The idea that the world is organized around an axis is widespread throughout the world. Also very regularly this axis appears in the form of a column that supports the sky above the earth. Sometimes, in certain mythological stories, it is he who, through his growth, is at the origin of the separation between heaven and earth, previously linked. This idea of column growth is perhaps at the origin of a particular form of world axis, present in numerous myths in the four corners of the planet: the tree.
The mythological figure of the World Tree is certainly not present everywhere. Therefore, it is absent in Australia, and if we know of some cases in Africa, especially in the Sahel and on the coast of the Indian Ocean, it is very possible that they are due to Christian or Muslim influence. But its wide distribution in space (all of Eurasia and America) and in time nevertheless shows its great antiquity, which certainly dates back to prehistoric times.
Source of magical knowledge.
This tree can appear in a very simple way: gigantic, its foliage is in the sky while it takes root deep in the earth. Through its trunk it communicates both. Sometimes his face becomes more complex. A bird, often an eagle, perches on its foliage (for example in Scandinavian myths), while a snake entwines its trunk or roots (also in Scandinavia, but also in Greece, where we find the “dragon” Ladon circling the golden apple tree of the Hesperides).
These two animals are often in conflict. Other animals may take their place on the tree, often ruminants: a deer or a goat among the Scandinavians, certainly a goat in India, or even a buffalo and a deer among the Kachin of Burma. Several female deities also usually live inside. Generally, a spring flows at its feet. In many traditions, particularly European ones, this source is the origin of magical knowledge.
Likewise, among certain Siberian peoples it is said that the tree itself is the origin of shamans. In the great monotheisms, the World Tree is divided: this is how the tree of life grows in the garden of Eden, near the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the one whose fruit Adam and Eve will eat, despite the divine prohibition. – and under the impulse of the serpent, which we still find here.
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