This crude worship of the god in the anthropomorphised tree lingered on amongst the peasantry side by side with the splendid temple ritual, even into days when the revelation of a Deity who filled all time and space, and was worshipped in temples not made with hands, was rapidly undermining the pagan worship of the cities. Maximus Tyrius, who lived in the second century A.D., and counted among his most diligent pupils the great Marcus Aurelius, relates how even in his day at the festival of Dionysus every peasant selected the most beautiful tree in his garden to convert it into an image of the god and to worship it.[70] And Apuleius, another writer of the same period, bears similar testimony. “It is the custom,” he says, “of pious travellers, when their way passes a grove or holy place, that they offer up a prayer for the fulfilment of their wishes, offer gifts and remain there a time; so I, when I set foot in that most sacred city, although in haste, must crave for a pardon, offer a prayer and moderate my haste. For never was traveller more justified in making a religious pause, when he perchance shall have come upon a flower-wreathed altar, a grotto covered with boughs, an oak decorated with many horns, or a beech-tree with skins hung to it, a little sacred hill fenced around, or a _tree trunk hewn as an image_ (_truncus dolamine effigatus_).”[71] Forms of the Tât or Didû, the emblem of Osiris. (Maspero, _op. cit._) [Illustration: Fig. 14.] [Illustration: Fig. 15.] This custom of carving a tree into the semblance of a god, and subsequently worshipping it as his sanctuary or symbol, was current in many parts of the world. The chief idol form of Osiris, the Didû or Tât, is believed by Maspero to have originated as a simple tree-trunk disbranched and planted in the ground.[72] Usually it is represented with a grotesque face, beneath four superimposed capitals, with a necklace round its neck, a long robe hiding the base of the column in its folds, and the whole surmounted by the familiar Osirian emblems. Again, it is said to have been a practice amongst the Druids, when an oak died to strip off its bark and shape it into a pillar, pyramid, or cross, and continue to worship it as an emblem of the god.[73] The cross especially was a favourite form, and any oak with two principal branches forming a cross with the main stem was consecrated by a sacred inscription, and from that time forward regarded with particular reverence.