got an interesting thing from a friend about how different birth dates relate to having the characteristics of different species of trees. (&, no, i’m not taking it seriously. it’s sort of a chinese calendar/astrology thing.)
got me wondering what the wood of the true cross was. i’m sure someone here knows. cedar?
I don’t know for sure special, but I’m gonna answer anyways.
My mother always told me growing up the wood of the cross was dogwood. The story she would tell me was that since it was the tree used to crucify Christ, it was the first tree to bloom in the spring, and God cursed the tree to be gnarled and twisted, thereby not allowing it to be useful in such a manner again. Made for an interesting story as a kid. I never investigated. Just thought I’d share.
Always be ready to speak your mind and a base man will avoid you.
-William Blake
i believe i’ve heard that one, too. it was also supposed to explain the little colored notches at the edge of the flower petals as the holes from the nails. but i don’t know that dogwood grew in the middle east.
i was thinking cedars because of the cedars of lebanon hospital.
Beats me, God’s around the message board somewhere. Maybe he’ll offer some insight.
Always be ready to speak your mind and a base man will avoid you.
-William Blake
A quote from the Catholic Encyclopedia
thank you, arnold. i knew someone here would know where to look.
somehow, pine, being a soft wood, surprises me. i would think they would have used something sturdier. then again, i guess pine would be easiest to nail into.
Wow… I thought this was going to be a thread that debunked (or proved correct) an offer I once saw in my grandma’s stuff - To get an actual piece of the woo from the cross for you to keep!
Anyone recall this? It was bogus, I assume…
Yer pal,
Satan
the site arnold put up has a long, but quite interesting, article about the true cross. one item in there is a reference to the oft-repeated statement that if all the pieces of the alleged true cross were gathered together, you would have sufficient wood to build a battleship (altho why you would want a wooden battle ship, i don’t know. put it in a really BIG bottle, i guess.).
anyway, someone sort of inventoried all the known pieces & came to an amount that would equal approx 2/3 of what might be considered standard size of a cruxifiction upright & crosspiece. the known pieces are all in places like air-tight reliqueries.
it did tell of one guy who went to some veneration & bit off a piece of wood when he knelt over it. surely, there aren’t enough pieces floating around, however, that anyone would want to sell one.
my own feeling is that i have to wonder if a piece of wood would even last & not deteriorate to dust after 2,000 yrs.
Traditional European folktales descibe it as Rowan wood. Don’t know what “Rowan” trees are, though.
With magic, you can turn a frog into a prince. With science, you can turn a frog into a Ph.D, and you still have the frog you started with.
This from Rbt.Graves’ The White Goddess:
"The elder is also said to have been the Crucifixion tree…The elder is the tree of doom–hence the continued unluckiness of the number thirteen [the elder being the thirteenth tree in this celtic system]and the month extends from Nov.25th to the winter solstice of Dec. 22nd."Interestingly, it flowers in midsummer as does the rowan, which is the tree of life or “quickening” otherwise known as the mountain ash or quicken, and was a tree used for oracular purposes by the Druids.
“Valenton del mundo!”
looove you sig line.
i’m not sure what a rowan tree is, either; but, again, doesn’t sound like something that grew in the desert. nor does a pine tree. that area was desert then, too, wasn’t it?
Encyclopedia Britannica:
Another fun fact: it is from this tree that the chemical sorbitol was first isolated and is how sorbitol got its common name.
I used to rock and roll all night and party every day. Then it was every other day. Now I’m lucky if I can find a half an hour a week in which to get funky.
There is an altarpiece/reliquary from the 14th C. (the Norfolk Triptych) which has embedded in it (this is the reliquary part) under the paint in a secret compartment what was apparently considered to be a piece of the Cross, and it is cypress, which seems like a reasonable guess anyway, being a mediterranean tree. So at least if they were guessing/faking it they were making educated guesses and the chunk of wood at least came from the right place.
The hackneyed quote about all the pieces of the True Cross together measuring whatever was first stated by Erasmus of Rotterdam in the first quarter or so of the sixteenth century.
go, erasmus: a skeptic. my kinda guy.
Please keep in mind too, that at Golgotha they had big poles stuck permanently in the ground. For each execution, they fastened the victim to a crosspiece, and then hoisted that into place on the pole, making the cross, as such.
Jumping back to the dogwood myth: I heard this one growing up, too, but a somewhat different version. According to the story, the dogwood was used to provide the wood for the cross, and was so shamed by the use it had been put to that it asked God (No I don’t know how it could ask questions without a mouth – it’s a frickin’ legend, people) to make it impossible for it to be so used ever again.
So God made it small and with slender branches and trunk, and the Crucifixion was recorded in the flowers: the flower is in the shape of the cross, each petal has a red depression in the center of each end for the nail wounds, and the crown of thorns is shown in the middle of each blossom. It blooms first in the spring as a sign of the Resurrection.
I knew that it was common to sell slivers of the (ahem) True Cross to pilgrims in the Middle Ages, but I had no idea that there were fragments still venerated. As a lark, has anyone ever compared the different wood chips to see how many species of trees they came from?
well, the site arnold put up said there was some archeological work done in the area & they were certain they had found the actual hole that was used (there is a shrine supposedly built over the spot). the wood slivers they found were apparently pine. however, m.k. said the norfolk triptych reliquary had a piece of cypress.
The dogwood is the state tree (whatever that means) of Missouri, so I’ve heard the dogwood story a lot.
Obviously it makes no sense whatsoever. Dogwoods didn’t suddenly mutate to their present form about 1965 years ago; if they had, you’d think there’d be some kind of record of it: “Someone stole the dogwood in front of the palace last night and replaced it with this funny-looking little scrawny twisty tree.”
I don’t know if dogwood is even native to the Jerusalem area, but I suspect that it’s not.
Is there a word for legends that were never INTENDED to be believed? The best I can come up with is “tall tales,” and the dogwood story doesn’t really seem to fit in alongside Pecos Bill or Paul Bunyan.
oh, torq, i don’t think anyone believed it. it’s just a pretty story to explain the pretty tree. i think legend probably covers it.
The part of Jerusalem with the Holy Sepulchre, “Golgotha”, etc has been so very invasively landscaped since the 1st C AD, I bet archaeology there is a real nightmare. We’ve been looking at some diagrams of how the hill in which the tomb was dug was basically removed from around the tomb, so by the 4th C it was essentially a rock-cut tomb with nothing left around it except for the building complex.
Has anyone heard the old Cxn notion of how from the bllod of Adam a tree grew, which happened to be the same tree the cross was eventually made from? Fun stuff.