 With its roots burrowing deep into the soil and its
branches rising to the Heavens, the tree is universally seen as the
symbol of the connection between Earth and Heaven. The tree enjoys such
a central role that the World Tree is identified with the World Axis.
Trees are also the bridge that connects the three planes of the cosmos:
the Underworld through their roots burrowing deep into the soil, the
Earth’s surface with their trunk and lower branches, and the Heavens
with their upper branches and top, in search of light.
So, trees relate the Lower World to the Upper
World. Reptiles crawl among their roots and birds roost in their
branches. The four elements are to be found in the tree: Water
circulates in its sap, Earth becomes part of its body through its
roots, Air feeds its leaves, and Fire is produced by rubbing its sticks
together.
This representation of the relationship between Earth and Heaven is
often to be found in philosophy and spiritual meditation : the tree is
then the symbol of Creation as a whole : it is the macro-cosmos or big
Universe. Trees are also the symbol of man, as small universe or
micro-cosmos. Ever rising to the Heavens, trees are the perfect symbol
of verticality.
The many symbolic representations of trees are all related to the
notion of the living cosmos in a state of perpetual regeneration. Their
annual cycle is associated with the natural development of life, death
and regeneration. Trees symbolize life in perpetual evolution.
We have to mention a particular symbol : the inverted tree with its
roots turned towards the Heavens and its branches falling downward to
the Earth. According to the older texts of India (Rig-Veda) and the
western alchemical treatises, the inverted tree reveals the celestial
origin of man and invites him to free himself from terrestrial bonds,
in order to find in himself, behind the veil of illusion, his own
interior Heaven of the same nature as the Holy Heaven itself.
Nearly all ancient peoples had sacred trees, either real or idealized,
promoted to the rank of cosmic symbols. The most ancient natural
religions considered trees as true living beings inhabited by spirits
of nature, nymphs or elves, having their own soul and with which man
had a particular relationship.
The cosmic tree is often represented as a particularly majestic
species. So was the oak for the Celts, the lime for the Germans, the
ash for the Scandinavians, the olive tree for the Islamic East, the
larch and the birch for the Siberians. All these trees are remarkable
for their size and their longevity.
The tree as axis of the world is the one around which the world
assembles itself, like Yggdrasil, the ash of the Germans of the North
or Ceiba or Yaxché, the sacred tree of the Mayas in Yucatan, which
grows in the centre (or navel) of the world and bears the various
planes of Heaven. The same idea is to be found in China with the tree
Kien-mou whose branches and roots touch the heavens and the underground
springs where death hides itself.
According to Buddhists, Boddhi, the tree under which Gautama Buddha
became Enlightened, is the symbol of the Great Awakening. Ancient Egypt
worshipped sycamores where the goddess Hathor drew a beverage and food
that she gave to the dead or more precisely to their souls. The
Sumerian god of vegetation Dummuzi or Tammuz was worshipped as Tree of
Life.
Christian tradition associates the Tree of Life with the manifestation
of the godhead. There is an analogy between the tree of the first
Covenant, the Tree of Life in Genesis and the tree of the Cross or tree
of the New Covenant, which regenerates mankind.
In time the tree-ancestor became the family tree. Let us recall the
famous tree of Jessé symbolizing the sequence of generations of which
the Bible tells the story and which culminates with the coming of Jesus
Christ.
It seems that a comparison between man and tree has always existed.
Either man transforms himself into a tree (like Daphne, mistress of
Apollo, who was transformed by her lover into a laurel) or the tree
becomes man or woman. Tree symbolism is always ambivalent and it is not
surprising to find it, alternatively, male and female. The gender
ambivalence of the tree symbol, simultaneously phallic by his trunk and
womb-like by the hollows inside it, becomes more evident with the
evolution of language: the tree was female in Latin and became male in
the Roman languages of the Middle Ages. Thus the double tree,
simultaneously phallus and womb, symbolizes the individuation process
in which the inner opposites in ourselves unite.
The tree has also been regarded as an image of the androgyne or
primordial hermaphrodite. It is also linked to the athanor of the
alchemists, womb in which the philosopher’s gold gestates.
The main symbols associated with the tree are the cross and the mountain.
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