrestrial magnetism as it is understood is probably far too easy. In the first case we have the perfectly simple matter of closing a circuit in one plane. The horseshoe magnet is only a bar magnet bent round in a half circle and all that the soft iron rod does is to join one pole to another. A piece of soft iron joining the two ends of a straight magnet would have the same effect.

But in the case of the fields we are exploring a small object placed beside another appears to swamp a whole biconical field with its own. The field of a human-made magnet is imperceptible to the five senses. That of an object is so also. Neither magnetism nor electricity are directly perceptible to the five sense; although their shocks to the body can be appreciated.

The biconical fields surrounding the objects we are studying can only be appreciated by indicators of some kind. The electro-magnetic fields of the inanimate objects may come into the normal curriculum of physics. The fields of human beings and animate objects are not so easy to study. We are probably trying to investigate a facet of life itself and the means available are quite inadequate.

Electricity and magnetism no doubt come into it, but are only a small part of the whole. Life itself appears to be four dimensional. Therefore we have no idea how powerful these biconical fields may be, nor what effect they may have on the human body. Without knowing this, it is impossible to say that elder is not hostile to humanity nor that rowan is friendly.

If we look at our table again, which is in itself very incomplete, we see two trees whose fruits were to the ancient Celtic world symbols of immortality. One is hazel and the other apple. Most people must have heard of the Apple of Life, which the Goddess Brigid held in her hand and know of the apples in the Garden of the Hesperides. Hazel nuts were similarly regarded as friendly to mankind.

Both of them, like rowan, have a female rate and are interrupters. They muzzle hostility, or let current flow between the human field and whatever the main field may be. If the main field is in reality the source of life and the provider of the energy which keeps things alive, then the value of the interrupters becomes understandable. Given that mankind was once more sensitive to such things than it is today, its reaction can have been much more like that of our cat sensing another at a distance. Man may have felt with his sixth sense which things were friendly to him and which were harmful.

For instance how do birds know which berries are good to eat and which are poisonous. Domestic animals have lost this faculty. They eat, at least cows do, yew clippings and die from it. But surely they never did this in a wild state. The great black aurochs, the ancestors of domestic cattle, which was so huge that classical writers compared it with an elephant, was a woodland beast. There must have been plenty of yew trees in the primeval forest which it could have eaten and died from the effects.

Are we to suppose that a percentage always died from eating this tree, or that the aurochs knew that it was a poisonous plant and left it alone? Or are we to surmise that man learnt by trial and error that he must not eat deadly nightshade, henbane, and the other poisonous plants? Was the early road of mankind strewn with corpses of people who had tried eating various fruits out of altruistic regard for their fellows?

Did men come up to one of their companions writhing in agony and say, ‘What did you eat, old chap, so that we will know it another time?’ This seems most improbable. They knew by their sixth sense and traces of their knowledge remain to this day. Just as something buzzed near my head and told me the future winner of the Grand National, so something buzzed for prehistoric man and warned him not to eat Amanita phalloides, that most deadly of poisonous fungi.

Really good water-diviners, as I have said before, can tell without a rod where water lies, by the tingling in the nerve-ends of their fingers. I have little doubt that this faculty was much more developed in primitive men. Has anyone ever heard of a wild animal eating anything poisonous before man started scattering poisons broadcast?

But primitive man thought about what the sixth sense told him. When he was warned that something could kill him, he thought: ‘Then I will not eat it myself, but I will put it on something and poke it into that bear, which is always trying to come into my cave.’ Something outside themselves told them more than they could learn by direct observation. This something has to a large extent been cut off from us, but it is still available, even if at the moment we can only talk to it with a pendulum.

The cat could never observe the other cat hunting on a hill 450 yards away, but it could sense it. The Manx shearwater could not know where its chick was, but it was led unerringly back to it over thousands of miles of sea. People cannot know by any of the ordinary senses what will happen in a month’s time, yet some do know. It is all part of one unexplored subject, which could be investigated on an infinitely wider scale than I can even think about, much less hope to do.

Endnotes

[1] Source: Chapter 7 in ESP:Beyond Time and Distance; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965.