From the Vault: Tree of Life

Sacred trees. World trees. Holy trees of wisdom, immortality and the soul. They seem to grow from every culture on Earth and their roots dig deep into the soil of prehistory. What do they mean? Why are we so drawn to their symbolic power? Join Robert Lamb and Christian Sager for a stirring exploration. (Originally published Nov. 30, 2017)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And today
we're venturing into the vault for an episode that originally
published November. This is an episode you did with Christian. Right,
this was the last episode I did with Christian, last
episode Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Yeah, this was his
his final episode. He got to pick the topic he
had been wanting to do one on on the Tree

(00:28):
of Life and the motif of the of the tree
in in human uh cultures around the world and uh
and yeah, so it was like his last episode he
got to choose, and and in doing so he kind
of accidentally um made us to a Christmas episode because
we end up talking a little bit about holiday trees
Christmas trees in this episode as well. Uh, thus are

(00:50):
rerunning of of this episode during the holiday season. You're
gonna make people cry all over again for Christians. Farewell,
welcome cry if you must. But yeah, we were sad
to see him go. It's your party, all right. Uh,
so I guess we should get right into the episode.
We hope you enjoy The Tree of Life. Men call

(01:11):
the Swatha the Banyan tree. Which hath its bows beneath,
its roots above the ever holy tree Yea, for its
leaves are green and waving hymns which whisper truth, who
knows the Aswatha knows vEDS, and all its branches shoot
to heaven and sink to earth, even as the deeds

(01:32):
of men, which take their birth from qualities. Its silver
sprays and blooms, and all the eager verdure of its
girth leap to quick life at kiss of sun and air,
as men's lives quickened to the temptings fair of wooing sense.
It's hanging Rootlets seek the soil beneath, helping to hold

(01:53):
it there as actions rought amid this world of men
buying them by ever tightening bond again. Welcome to stuff
to blow your mind from How Stuff Works dot com.

(02:15):
Hey you, welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and my name is Christian Saga.
And that was a reading from a book I can't
pronounce the right way, but it's the arnold translation. Chapter fifteen.
You say it yes, the bag geta, or you know
you can just call it the geta. I always say
it wrong, baga geta. Yeah, or just the geta. You know,
you can be impersonal with it if you like. Okay,

(02:37):
but yeah, that's the Arnold translation Chapter fifteen, referring to
one of the many world trees, the sacred trees, the
trees of life that seemed to crop up from cultures
and traditions around the world, and the roots of these
trees seemed to dive down deep into human prehistory. Yeah.
I have been thinking about this topic for a few

(02:58):
years now. I've I've had this the back of my
head when I joined the show. Uh, here's a little
behind the scenes for you all. We have this huge
spreadsheet document that has all of our potential topics in it,
and when I first joined the show, I probably put
I don't know, like two ideas into it, and this
was like one of the first ones I put in
there because I was like, I know what Robert's into,
I know what the show has covered before. I need

(03:19):
the answer to this question. And the way I had
framed it was, why are the Kundalini, ig, DRIs Sill,
and seff Rof also similar? And these are all basically
and we're going to get into this. These are all
representations of tree of life symbology across the world, right.
And it first struck me when I was reading these
esoteric books about things like yoga and Norse myths and

(03:42):
cobbalistic mysticism. And then it occurred to me that these
cosmological symbols, they're so similar, despite the fact that the
cultures that they come from are vastly different and very
far away from one another. But I didn't originally think
of them as trees per se. And now that we've
sat down and we've done our homework for this episode,
it's it's pretty obvious that they're they're all trees. Yeah.

(04:03):
And if you if you don't know what those those
three names were, you don't know these particular world trees
by name. I feel like most people, you're probably connected
with some culture or another that has a tree symbol
within it. And even if you're completely like somehow completely
removed from uh, you know, ancient traditions and spiritual practices

(04:27):
and religious history, you are still going to encounter the
symbol of the tree somewhere in your world. And as
as with all the symbols, symbols come into contact with
each other, UH and you you really can't interact with
the symbol of the tree, I feel without um engaging
with the legacy of that symbol, which we're going to

(04:47):
discuss here today. Yeah, exactly, and so we're gonna provide
you with examples too. Well, we'll get into all of those,
but really our core question here today is why are
trees so intimately connected with spiritual training and development everywhere
in the world. And we'll find that this actually goes
along with scientific development as well, that the tree symbology

(05:09):
has been applied there too. Now I have to note
here we could do the whole episodes just on all
the various world trees and sacred trees in human tradition.
We could do a whole episode just on tree spirits
and the idea that the tree is a home for
the soul of the departed, But obviously we don't have time.
We're going to try and at least dip our toes
and and all the appropriate waters, but we're not gonna

(05:31):
really have time to immerse ourselves. Yeah, this is one
of those where you could do just like an entire
podcast called Tree of Life, and it would be just
every episode would be about a different one. Because the
further we dug into this, the more obvious. It was.
It was in every culture everybody has and each one's fascinating.
Each one has its own particular you know, flourishes. Uh so, yeah,
you could. You could just have a Tree of the Week,

(05:53):
but unfortunately I won't be able to join you for
that Tree of the Week on Stuff to Blow Your
Mind at least because this is my last episode of
Stuff to Blow your Mind. I'm actually moving to Portland, Oregon,
So if any of our listeners are out that way
and you want to help me get situated as I move,
I would love your advice. So what we're gonna do
is at the end of this episode, I will provide

(06:15):
information on how to get in contact with me where
you can find me online. But I want to thank
everybody out there, all of you for accepting me into
your ears for the last few years. I've learned so
much working on this show and interacting with its wonderful community,
and I've made so many friends from being on this show.
So thank you everybody. And I wanted to choose a
topic that was something I've really wanted to cover on

(06:37):
this show, but that's also it's universal, man. Yeah, Well,
I mean, for for starters, I want to thank you
for everything you've done for the show and UH and
you have helped to shape its voice over the past
a few years here, and I wish you the absolute
best in Portland's and UH and as we'll get into
at the end of the show, also your your your
future podcast endeavors. Yeah, You're gonna remain a friend of

(07:00):
Stuff to Boil your Mind going forward, and I want
everyone to to to be clear on that, like, like
five years from now, I'm going to show up and
we're gonna do UH an episode on some kind of
paraphilia and then we'll mix in like the science of
some kind of psychedelic drug into it. Right on that note,
I am glad that your final episode doesn't have to

(07:21):
be the zoophilia episode. That was one of the ones.
I'm kind of your Stuff to Boil your Mind bucket
was my hit list. Yeah, yeah, after the necrophilia episode,
I was like, we gotta do another paraphilia and so
I'm glad we got that out of the way as
a as ikey as it made us both feel when
we did it. You know, one of the other things
I like here is that your last episode is kind

(07:44):
of accidentally a Christmas episode, or at least a Christmas
Tree episode, because I found at least one source referring
to the Christmas tree as as yet another symbol, as
yet another echo of this global tradition, which which honestly
I didn't even really think. I guess it's just because
the Christmas tree is just so it's kind of so

(08:04):
overdone in Western tradition, especially because we cut them down right.
But yeah, I hadn't thought of it either, And it's
so obvious now that you pointed out. Yeah, and this
comes out like somewhat at the beginning of December, So
maybe this will be an appropriate, uh, going into the
Holidays episode for everybody to listen to and think about trees.
So some of you out there are probably wondering, what

(08:27):
are you guys talking about? What is a tree of life? Well,
a tree of life it's a widespread archetype or motive
that shows up in many human myths across the world.
There seemed to be two main forms that show up,
the world tree and the tree of life. Sometimes it's
called the cosmic tree or the tree of knowledge in symbology.

(08:48):
But the first one is a tree that has a
vertical center that binds together heaven and Earth. And the
second one is a tree that is the source of
life at the horizontal so uner of the earth, and
the concepts that are associated with it include life giving force,
eternal life, desire for heaven, and fertility. So if we

(09:10):
look at the world tree one first, this is the
vertical tradition. The tree extends between earth and heaven and
is the connection between humans and the gods, and the
base of the tree is where oracles and profits perform
their activities. But because the top of this tree reaches
up into the heavens, it was seen as an entity

(09:31):
that actually connected the three spheres of what most people
thought of as existence Heaven, Earth, and then underground, which
would be the land of the dead in some cultures. Now,
what I think is interesting about this is that you
can easily compare it to the Holy Mountain in global traditions.
But though the mountain is a like a thing, this
is not geologically speaking, but speaking from like human perspective.

(09:54):
The mountain is a thing that exists and is solid
and is unchanging, but the tree is a thing that
is obviously grown um, which puts it more in keeping
with for instance, the idea of of a tower of Babbel,
the idea of power to reach the heavens of false mountain,
except that the tree is is authentic. And it also
reminds me, of course, of of space elevators, man made

(10:18):
thing that has grown or built and used to reach
the heavenly realm or at least you know, lower orbit. Yeah,
those are all metaphors that have shown up in other cultures,
not space elevators yet, but we still have time. We
can do like the space Elevator of Life movie at
some point. But you're right, mountains actually are interchangeable with
trees and some of these symbolic legends. But I think

(10:41):
that trees are usually the fallback because they grow and
because of their cycle of fertility. Uh. But let's look
at the horizontal tradition and see how that I think
that plays into that further. That's this is again the
tree of life versus the world tree. So this version
has the tree plan did at the center of the
world and usually it's protected by supernatural guardians. The tree

(11:05):
is the source of fertility and life, and we humans
are actually descended from the tree. If it's cut down,
the ability to reproduce in the world would cease to exist,
and the tree is common in quest myths, so that
you see a lot of myths where like somebody has
to go and get something, the trees usually involved. So
for example Gilgamesh he obtains the elixir of immortality after

(11:27):
fighting the guards of the Tree of Life, and its
fruit and sap are thought to bestow both knowledge and enlightenment. Now,
in some variations this is interesting. I only found this
in a few. There are goats at the base of
the tree, and they are also worshiped and seen as
symbolic of birth and fertility. That's interesting. I was looking

(11:49):
through um the writings of James Frasier and he made
some connections there as well, between antlered or horned animals
and the branches of trees. Well, it seems like the
goat represents the ibex, which was once worshiped as an
incarnation of human and herd fertility, so that would make sense,

(12:09):
and the horn formations connecting together. That also makes sense.
In other variations, though instead of a goat, it's a
dragon or a serpent. I guess dragons sometimes have horns,
but serpents don't. Usually, Yeah, I mean you do see
dragons with horns or antlers, a lot of traditions. I mean,
just kind of a reminder that the dragon is essentially
a chimera. It's a it's a you know, it's a

(12:32):
it's a creature created out of pieces of all these
other animals, including, uh, say, a deer or a goat, right,
and so these seem to symbolize the spirit of the earth.
But the serpent is also an image for the quicksilvery
sap that's within the tree as well, because of the
way it moves, So that's interesting as well. Yeah, I
had not realized that. Yeah, and obviously we'll get to this,

(12:53):
but when we go to the Judeo Christian version of this,
obviously the serpent in the tree in the Garden of Eden,
that all fits together. Right now, I want to remind
everybody about archetypes before we get into this, because we're
gonna definitely throw that term around a lot. Uh. Robert
and I have covered that in previous episodes. We did
an episode on just myth in general and taking a
look at myths across history. We also did an episode

(13:15):
on the hero myth and we talked about archetypes, and
we specifically talked about Karl Gustav Young in those episodes,
but just to give you a primer refresher what have you.
He was a psychoanalyst whose main theory was that archetypes
reappear in the collective unconscious that all human societies share.
And he saw this as a ancient universal mind that

(13:38):
was common to all humans. It's like an ancestral memory. Uh.
And explains why we had the same archetypes across different cultures.
This is his answer to my question, why why is
this this symbology exactly the same in these cultures all
around the world. Uh. And for instance, the hero, as
we talked about in in in that previous episode, was

(13:59):
one of the most prominent of these archetypes. Young posits
that there's this deeper unconscious level that's going on that
manifests itself as dreams or sometimes in more complex forms
as myths or fairy tales. So this is in his
you know, worldview. And we'll cover some some more frameworks
like this later on in the episode why these all

(14:21):
connect together? So the tree itself has been used since
prehistoric humanity as a representation for the cosmos, for God,
for fertility, knowledge, and eternal life. In fact, there are
representations of it in prehistoric artistic productions. That's pretty interesting.
I didn't I didn't realize that. Uh. We also find

(14:43):
the tree in our conceptions of physical matter. So whether
you're looking at vegetation or rivers or the circulation systems
of animals, they're all we use terms from trees, like
branches for instance, right. Uh. And the human brain in
these network actually resembles the trees crown in the spinal
cords its trunk, so you can see why human beings

(15:06):
would automatically gravitate towards this symbol. Yeah, the tree is
just a like a natural symbol, a natural metaphor for
all of these other things were encountering, and it's it's complete.
You can see it as a silhouette on a hill
and then use it as a model as kind of
an externalization of cognition to help you understand the rest

(15:26):
of your world exactly. And they're obviously a symbol for
the cycle of seasons, right like early humanity to now,
we all know that trees cycle through seasons, blossom, fruit, decay,
and then are reborn. This is seen as a reflection
of the regenerative cycle of the cosmos. Itself and trees. Then,

(15:46):
because they have a longer lifespan than ours, they seem
inexhaustible to us. Right, it seems like they have this
natural vigor that lasts forever. But that's just because they
live longer than us. It's like uh, ents in a
Lord of the rinks. There you go, So yet another
world tree that we we didn't add to the notes
here today. Yeah yeah, I also don't think we mentioned

(16:06):
Game of Thrones at all. But of course they have those,
uh the spirit trees that the at least the people
of the north use the where would is that what
it's calla with the faces of the children of the forest.
Yeah yeah, Now remember too that in this symbology, the
fruit of these trees bestows both knowledge and eternal life. Right,
So here's an example. The golden apples of Igdrasill are

(16:27):
said to be stored in Valhalla to restore the youthfulness
of the gods. But and this is this pun is intended?
What if it all stemmed from a psychotropic agent that
was in trees in the original representation. So actually, ethnobotanists
have been throwing theories around trying to figure this out
for a while now and some of the examples that

(16:49):
they looked at as possibilities where the fly a garrick
or the Syrian ru trees, But so far they haven't
been able to find a specific hallucinogenic plant that satisfactorily
fits with the description of world trees. See, I actually
found out a way to work in UH psychedelics into
my last episode. Well, you know, this does make me

(17:09):
wonder though, it's would it be necessary to be able
to find like the one the one to one example
of like here's a tree that produced a psychedelic fruit,
when it would be seems like it would be just
as likely that you have the symbol of the tree.
But then there's this vast knowledge of these other plants
in your environment that produce various medicinal or psychotropic effects.

(17:30):
You know, Yeah, I agree. I think that some of
these researchers, what they're trying to do is pinpoint the
origin place where the myth first started. And a lot
of it we'll get into this later, but a lot
of it seems to point to the Middle East. So
I think that's why they're looking at those particular trees.
But you're right, I think that as this UH myth
spread throughout cultures around the world. Obviously, various trees could

(17:54):
influence it depending on what locations are in. So let's
get Christmas e again for a second. M I ran
across the um. This article in Nature from two thousand
by ecologist gear hess Mark titled Temptations of the Tree
a perennial image of life, history and enlightenment and uh
and he did a wonderful job tying it all into Christmas.
He says, at this time of year, many people the

(18:16):
world over bring a Christmas tree into their living room
to celebrate life. The tree is one of the most
powerful images in human thought and worship, a feature of
human environments from tiger to rainforest, and a symbol of persistence, fertility, life, descent, destiny, purification,
and strength, a vertical link between the earth and the heavens,
a place to seek knowledge. Yeah, you know what this

(18:38):
is interesting? Actually, do you do you and your family
get a Christmas tree every year? We do? Yeah? I
used to. In fact, my family, like my extended family,
owned a Christmas tree farm in New England, so it
was like part of the family like business, you know. Um,
and it's always sort of been in the back of
my head that that's why we use Christmas trees. But
you know what I mean, Like, as you're saying beginning,

(19:00):
we in American culture at least don't really specifically think
about the fertility stuff that's connected with it. It's more
about the I guess, like the holiday itself from the
commercial Well, you know, I was more inclined to recognize
the fertility aspects of it because it's like you're bringing
an average tree, an evergreen tree into your home during
the winter, and and they're all these various pagan connotations there.

(19:22):
But for some reason, I never really thought about the
whole bridge from earth to heaven, despite the fact that
most in most traditions, you're putting a star or an angel,
you know, a heavenly being on the very top of
the tree. Like you couldn't have it. It couldn't be
anymore clear when you think about it, is tree is
in your house, reaching up and connecting your house to heaven.

(19:44):
We actually have a ceramic tree now, we just have
like a little like one ft tall ceramic tree. So
maybe that's why I stopped thinking that it doesn't reach
to the heaven. What does it mean that we put
gifts under the tree you have really like the root
system of the tree would be the underworld. Yeah, all
of our gifts are from Hell. I'll leave that one
for the listeners to figure out. All right, we should

(20:06):
probably take a quick break, and when we get back,
we will jump into some various global examples of the
sacred Tree, the Tree of life, the Holy Tree, so
that we can further ground this discussion. Alright, we're back,
So why don't we start with the example that is
probably most obvious for many of our listeners, the jude

(20:28):
and Christian tree. We were already kind of getting into
it with a Christmas tree, that's right. Yeah. Western audiences
are likely familiar with the trees of Eden Uh and
the Fall of Man and the Bible. Humans were denied
the fruit of the Tree of eternal life, but the
ate of the Tree of knowledge. Later in Christianity, the
god incarnate Jesus Christ dies upon an artificial tree of sorts,

(20:50):
the Cross and Uh. In that essay that I was
referencing earlier um ecologist gear hess Mark, he quotes a St.
Justin mar who said that the Lord quote reigned from
the tree, meaning both the Cross and the Tree of life.
So two were kind of combined into one symbol. I
never thought about that before that the cross is a

(21:10):
tree a dead tree, weird. And the way the crown
of thorns too, well, yeah, you can definitely make that
case as well. Huh. Now, outside of just the Christian tradition,
in Jewish tradition, we have plenty of examples of this
as well. The minora, for example, symbolizes the expansion and
illumination of consciousness in the image of the tree. Yeah,

(21:31):
and obviously, as I mentioned earlier, the tree is represented
in Christianity by the tree that's in the Garden of Eden. Interestingly,
the Christian Church interpretation seems to be one of the
only ones that associates the tree with guilt and sin.
It became a loathsome quote tree of temptation only in

(21:51):
Christian Europe, So that's kind of interesting. As we go
through our other examples here, you don't really see that. Yeah, well,
I mean, I guess you could make a case that,
like the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of of
life in Christian traditions, like they're they're not really vilified
so much as like humans were unsuitable consumers of either fruit. Yeah. Yeah,

(22:13):
that's true. That's true. So this leads us to our
second example, which is connected to Judaism, which is the
Jewish mystical doctrine known as Kabbalah. This is one of
the ones I mentioned at the top. The Seffirof is
another tree of life within the Kabbala that represents a
theory of ten creative forces that intervened between the divine

(22:33):
in our world. Most people probably are familiar with the
terms Seferrath from Final Fantasy seven. I believe that's the
end boss. But if if you, if you have so
much as looked up Kabbala on Wikipedia and even just
glanced at it, you've probably seen this symbol like this
is the Probably you could say this is the chief
symbol of the cab Yeah. The right side of the

(22:54):
Seffroth represents principles of unity, harmony, and benevolence, and this
I as associated with masculinity. The left side is a
side of power and strict justice that is seen as
the female side, and it represents the fearsome awe of God.
Now this is not me, this is from the literature.

(23:14):
When unrestrained, the side, the feminine side, gives rise to evil.
So it's pretty obvious that there's some sexist and gendered
systems going on within Cabala, even from the get go.
But I have to be honest that I don't know
enough about Cabala other than that basic reading of it
that I can't comment any further on it. So if
there's people out there that know it much better, maybe

(23:36):
maybe it's not sexist. Maybe it makes sense. The way
that it probably makes sense is because the middle column
represents an ideal balance between mercy and justice. So it's
a balancing between gender identities. Yeah, and it recognizes that
the universe itself could not survive without both of these.

(23:57):
I looked at this paper by m. Dan See that
came out in twenty eleven called Archetypes and the Spheres
of the Tree of Life. It was published in the
Scientific Journal of Humanistic Studies, and Dancy says cobbalists consider
that by becoming more and more conscious of these archetypical forces,
life may become a meaningful adventure based on increased consciousness

(24:21):
and on the knowledge of the divine uh and Dancy
primarily in this paper is citing a book by Gareth
Knight that's called A Practical Guide to cobbalistic symbolism, and
it recommends the idea really of the suffer rath here
is training the mind through special techniques like meditation, so
that you can further understand the archetypes that are within

(24:42):
this tree of life. So these realizations that come from
meditating on this are important and cobbalistic practice because it
allows the significance of the ramification of those symbols to
be better understood. The basic idea here is that by
understanding the archetypes of the tree of life, we can
better under stand our own nature and then subsequently become

(25:03):
better versions of ourselves. That sounds nice. I don't know
a ton about cobbalism other than you know, the connections
it has obviously some of the occult things that you
and I have covered in the past. Uh, there's some
interesting like overlap there. But also obviously it had like
kind of a pop culture surge, what would you say,
in like the mid two thousand's, Yeah, I think so.

(25:25):
I think that was around the time that I picked
up a really really well um pageinated Cabbala book. Like
I I didn't have enough time to really get into it,
but I was leafing through it and I realized, wow,
this the layout in this book is just amazing. They
do such a great job with the symbols and these
little explanations of everything. But then a friend's birthday came

(25:48):
up and we're like, oh crap, we need to get
him something. Let's give them this book, and I haven't really,
I haven't picked that book back up again from another Well,
it seems like the celebrity that most people associate with
this is Madonna. I believe that she was pretty heavily
involved with with Cobbalism, but that's about the extent of
my knowledge of it. It seems like, though, when whenever
I've read over these kind of very basic explanations of

(26:10):
the symbology, it's very similar to lots of other cultures.
So it's it's not all that much mystic or occult
in the sense of that it's different from other things.
All Right, So we've hit Christian and Jewish tradition. We
should probably touch in on the Middle East and Islam. Yeah,
so this example isn't necessarily Islamic in nature, but some

(26:31):
people believe that the tree of life symbolism actually originated
in the Middle East, maybe also Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece,
so somewhere in that general area. Now gear offt is
an almost fourteen thousand square kilometer area that's in southeastern
Iran and it had great influence on cultural developments of

(26:53):
the third millennium BC in the Bronze Age, so this
is seen as a potential area for where this actually
all star it out today. Giraffe is also the name
for a city that is in the Kerman Province of Iran,
and in ancient Iranian religions, there is some evidence that
cypress trees were considered divine because they were brought from

(27:14):
heaven by Zarathustra, but the date tree is more commonly
a symbol of fertility, that is throughout both Egypt and Mesopotamia.
So some of the first depictions of the Tree of
Life seemed to be either date trees or palm trees,
but cypress trees are also associated with it. Uh. These
are the things that are these trees growing around in Afghanistan,

(27:35):
so they're associated and this is where that goat Ibec
symbology seems to come from as well. It's directly related
to this area of the world. Uh. There's this paper
by res Garad that came out this year has this
great overview of symbology and the Journal of History, Culture
and Art Research, and they use this visual structure, credibility,

(28:00):
and aesthetics to conduct an analytical and semantic survey of
how trees and goat symbology is used in artwork from
this particular region. It's it's pretty interesting. Yeah. This all
this also reminds me of our Zoophilia episode where we
talk a little bit about about humanity's closeness to nature
and closeness to animals through most of its history. So

(28:22):
it seems natural that you would look to animals and
as you're thinking about yourself and your world, you use
them as mirrors, you use them as symbols, and and
of course you would look to trees as well, in
much the same way that you know, we would look
to our the digits of our hands and feet and
end up basing our number systems on those. So, um,

(28:42):
I mean, I would imagine this is just I'm just
going off the cuff here. This is not the notes,
but they if you're an early civilization, you're going to
base your community around areas that have a ready water
source and plenty of trees. You know, for lots of reasons. Um,
so yeah, it seems a lot are all that the
tree would be the center of the community. All right,

(29:03):
let's look at a few other areas of human tradition.
So the ancient Egyptians, how the acacia tree is sacred,
the first couple Isis and Osiris are said to have
emerged from it, and there are there are various traditions
of holy trees and spirit trees, at least in African traditions.
This gets into this whole legacy of of of trees
being a place where the spirits of the dead reside

(29:25):
the people, people transform into trees and sometimes you know,
trees transform into people. There's been there being this, this
this strict link between the two. Now if you get
into Hinduism that there are some wonderful examples here as well.
So Hinduism has no singular creation story. It has many
uh there there's there's no singular creation, but rather periodic

(29:46):
cycles of creation. And this is just one of innumerable
universes in this view of the cosmos. So in in
our reality, the ideas that it all begins in a
vast ocean, a serpent sleeps on its surface. Vishnus sleeps
in its coils, and a lotus sprouts from his navel,
and within it is Brahma, and he's urged to meditate

(30:09):
on the nature of of his coming creation and finally
splits the lotus into three forms heaven, sky, and Earth.
Everything else stems from this. So while it's not a
tree per se, we still see the growth of a
plant as the means of explaining cosmic emergence. And then
also Hinduism holds them the ashvata or the sacred fig

(30:30):
as holy, which we referenced in the opening reading from
the Bagavadgita. Speaking of which the that reading referenced the
Banyan tree. I think that's how you say banyon Banyan.
That tree is the perfect representation of a sacred tree
with cosmic principles because it has aerial roots that come

(30:50):
down from its branches. I've never seen one of these.
It sounds super cool. It comes the roots, come down
from the branches and then take root in the ground.
So the appearance suggests the tree is actually rooted in
the heavens. That seems really interesting. And then I think
that this is connected to Buddhism, right, yeah, Yeah, it's
said that Siddharta Gattama experience enlightenment under the Banyan or

(31:12):
sometimes it's referred to as the Bodhi tree, and thus
became the Shakyamuni Buddha, the often just referred to as Buddha.
And you see this depicted in a lot of Buddhist
iconography and uh and and sometimes just happenstance to. For instance,
if you've anyone who's ever been to Thailand, if you
go to the Ruins of Youth, ya, there's this iconic

(31:36):
Buddha head, a statue head that has been overtaken by
the roots of a tree. Yeah, and that's interesting. So
tons of photos have been taken. I was gonna say,
lots of symbolic connections there. Yeah. Now, we've talked a
bit in the past about sacred plants in Chinese mythology,
Chinese traditional medicine, folk traditions. We've also touched on Chinese

(31:59):
cosma oology and how there are a few different cosmic
origin stories. But the Chinese definitely have a world tree
or two. They have actually have quite a few sacred trees.
So I was reading about this in A Burial's Chinese Mythology,
which again i've referenced this this text on the show before.
It's just a wonderful book on Chinese mythology, and she

(32:22):
she references uh the Chien MoU sky ladder uh, and
she says that China MoU literally means building tree. At
any rate, it's situated at the center of the world,
so centered that it produces neither shadow nor echo. It
was created by the Yellow Emperor, and it grew into
the sky, and having reached the impenetrable barrier of the heavens,

(32:44):
it spreads across its expanse and quote likewise above the
barrier of the ends of the earth, creating gigantic coils
and the sky and huge root tangles in the earth.
Then the gods used this sky ladder to ascend and descend.
And it's pnk is purple, it's blossoms black, and its
fruit is yellow. Okay, So this is definitely a world tree.

(33:05):
It's that vertical tradition of going up to the heavens exactly.
Now you have other cosmic trees and Chinese tradition, including
the Trinity mulberry, the search tree, the accord tree. There's
the leaning mulberry tree. And this is where the ten
sons roosted in ancient times before the hero you the
Archer shot the nine surplus sons down. That's one of them. Sorry,

(33:28):
remind me of this because we talked about it in
a previous episode. Isn't you the Archer one of those
uh like mythological iterations of the hero symbol? Yeah? Yeah,
so that The idea here with this story is that
there was a time when there were ten sons and
it was just burning the earth up. You know, we
couldn't have the crops wouldn't grow. And then the heroic
Archer comes forth and he's able to shoot the nine

(33:49):
surplus sons out of the sky, leaving just one son
to to light and warm the world. Oh wow, he
would be perfect for the end of our Uninhabitable Earth
episode that we just recorded. Once the earth the sun
starts turning into a red giant, he can just shoot
it down. That's right. As long as he has one
arrow left in the quiver, we're good, right. Uh. In
Chinese tradition, there's also the giant peach tree, which also

(34:11):
tangles against the barrier of heaven. Uh. The peaches here,
they provide immortality to those who consume it, and it
also serves as a bridge between realms. I have a
quote here that Beryl provides in her book Uh and
this is This is from an older Chinese text in
Sane See there is two show mountain. On its summit

(34:33):
is a huge peach tree. It twists and turns over
three thousand leagues among its branches. On the northeast side
or what is called goblin gates, through which a myriad
goblin's pass. On top. There two gods. One is called
Holy Shoe, the other is called Yulu. These lords supervise
and control the myriad goblins. Whenever a goblin does evil,

(34:56):
they bind him with a reed rope and feed him
to tigers. Then the Yellow Emperor devised a ritual ceremony
so that they could expel the evildo or in due season,
they set up a large peachwood figurines and painted images
of Holy Shoe and Yulu and a tiger on gates
and doors, and hung reed ropes from them so as
to harness the evil. So some of you probably sat

(35:19):
up while you're listening to this and went, wait a minute,
goblin's Yeah, but it actually makes sense across cultures. So
this is here's one of the amazing connections we're gonna make,
all right, So let's go from Chinese mythology to that
section that Robert just read to us, right, sounds a
little Lord of the Rings e right, Yeah, yeah, Goblin gates,
Goblin spelling out of the into out of other realms

(35:40):
onto our ours, crawling down the world tree. Yeah, and
then you take that, imagine the little Indiana Jones dotted line,
and you're traveling across the world to Norris culture. And
then we get the egg DRIs Cill tree that I
mentioned at the top. And this is very Lord of
the Rings. In fact, I would imagine that it probably
in aspired a lot of Tolkien's mythos, right. But the

(36:04):
idea here is in the twelfth century Icelandic scholar, poet, historian,
and politician Snorri Sturlinson wrote about Igdrasill in his epic
poem The Ada and Igdrasill. A lot of you are
probably familiar with this, like myself, mainly from Thor and

(36:25):
Marvel comics. So the Thor movies are pretty big right now.
And then in the comic books, really Stanley and Jack
Kirby were just kind of like, hey, let's take this
entire entire cultures mythology, and we'll just bastardize it and
turn these into superheroes, uh and make them talk like
they're in a Shakespearean play. Well, that's that's that's kind
of that's sal mythology works. Yeah, take what came before

(36:46):
and then you you repackage it for the current audience.
Exactly in the original Norris mythology, Igdrasill is also a
bridge between all of the great realms of existence. In
its middle is Asgard, but also reaches the realms of frost,
giants and Niflheim. I think is how you say it,
which is the underworld or the realm of the dead?

(37:08):
Going off of my Marvel knowledge, not of the research
into Norris mythology, I think there's also places where their
dwarves there's like a dark elf place, like there are
different the nine realms that they reference that are connected
to Igdrasill have like different sort of D and d
Lord of the Ring species that exist in each one. Now,

(37:29):
there are three sacred springs that are supposed to be
beneath Igdrasil. The first is the Spring of Wisdom and Knowledge.
The second is the Well of Destiny, that's guarded by
the norns, who are the sisters of fate. Uh And
the last is the river of life that carries the
souls of the dead back to be reborn into their

(37:49):
next incarnations. So you can see Idrisilla is both a
world tree and a tree of life. It's pretty interesting. Now,
Idrisill is one of those trees that has a serpent.
Remember we were talking about how sometimes there's goats, sometimes
there's dragons, sometimes there's serpents. If you just sill serpent
is nid hog and this is a serpent that gnaws
away at its roots. But this serpent is kept at

(38:11):
bay by an eagle that lives in its upper branches,
and the eagle will come down occasionally and fight off
the fight off the serpent. The eagle itself is a
symbol of the sun. Again, coming right back to this
Chinese mythology. So it's kind of fascinating to see. This
is a perfect example of how far away these cultures
are from one another, and yet how similar their archetypes are. Yeah,

(38:32):
I mean it would be uh it would be it
would be unsettling if we didn't have all these additional
reads and uh um and and analyses to go off on. Yeah, so, uh,
similar to this, and this is what I wish we
had more time to get into, but unfortunately, you know,
we're just we've got too many trees. Uh. There's the

(38:53):
Yacht's tree in the meso American World tree culture. It's
very similar to others we've mentioned, especially these lad Us
two and it's represented in these cultures as the seabaw
tree and its access connects the earth in the sky
and its roots go into the underworld. Zebulba. Now the
Zebulba thing. This is going to be our segue. We'll

(39:14):
just talk real briefly about some pop culture examples. The
one that immediately came to mind for me after Thor
is Darren Aronofsky is The Fountain, which is about trees
of life and and they use the terminology for the
meso American tree a lot in that. And don't forget Avatar,
that's right central world tree at the heart of that

(39:34):
movie as well. You also see it in things like
American Gods, obviously because that's based on myths. But I've
mentioned World of Warcraft on the show before. I remember
there's a tree called nord Dressill in World of Warcraft
that's like literally like a tree that you you go
to and it has its own you know, video game
mythology surrounding it. Also, remember you were talking about space

(39:56):
elevators at the beginning. I hadn't thought of this before.
The Dark Tower by Stephen King. The Dark Tower is
a world tree. It's just a variation on it. He
kind of takes the the idea of a false tree
and makes it true again in a weird way. Yeah,
and then of course we see the iterations of the
Trio life and a lot of pop culture. Obviously, Uh,

(40:16):
we can trace this back to Joseph Campbell, who we've
talked about in our myth episodes before, because it is
a common archetype that he mentions in his book The
Hero with a Thousand Faces, which is this book that
just like every screenwriter under the sun since probably like
the late sixties has been referencing. Alright, well, on that note,
let's take one more break, and when we get back,

(40:36):
we'll we'll start teasing a part the psychology and even
the science of this fascination, this obsession with tree symbolism.
Thank thank Alright, we're back, So we've done a pretty
good job. I think of showing just a lot of examples,
like putting the evidence on the table. Look, there are
all these world trees, they're very similar, they're all over

(40:58):
the world. But what we haven't answered yet is why,
why how is it that this happened? Well, one uh,
explanation that comes to mind, and I've kind of been
alluding to this a lot already. It has to do
with the biophilia hypothesis, which listeners to the show you
may remember that Joe and I did an episode on

(41:18):
biophilia hypothesis recently. It's a fascinating take on humanity's attachment
to nature. It's the work of of acclaimed American biologist
Edward O. Wilson, a highly accomplished scientist and author of
numerous books wonderful author, including N four's Biophilia The Human
Bond with Other Species, in which he defined biophilia as

(41:41):
humanity's innate tendency to focus on living things as opposed
to inanimate things any in an in effect, he argued
for an innate love of nature. He said, quote, the
object of my reflection can be summarized by a single
world biophilia, which I will be so bold as to
define as the innate tendency to folk us on life
and lifelike processes. Okay, so you can definitely see a

(42:03):
connection here where again, like all of these cultures are
focusing on the lifelike processes that are around them and
using this terminology to define both the immaterial and in
the material things that are around them right right now.
When it comes to evidence for this hypothesis and and
it remains a hypothesis there, there's various evidence that's presented,

(42:26):
including the universal appreciation for nature among human cultures, the
symbolic use of nature in language. So you know, think
of all the times just during the course of your
day that you compare your own behaviors and motivations or
those around you to the actions of animals or plants. Yes, yeah,
a lot. Yeah, Like if you actually stopped yourself throughout

(42:47):
the day, or at least in my case, if I
stop myself throughout the day and realized how many times
I use UH similes or metaphors just in my my
general conversation that are alluding to animal activities or or
natural activities. And then also another bit of of of
supporting evidence is the spiritual reverence for nature across culture.

(43:09):
So animust, God's sacred environmental places and sacred trees. So
the idea here is that our attraction to the natural
world is just hardwired into us, and so of course
we build it into our metaphoric and symbolic understanding of
the world. Is pointed out by Robert Sommer in Trees
and Human identity, and this is collected in identity and

(43:31):
the natural environment the psychological significance of nature. Belief in
sacred trees and tree spirits is of very ancient things
and entailing both the creation of people from trees, the
transformation of people into trees and UH. James G. Frasier
he discusses numerous examples of this in his work as well,
including uh uh the I believe it is the Diary

(43:54):
tribe of South Australia who regarded certain trees as their
fathers transformed. Some Philippine Islanders also believe the souls of
their forefathers reside in trees. These just to name a few,
we see. We see this legacy continue today even in
the form of memory trees, you know, planting planting a
tree in in remembrance of somebody who has died and

(44:17):
uh and some of the psychological uh, factors that are
involved there. So I had one example, and I didn't
know where to place this. This is the best spot
I could find. Maybe it's a biophilia related example. Uh.
It is actually thought that the world tree tree of
life symbology is why you find in graveyards and cemeteries

(44:40):
ancient trees that are often used, and they're often planted
next to springs of water. So I wonder if that's
related to this the idea of the spirits belonging to
the trees. Well, you know, if you think of a
large tree growing in a cemetery graveyard, yeah, I mean
it makes perfect sense. Right, the underworld the place where

(45:00):
the dead go, that is where the bodies are are
literally laid to rest. It's providing sustenance to the tree. Yeah.
And then and then you have the tree growing up
into into the sky, and then it makes it makes
perfect sense. Now, there are various additional ways to tackle
the symbol of the tree, and UH. I found a

(45:23):
number of different examples here. We're going to roll through
these and discuss these. Uh. And at least some of
these are pointed out by by Richard Summer and again
in that work trees and human identity, which I highly recommend. So,
first of all, there's the Darwinian take on everything. The
roll of trees in a natural selection influence latent and
manifest preferences people as trees past and present. Uh, preferences

(45:48):
merged with self image. I am what I like, I
like what I am. And also Darwin was a fan
of trees as symbols of evolutionary process he said in
fifty nine The Orde and of Species. I believe this
similarly largely speaks the truth. So when when if you've
ever looked into a natural selection, you've probably or even

(46:09):
just to you know, flipped around and say a book
on dinosaurs, you've probably encountered these these trees, these essentially
family trees of of how we think different species emerged
from each other. And these are known as phylogenetic trees.
And we're so we're still using the tree as a
way to understand who we are in the world. Yeah,

(46:30):
this was the science angle that I was mentioning at
the top of the episode. The phylogenetic tree. Uh. It's
used in the sciences as a representation of evolutionary relationships
between all species on Earth, and one paper I downloaded.
Actually was all about this software that's being built, these
various tools to explore that representation that connects eight hundred

(46:52):
thousand to two point two million species together. The idea
being that you're reproducing the phylogenetic classification scheme that describes
evolutionary relationships, but you're using a tree as a map. Yeah. Yeah,
now that that piece that I referenced earlier by gear
hest Mark Temptations of the tree. Uh. Now he he
made an interesting argument here. He said that phylogenetic trees

(47:15):
have a rhetorical power that's hard to shake. Yeah. He
reminds readers that ultimately these are only sketches of historical
hypothesis constructed from imperfect historical evidence. So they're not they're
not set in stone or set in would rather uh
like the living physical trees. There's almost kind of a
trap in referencing, uh, something that has a sort of

(47:37):
symbolic potency to it like that. That's interesting, Yeah, especially
like from my rhetorical background, Like I could totally see
somebody writing like two dissertation trying to pull that all
apart and how it's used. That's very interesting, And I
wonder if you could trace how tree symbology is used

(47:58):
in political rhetoric as well, bringing it into a sort
of a more contemporary cultural point of view, because it's
interesting to think of what the tree is doing, you know,
because from a human perspective, at any given moment, a
tree is is a solid thing reaching from earth into
the sky. And yet at the same time it is
it is, it is growing, it is reaching in a

(48:20):
way that that a mountain is not. And when we're
aware of it, like we know that a tree starts
how small, and grows larger, but it takes takes place
over the course of a lifetime or multiple lifetimes. Well,
and then on top of that, it's vulnerable to a
tree maybe chopped down, a tree maybe blown down by
the wind, whereas a mountain would not. Hopefully, no, I

(48:42):
mean the mountain over time. But I don't even know
to what extent that was. Uh, that that's what That's
not something I've looked at in the research. But I'm
not sure to what extent ancient people's were aware of
erosions the mountains. Yeah, well, all of this could would
potentially be explained by another aspect that we've already mentioned

(49:04):
here today. This is young Ian depth psychology. So the
idea here of the archetypes and human collective subconscious that
I mentioned earlier. There are some people that argue the
world tree itself actually has evolutionary origins, not phylogenetically, but
as part of our collective unconscious, that it's like all

(49:24):
of us have this kind of programmed into our minds.
Were thinking about numbers with their fingers and thinking about
other aspects of the world with treats. Yeah, outside of
Young's perspective, almost all world tree traditions seem to have
levels to them, and I didn't really mention this too much,
but some of the examples that I provided, so for instance,
like the suffer Rath and Idris Sill, they have variations

(49:46):
of levels. These range between eight and twenty two throughout cultures,
and they seem to represent specific states of consciousness. So
Idrisill is the example I'll use here. It's composed of
the nine worlds I meant and some of these earliers.
When it's mapped out, mid Guard, which is Earth's representation,
is at the center of the trunk the world that's

(50:07):
where we live. The arrangement of all the other worlds
around it are North south east and west on the tree,
and those represent awareness and perception. But then there's worlds
that are above midguard and those represent higher levels of consciousness,
and worlds below midguard that represent the unconscious mind. Now,
just going off script here for a second, that immediately

(50:31):
calls to mind Freudian psychology. Right, so did ego super
ego That seems like Igors was representing all of that,
like thousands of years before Freud even put that to paper. Now,
another take on all of this is the phenomenological approach.
This is the idea, and we've been talking about this already,
is that you have metaphors between the natural and the

(50:53):
human world. Here we have, you know, the roots, trunk,
and the canopy of a tree, and these are mirroring
the infernal or such anian world, the earthly world, and
the heavenly world. And uh. On top of that, people
in society are covered by fruits or flowers that are
growing within the tree. A tree provides a first hand
encounter with the world and our our place in it.

(51:14):
This made me think back to my last visit to
Zoo Atlanta. Yeah, all the time, they know you, they
know you probably at the gates, right, Yeah, well they
have they have this one aviary section and they have
a ton of birds in there from different parts of
the world, and there's a large tree in there, and
the birds make their homes in different parts of the tree.

(51:36):
Like there's I think it's a scarlet um ibis that
it only stays at the very top. It's like some
it's like like like a heavenly bird. If we're thinking
of this as a world tree, and others make their
home and other portions of the tree. I believe those
ibises are natural to Trinidad and Tobago because when I

(51:57):
visited there, she's almost fifteen years ago, they were all
around naturally and they did the same thing. Yeah, it's
a beautiful bird. So you can imagine what how how
seeing things like that in nature would then also affect
your interpretation of the tree and your use of the
tree as a metaphor. Then, according to Summer, there's also
the realm of ecopsychology, which I I think sounds an

(52:19):
awful lot like biophilia, And maybe there's a there's more
connection there that I'm not aware of. He says, quote,
beyond the individual self, there is an ecological self that
is nurtured through contact with and concern for the natural environment.
A person should feel at one with nature, and if
these feelings are absent or distorted, a healing process is needed.
So the tree kind of becomes a way to engage

(52:43):
in that reconnection. Like even even if you're in the
middle of a city and uh and and and maybe
there's not a nearby park, just the symbol of the
tree can sort of get in touch with that ecological
biophilic legacy. All of this, the last two, especially phenomenal
logical approaches and ecopsychological approaches, make me think of Cormac

(53:04):
McCarthy's The Road, because the idea I believe behind that
book is that it's thematically about our ecosystem and the
basically like our mistreatment of the ecosystem. Right, And it's
been a while since I've read that book. It's super depressing,
but basically I remember a lot of descriptions of dead trees. Yeah, yeah,

(53:25):
that's that is a great book, a pretty bleak book.
I've yet to read it as a father, um, and
I don't think I'm quite ready to do that. I
can imagine that would be real tough, um, but certainly
I yeah, now that now that you mentioned Court McCarthy
and the world tree, I wonder he trees come up.

(53:45):
I mean, trees come up in every work of fiction. Really.
I mean it's it's in the same It's kind of
the core argument here is that trees are such a
part of our world that they have become an inseparable
part of our our symbolic understanding of our elves in
the universe and cosmology, that it becomes this thing upon
which we build our our boldest fantasies and our our

(54:09):
darkest hors. So it's it's one of those things where
I feel like you could probably tease apart any work
of literature and say, okay, here's my you know, three
ball volume study of trees and Cornan McCarthy or trees
in the work of Shakespeare. I'm sure I'm sure someone
has done. Yes. Yeah, Well, I think that's part of
the reason why I wanted to end with this topic,

(54:30):
because it seems like it's so universal. We're heading into
Christmas season and it seems like we've found uh no,
no pun intended a route for the origin of the
Christmas tree, right, but that it's just this thing that
connects us all together no matter what our religion or
ethnicity or creeds, whatever trees are important to us. Indeed, alright, Christian,

(54:54):
well well this was it, then, this was this was
your your final episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
So again I want to thank you for all that
you've done on this show, with this show, helping to
grow this show over the past few years. Oh I,
we look forward to keeping in touch with you in
the future. Can you tell our listeners where they can
continue to uh, to listen to you, to read your

(55:17):
work over the years ahead. Yeah, thank you, and thanks
again for having me on the show the last couple
of years. Everyone out there, and and this is Robert
and Joe included. You can all reach me on Twitter
at Christian Sager, or if you want to email me,
for instance about this episode, uh, you can email me
at Christian dot Seger at gmail dot com. I will

(55:38):
also continue to be hanging out in our Stuff to
Blow Your Mind discussion module on Facebook, so you're not
getting rid of me that easily. I'll be interacting with
the awesome community that we have over there. I may
not be here on the show anymore, but I'm still
going to be actively writing and podcasting online, and as
Robert alluded to, I'm continuing to do my creator own podcast,

(55:59):
Super cont Text. Some of you are familiar with this,
but if you've never heard it before, it's a podcast
autopsy of media, how we consume it and how it
informs our everyday culture. In each episode, we try to
understand the entertainment world we all live in, whether it's film, television, prose, music,
or comic books. You can find it wherever you get podcasts,
or you can get it at super Context dot Libson

(56:22):
dot com. I'll also be publishing a goodbye post to
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com that will also
cover all of this stuff. Is where you can find
me and uh, I imagine that we'll have like cross
links between the podcast page and that blog page referencing
back to both one another. That's right, And yeah, I
recommend everyone check out super Context, even if you if

(56:44):
you don't have time to listen to it when it
comes out. Check out the artwork. The artwork is always
amusing because you you do custom artwork for each episode.
I do, yeah, I hand draw, well, it's there digitally,
but I draw the artwork for every episode, and they're
like weird little car tunes that are related to whatever
the topic is. Yeah, awesome, all right, well thanks again,

(57:06):
so that this is thanks, this is goodbye, and hey,
the rest of you, you want to keep up with
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(57:28):
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(57:53):
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