The World Tree

Four Trees, One Theory

First attested
around 300 BCEEach tree is attested only in its own corpus, and the dates do not line up. The inverted aśvattha stands at Kaṭha Upaniṣad 6.1 — the numbering Olivelle's own edition and index print — and at Bhagavad Gītā 15.1–4; Olivelle places the verse Upaniṣads in the last few centuries BCE (Introduction, p. 12), which makes this the earliest of the four and makes the date a bracket rather than a year. Yggdrasil is named in Völuspá 19 and Grímnismál 29–35 in the Codex Regius of c. 1270 and systematised by Snorri Sturluson c. 1220 — Christian Iceland throughout, Snorri two centuries after the conversion of c. 1000, the manuscript nearly three. Palenque's Cross Group was dedicated at 9.12.19.14.12, 10 January 692, under K'inich Kan Bahlam II. Harva's Altaic material was collected from living informants and published in Finnish in 1933 and in German in 1938. No one of these texts refers to any other.
Claimed
around 10000 BCEasserted by Mircea Eliade, who in Patterns in Comparative Religion (Traité d'histoire des religions, 1949; trans. Rosemary Sheed, 1958) and Shamanism (Le Chamanisme, 1951; trans. Willard R. Trask, 1964) presented the Cosmic Tree, Cosmic Pillar and Cosmic Mountain marking the axis mundi as survivals of what he called a substratum of 'primitive' religious beliefs and techniques, reaching back on his account to the first migrations from Northeast Asia into the New World. No claimant offers a date; the figure here stands for that unbounded prehistory, which is why the scale is era. Alice Kehoe observed in 1996 that Eliade's evidence for this archaic substratum came largely from ethnological reports of modern peoples.

The claim runs about 9.7 thousand years ahead of the evidence.

Each of these trees is real in its own text; the one myth joining them is Eliade's, assembled 1949–1951, and the Maya tree was fitted to it only in 1990–93 — Klein and colleagues traced that in 2002 to Freidel's student reading of Eliade.

Four unrelated trees — Norse, Indian, Siberian, Maya — gathered into one archaic myth after Eliade, 1949.

Four trees, four unrelated corpora. The inverted aśvattha — root above, branches below — stands in Kaṭha Upaniṣad 6.1 and Bhagavad Gītā 15.1, where Kṛṣṇa orders it felled. Yggdrasil is named in Völuspá 19 and Grímnismál 29–35, Codex Regius, c. 1270. Uno Harva published the Altaic shaman's tree in 1933, German 1938. Palenque's Temple of the Cross was dedicated 10 January 692. Mircea Eliade fused the Indian, Norse and Siberian trees into one archaic substratum in Patterns in Comparative Religion (1949) and Shamanism (1951); Schele and Freidel added the Maya cross in 1990–93. Axis mundi is his Latin for the sacred centre — older astronomical Latin repurposed, no tradition's own word. Jonathan Z. Smith answered in 1972 that the centre is not universal; Bruce Lincoln, Eliade's own doctoral student, that comparativists credit ancient inheritance for resemblances their own selection produced.

Light

Comparison is how anything is noticed at all. Uno Holmberg's Der Baum des Lebens, 1922, first put the Siberian, Finnic and Near Eastern material on one page — and Smith, who took the method apart, spent the rest of his career rebuilding it.

Shadow

The pattern flattens every text it collects. The Gītā's tree is to be cut down, not revered; and Wakah Chan may be a misnomer — Callaway argued in 2006, Stuart calling the decipherment suspect, that no inscription directly names the cross, or any tree, that.

Sources and verification16 sources · 3 links

Primary source

  • Uno Harva (Finnish original 1933; German translation by Erich Kunze), Die religiösen Vorstellungen der altaischen Völker, FF Communications 125, Helsinki, 1938, the whole volume; the shaman's tree and the ascent through the heavensThe Altaic shaman's tree and the ascent it permits, recorded from living informants and earlier Russian and Finnish ethnography; the Finnish original is Altain suvun uskonto, 1933, and 1938 is Kunze's German. Cited as the record it is, and as history of scholarship: Anna-Leena Siikala's Mythic Images and Shamanism (2002) supersedes Harva's generation for what the material actually shows.
  • J. A. B. van Buitenen, The Bhagavadgītā in the Mahābhārata, 1981, 15.1–4, in the Bhīṣmaparvan of the Poona critical editionGītā 15.1 speaks of an imperishable aśvattha with roots above and branches below; 15.3–4 instructs that it be cut through with the firm weapon of non-attachment, asaṅgaśastreṇa dṛḍhena. The Indian tree is to be felled, not climbed or venerated — and the Gītā is a passage inside an epic, not a free-standing scripture.
  • Patrick Olivelle, The Early Upaniṣads: Annotated Text and Translation, 1998, Kaṭha Upaniṣad 6.1 (vallī 6, the numbering Olivelle prints); the dating of the verse Upaniṣads at Introduction, p. 12The eternal aśvattha with its root above and its branches below, its root identified with brahman; and Olivelle's placement of the verse Upaniṣads, Kaṭha among them, in the last few centuries BCE — a bracket of several centuries, not a year.
  • Snorri Sturluson; ed. Anthony Faulkes, Edda: Prologue and Gylfaginning, 2nd edn, Viking Society for Northern Research, 2005, Gylfaginning 15–16: the ash's three roots, the wells beneath them and the nornsThe systematised Norse cosmology this entry dates to c. 1220–35. Cited as a source ABOUT the myths, not a pagan scripture: Snorri writes in Christian Iceland, euhemerises, and composes Gylfaginning partly as a poets' handbook, and much circulated online as Norse belief is Snorri with no independent attestation. Old Norse text; Faulkes' 1987 translation is the English.
  • Carolyne Larrington (trans.), The Poetic Edda, revised edition, 2014, Völuspá 19; Grímnismál 29–35, especially 31An ash called Yggdrasil standing ever green over Urd's well, with three roots under Hel, the frost-giants and humankind. The manuscript, Codex Regius of c. 1270, is untitled and late-thirteenth-century Christian Icelandic; no poem in it is securely Viking-Age. Cite by poem and stanza, and name the edition — the 2014 revision changes readings from 1996.

Scholarship

  • Uno Holmberg, who took the name Uno Harva in 1927, Der Baum des Lebens, 1922, Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, HelsinkiThe first systematic cross-cultural assembly of world-tree material, and therefore the point at which the comparison itself was made — before Eliade, and by the scholar whose Siberian fieldwork Eliade would later depend on.
  • Jonathan Z. Smith, 'The Wobbling Pivot', first published in The Journal of Religion 52 (1972), collected as chapter 4 of Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (1978), 1972, Map Is Not Territory, pp. 88–103The challenge to the universality of Eliade's centre and his archaic ontology, made in 1972 and reprinted in 1978: that the category of the centre had been narrowed to geographical symbolism, that not every mythic first time is paradigmatic for ritual repetition, and that the archaic/modern dichotomy does not cover the temporal patterns the evidence shows.
  • Jonathan Z. Smith, 'In Comparison a Magic Dwells', in Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown, pp. 19–35, 1982, delivered to the American Academy of Religion in 1979; pp. 19–35That comparison in the morphological mode — Eliade's mode — rests on the scholar's own perception of similarity, with no stated method for deciding which similarities count as evidence. The essay ends by insisting the operation be rebuilt on defensible ground rather than abandoned.
  • Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, 1999, the chapter on Dumézil, ideology and the Indo-EuropeansThat comparativists account for the resemblances they find not by the interests that conditioned their own selectivity but by positing a common inheritance of great antiquity — the move this entry reports. Lincoln took his Chicago doctorate under Eliade in 1976, with the dissertation 'Priests, Warriors, and Cattle'.
  • Cecelia F. Klein, Eulogio Guzmán, Elisa C. Mandell and Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, 'The Role of Shamanism in Mesoamerican Art: A Reassessment', Current Anthropology 43(3), 383–419, 2002, pp. 389–91The documented route by which Eliade entered Maya studies: Freidel read Shamanism as a student and, by the authors' own note in Maya Cosmos (1993:12), interested Schele and Parker in it; Maya trees and mountains were then identified as variant forms of the axis mundi (Schele and Freidel 1990); and the cross on Pakal's sarcophagus lid was read as a World Tree on the strength of a glyph in the Temple of the Cross read as wakah kan. Also Alice Kehoe's 1996 point that Eliade's archaic substratum rested on reports of modern peoples, and that Asia–Americas resemblances may reflect documented seventeenth- and eighteenth-century contact.
  • Carl D. Callaway, The Maya Cross at Palenque: A Reappraisal, MA thesis, University of Texas at Austin, supervised by David Stuart, 2006, pp. 84–86; dedication date at p. 1 n. 1That nowhere in the corpus of Maya inscriptions do the scribes directly name the cross, or any tree, as the Wakah Chan — the title appears as the name of the Temple of the Cross sanctuary and of the god GI; that the reading rests on a mis-analysis of the doubled T584 sign, David Stuart calling the decipherment highly suspect (Stuart 2006:109); that the Cross Group dedication falls at 9.12.19.14.12, 10 January 692; and that the object is better read as a jade tree. An unpublished MA thesis: cited as an argument, with its corroboration named, not as a demonstration.

The tradition itself

  • Mircea Eliade, Le Chamanisme, 1951The esoteric reading given on this entry — on the axis mundi and the world tree

Where this claim originates

  • Mircea Eliade; trans. Rosemary Sheed, Patterns in Comparative Religion (Traité d'histoire des religions, 1949), 1958, the chapter on vegetation, rites and symbols of regeneration, and the section on the Cosmic TreeCited for the claim: the Cosmic Tree and the Centre of the World set out as a universal morphology, with instances gathered from unrelated traditions on the strength of their resemblance. This is where the pattern enters general circulation — with no Maya instance in it, the Maya cross being fitted to the scheme only by Schele and Freidel from 1990.
  • Mircea Eliade; trans. Willard R. Trask, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaïques de l'extase, 1951), Bollingen Series LXXVI, 1964, p. 6 for the 'substratum'; pp. 266–72 on the World Tree — locators taken from Klein and colleagues, not from the bookCited for what it asserts and when: that the Cosmic Pillar, World Tree and Cosmic Mountain marking the axis mundi are remnants of an archaic religious substratum common to shamanic cultures. Never as evidence the assertion is true.
  • David Freidel, Linda Schele and Joy Parker, Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman's Path, 1993, pp. 12, 57, 69–100Cited for what the book asserts and when: the Maya world tree named Wakah Chan, its identification with the Milky Way, and the shaman's path as a three-thousand-year continuity. Never as evidence any of that is so.

Further reading

Linked entries

  • Set againstYggdrasilAttested

    Yggdrasil is the tree this category recruits most often, and its evidence runs the other way: Völuspá 19 and Grímnismál 29–35 in a manuscript of c. 1270, written in Christian Iceland, with nothing in them reaching beyond Scandinavia.

  • Set againstThe Aj Q'ij (Day-Keeper)A modern connection

    The shaman's path of Maya Cosmos (1993) reached Maya studies exactly as the world tree did — Klein and colleagues traced it in 2002 to Freidel's student reading of Eliade — which is why a living Maya calendar office is better described from its own practice than from a comparative type.

  • Set againstPatañjaliA modern connection

    Eliade ran the same operation on yoga: Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (1958) derived it from archaic shamanic technique, a claim the source register marks claim-only and which the Pātañjalayogaśāstra does not support.

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