Reviews

Book Review – The Cult of the Yew by Janis Fry

Book Review

The Cult of the Yew:
Tree of Life, Mystery, and Magic

Written by Janis Fry

Publisher: Moon Books

480 Pages

Release Date: April 1, 2023

 

 

 

It is not often a book summons you from the Forest of your Soul and takes you on a journey through time and out of time back into a richer, freer, and more integrated Forest of your Eternal Soul. Janis Fry’s The Cult of the Yew was that catalyst for me. The Yew trees first started whirling in my awareness after a random conversation in the Forest one day with a neighboring woman I met on the trail. She shared how there used to be an ancient yew grove in these woods before someone cut them down a few years back. I felt this conversation and interaction to be a sort of meet-cute or Divine orchestration. The imprint of the Yew trees stayed with me from then on. It was only a few short months after that I discovered Janis’s book on the sacred Yews. I believe books find you when you are ready and open to receive their medicine and you find them through a telepathic-like connection. The Cult of the Yew was nothing short of Divine intervention and symbolic of Soul to Soul communion.

Janis Fry has given her devotion to researching and protecting the history and restoration of the sacred Yew trees for over 40 years. She is an artist and author of several books, including the “prequel” to this book, The God Tree. It is not necessary to read The God Tree prior to reading The Cult of the Yew as she cites it whenever necessary to bridge any gaps. Her body of wisdom makes her an expert in her field and an ally for the safekeeping of our precious Yews, old and new.

Janis Fry states, “The Yew is the seat of Nature’s consciousness.” Janis has this incredible gift of being able to bring you throughout history, weaving through and past religions, migration, and colonization while staying deeply rooted to the one and constant source, The Tree of Life, our beloved Yew. It is through the Yew’s golden bough or magic rod and staff that the Yew trees draw a connection to our ever changing mythology and theology from oral to written storytelling, pictographs, and Petroglyphs and brings our past full circle to the present. Janis speaks of the Axis Mundi, “the pole around which the whole world revolves”, calling it, “the center of the world, connecting heaven and earth”. Whether you are studying the Bible or Mother Earth Herself as the road map to our existence, Janis Fry shows how without fail the sacred Yew is at the center, in the beginning, and at the end of it all.

The Yew’s were our Ancestors’ Holy or “Halig” places, shrines, and nemetons where communion between Nature Spirits, Deities, God/Goddesses, as well as the Trees themselves and humans took place and intersected. They were the churches, town halls, and courtrooms, whatever was needed, to restore and find faith, truth, harmony, salvation, and restitution. That is until Janis reminds us, “we must not forget that the eradication of the knowledge of these sacred and ancient trees began with the vehemence with which most early Christian leaders denounced the old religion and ensured that evidence of it, be destroyed.” Janis has dedicated her life to the Yew’s legacy making sure we have access to our Ancestry, and one might say, Divinity!

The Cult of the Yew is jam packed with history. I found Janis Fry’s knowledge of the spiraling and crooked paths of truth to be honorable and not an easy undertaking. She did so with grace and dignity, also not an easy task when speaking of such atrocities. She shared from her research, “Yews are the oldest living trees.” In this sense they have stood the test of time and hold the key of knowledge, hence the tree of life, throughout and for our evolution. We must return to them if we are to withstand the trials of our time while remaining rooted in our eternal belonging.

The trees and the people were once intertwined and inseparable. “In Sanskrit, which was the international language for thousands of years before Latin, the name Deva Daru, the sacred tree, the tree of the God/dess of Divinity, meant both tree and truth, as it did in Saxon.” Telepathic communication and travel happened in co-operation with the Yew. “The time has come for us to set aside our fixed ideas, suspend our disbelief, renew our connection with the Yew and return it to our consciousness”, Janis writes. This book is a portal into another time when humans and trees were allies. They supported one another in their quest for Divine inheritance, enriched quality and meaning, and everlasting life. If you are returning to Nature yourself and are thirsty to drink from the Well, then, The Cult of the Yew is for you! Step inside and travel with the sacred Yew to come back anew!

Nicole Lynn
FLOE; Facilitating Love On Earth
Floe.love


About the Author

Janis Fry is a leading authority on ancient yews researching them for 40 years. She is guided by the magic of the Yew and is the author of four books. In 2014 she put the Defynnog Yew in Wales on the map as the oldest tree in Britain. She lives in Ammanford, UK.

 

 

The Cult of the Yew on Amazon

 

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About the Author:

Nicole Lynn lives in the White Mountains of New Hampshire with her husband and fur babies. She is a Nature lover where everything she does centers around her connection to Nature and Spirit. She is an Intuitive counselor/life coach with many certifications in holistic healing modalities. Nicole broke away from traditional psychotherapy back in 2015 and started leading nature-based sessions, Shamanic journeys, meditations, and what She calls, Soul Sessions. She specializes in Mind, Body, Spirit integration and living from an embodied place of Wholeness. Nicole Lynn is a Soul Writer in the field of Higher Consciousness embodiment and the creator of the new Mushroom Medicine Oracle deck as well as four books for our “Inner and Outer” Children; I am a Child of the Forest, Spring is Here, Faeries; Light Reflecting Particles in Motion, and Where Angels come to Sing inside You & Me.

Nicole’s Mission is to help humanity remember the Purity and Power of their Divine Essence integrated into physical form.

Nicole Lynn at FLOE; Facilitating Love On Earth
Floe.love