So the temple is at the same time forest. What we think of as a built, walled house dissolves, the earlier we go back, into the concept of a sacred place untouched by human hands, tended and enclosed by self-grown trees. There the deity dwells and hides its image in the rustling leaves of the branches [...]
I do not claim that this forest worship exhausted all the ideas our ancestors had about the deity and its abode; it was only the most important. Individual gods may dwell on mountain peaks, in rocky caves, in rivers, but the solemn, general worship of the people has its seat in the grove; nowhere could it have found a more worthy home.
-Jakob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, Vol. I, 1835
