As we continue our discussion of sacred trees and groves in places as far removed as Assyria, ancient Palestine, Gaul, Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia, we will see similar themes in all these places. All of them bear witness to a pattern of repression by conquering nations and factions who use the destruction of the symbols that give meaning to the conquered culture, in an attempt to sever its link to the land which gives it life. Trees are a representation of these cultures’ cosmologies and the dwelling places of their divinities, destruction of their sacred groves and holy trees is often the first step in cultural genocide. In an unfortunate drama which has been played out innumerable times throughout history and is still being played out today. Genocide begins with ecocide. Destroy the sacred trees, cut the sacred groves, ban the ancient rites, slander the old ways with a propaganda campaign, preferably by erasing all counter narratives, and impose the cultural traditions of the conquerors by force.
The Biblical tradition of the ancient Hebrew people had its own version of the sacred tree myth, which stems from the Biblical Book of Genesis. In the Garden of Eden, the primordial paradise in which the first humans were placed, the creator god Yahweh Elohim, “ planted a garden in Eden in the east; and there he placed the man he formed. And out of the ground Yahweh Elohim made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” (Genesis 2:8-9) A river flowed out of the garden of Eden, which became four rivers, the Gihon, the Pishon, the Tigris, and the Euphrates, which flowed from the Tree of life at the center of the world, like mandala, a central tree with four rivers watering the whole world. In the familiar tale Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, but are expelled from the garden for their disobedience before they have a chance to eat the fruit of the tree of life. It is possible that this story is related to Assyrian tales of the Tree of Life, a legendary cedar or date palm known as the kiškānû.
Assyriologist Archibald Sayce related the story of the kiškānû with both the myth of Tammuz and the Garden of Eden. Tammuz was the son of Ea, known to the Sumerians as Enki and the goddess Dav-kina, and his original home was the “garden” of Edin, or Eden, which according to Sayce, in Babylonian tradition, was located near Eridu, 12 miles from the city of Ur in what is now Iraq. This ancient hymn, preserved in a cuneiform tablet tells of the tree of Tammuz in Edin:
“1. ‘(In) Eridu a stalk” grew over-shadowing; in a holy place did it become green;
2. its root ([sur]sum) was of white crystal which stretched towards the deep ;
3. (before) Ea was its course in Eridu, teeming with fertility;
4.its seat was the (central) place of the earth;
5. its foliage (?) was the couch of Zikum (the primaeval) mother.
6. Into the heart of its holy house which spread its shade like a forest hath no man entered.
7. (There is the home) of the mighty mother who passes across the sky.
8. (In) the midst of it was Tammuz.
(line 9 is missing)
10. (There is the shrine?) of the two (gods).”
(Archibald Sayce, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by the Religion of the Ancient Babylonians, p.238.)
Interestingly Sayce explicitly mentioned a similarity between the Tree of Tammuz and the Tree of Norse mythology, Yggdrasil, writing the following: “The description reminds us of the famous Ygg-drasil of Norse mythology, the world-tree whose roots descend into the world of death, while its branches rise into Asgard, the heaven of the gods. The Babylonian poet evidently imagined his tree also to be a world-tree, whose roots stretched downwards into the abysmal deep, where Ea presided, nourishing the earth with the springs and streams that forced their way upwards from it to the surface of the ground. Its seat was the earth itself, which stood midway between the deep below and Zikum, the primordial heavens, above, who rested as it were upon the overshadowing branches of the mighty “stem.” Within it, it would seem, was the holy house of Dav-kina, “the great mother,” and of Tammuz her son, a temple too sacred and far hidden in the recesses of the earth for mortal man to enter.” (Archibald Sayce, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by the Religion of the Ancient Babylonians, pp.238,239.) The similarity between the two trees must be purely archetypal, as far removed in time and space as the cultures that created them are. But we do see similar tree symbolism in much nearer central Asia, the home of the Indo-European cultural ancestors of the Germanic Norse.
Sayce’s identification of the kiškānû with the Biblical Tree of Life has fallen out of favor with scholars, but it is interesting; a sacred tree in a garden with divine beings, in the center of the world sounds much like the Edenic trees as well. Again, the link may be the archetypal universality of the tree motif, rather than cultural influence. However, after the fall of Jerusalem (597 BCE) and the Kingdom of Judah, many Judean people were brought to Babylon by their conquerors and were held captive there for nearly 60 years, until 538 BCE, which would have been several generations, during which time many would have absorbed a large amount of Babylonian culture. Some parts of the creation narrative in the Book of Genesis were believed to have been written or compiled during the captivity, so it is possible that Babylonian myths of a primal garden of the gods and sacred trees with magical properties were influences on the narrative.
Assyriologist Simo Parpola, in a paper titled The Assyrian Tree of Life: Tracing the Origin of Jewish Mysticism and Greek Philosophy, asserts that the the source of the famous cosmological diagram known as the Tree of Life, The Etz Chaim, which is central to the medieval Jewish mystical system known as the Kabbalah. The Kabbalistic tree, he says, originated with the tree of life motif central to the Mesopotamian worldview. Parpola tells us that the Assyrian “tree symbolized the divine world order” and that “it could also be projected on the king to portray him as the perfect man.” (Simo Parpola, The Assyrian Tree of Life: Tracing the Origin of Jewish Mysticism and Greek Philosophy, p.166-167) The Kabbalistic tree also symbolizes the divine order, it describes a graded system of divine emanations from a transcendent source to the material world. The divine emanation passes through ten levels or Sephiroth in the creation of the material realm, which is sustained by pulses of divine efflux moment to moment. Many systems have been formulated to equate these Sephiroth with gods, angels, and planetary intelligences, in a manner highly influenced by Neoplatonism. Parpola adds his own nuance by graphing the Babylonian gods on the tree, in the Sephiroth he deems appropriate to their own powers and attributes, in a way that seems both natural and appropriate. (Simo Parpola, The Assyrian Tree of Life: Tracing the Origin of Jewish Mysticism and Greek Philosophy, pp. 177-181)
Parpola asserts that “the emergence of Kabbalah as a doctrinal structure can now be reliably traced to the first century in A.D.61. The renowned rabbinical schools of Babylonia were the major centers from which the Kabbalistic doctrines spread to Europe during the high Middle Ages” (Parpola, ibid, p.174.) Placing the development of this influential system of Jewish mysticism well into antiquity, and presenting a very good case for Babylonian origins to this “branch” of the myth of the sacred tree, one with its roots in the supercelestial realm of the ultimate transcendent.
Another part of the story of Middle Eastern and Jewish myths of the Sacred Tree, is the presence in the Biblical tradition of a being or object called Asherah, who is at times described as either a goddess or a sacred pole or tree of some sort, and in all likelihood is both. She may be associated with the Babylonian traditions of the sacred tree described above, and perhaps be related to Dav-kina, the consort of Ea, and mother of Tammuz. Some historians have proposed that Yahweh or perhaps El, who was subsumed into the Yahweh cult, are forms of Ea/Enlil, and Asherah has been thought to be the consort of Yahweh, so there is actually a chance that these (sorry for the pun) are yet two more branches of the same tradition.
In ancient Palestine, the traditional religion of the ancient Israelites, before the Yahweh cult rose to ascendancy, involved the worship of a pantheon of divinities, including the goddess Asherah. Asherah was a Canaanite fertility goddess, divine consort of the chief god El, who was later absorbed by the Yahweh cult. (John Day, Yahweh and The Gods and Goddesses of Canaan, p. 60) The cult of Asherah seems to have involved trees, groves, and wooden pillars, set up in mountain top sanctuaries throughout Israel and Judah, indeed the plural asherim is used mostly to refer, scholars say, to wooden poles and carved cult objects, and sometimes live trees representing the goddess. On the basis of several inscriptions that mention “Yahweh and his Asherah” some authorities believe that she was worshiped as a consort of Yahweh in southern Palestine. The Old Testament mentions the word “AShRH” forty times in nine books, many of the mentions record attempts by the leaders of the Yahweh cult to wipe out the cult of the goddess.
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