The device of a golden tree hung with jewels, which is common throughout the East in all fine goldsmiths’ work, and a good example of which was formerly one of the treasures of the palace of the Great Mogul at Agra,[273] was no doubt derived from the conception of a star-bearing world-tree. For it must be remembered that the ancients believed gems to be self-lustrous like the stars. Homer’s palaces emitted a radiance like moonlight, and the columns of gold and emerald seen by Herodotus at Tyre gave out light.[274] We have no direct instance of gem-bearing trees in Greek mythology, though the golden apples of the Hesperides growing on Mount Atlas, the sky-sustaining mountain in the country beyond the north wind, had evidently some kinship to the jewelled fruit of Eastern legend. In addition to the Norse Yggdrasil, there are other traces of the tradition of a world-tree to be met with amongst European nations. The Russians have a legend, derived from Byzantium, of an iron-tree, the root of which is the power of God, while its head sustains the three worlds, the heavenly ocean of air, the earth, and hell with its burning fire and brimstone.[275] Amongst the Saxons the idea of a world-tree seems to have persisted even to the time of Charlemagne, who in the course of his campaign against them in 772 A.D. solemnly destroyed as a heathen idol their Irmensûl or “World-pillar,” a lofty tree-trunk, which they worshipped as typifying the universal column that supports all things. Mannhardt, however, regards the Irmensûl as simply a national tree, corresponding to the community trees already mentioned, and explains Charlemagne’s act as a political rather than a religious one.[276] In the Cathedral at Hildesheim there is an ancient stone column known as the Irmensäule (though its claim to the name is disputed), which was dug up under Louis le Débonnaire, and transformed into a candelabrum surmounted by an image of the Virgin,[277] the conception of moral support thus taking the place of the grosser idea of a material stay. As in Eastern legend the universe-tree was venerated as something more than a mere material supporter of the world, being sometimes the giver of wisdom and sometimes the conveyer of immortality, so in European myth it is found linked with a similar beneficence. In the legends of the Finns its branches are represented as conferring “eternal welfare,” and “the delight that never ceases.” The Kalevala, which dates back to an unknown antiquity, relates how the last of created trees, the oak, sprang from the magic acorn planted by the hero Wainamoinen in the ashes of burnt hay which had been mown by the water-maidens:— Spreads the oak-tree many branches, Rounds itself a broad corona, Raises it above the storm clouds; Far it stretches out its branches, Stops the white clouds in their courses, With its branches hides the sunlight, With its many leaves the moonbeams, And the starlight dies in heaven.