Tree Nymph

Tree Nymph

Rollerball on copier paper.

Featured in All Things Black.
Featured in The Divine Feminine.
Tee featured in All Things Black.
Tee featured in Finks of Inks.

Many many thanks to Tammy for posting in the Buyer’s Booth, and also

Many many thanks to Anita for posting a pic in the Buyer’s Booth, which was featured on the home page :-))

Here’s the tee :-)

Inspired by this fabulous forest painting.

In most introductions to Greek religion, the nature deities are briefly noted as minor gods in the pantheon, overshadowed by the towering personalities and presences of the Olympian gods. Yet a quantitative analysis, were such a thing possible, would show that the vast numbers of river gods, nymphs, and other local deities accorded divine status by the Greeks made them a constant presence in daily life. Greek authors focus primarily on the city and its festivals, yet most Greeks were peasants who lived in the countryside and supported the towns through farming and herding. The experience of this majority certainly included a much closer acquaintance with the gods of the landscape than our literary sources suggest. The category of “nature deities” is a modern construct. All of the Greek gods were connected in one way or another with natural phenomena, so in some sense all are nature deities. Zeus was a god of rain, Poseidon of earthquakes, Artemis of wild beasts. Even deities like Athena whose panhellenic personae were focused on the cultural rather than the natural sphere could be called upon in a variety of contexts to influence natural processes, such as stopping a plague or helping to ensure good crops. A number of lesser deities, however, were nature gods in the sense that they personified specific features in the landscape or phenomena in the environment.

From ‘A Land Full of Gods: Nature Deities in Greek Religion’, Chapter 3, by Jennifer Larson

Dryads (Δρυάδες, sing.: Δρυάς) are tree nymphs in Greek mythology. In Greek drys signifies ‘oak,’ from an Indo-European root derew(o)- ‘tree’ or ‘wood’. Thus dryads are specifically the nymphs of oak trees, though the term has come to be used for all tree nymphs in general. “Such deities are very much overshadowed by the divine figures defined through poetry and cult,” Walter Burkert remarked of Greek nature deities (Burkert 1986, p174). They were normally considered to be very shy creatures, except around the goddess Artemis, who was known to be a friend to most nymphs.

Dryads, like all nymphs, were supernaturally long-lived and tied to their homes, but some were a step beyond most nymphs. These were the hamadryads who were an integral part of their trees, such that if the tree died, the hamadryad associated with it died as well. For these reasons, dryads and the Greek gods punished any mortals who harmed trees without first propitiating the tree-nymphs.

Link to Celtic Druids
Phillip Freeman, a classics professor, discusses a later reference to Dryades, which he translates as Druidesses, writing that “The fourth century A.D. collection of imperial biographies known as the Historia Augusta contains three short passages involving Gaulish women called “Dryades” (“Druidesses”).” He points out that “In all of these, the women may not be direct heirs of the Druids who were supposedly wiped out by the Romans—but in any case they do show that the druidic function of prophesy continued among the natives in Roman Gaul.”

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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