The God Tree (Book)
by Janis Fry (Author), Allen Meredith (Editor)
21 Aug 2012
By Janis Fry researched with Allen Meredith. ‘The God Tree’ is the first book to take up the quest for the Golden Bough since JG Frazer’s classic study in 1915 with the discovery of the bough growing once more, as the rare adornment of a small number of ancient Yews. This book develops Janis Fry’s interest in ancient yews and also the rediscovery of the Tree of Life in ‘The Sacred Yew’ by Anand Chetan and Diana Brueton from the work of Allen Meredith. It reveals the fact that Yews of particular significance were brought to Britain from Ancient Egypt and the Holy Lands as dry staffs carried by pilgrims, at great personal risk, thousands of years ago. These were planted in remote sanctuaries, particularly in Wales where they sprouted and grew into trees. Thus those who carried them ensured the continued existence of something so precious, it was essential it be preserved for future generations.
Review of The God Tree by Michael Dunning of the Sacred Yew Institute:- ‘ The Original Tree of Life was hidden from mankind a long time ago. Gradually the voice of eternity through which it had once guided the souls of human beings became eclipsed by fear, anxiety, shame and greed. Some refer to this as the Fall, but it is a story that appears in various forms in the ancient myths of all peoples throughout the world. The eternal nature of the Tree of Life was slowly and deliberately down-graded to a symbolic concept in human imagination, where actual reference to it could only be found in the shards of myth and in the faded and fragile pages of medieval manuscripts…at least until now! It takes a lot of persistence and courage to revise ‘official’ history and well -established myth in order to present the truth, especially when that truth will most likely upset a lot of people. Allen Meredith was one of the first people in modern times to awaken to the truth. A tree that had been largely ignored or viewed as a graveyard companion suddenly spoke to him in his dreams. Allen was literally ‘gripped’ by the yew tree as he set out on a quest to communicate its true identity. Janis Fry joined in this quest some years later and the yew tree began to re-ignite the flame of eternity in human consciousness. The gestational period of the God Tree had begun. The yew cannot be compared to other trees. The few incalculably ancient remaining yew trees preserve the secrets of eternal life in the living language of their form, growth and gesture. The yew tree continually regenerates itself – it is forever young. 15,000 years ago, cuttings were taken from the original Tree of Life and for thousands of years the secrets of the yew’s powers were passed down through a living ‘blood’ line that was held in the potent wood of the tree itself in the form of yew ‘staffs’. Throughout these utterly compelling pages you will read about the holy hermits who risked their lives to transport these sacred staffs from Egypt and Palestine to the British Isles. The staffs were planted and eventually grew into magnificent and significant yew trees, some of which still exist in the British Isles today.
Janis Fry artfully leads us through a complex maze of historical, biblical and mythological information to the essential pulse and premise of her work – that the function of the yew tree and the secret of the holy graal are one and the same! I have been waiting for this book for a long time. My first encounter with the healing powers of the yew tree occurred in the early 1990’s. I was very sick and close to death. Through a bizarre sequence of events I was drawn to an ancient female yew tree in the south – east of Scotland. She nourished me under her living womb enclosure for over nine-years. The tree not only returned me to health, but also gave me deep experiential insight into her mysteries. At the time I felt very alone with an otherwordly ‘knowledge’ that I was unable to fully comprehend. It came as a great relief to discover the work of Allen Meredith and Janis Fry. We have often ‘joked’ over the years that we are the “yew people”, chosen, along with several others to fulfil certain key aspects of the tree’s return as a beacon of hope and healing to human consciousness in a co-creative relationship with our planet. There seemed to be a sequence to the events as if the yew was somehow orchestrating its own rebirth. Initially there was Allen, and the important work he began in the 1970’s to turn people toward an appreciation of the significance of the yew, a tree that had been ignored and abused for hundreds of years. In the 1990’s the “Sacred Yew” by Chetan and Brueton appeared, and following that in 2007, Fred Hageneder’s book “Yew - A History” emerged to ground the botanical, mythological and scientific knowledge base necessary for most western readers. There have been many other wonderful books published about the yew tree. But “The God Tree” is the next step in the sequence. It is not a book for the faint-hearted. The implications of the information revealed here are staggering and demands nothing less than a complete revision of the Bible story as well as Arthurian legend.
The God Tree is written in a style that is as thorough as Mircea Eliade and as suspenseful as the best adventure story. It is as fluid and as visual as the Matrix and just like that movie will lead you through the rabbit-hole to a world that you could not have possibly imagined. Buckle your seatbelt Dorothy – dry mythology and religious dogma is going bye - bye!’