The tree of life symbol has been used throughout the centuries, in
most cultures. Reaching from Earth to heaven, the sky to the land,
the axis
mundi of the alchemists,
the center of a garden in which trees hold spirits, trees around which
to dance and drum, trees rooted to the center of the Earth, tree of
medication and meditation.
Every mythology seems to have a tree as one of it's characters. The tree being
an archetype with which every culture of the world has lived with, from the desert
shrub to the lush jungle vines. The tree provides foods, shelter from the rain,
wood for the fire and wood to build a house with. It provides a place for humans
and other animal alike to gather under. It provides shade from the hot sun, or
a place to warm up around. The tree has been there as long as humans have, and
much longer, being a symbol for nature and what it provides, a hierachical image,
a rope climbing up to the celestial spheres, the ladder connecting the low and
the high, the known and the unknown.
For the celtic people, there was a yearly
tree calendar. The Buddha got enlightened under a Bodhi
tree, the catholic have a tree of good and evil, the
tree of knowledge, as well as a tree of life which procures immortality.
The Kabala uses
a tree filled with sephirots to represent the planets archetypes
and elements composing the Earth solar system. The shamans of the
Amazon use a vine tree, the tree
of the soul, through which, according to Jeremy Narby in his
Cosmic Serpent book, they access knowledge from a molecular level,
bring this knowledge back to share it with the rest of the tribe,
and apply it to mainly medecinal uses. Science has
it's own tree of categories, the tree of evolution, from single cell
organism, to more complex cells, to the creation of life as we know
it now.The Egyptians had a tree representing the various stages of
human life. The tree Yggdrasil occupied
a central figure in the Norse myths.
It seems the the tree has always been a part of humans myths and archetypes.
