YEW

The yew accompanies the dead in hundreds of churchyards in the British Isles. It is often called the Tree of the Dead.

Its leaves, bark, berries and sap are poisonous. Nothing grows beneath the yew save brave twirls of ivy. No sheep nibble nearby. No sheep shit amongst the tombs. No grazing cows or horses. No raucous birdsong spills from the yew’s boughs.

The yew is silent and eerie. The sun cannot penetrate the dense dark needles. The yew abides in hushed reverence over the dead.

And the message of the yew tree is blackness – blackness and silence.

(Sylvia Plath, ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’)

In the Middle Ages its wood was used to craft the deadly English longbow. Many yews were lost to the production. Many men were lost to the rain of arrows, the tips dipped in yew sap. So important was the yew and so depleted the groves that Henry IV ordered his bowyers to enter private estates to plunder the yew.

Ötzi, the Chalcolithic mummy found in 1991 in the Italian Alps, carried an unfinished longbow made of yew wood.

Dagger handles in many cultures have been made of yew wood.

‘Strong chiefs in war,’ writes Robert Graves of the yew.

No yew bough would be brought into a house. Such would presage a death in the household.

In The White Goddess, Robert Graves writes of the deathly magic of the yew and the divine feminine:

The Night Mare is one of the cruellest aspects of the White Goddess. Her nests, when one comes across them in dreams, lodged in rock-clefts or the branches of enormous hollow yews, are built of carefully chosen twigs, lined with white horse-hair and the plumage of prophetic birds and littered with the jaw-bones and entrails of poets.

Poets beware! The Night Mare may hang your jaw in an old yew tree…

In his encyclopaedic Greek Myths, Graves again writes of the yew and the Divine Feminine:

The Mysteries of the Great Goddesses, which concerned resurrection, had been buried between yew and myrtle because these stood, respectively, for the last vowel and the last consonant of the tree alphabet, and were sacred to the Death-goddess.

And yet, there is no death without life. There is no life without death. This ancient cycle is represented in Celtic designs of the endless knot.

And so the yew is the tree of life.

The yew preserves its greenery, in the dead of winter.

Gazing through the sparse winter woodland one sees occasional islands of dark green beneath bare trees: the holly, the ivy, and the yew, absorbing the feeble sunlight whilst their deciduous neighbours, garrulous in summer, halt photosynthesis and stand cold and naked.

The yew is wintery in summer and summery in winter, the only modest change being the lighter green needles the yew pushes out with graceful dignity in the spring.

The yew is psychopomp, straddling the land of the living and the land of the dead, conducting the souls of the departed into the world beyond, allowing the living to reach out to the dead, allowing the dead to reach out to the living. There is a ghostly timelessness to the yew.

The yew is an ancient tree. Yew ancestors are found in the fossil record from the Oligocene and Upper Miocene, many millions of years before the present.

The Yew can be very long-lived, often predating the churchyard in which it grows. The Fortingall Yew in Perthshire is 3000 years old, perhaps older, and is likely the oldest tree in Europe. It is said that Pontius Pilate played beneath it as a child.

Mediaeval yews, Norman yews, Saxon yews, Roman yews, Celtic yews, antique yews from ancient times. Sacred groves for holy rites. Ceremonies of the dead.

The Irish Druids made their wands of divination from the yew-tree.

(W. Y. Evans Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, 1911)

It grows through renewal. As a branch hangs down to touch the ground it may sprout roots and stiffen to form a new stem, a new trunk, a buttress against the old trunk. New growth surrounds the old. The old gradually gives way to the new. Ancient yews become rings of yews. One tree, many trees, magical circles.

So the yew has long been symbol of the renewal of life, rebirth, revival, rejuvenation, regeneration, reincarnation, eternal return.

Some associate the yew with the Holy Grail. Some claim it was the wood of Christ’s cross, its red sap as the Healer’s blood. Some see the yew as Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life of Norse mythology. The tree of death is the tree of life.

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree

Are of equal duration.

(T.S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding,’ from The Four Quartets)

The yew thus renews. Yew-renewal. New yew.

New you: poisonous alkaloids called taxanes (from yew family Taxaceae) are used as chemotherapy agents in cancer treatment. Toxins from taxanes harm and yet heal. Taxanes from toxins heal and yet harm.

Meditating beneath a yew can be a healing experience. The deep wisdom of the yew is nourishing. The deep silence allows consciousness to transcend the limitations of standard time and space. Rich needle-smell, squished berries on trousers, hanging tendrils of dusty cobwebs. Dry, even in the rain…

We must preserve and protect the yew – in so doing the yew will preserve and protect us… They will be our companions when we are laid to rest in their dusky shade. We and the yews will mingle our blood with our ancestors’ blood in the churchyard soil.

I and I. I and you. Eye and yew. You and yew. Sleeping the long sleep…

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,

Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap,

Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,

The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

Thomas Gray, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1750)