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Why Do Religious Forms
Matter?
Reflections on Materialism,
Toleration, and
Public Reason

Pooyan Tamimi Arab

Why Do Religious Forms Matter?
 Pooyan Tamimi Arab

Why Do Religious
Forms Matter?
Reflections on Materialism, Toleration,
and Public Reason
Pooyan Tamimi Arab
Amsterdam, Noord-Holland,
The Netherlands

ISBN 978-3-030-95778-0    ISBN 978-3-030-95779-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95779-7

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect
to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.

Cover pattern © Melisa Hasan

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Roshan
 Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Philip Getz and his colleagues at Palgrave and Springer for
their patience as I wrote this book during the Coronavirus pandemic.
For Chap. 2 I would like to thank Jennifer Hughes and S. Brent Plate
for comments and support. Our coedited Routledge Handbook of Material
Religion will contain a version of this chapter, which is based on a lecture
I gave in 2018 for the Amsterdam Spinoza Circle at Paradiso. I am
indebted to Henri Krop and fellow Spinozists and to the city of Amsterdam
where I first encountered the philosopher at the multicultural Spinoza
Lyceum High School.
Chapter 3’s theoretical basis was developed for a 2017 Studium
Generale lecture delivered at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. A
short version that doesn’t focus on Locke also appeared in Religion,
Secularism, and Political Belonging, edited by Leerom Medovoi and
Elizabeth Bentley and published by Duke University Press in 2021. Apart
from the inspiration I’ve found in Martha Nussbaum’s works, the reflec-
tions on neutrality found here were inspired by reading and conversing
with Rajeev Bhargava at a 2012 summer school at the University Centre
Saint-Ignatius Antwerp—as well as more recently by a public conversation
with Tariq Modood and Ernst van den Hemel at Utrecht University,
which was published as “A Conversation on Tariq Modood’s Essays on
Secularism and Multiculturalism” in Patterns of Prejudice in 2021.
For Chap. 4 I am indebted to Christoph Baumgartner, who first rec-
ommended Habermas’s essay “Religion in the Public Sphere” and whose
critical comments sharpened my argumentation. A section of this chapter

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

was presented in 2020 in the online conference Religious Tolerance in an

Age of Secularism, organized by fellow members of the Utrecht Young
Academy Fenella Fleischmann, Joas Wagemakers, and Brianne
McGonigle Leyh.
Special thanks go to Birgit Meyer and the members of our research
project Religious Matters in an Entangled World, who provided invaluable
comments from different disciplinary perspectives. All chapters were
superbly line-edited by Mitch Cohen and Kirsten Janene-Nelson.
This book is dedicated to my son Roshan. May he grow up to shine in
the eyes of others.
 Contents

1 Introduction: What Is a Religious Form?  1

Religious Forms: Essential and Non-Essential?   5
Religious Forms of Discourse in Public Domains   9
References  13

2 Spinoza: Arch-Father of the Material-­Religion Approach 15

Mind-Body Equality  18
Imagined Sacrality/Imagined Communities  23
Internal Faith/External Ritual  27
Governing Religious Pluralities  30
Why Materialist Critique Still Matters  33
References  37

3 Locke: Equal Rights to Toleration Today 43

Equal Monks, Equal Hoods  47
Accommodating Religious Minorities  51
Constructing Mosques: Emancipation and Ottomania  56
Amplifying Islam: Sound Testing Toleration’s Limits  63
Ritual Slaughter: Not Just an Exception to the Rule  67
The Spirit of Neutrality  74
References  81

4 Rawls: Religious Forms and Public Reason 87

Is the Constitutional State Secular?  92
Is Public Reason Secular?  95
ix
x Contents

Desires of Public Reason 103

Diverse Ways Toward an Overlapping Consensus 106
The Early Modern Legacy 110
References 118

5 Coda: Why Abstraction Matters123

References 129

Index131
 About the Author

Pooyan Tamimi Arab is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at

Utrecht University, The Netherlands. He is a board member of the
Amsterdam Spinoza Circle and member of the Young Academy of the
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

xi
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Hunt Slonem. 1983. Saint Martin de Porres. Oil on canvas.
Private Collection. (Photograph by Ben Visser) 3
Fig. 2.1 Francis Bacon. 1965. From Muybridge “The Human Figure
in Motion: Woman Emptying a Bowl of Water/Paralytic Child
Walking on All Fours.” Oil on canvas. Stedelijk Museum
Amsterdam21
Fig. 2.2 Pieter Brueghel the Elder. 1562. The Fall of the Rebel Angels.
Oil on panel. Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels 24
Fig. 2.3 Pieter Jansz. Saenredam. 1649. Interior of the Sint-Odulphuskerk
in Assendelft. Oil on panel. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 27
Fig. 3.1 Orthodox church frequented by Ethiopians and Eritreans in the
“Jungle Refugee Camp,” Calais, France. (Photograph by
Friedrich Stark, February 2016) 51
Fig. 3.2 Breitman-Breitman Architecture. 2016. The Western Mosque
in Amsterdam (Dutch: Westermoskee, Turkish: Ayasofya Camii).
(Photograph by the author, Spring 2016) 59
Fig. 3.3 Ritual slaughterhouse in Oudeschoot, the Netherlands, in
preparation for the Islamic Feast of Sacrifice. (Photograph by
Robert Vos, November 2011, published in 2015 in the national
newspaper NRC Handelsblad in an article on competing
interpretations of ritual slaughter) 74
Fig. 4.1 Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, the Qur’an, the Bible,
and other books on the table of the Speaker of the House of
Representatives, The Hague. (Photograph by Bart Maat,
September 2014) 88

xiii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: What Is a Religious Form?

Abstract This book explores the Early Modern roots and contemporary
relevance of a materialist perspective on the politics of religious diversity.
The political philosophies of Spinoza, Locke, and Rawls are explored in
three chapters to understand what coexisting religious forms are and why
they matter for the idea of justice. The introduction defines religious
forms as configurations of sensuous materials, which are indispensable to
understanding religious matters in an entangled, pluralist world. However,
this book does not exclude religious ideas, beliefs, and linguistic expres-
sions: Religious forms of discourse are part of the analysis. These diverse
religious forms—from buildings, images, and food to discourses—mani-
fest in “domains,” which are private and public spaces whose existence
depends on how political conceptions of justice are applied.

Keywords Material religion • Aesthetics • Justice • Benedictus de

Spinoza • John Locke • John Rawls

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
P. Tamimi Arab, Why Do Religious Forms Matter?,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95779-7_1
2 P. TAMIMI ARAB

This book explores the Early Modern roots and contemporary relevance of a
materialist perspective on the politics of religious diversity. I analyze the polit-
ical philosophies of Spinoza, Locke, and Rawls to understand what coexist-
ing religious forms are and why they matter for the idea of justice. Each
philosopher writes about religious forms in a distinct style. In general, in
referring to a religious “form” I mean nothing more or less than “a configu-
ration of sensuous material,” as Hegel defines “form” in his lectures on aes-
thetics—to be distinguished from “the content,” an idea or a belief.1 My
understanding of the forms that can be said to be religious derives from the
so-called material-religion approach. Starting in the 1990s, by self-examining
the notorious “Protestant bias,” scholars in history, anthropology, and reli-
gious studies have corrected the reduction of the concept of religion as com-
prising sets of beliefs. This was done in part under the influence of the
twentieth-century “affective turn” in the humanities, which recognizes the
power of pre-linguistic or extra-­linguistic structures of experience along with
experiences that are shaped by discourses.2 In contrast with Hegel, these
scholars do not see forms as the secondary manifestations of a more universal
capitalized Ideal. They pay attention to the entanglement of form and con-
tent and—in some cases, as in formalist art history—to the internal logics or
independence of forms themselves. This led in 2005 to the founding of
Material Religion: The Journal of Art, Objects, and Belief, as well as to numer-
ous research projects conducted on all continents. The material-religion
approach is spearheaded by, among other researchers, my colleague Birgit
Meyer, who coined the concept of the “sensational form” as a methodologi-
cal device for focusing on specific, tangible forms as entry points to people’s
religious worlds. For Meyer, a sensational form mediates access to what
believers call “spirits,” the “divine,” the “transcendent,” or simply a “beyond”
that cannot be perceived directly. Mediation bridges the distance between
mere form and the reality of God’s and other beings’ presence, which is “felt
in the bones” (Meyer 2009: 5).
Sensational forms, as conceived by Meyer, are part of larger “aesthetic
formations” that not only produce representations through the imagination
but also materially shape ever-interacting and thus ever-changing religious
communities. As an anthropologist, she is interested in those communities’
perspectives and what is true for them. From an outsider perspective, how-
ever—which anthropologists must take if they not only participate in their
research field but also want to observe it—the idea of aesthetic formations
entails giving a distanced description of the webs of meaning that tie reli-
gious identities to cosmologies, rituals, and experiences. These religious
identities are modalities of the forms that communities themselves design.
The Tibetan flag, with two snow lions on a white mountain under a radiant
 1 INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS A RELIGIOUS FORM? 3

sun, does not just represent a past identity; it also reinforces the very idea of
a Tibetan people and the demand for religious freedom today. A necklace
with a conspicuous gilded cross does not just represent Iranian Christian
converts’ newfound faith; it does that, but the act of wearing it also makes
them appear as what they want to be in the European country they sought
refuge in. Scholars of material religion are often interested in the empirical
complexity of the use of such specific things, and they predominantly choose
interpretive methods that make it possible to convey their unique stories—
even as these forms are embedded in recurring patterns of religiosity
throughout history and in macro-level societal developments.3
Consider a painting of Saint Martin de Porres (1579–1639) by the
American neo-expressionist artist Hunt Slonem, who was born in 1951 in
the state of Maine (see Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1 Hunt Slonem. 1983. Saint Martin de Porres. Oil on canvas. Private
Collection. (Photograph by Ben Visser)
4 P. TAMIMI ARAB

In the Netherlands, where I live and the current location of the artwork,
few know the first Black Saint of the Americas. And so, after seeing the
painting, they ask about the haloed man’s identity. The art critic Vincent
Katz’s answer gives a glimpse of the amazing web of meaning one image
can conjure in the mind:

Saint Martin de Porres was a Peruvian lay Dominican brother, born in Lima,
the son of a Spanish soldier and a black Panamanian freedwoman. He
devoted himself to the sick, built an orphanage, and founded several nurser-
ies. He was known for bilocation, levitation, miraculous knowledge, instan-
taneous cures and an ability to communicate with animals. One of his
symbols was the grouping of a dog, a cat, and a mouse, who ate together
without fighting. St. Martin de Porres is often depicted with a broom, since
he thought all work, even sweeping a floor, to be sacred. He is the patron
saint of African-Americans, bi-racial people, hairdressers, hotel-keepers,
mulattoes, and race relations. He was canonized in 1962.4

A broom symbolizes piety; animals eating together symbolize paradisal

harmony; and the saint’s skin color triggers memories of past “frontier
zones” of race and religion (Chidester 1996: 20–21). But even before we
realize the saint’s dazzling multiplicity, we see how the brimming colors
and the exotic birds display an intuitively sensed liveliness. The painting
was not made by a Catholic artist, but by someone who carried out spiri-
tual practices of the Siddha Yoga Path, experimented with channeling
through mediums, and lives and takes part in New York City’s cultural life.
Slonem’s Saint reminds us of Early Modern colonialism, and it is simulta-
neously a testament to the diversity that characterizes our entangled world.
In this world, religious forms sometimes emanate sensorial ecstasy and
sometimes help discipline the emotions—just as they do in art. Whatever
their purpose, religious forms are always sensed forms.
The innumerable ways religious forms can be designed are subsumed in
the concept of aesthetic formations, which provides an objective or etic
criterion of what religions are in general. In Chap. 2, on Spinoza, I trace
this analytic back to the Early Modern period in European philosophy.
Because the material-religion approach has been developed especially by
anthropologists and religious studies scholars, its philosophical genealogy
is less known and studied. If the material-religion approach is rooted in a
postcolonial critique of the Protestant bias, as Meyer sees it, I argue at the
same time that it can be traced back to those philosophers who were
 1 INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS A RELIGIOUS FORM? 5

inspired by Protestant debates about the role of religious forms in the rela-
tion between State and Church. Spinoza stands out because he developed
ideas that the material-religion approach explicitly relies on—as well as
ideas that its protagonists would strongly criticize. On the one hand,
Spinoza’s mind-body equating lays the foundation for his analysis of
human affects, which inspired the affective turn through such readers as
Deleuze and underpins material-religion scholars’ view of religious affects.
Spinoza, famously, turns against the denigration of sensed things and
against the supposed superiority of human thinking or the immaterial
soul, radically stating, “The order and connection of ideas is the same as
the order and connection of things” (Spinoza, in Curley’s translation,
[1677] 1985: 451). On the other hand, this theoretical perspective also
paves the way to the Enlightenment philosopher’s critique of religious
imaginations and associated practices. In contrast to most anthropologists
today, Spinoza’s political philosophy is concerned with criticizing the
theocratic abuse of state power. “Superstition,” he argues in the Theological-­
Political Treatise, published in 1670, is what demagogues use to justify
violence in the name of misleading religious imaginations. To launch these
and other criticisms, Spinoza describes the forms of all historical religions,
prefiguring scholarship such as Durkheim’s 1912 Elementary Forms of
Religious Life (cf. Meyer 2016), which explains how a form of life, broadly
conceived, relies on being made tangible through a definite “material
form” (une forme matérielle, see in English: Durkheim 1995: 94). I use an
open concept of forms to connect and compare how Spinoza and other
philosophers thought about diverse religious forms in shared public
domains, highlighting what he wrote about visions, books, rituals, and
buildings. By re-membering our philosophical ancestor, the material-­
religion approach’s genealogy and theoretical basis are understood better.
The focus on material religion, however, also reveals the Early Modern
boundaries of inclusion in Spinoza’s conception of a free society.
Notwithstanding his celebrated freedom to philosophize, Spinoza, as I
will show, does not develop a concept of toleration for religious minori-
ties’ diverse ways of materially manifesting themselves.

Religious Forms: Essential and Non-Essential?

Spinoza’s objective approach to material religion leads him to distinguish
religious forms, which spark a community’s imagination, from the truly
universal religion of charity and justice. Otherwise put, the objective
6 P. TAMIMI ARAB

approach leads him to see religious forms as ultimately adiaphorous or

non-essential from the normative perspective that he develops through
biblical exegesis.5 But such a perspective can also hide power relations and
paradoxically lead to positing the importance of certain forms over oth-
ers—an uncircumcised male body over a circumcised one, pork over
kosher food, a sober well-lit church interior over a darker one crowded
with statues and colorful wall motives. For Spinoza, who forcefully rea-
soned against the separation of Church and State, such relatively weak
power inequality, expressed through a hierarchy of forms related to spe-
cific religious groups, was recommendable for preserving the unity of the
society and the peace of his ideal Republic—as long as the sovereign state
also accommodated diverse religious groups’ coexistence.
For liberal-democratic societies in our time, however, overt aesthetic
inequalities between religions are highly contested. The examples that
come to mind are European disagreements about mosque construction,
minarets, and the amplified Islamic call to prayer or adhan. Opponents of
these forms often argue, “objectively,” that believers should consider them
unnecessary. In my previous research on the amplified adhan in the
Netherlands (Tamimi Arab 2017), I was often asked why some mosques
insist on using loudspeakers when most Muslims don’t consider amplifica-
tion to be mandated by Islam. Why not use private adhan clocks or smart-
phone applications? While religious freedom is an important principle that
should be upheld, so the argument goes, not all forms are essential to a
religion—in other words, prescribed by a religious authority. Therefore,
their public manifestations do not necessarily fall under constitu-
tional rights.
An extreme example is Switzerland’s ban of minaret construction after
an internationally criticized referendum in 2009. Few scholars have played
devil’s advocate to defend the Swiss law’s blunt singling out of one reli-
gion. One such attempt at thinking through arguments in favor of the ban
is by the political theorist David Miller. His conclusion: the ban is
unjustifiable. Here, though, I am concerned with an argument he insists
on—namely, that minarets aren’t essential to Islam:

Historically, it appears that associating a tower with a mosque did not

become widespread until the ninth century, and the building of minarets at
that time had more to do with their functions as symbols of religious power
than with their role in Islamic religious practice; they were not, for example,
regarded as essential for broadcasting the call to prayer… So although, for
 1 INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS A RELIGIOUS FORM? 7

Muslims, the right to religious freedom must include the right to have
access to a mosque—to build one, or to convert an existing building, if nec-
essary—the features that are essential to a mosque are those that allow col-
lective prayer and other rituals to be performed, and a minaret does not
qualify for that purpose. What a minaret does, plainly, is to signal to the
wider world that the building it is attached to is a mosque, increase its visi-
bility, and in certain cases make it easier to broadcast the call to prayer. These
may all be seen as desirable features, but they fall into the same broad cate-
gory as stained glass windows, or indeed church spires, which are equally
not essential to Christian practice. (Miller 2016: 445)

Miller poses the question in a way that fails to recognize the power inequal-
ity that manifests as aesthetic inequality between the Swiss who identify
with Islam and the Swiss who identify with Christianity—either as a reli-
gion they adhere to or as the keeper of national heritage in the form of
church architecture. Miller describes the Swiss (post-) Christians as “the
indigenous majority” in order to garner sympathy for a nation’s right to
shape and preserve the environment it lives in. But by doing so he is
unconvincingly drawing on the connotation of the word “indigenous,”
which often refers to groups who lacked the power of self-determination
under the yoke of European colonialism—as in, say, when we speak of
“Australia’s indigenous population.” Moreover, while Miller has a point—
at least from a minimalist conception of human rights: that the right to a
building may matter more than stained glass windows—from the perspec-
tive of anthropologists and scholars of religion, his reasoning betrays an
essentialist conception of religion, which in this case problematically
determines that the beginning of Islam decisively informs the meaning of
minarets in Switzerland in the twenty-first century.6
Miller’s reasoning can be called adiaphorous in the sense that it refers
to minarets as though they are not integral to Islam—or at least as though
Muslims are indifferent to minarets. Compare this underlying view of reli-
gions to Slonem’s lively depiction of Saint Martin de Porres, which speaks
to the intricate web of meaning that even seemingly simple forms can
have. Miller thus privileges a religious essence at the expense of what
becomes mere aesthetic baggage: describing what in religions is “required”
as opposed to what is only preferred or appreciated. Like Spinoza, who
defended the idea of an official religion of the majority, Miller does not
take as a starting point the experiences and desires of religious-minority
citizens themselves—in this case, Muslims, for whom the minarets express
equal citizenship.
8 P. TAMIMI ARAB

Miller’s reasoning fits into the kind that gives political philosophers the
reputation that they think too abstractly, losing sight of what is happening
on the ground. This has sometimes led to stereotypes. In the anthology
Materiality (Politics, History, and Culture), the anthropologist Daniel
Miller sharply distinguishes philosophical heights from grounded anthro-
pology, stating: “Anthropology always incorporates an engagement that
starts from the opposite position to that of philosophy” (2005: 14). In
Religion: Material Dynamics, comparative religion scholar David Chidester
writes that “religion is more like cooking than philosophy” (2018: 53)
suggesting that religion, not unlike anthropology, is involved in the varied
sensory nature of human lives more than philosophy is. There is a grain of
truth in these statements, since throughout history philosophers have
tended to privilege essence over appearance and universal principles over
particular experiences (with consequences for the less powerful—for
example, women or indigenous people—whose ideas and practices were
relegated to the realm of mere appearance, the non-essential, and the non-­
enlightened). We see this tendency in Spinoza’s philosophy, too, in his
attempt to purify the meaning of the very word “religion,” identifying it
with a moral core. But, at the same time, there are so many forms, so many
configurations of sensuous material, that philosophers in the Early Modern
period were deeply concerned with and wrote about. These interactions
and experiences of philosophers revolved around texts and Biblical criti-
cism—which is itself a practical issue, connected as it was to preaching—
and around highly context-dependent questions, such as whether it is
allowed to wear a surplice in church. By discussing and reinventing the
relations between forms (of worship) and contents (beliefs) and between
State and Church, in the Early Modern period the ground was paved for
Locke’s systematizing the insights of his time into a theory of toleration.
Locke, in contrast with Spinoza, takes a relativistic stance regarding reli-
gions’ ultimate truths and a subjectivist stance toward religious forms.
Much of our understanding of toleration and equality today rests on this
assumption that these principles are not supposed to preserve religious
forms in themselves, but only as forms that matter to right-bearing sub-
jects who deem them important. That is, if the state is to institute toler-
ance as a civil right—which is a right that citizens intrinsically have, rather
than a right that is bestowed on them by the state—then it should restrain
from imposing certain forms over others, instead applying a stance of strict
neutrality as much as circumstances allow. The answer to this book’s ques-
tion—why religious forms matter—then, can be found in Locke’s early
 1 INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS A RELIGIOUS FORM? 9

Essay Concerning Toleration, written in 1667 (not to be confused with the

later Letter). Religious forms matter because the people who value them
find their unique qualities to be irreplaceable. “In religious worship,”
Locke writes, it should be assumed that, for religious groups themselves,
“nothing is indifferent” (1993 [1667]: 190).
In Chap. 3, I describe how Locke’s subjectivist perspective led him to
conceptualize the toleration of different religious forms as a neutrally
applied civil right. I compare Locke’s view with that of contemporary
thinkers like Tariq Modood (2019) and Martha Nussbaum (2012), who
suggest that accommodation—context-dependent differential treatment
of religious minorities—is a superior principle of equality. A focus on the
Netherlands today shows that accommodation indeed recognizes believ-
ers’ deeply felt religious convictions in ways that a strict perspective can-
not. For example, orthodox Protestants are exempt from health insurance
requirements because they believe those requirements contradict God’s
providence. And houses of worship are free to hold services despite
national health measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But it
is Lockean-aligned strict neutrality on the state level that secures public
manifestations of religion, such as Islamic mosques and amplified calls to
prayer, as well as more private manifestations, such as the slaughter of
animals according to Jewish and Islamic prescriptions. To reach this con-
clusion, I take Tariq Modood’s advice: to start the analysis by observing
how states address the challenge of religious diversity. Material religion is
well suited to this task, as it is par-excellence practical in that it distinctly
answers such questions as: Do mosques get built? Can sheep be ritually
slaughtered? And under what social and legal conditions?

Religious Forms of Discourse in Public Domains

A difference between the material-religion approach and political
philosophy is that the former’s normative judgments are expressed
implicitly through the idea of critique—“critical genealogies,” “critical
analysis,” and “critical rethinking” (Meyer 2012)—while the latter seeks
to explicitly justify principles such as “liberty” and “equality,” as well as
the idealized governance systems that enable both. In my view, political
liberalism—the political system that best manages religious diversity—can
learn both from the material-religion approach and from scholars who
criticize taking the genealogies of the concept of religion for granted. A
key insight is that inequality can be traced by studying how state power
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 Chapter VIII
THE ELMS AND THE HACKBERRY

Family Ulmaceæ

T HE members of this family are found in Europe, Asia, and North

America. Two genera, the elm (Ulmus) and the hackberry
(Celtis), are found in the Northeastern States.
The elms are remarkable for the massive strength of their trunk
and limbs and for the light delicacy of their small branches and twigs
as we see them against the sky in winter. The American and English
elms particularly are really more beautiful in winter than in summer,
when the contrast between the little twigs and the little branches is
hidden by the leaves. The elms are all long-lived trees and grow
rapidly. They bear transplanting and pruning better than any other
tree, and grow on almost any kind of soil. If it were not for the attacks
of insects, to which the elms seem peculiarly liable, no trees would
be more deserving of cultivation. Perhaps no other tree is so strongly
associated in our minds with the beautiful old valley towns and
hillside villages of New England, and to the elms they largely owe
their beauty. Three indigenous elms are found in the Northeastern
States, the American, slippery, and cork elms, and two from Europe,
the English and the Scotch or Dutch elms, are planted commonly in
our gardens and parks.
A large spreading tree, with graceful, drooping
American or branches. Smooth brown twigs; alternate leaf-
White Elm scars. The terminal and lateral buds are the same
Ulmus size; the flower buds are larger. The flowers come
americana
before the leaves in the early spring, and the fruit,
a small round samara, ripens later in the spring.
The American elm stands absolutely alone among trees for its
especial kind of beauty. No other tree combines such strength and
lofty stateliness with so much fine work and delicacy. Its trunk divides
a short distance from the ground into many large, spreading
branches, which stretch up high into the air and support the waving,
drooping, curving twigs and small branches.
 AMERICAN ELM, LANCASTER, MASS.
Ulmus americana
(From a photograph by Mr. Eli Forbes)
Page 102
 It is interesting to find how many distinct shapes the American elm
takes. These are so varied that many people think that each form is
a separate species, but they are all different types of the same tree.
The Etruscan vase is one of the most familiar shapes of this elm. Its
trunk divides a short way from the ground into several equally large
branches, and the top of the tree is flat, with down-sweeping lateral
branches. The beautiful Lancaster elm, from which the
accompanying photograph was taken, belongs to this Etruscan vase
form. Another well-known shape is the plume, which may be either
single or compound. In these trees the single trunk or two or three
parallel limbs rise to a great height without branches, and these
spread into one or two light waving plumes. Many of these plume
elms are found in the Berkshire Hills and throughout New England
where the woods have been cut away and the elms have been left
standing. The oak form, still another shape the elm occasionally
takes, is broad and round-headed, with heavy lateral branches which
extend in a horizontal direction in a manner very suggestive of the
white oak. This is not so common as the vase and plume elms, and
only occurs when the tree has grown in an open situation with plenty
of air and light. A fine specimen of this tree stands near the Pratt
house, in Concord, Massachusetts. “Feathered” elms are those
which have a growth of little twigs along the trunk and branches.
They may feather any of the different forms already described, and
they come from latent buds which may have been dormant for years
before opening.
“The white elm,” Professor Charles S. Sargent says, “is one of the
largest and most graceful trees of the Northeastern States and
Canada. It is beautiful at all seasons of the year,—when its minute
flowers, harbingers of earliest spring, cover the branches; when in
summer it rises like a great fountain of dark and brilliant green above
its humbler companions of the forest or sweeps with long and
graceful boughs the placid waters of some stream flowing through
verdant meadows; when autumn delicately tints its leaves; and when
winter brings out every detail of the great arching limbs and slender
pendulous branches standing out in clear relief against the sky.
 “The elm trees which greeted the English colonists as they landed
on the shores of New England seemed like old friends from their
general resemblance to the elm trees that had stood by their
cottages at home; and as the forest gave way to cornfields many elm
trees were allowed to escape the axe, and when a home was made
a sapling elm taken from the borders of a neighboring swamp was
often set to guard the rooftree. These elm trees, remnants of the
forest which covered New England when it was first inhabited by
white men, or planted during the first century of their occupation, are
now dead or rapidly disappearing; they long remained the noblest
and most imposing trees of the Northern States, and no others
planted by man in North America have equalled the largest of them
in beauty and size.”
The wood is heavy, tough, and difficult to split. It is used for
making the hubs of wheels and for flooring, cooperage, and boat-
building.
The generic name, Ulmus, comes from ulm or elm, the Saxon
name of the tree, the specific name explains itself. The American
elm is found from Newfoundland to Florida and as far west as the
eastern base of the Rocky Mountains.
A medium-sized tree, 45 to 60 feet high. The
Slippery or Red twigs are gray and bristled, unlike the smooth twigs
Elm Ulmus of the white elm. Alternate leaf-scars, which are
pubescens more conspicuous than those of the white elm. The
buds are larger and rounder than those of the
white elm; they are soft and downy, and are covered with reddish
brown hairs. The inner bark is very mucilaginous.
Country boys know the slippery elm for its sweet mucilage, just as
they know the shagbark for its nuts, the sassafras for its aromatic
roots, and the spruce for its gum; and this mucilaginous
characteristic is a certain means of determining the tree.
In form it is less drooping than the white elm and it is also much
smaller. The hairy buds give the whole tree a reddish color in spring,
and from this it probably takes the name of red elm; the slippery elm
is a more characteristic name however, as few trees have such a
slippery inner bark. These hairy brown buds are among the prettiest
to be found on any trees in winter. Compared with the smooth, hard
buds on many trees, they are what soft, long-haired Angoras are to
ordinary cats.
The wood is strong, hard, and close-grained and is used for
making posts, railroad ties, and agricultural implements. The inner
bark is used for inflammatory diseases and externally for poultices.
The specific name, pubescens (down or soft hair), refers to the
pubescence on the buds and leaves and along the recent shoots.
 YOUNG CORK ELM
Ulmus racemosa
Page 107
 The slippery elm is found in certain localities throughout the
Atlantic States, it is not common in Eastern Massachusetts.
A large tree, 80 to 100 feet high, known by the
Cork or Rock peculiar corky ridges along the branches. Alternate
Elm Ulmus leaf-scars. The recent twigs and the scales of the
racemosa bud are fringed with downy hair.
In New England the cork elm is found in the northwestern part of
New Hampshire and in Southern Vermont. It is rare in
Massachusetts, and would probably be found only in the western
part of the State growing wild. Neither Michaux nor Emerson has
described the cork elm. Nuttall says that it was discovered in the
State of New York by a Mr. Thomas, and he gives the tree the name
“Thomas’s elm,” which has fortunately not been retained.
The wood is tougher and of somewhat finer grain than that of the
white elm, and in the “Silva of North America,” Professor Sargent
says: “The value of the wood of the rock elm threatens its extinction;
and most of the large trees have already been cut in the forests of
Canada, New England, New York, and Michigan. The rock elm is
sometimes planted as a shade tree in the region which it inhabits
naturally, and although it grows rather more slowly than the white
elm, it is a handsome and distinct ornamental tree which planters
have too generally neglected.”
The specific name, racemosa (cluster-flowered), refers to the
flowers which grow in a raceme.
It is found in New England, its range extending southward and
westward.
A tall tree, more upright in growth than the
English Elm American elm. The branches are less spreading
Ulmus and more erect than those of the American
campestris species. In this climate it is often distinguished by
the little tufts of dead twigs on the tree. The bark is
darker and coarser than that of the American elm; the buds and
twigs differ very little from those of our species.
 ENGLISH ELMS
Ulmus campestris
Page 108

The English elm is found planted frequently throughout New

England, and there are many fine specimens in Massachusetts,
especially in the country about Boston. According to Emerson, they
were originally said to be imported and planted by a wheelwright for
his own use in making the hubs of wheels, for which purpose the
wood of the English elm is superior to any other. At all events, there
are many beautiful specimens growing near old colonial houses, and
sometimes they are found growing by stone walls at some distance
from the house, back of farm buildings and barns, as was the group
from which I took the following photograph.
The American elm is more graceful than the English elm, which,
on the other hand, is more stately; both trees are unusually beautiful,
although representing such different types of beauty. In the “Autocrat
of the Breakfast-Table,” Dr. Holmes contrasts the English and
American elms growing on Boston Common. “Go out with me into
that walk which we call the Mall,” he says, “and look at the English
and American elms. The American elm is tall, graceful, slender-
sprayed, and drooping as if from languor. The English elm is
compact, robust, holds its branches up, and carries its leaves for
weeks longer than our own native tree. Is this typical of the creative
force on the two sides of the ocean or not?”
In England the elm has been planted from the time of the Romans,
though Dr. Walker thinks that it was brought over at the time of the
Crusades. The elm was planted by the Romans as a prop for grape
vines, and in the South of Italy it is still used for that purpose. In
“Paradise Lost” Milton refers to this when he describes how Adam
and Eve spent their time in the Garden of Eden. Among various
other occupations,

“They led the vine

To wed her elm; she spoused about him twines
 Her marriageable arms; and with her brings
Her dower, the adopted clusters to adorn
His barren leaves.”

Columella tells us that vineyards with elm trees as props were

named arbusta, the vines themselves being called arbustivæ vitæ, to
distinguish them from others raised in more confined situations.
Once in two years the elms were carefully pruned to prevent their
leaves from overshadowing the grapes; this was considered of great
importance, and we have a better understanding of Virgil’s reproach
to Corydon, who neglected both his elms and vines, when we realize
this:—

“Semiputate tibi frondosa vitis in ulmo est.”

(Your vine half pruned upon the leafy elm.)

In Ovid, Vertumnus alludes to the mutual dependence of the elm

and the vine when he assures Pomona of the advantages of a happy
marriage:—

“‘If that fair elm,’ he cried, ‘alone should stand

No grapes would glow with gold, and tempt the hand;
Or if that vine without her elm should grow,
’T would creep a poor neglected shrub, below.’”

The specific name, campestris, comes from the Latin word

meaning belonging to a plain or field.
 SCOTCH ELM
Ulmus montana
Page 111

A medium-sized tree, 50 to 60 feet high. The

Scotch, Dutch, bark is smooth and green. The branches are
or Wych Elm spreading and somewhat drooping. The buds are
Ulmus montana not downy like those of the slippery elm.
The Scotch elm, like the English elm, is extensively cultivated in
the parks and gardens about Boston, and it is frequently planted
along roadsides. It is less upright and tall than the English elm, its
average height being about forty feet, and it has a more spreading
head.
The Scotch elm, according to Gerard, had various uses in ancient
times. Its wood was made into bows, and its bark, which is so tough
that it will strip or peel off from the wood from one end of a bough to
the other without breaking, was made into ropes. Its wood was not
considered so good for naves as that of the English elm, though in
Scotland it is used by ship-builders, the block and pump maker, the
cartwright and cabinet maker. Loudon says in his “Arboretum et
Fruticetum Britannicum”: “In many parts of the country, the wych elm,
or witch-hazel, as it is still occasionally called, is considered a
preservative against witches; probably from the coincidence,
between the words ‘wych’ and ‘witch.’ In some of the midland
counties, even to the present day, a little cavity is made in the churn
to receive a small portion of witch-hazel, without which the
dairymaids imagine that they would not be able to get the butter to
come.”
The specific name, montana, from the Latin word meaning living
on mountains, was given to this tree because it is found growing, not
only in the plains and valleys, like Ulmus campestris, but also in the
remote highlands where it finds a foothold and flourishes on the
steep slopes of the mountains.
 A small tree, 20 to 50 feet high, with slender,
Hackberry, wide-spreading branches. The terminal buds are
Sugarberry, lacking, the lateral ones are flattened and pointed
Nettle Tree and somewhat hairy. The twigs are dark grayish
Celtis
brown with white chambered pith inside the stems.
occidentalis
The leaf-scars are semi-oval with three bundle-
scars and alternate in arrangement. The fruit is reddish, turning dark
purple; it is round and berry-like and about the size of a currant.
 HACKBERRY
Celtis occidentalis
Page 112

The hackberry grows wild in Massachusetts, but it is found rarely

and is generally mistaken for an elm. It grows commonly in lowland
woods in Western New York and the Middle States, and it can be
identified both in winter and summer by the white chambered pith,
which is found by cutting a stem of recent growth. The dried fruit,
which hangs on the stems through the winter, is also another means
of recognizing the tree,—this berry-like fruit can be seen in the
photograph which I took as late in the deciduous season as April
thirteenth. It is a round-headed tree with a short trunk and usually a
broad spread of branches, but in the basin of the Ohio River it grows
to be a tall and stately tree.
The wood is heavy and coarsely grained, and is used for fences
and for making cheap furniture.
The generic name, Celtis, is the ancient Greek name for the lotus
berry; and the specific name, occidentalis (belonging to the west),
designates its American origin.
 Chapter IX
THE BUTTONWOOD, THE TUPELO, AND THE
MULBERRIES
The Buttonwood, showing the hollow base of the leafstalk which
covers the bud until the leaf falls.