What is the Melyan Tree?

'A tree is a community ...'

The Melyan Tree is a poetic myth, rooted in ecology.

It is a Giant Tree which holds, and gives life to, hundreds of thousands of living communities.  It lives in the mythical tropical rainforest, which has risen upon such rich volcanic soil that the trees reach a hundred metres into the sky.   

Every community within this tree lives in perfect equilibrium, perfect harmony:  from the tiniest microscopic fauna to the giant monkeys that swing and hoot in its splendid branches; from the fungi that weave between its roots, to the birds that soar from its highest canopy.  The tree holds the Web of Life.  

Ecology is not just the world outside us, ‘the environment’.  It is within us.  We are walking ecology.   We are interwoven with the ecology that surrounds our bodies.  The air we breathe, the water we drink … as it has been said:  'if you doubt that you are connected with the systems of life on Earth, try not breathing for five minutes."

As a child I knew this.  Children can be wise.  At the age of twelve, I began to write a story, which I am still writing today.  It is a story about the Melyan Trees of the Great Caldera Forest.

***

There was a forest … perhaps in the distant past, perhaps in the distant future, perhaps in an Earth parallel to ours, yet a forest that existed.  It formed at the beginning of an age in the basin of a great volcanic eruption, a caldera, hot and wet and steamy.  In the rich basaltic soils, in the deep crevices and canyons of lava flows, in the gullies carved by torrential rains, it grew to impenetrable size and depth.  Thousands of animals and plants and insects and fungi wove together, thicker and richer by the age; and within this tight, diverse web of life grew the greatest Trees ever on the Earth, called by the ancient peoples of that land, 'Melyana' … the Melyan Trees.

The people who lived in this forest:  who knew from where they came?  They had always been there.  They were the deschana, a small, wiry people whose feet only touched the ground when they consecrated their children and buried their dead.  They lived high in the canopy, on frets and structures of bamboo, cut with prayer; their songs in many languages sounded like water and birdsong; and their life was as harmonious as it was possible for human beings, in their element, in the forest, in the Melyan Trees.

They never got sick, for a large part of their food came from the honey of the Black Guanye Bee.  This honey was taken with much ceremony from the hives of the bees, who had actually evolved the propensity to build a spare shelf of wax, so the people could take the honey without compromising the lives of the bees.  The honey was mixed with a hundred medicines, berries, fruits and dyes from vines, and the potent drink was called mela; and with this, the people never starved or were hungry.

One day this harmony was interrupted, and the peaceful lives of the deschana were changed forever.   

It started with a pervasive discord, a fear, an feeling of discomfort which seemed into the clans and tribes and families of the Melyan Tree People.   People began to squabble amongst themselves.  The healers began to use sorcery to try and restore balance; but the sorcery twisted unto itself and became dark, and one day, in one particular tribe, somebody was killed by another man.  

This tribe were the Amatei people.  All the families of the Amatei grieved; and the shamans went into ceremony to ask for guidance from the Trees.  They drank the sacred vine medicine, pituangha, which induces visions; and as one, lamenting, they asked the question:

‘Sacred trees, life of Oam, Law of the Forest, what is happening?  Why has one man killed another?’

And the trees replied:

‘A great enemy is about to arrive from over a great Water, from the Land Below the Clouds.  They will enter the forest and penetrate, and bring fire, death and destruction to all trees and all the web of life.  Your people know this, deep down, in their hearts.  They are afraid; and from this fear comes the violence.’

The shamans were deeply troubled.  They had never fought an enemy from outside.  There had never been an enemy.  In their visions they could see the fire-smoke on the horizon, the monstrous people carving gouges into the land, travelling in giant toothed monsters with gaping mouths, entering the sacred maples paths of the forest, striking a lightning into the bases of the Great Melyan Trees, producing fire, fire which roared into the trees and ate them, until nothing was left but a black and smoking ruin …

‘What do we do?’ they cried, in lament.

‘Guard us,’ said the Trees.

‘How?  We cannot fight fire!  If a lightning strikes a tree, we cannot live there any longer.  This is more than lightning!  This is a death that rivals the menace of Akhar, the First Mountain, who vomited her rivers of liquid stone over the land in the Beginning Times!”

“How are you to guard us?  You must.  You are to build a web of light and song that the enemy cannot penetrate.  And you are to send forth an emissary, a shaman of your people, who will teach the enemy about the Law of the Forest.  Once the enemy know the Law, they will no longer be able to destroy us or violate the sacred Web of Life.”

Deeply puzzled and troubled, the shamans of the Amatei went back to their families and called Councils.  Holding the talking sticks of the Law, they told their people what the trees had said. 

And meanwhile, far away, below the clouds, on the edge of a great expanse of salty water, a strange people dressed in many skins were standing in their own ceremony.  A chief, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, shouted and declaimed his sovereignty over the new land as nearby sweating men raised a tall pole, on which a strange and garish flag blew in the blistering sun.

A hundred years passed.  In that hundred years, terrible things happened.  In the forest that reached to the edge of the land, fire was set to destroy thousands of trees.  In the smoking ruins, just as the shamans of the deschana had seen in vision, the strange people of many skins began to build houses.  They cut the living trees, hoisted the dead carcasses of the trees onto carts hauled by alien four-footed beasts, and made structures square and ominous on the ground, in the ash and the dust.  Their settlements grew like cancers across the devastated land that once was forest.  As they pushed their frontier back, they began to encroach on the edges of the territories of the Melyan Tree People.  

These forest tribes, who lived on the frontier, had no chance; they were unprepared for the suddenness of the assault; they had never made such war or had to defend themselves against such an enemy.  Their story is written across the world, in the histories of conquest.  Those that survived came to live on the ground, alongside the rivers which now ran black with filth.  Children were born of both races, the forest and the water-people: and these children were poor, spat upon by the elites of the settlement.  The land was dug for rare and precious metals, which were packed onto boats and sent far away across the Water.  A great city was born, called Darroman.  In the depths and welts of this city, in the rum-drenched slums of Darroman, the remains of these forest people forgot the Law of the Forest.

Far away, in the mountains of the Caldera, above the clouds, the forest remained unviolated for the first hundred years.  The shamans of the Amatei, who had spoken to the Melyan Trees, passed their skills and dreams onto their children.  Life went on, seemingly as usual.

But it was no longer harmonious and innocent.  Ever fearful, unaware of the fate of their brothers and sisters down on the coast, the Amatei waited for more news on the wind of the Enemy, whom they called Khalurn - the ‘firemakers.’  And they pondered how they might protect their land, what this ‘web of light and song’ might be; and they speculated on the birth of the Great One, the shaman who would go to the land of the enemy and teach them the Law so that all threat would vanish forever.

One day, as foreseen, the Khalurn came to the land of the mountain people, to the deep high forest of the Melyan Trees.  With savage toothed monsters they gouged a track all the way up the River Samlura, all the way from the rim of the caldera to the mountains above the clouds.  Gradually, in small but terrible numbers, they began to carve out territories of their own, to massacre swathes of sacred trees.  They were looking for precious metals; and they had discovered that the wood of the Melyan is rich and deep and red and valuable.  The might of Darroman had reached, at last, into the deepest forest.  And the Amatei had no choice but to act on their prophecy.  All life was at stake.

As their territories were slowly invaded, they did what the frontier tribes before them had done: they retreated deeper.  They held vigils and mourning ceremonies for the massacres of their trees.  They began to fight with their neighbouring tribe, the Turindji, who did not want to let them onto their territory.  A terrible inter-tribal war began.  The Amatei Elders held council after council.  ‘Who is this shaman?’ they argued.  ‘Who is to build the web?’  Finally, the women retreated, having had enough of all the talk.  They  came together and began to sing.  With their song they began to weave a magic, which they hoped would be powerful enough to deter the Khalurn.  They thought that perhaps if the Khalurn saw how powerful their sorcery was, they would be afraid, and they would leave. 

But it soon became apparent that the Khalurn had no respect for such magic. They drove straight through the invisible webs of light and song with their helicopters, their napalm fire-bombs, their trucks and their bulldozers.  The Amatei raised the offensive.  They began to make poison darts strong enough to kill a Khalurn through their thick skins.  But the Khalurn retaliated with more powerful weapons:  long black sticks that shot thunder and lightning, and could punch a hole right through a man.  Slowly but surely, a major war was beginning in the land of the Melyan Trees.  Violence and chaos and fear tightened their strangling grip on those clans still remote enough to watch the invasion from the distance.

One night, in the midst of this, a young boy, twelve years old, about to enter his teman, his initiation of manhood, was tried in front of full Council for breaking the Law.  He had done no more than spy on an act of magic that a sorceror was weaving; yet to the tribe, he presented a greater threat.  He had been seen to possess, and wield, powers that even the Elders could not seek to compete with.  The Elders argued long into the night, as the boy stood tied to a branch, unable to move or escape, terrified and defiant.  Some elders cried: ‘This boy is the one who will talk to the Enemy, the one of the old prophecy!’  Yet others argued:  ‘This boy is a curse upon us!  He has defied Law.  If we do not deal with him unto the Law, the Enemy will completely destroy us!” 

In the mire of superstition, violence and fear to which the Amatei had descended, the women grieved and tried to remind the men of the word of the Melyan Trees.  But to no avail.  The boy was exiled, by the Elders, under pain of death by sorcery.  The wailing broke into the night as the boy fled, shadows closing in behind him. 

And not so far away, in a jungle-camp, on the ground, three sweating Khalurn men put their hands over their ears at the frightening sound, and grumbled that one day these ‘forest savages’ would hinder their progress no more …

End of Part 1 ...


I might be asked why I am creating a fantasy story about a forest.  It is not to portray a romanticised ideal of an indigenous people threatened by colonisation.  In the fantasy vein, I have not modelled the Melyan Tree society on any Earth indigenous people of a particular tribe or culture.  I don't want to claim to represent any existing society of people.

Based as it is in a fantasy Earth, this story is allegorical.  I want to express a truth that has echoed through human history:  the appropriation and invasion of lands, the pattern of conquest and domination waged by races with ever-stronger weapons, technology, and lust for power.  But underneath this, I want to imagine a people who live so close to the forces of Nature that they consider themselves inextricably woven with it; a people whose lives might even appear, to us, to be 'magical'.  The spiritual force or cosmology that drives these people, that fills their waking and dreaming consciousness, is what they call the Law:  the Law of Life, the circle, at the centre of which the patterns of creation are woven, by dancers of light ...

And I want to imagine what happens when these people encounter the brutal world that is ours... what happens when they encounter the forces that threaten to rip and tear the delicate balance of the forest apart.  

And how they might protect themselves and the forest from annihilation ...

Thus, with imagination, I hope to engage emotions and feelings and visions and ideas ... the idea of what it is for humans to live in complete harmony with ecosystems on Earth ... ideas of alternative perception, animism, spiritual connectedness ...  ideas that could fuel a collective, directed and strategic action towards protecting the Earth systems that weave and support life.  The symbol of the Melyan Tree, as a living community, rooted in the ground, reaching for the Sun, can become a vision of human societies that live in total harmony with Nature ... societies that we can build.

Imagination is the key to understanding mystery ...

As synopses and chapters are written, they should hopefully be posted on this blog!  But lots of other kinds of posts will appear here too.  Topics of sacred ecology, deep ecology and spiritual ecology will be explored.  And so will photos, art and contemplations that encourage us to connect with the amazing complexity of life on Earth, to understand the geometry and the science of it, and to wonder at the patterns unfolded through evolution.

Eclectic insights, writings, inspirations, projects and sacred activism will be shared.  Remember that the key two themes are 'connectedness' and 'action' ... how we feel towards Mother Earth, and how we behave towards her.  These two themes go hand in hand.  Connectedness without action is impotent.  Action without connectedness is destructive.  

With Hope