A Certain Tree: Francis Hamel

A few years ago I spent some time reading The Golden Bough by James

Frazer. He starts volume one with an extraordinary story set on the shores

of a flooded volcano, Lake Nemi, in the Alban Hills just south of Rome. The

story describes the macabre succession to the priesthood at the Temple to

the Goddess Diana. His fascination with this story forms the starting point for

a vast comparative study of religion, ritual and magic. Frazer describes the

universal progression from belief in magic, to religion and then to science. In

the same way that Jung found a similarity of dreams amongst all people, Frazer

found that religion and magic also form a common pattern. He writes a good

deal about trees too. The old world was covered in trees and of course, if we

left it alone for long enough, the planet would revert to forest so it’s no surprise

that the old gods were tree gods and that all over the world ritual and magic

grew in partnership with the trees.

As a child I spent a good deal of my life up trees, we had some good trees in

the vicarage garden and, away from parental supervision, I was mostly up a

tree somewhere. I started to draw trees at the same time and, although now

I paint many different subjects, I am always painting trees. They’re never far

away.