December 23, 2022
Standing in the middle of my living room is a tree. This ought to seem strange and uncanny, a violation of categories. Trees are part of nature, and nature belongs in the category “outside.” This tree has crossed the threshold between inner and outer, human and natural, and by rights should be as disturbing as the Birnham Wood that walked and stood before the gates of Dunsinane. To be honest, it isn’t a real tree. But it looks like one, and in many other living rooms at this time of year the tree is quite real, pine smell, shed needles, and all.
Far from being disturbing, however, the tree is a symbol of comfort and hope—not just a symbol but a manifestation of something that breaks through all the categories of this imprisoned world, what Mircea Eliade would call a hierophany. Christmas trees may be, I sometimes think, the best thing about Christmas, standing apart from all the social neurosis, towering over it, pointing upward towards something better. Christmas trees are part of the mythology of Christmas that emerged in the Renaissance and was processed into its present form largely by German Romanticism. Some people despise that mythology, less because it is Christian than because it is sentimental. So, yes, I am unapologetically sentimental about Christmas trees. I loved to sit by them as a child in the 50’s, when most trees were real, which meant imperfect, the unseen irregular side turned to the wall, and when you had to be careful to keep your tree watered, lest the old-fashioned lights of the time—hot enough to burn your fingers—set fire to it and turn Christmas into a catastrophic parody of the glittering symbol it was meant to be. I used to look into some of the shiny bulbs and see another world, which resembled the living room but convex and transformed, a hint that the world can be transformed by the change of perspective we call art. When we moved to this house 16 years ago, with its gable-high, cedar-beamed living room ceiling and its front wall entirely of glass (chalet ranch style, they call it), we bought the biggest tree that two people could sanely assemble, 9 feet tall. Sitting in front of that wall of glass, its white lights blaze all the way to the road 450 feet away like a beacon.
A Christmas tree is not just nature but nature spiritualized, nature alight with an energy that transfigures but does not consume it, like Moses’ burning bush. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” says Gerard Manley Hopkins. “It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.” The most fully exfoliated form of this imagery, so to speak, is the image of the world tree common to a number of mythologies. The world tree is one form of the axis mundi, the vertical axis of Creation with the heavens above, underworlds below, and middle earth between them. Its best known version is Yggdrasil in Norse mythology. The modern Christmas tree may derive from Reformation and Romantic Germany, but archetypal imagery has roots (it is impossible to stop punning on this subject) in a level deeper than the historical, and it is plausible to see our modern trees as Christianized versions of the pagan Germanic and Scandinavian Yule tree, a version of the world tree that was part of the solstice festival. It is the world tree that sits in our living rooms, its bulbs the planets and its lights the stars.
Two very different Creation myths have been redacted (a scholarly term meaning “stitched together”) in the Book of Genesis. The P or Priestly Creation myth that opens the Bible depicts the creation of a cosmic order out of chaos. The vertical axis mundi is a fully elaborated symbol of what an old phrase called natura naturata, nature as an order, a vision still going strong in Dante’s Paradiso. Milton’s great Nativity Ode, about which I will be speaking in a special podcast episode for Christmas Day, speaks of “our great redemption from above,” which the first half of the poem depicts as the descent of successive spiritual powers, including a personified dovelike Peace and of course the angels we have heard on high. The poem’s second half catalogues the demonic pagan gods expelled downward into metaphorical darkness. According to Mircea Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion, in both the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita of Hindu tradition the image is disconcertingly inverted: “the Universe is an inverted tree, burying its roots in the sky and spreading its branches over the whole earth. (It is not impossible that this image was suggested by the downpouring of the sun’s rays” (273). It “represents the clearest possible manifestation of Brahman in the Cosmos, represents, in other words, creation as a descending movement” (273). But the vertiginous and disturbing effect of this image, like the upside-down-and-backwards image in a telescope, may hint that it is not in fact an ideal image but an image of the world as an illusion, and the texts go on to counsel cutting the tree down: “’To cut the tree at its roots’ means to withdraw man from the cosmos, to cut him off from the things of sense and the roots of his actions,” which is “man’s only way of transcending himself and becoming free” (274).
This is the kind of transcendence that Yeats rejects in the second part of a long poem called “Vacillation,” in which “A tree there is that from its topmost bough / Is half all glittering flame and half all green.” The image is said to be borrowed from the Welsh Mabinogion, but Yeats makes cryptically ironic use of it:
And he that Attis’ image hangs between That staring fury and the blind lush leaf May know not what he knows, but knows not grief.
Attis was a vegetation deity who castrated himself and turned into a pine tree. The priests of Attis castrated themselves in one of the more inconvenient methods of transcending the natural self. The first line of “Vacillation” is “Between extremities man runs his course,” and the only way to escape the “grief” of being caught between extremities is to seek transcendence in an oblivion in which we know not what we know, which Yeats sees as a cowardly evasion and rejects for himself here and elsewhere in his late poems.
The other Creation story in Genesis, beginning at 2:4, the J or Jahwist account, is a Contrary to the Priestly account, a vision of creation from the bottom up rather than the top down. It really amounts to what mythologists call an emergence myth, in which humanity rises from underground, as seeds grow. The J narrative begins with a Garden watered by a mist, and with God fashioning the first human being out of the red, fertile clay of the garden, the adamah. At the center of the J narrative are two trees, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge. The tree of life is paradise condensed into a single image, for paradise is life, life as process and growth: in the traditional terms a natura naturans rather than a natura naturata: it is a life force, and its essence is not order but metamorphosis. Out of the buried seed is born the plant, which climbs the vertical axis, seeking the sun, and out of the plant bursts the flower like quiet fireworks. The tree of life signifies proliferation and diversity, which may be why for once even the encyclopedic Eliade sounds a bit overwhelmed by it, saying, “There is a considerable amount of material; but it takes such a variety of forms as to baffle any attempt at systematic classification” (265).
The tree of life has a companion image, the water of life, in Genesis a fountain from which flow four rivers. Humanity loses both tree and water, but gets them back at the end of time, when the garden reappears at the center of the city of New Jerusalem. In chapter 22 of the Book of Revelation, the last chapter of the last book of the Bible, both John and the reader are invited to drink of the water of life, the vivifying water that is also the creative Word, an image echoed by Dante in the final cantos of the Paradiso. However, in many texts the tree and water of life have a third complement, the stone. As Eliade says, “From Minoan times right up till the twilight of Hellenism, we always find the tree used for worship beside a rock. Primitive Semitic sanctuaries often consisted of a tree and a bethel” (270): the latter means “house of El,” in other words “house of God,” the most famous bethel being the rock on which Jacob lay his head and dreamed the vertical axis of “Jacob’s ladder.”
The tree and the stone, the organic and the inorganic, the constantly changing the the changelessness that underlies it. In traditional mythology, says Eliade, “Stone stood supremely for reality: indestructability and lastingness; the tree, with its periodic regeneration, manifested the power of the sacred in the order of life” (271). This reads almost as if it were a commentary on Wallace Steven’s late poem “The Rock,” which says “That the green leaves came and covered the high rock, / That the lilacs came and bloomed, like a blindness cleaned.” But, Stevens says,
It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves. We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground Or a cure of ourselves…
Making a play upon the leaves of a tree or plant and the leaves of a book (another image appearing in Dante’s Paradiso), he speaks of “the fiction of the leaves”:
These leaves are the poem, the icon and the man. These are a cure of the ground and of ourselves… | In this plenty, the poem makes meanings of the rock, Of such mixed motion and such imagery That its barrenness becomes a thousand things | And so exists no more.
The rock is the “ground of being” spoken of by philosophers. It can be death—tombs are made of stone, graves marked by headstones—but life “cures” the ground otherwise cursed by the fall, by growing out of it and thus bringing it to life—and poetry, the act of the imagination, also cures the ground by covering its barrenness with its fictions, its leaves. Once cured, the rock is transvalued, no longer just an image of death and negation.
However, rock is in fact itself alive, but with a different kind of life with a different relationship to time, one that is vastly slower. Flowers are the epitome of ephemeral, here and gone in a matter of days. Rock abides. In Jungian terms, flowers and plant life are the ego and personal unconscious; the rock is the more deeply buried layer of the collective unconscious, with its permanent archetypes. This is what the great Paleolithic artists of Lascaux and Altamira expressed by painting images of animals so vibrant they seem alive upon the rocks of caves far underground, rocks so unchanging that they have lasted for 20,000 years. Below even that is the level of the Self, so distant from us that it seems totally Other, and yet it too is alive, like the alchemical lapis or Philosopher’s Stone. At times in the alchemical tradition the lapis was identified with Christ, the stone that the builders rejected that becomes the cornerstone of the building. Tree and stone are opposites that on a deep level are paradoxically identified: Jung has a long essay, "The Philosophical Tree," in which one section is titled “The Tree as the Lapis.” The “Anna Livia Plurabelle” section of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is a dialogue of two Irish washerwomen doing laundry on the banks of the river Liffey. At the end, they turn into a tree and stone by the water, before the falling darkness subsumes all distinctions.
On a more displaced level, trees are alive and home to many living things—the birds, the squirrels: years ago, I was delighted to find that a squirrel plays the role of messenger, running messages up and down Yggdrasil, the world tree, possibly the only starring role for a squirrel in all of mythology. Yet trees may be immensely long-lived, like sequoias, and their time is closer to the slow time of the rocks, as Tolkien showed with his Ents, who, if left to their own devices, may take half a week to say hello. It is no accident that the Christmas tree is an evergreen, a tree that abides through the death-and-rebirth cycle of falling leaves and the bare, ruined choirs of winter. But deciduous trees abide in their own way, by accumulating rings that keep time rather than losing it. In one of the first poems I wrote in high school that had anything to it, I spoke of growing “As men and trees both grow, / Accumulating consecutive hardened rings of memory,” clinging to an image of gain rather than loss through time to console myself for, alas, yet another perpetually lost love. Trees do die, of course, but before they do so they scatter their potential rebirth in all directions. A sequoia the size of a Saturn V was once a single seed, and knowing all about DNA doesn’t make that miracle less miraculous. Jesus made the mustard seed an image of the kingdom itself. Poets scatter their poems and critics their books like seeds, hoping they may find fertile soil somewhere. Writers used to write on leaves of paper, scattering them through the world like Johnny Appleseed, hoping a few of them at least might take root somewhere, as in Jesus’ parable. Human beings scatter their seed too, of course, and the idea of living on as part of a “family tree” drives people to have children despite the fact that, in terms of quality of life, it is often not a very sensible thing to do.
The life force of trees survives in a different way if you happen to be someone who plays a musical instrument made out of wood, especially an acoustic one whose distinctive tone derives from the vibrations of the wood from which it is made. The discussion of the sonic properties of acoustic guitar tonewoods takes on the fervor of a religious cult. Devotees compare the deep resonance and rich overtones of rosewood with the dry clarity—the actual term is “woody”—of mahogany and the brightness of maple. The grain of the wood of some acoustic guitars is as beautiful as their sound. I sometimes find myself feeling gratitude towards the tree that provided the wood of my favorite guitar, and thank it for its sacrifice, hoping its new form of existence might be gratifying. I told you I was sentimental. Furniture made out of wood may also be inhabited not only by the spirit of the tree that provided the wood but by the spirit of the artisan who shaped it. The oak table on which I type these words was made almost a century ago by my Italian immigrant grandfather, trained as a cabinetmaker. The house I live in is wood and stone—cedar-beamed ceiling and pillars inside, rough, uncut stone of the front walls and chimney.
But there are some people who are decidedly not sentimental about trees, for whom “treehugger” is a term of contempt. As a “higher civilization,” in fact, we hate forests. The first act of civilizing a new area of capitalist and imperialist exploitation is to cut down all its trees, to “tame” the wilderness as one tames the “savages” who are its denizens. We speak of virgin forests, and what is often done to them is tantamount to rape, especially when the intent is not even to turn them into farmlands or living areas but just to log them, get what is profitable out of them, and move on, leaving behind devastation, as currently in the Amazon basin. Brazilian rosewood, the holy Grail of acoustic guitar tonewoods, is no longer legal to harvest. We are now told that the story we learned about George Washington when growing up is apocryphal. That is too bad, for the real moral of the story for young people was not the simplistic “Never tell a lie” (a statement that is itself a lie, as young people know) but rather “You should be shocked when someone cuts down something that was alive and beautiful without even having a good reason for it. Such a person is lacking a certain kind of human decency.” Why did young George chop down the tree? Because he had been given a hatchet, and he was enjoying its power to destroy.
It was not even just greed: people feared the “primeval forests” that in ancient days covered both the Old World and the New. Ancient and terrible things lurked there, including things surviving from prehistoric times. Robert Holdstock’s darkly powerful Mythago Wood and its various sequels are influenced by C.G. Jung. As its name implies, the deeper you go into Mythago Wood, the more numinous, terrifying, and inhuman are the “mythagos” that confront you. Tolkien’s Mirkwood has similar ominous associations. This is the kind of selva oscura that Dante is being forced into by three intensely frightening beasts in the famous opening canto of the Divine Comedy. To be lost in such dark woods is to be lost in the irrationality of the deep unconscious. But you do not have to travel there: that irrationality may come to you, even in the midst of paradise. For the garden of Eden had a second tree, a tree of death, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What kind of knowledge is this, and why should it be forbidden? The clue is who is tempting us with such knowledge: a serpent, dweller in the dark holes of the netherworld. This is not knowledge in the form of rationality and science, though it may often disguise itself as such. It is “knowledge” in the form of an obsessive conviction that one is godlike: after you and Adam eat of the forbidden fruit, the serpent tells Eve, “Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil as they know.” To acquire such knowledge is to experience the “enlightenment” of megalomania, the false gnosis of the will to power, the euphoric rush of being gripped by the numinosity of the unconscious, the epitome of evil that Jung calls “inflation.”
Yet the serpent speaks with a forked tongue: the temptation of power is actually, paradoxically, a form of powerlessness. The cloven tongue symbolizes the cleaving of consciousness that Blake called the "cloven fiction,” as consciousness is in fact alienated from its environment, including all that it desires. The alienation has a sexual component. We speak of the seduction of Eve by a fast-talking snake, a pattern that human women have unfortunately recapitulated for thousands of years. For men, the object of desire retreats, and may elude the desiring lover by actually turning into a tree, as Daphne did to escape Apollo. Bernini’s magnificent sculpture depicts Daphne caught mid-way, half woman and half tree, in the very moment she is grasped by Apollo. In the first book of the Metamorphoses, the source of the story, Ovid satirizes the frustration of male lust, as Apollo humiliates himself frantically trying to fondle a tree, a treehugger indeed: “He puts his hand where he had wished,” as one line demurely has it. The nearly 800 pages of Samuel Delany’s monumental literary fantasy Dhalgren begin with the amnesiac hero copulating outside the city of Bellona with a woman who turns into a tree.
As there is a tree of life that sums up paradise, so there is a tree of death to which both God and humanity are nailed in an agonizing moment of endless dying, “bound down upon the stems of vegetation,” as Blake put it. This is the cross, which according to a recurrent legend stood in the exact location as the tree of knowledge: its secular counterpart is the “gallows tree.” Yet the tree itself is innocent: the real evil is the human selfishness and cruelty that crucifies its victims. In the great Old English poem “The Dream of the Rood,” the rood or cross itself recounts the Crucifixion from its own point of view, identifying itself with Christ rather than with his crucifiers and thus becoming a victim itself. The real tree of death is inward, as Blake makes clear in a deeply ironic poem called “The Human Abstract”:
The Gods of the earth and sea Sought thro’ Nature to find this Tree; But their search was all in vain: There grows one in the Human Brain.
Its branches are the various forms of selfishness and cruelty that frequently masquerade as virtues but are really driven by a nihilistic hatred of life itself, and whose epiphany is the lynch mob screaming “Crucify him!”
The human death wish wants to cut down all the trees and replace them with the skyscrapers of vast cities, labyrinths of stone and steel in which people live their whole lives without any contact with nature at all. For as there is the living stone of the lapis, there is also a stone of death, out of which tyrants like Shelley’s Ozymandias shape monuments to themselves. But again, the stone is innocent: it is the attitude that is lethal.
A primary principle of the imagination is that you are your environment: you are what you choose to surround yourself with, and if you have not chosen your environment, you are in prison. The human form is itself a tree, the genuine inward form of the world tree. When Jesus cured the blind man, he saw “men as trees walking.” Even as we remain firmly planted upon ordinary middle earth, the expanding eyes of the imagination take in the starry heavens and become their circumference. And our inward roots go down into the darkness of a mystery that is somehow also a form of ourselves. In Robertson Davies’ wonderful satiric novel of ideas The Rebel Angels, a character gives the following speech:
I have thought a good deal about trees; I like them. They speak eloquently of that balanced dubiety which I told you was the sceptical attitude. No splendid crown without the strong root that works in the dark, drawing its nourishment among the rocks, the soil, hidden waters, and all the little, burrowing things. A man is like that; his splendours and his fruits are to be seen, to win him love and admiration. But what about the root? (190)
The character goes on to talk about how, when a tree is bulldozed, “It is a particularly distressing kind of death. And when the tree is upturned, the root proves to be as big as the crown” (190), which leads him to ask,
What is the root of man? All sorts of things nourish his visible part, but the deepest root of all, the tap-root, is that child he once was…That is the root which goes deepest because it is reaching downward toward the ancestors. | The ancestors—how grand it sounds! But the root does not go back to those old stuffed shirts with white wigs whose portraits people display so proudly, but to our unseen depths—which means the messy stuff of life from which the real creation and achievement takes its nourishment.” (190)
This is a different kind of Creation myth, a post-Romantic kind in which creation is a birth from hidden depths rather than a descent of order from on high. Davies’ character goes on to say, “The root is far more like a large placenta than it is like those family trees that are all branches” (190). The imagination is that placenta, in which our identities grow, out of which they are born. The world tree is sometimes associated with shamanism, the precursor of Romantic notions of human creative power in contrast to the power of supernatural gods projected into the sky. Sometimes the shaman flies to worlds above and below, but sometimes he climbs the world tree, like Jack climbing the beanstalk. There is a rumor that the Celtic alphabet called Ogham (pronounced owan) was associated with some kind of tree magic. It is at least easy to see how the rumor got started: the Ogham characters consist of sequences of horizontal and diagonal marks upon a vertical line, like branches on a tree.
But let us not end with dreams of power, lest we get what we wished for and the power we hoped to command answers our summons but commands us instead. Theodore Sturgeon, one of the greatest of literary science fiction writers, builds his story “Slow Sculpture” upon the metaphor of the art of cultivating Japanese bonsai trees:
Only the companion of a bonsai (there are owners of bonsai, but they are a lesser breed) fully understands the relationship. There is an exclusive and individual treeness to the tree because it is a living thing, and living things change, and there are definite ways in which the tree desires to change. A man sees the tree and in his mind makes certain extensions and extrapolations of what he sees, and sets about making them happen. The tree in turn will do only what a tree can do, will resist to the death any attempt to do what it cannot do, or to do it in less time than it needs. The shaping of a bonsai is therefore always a compromise and always a cooperation. A man cannot create bonai, nor can a tree; it takes both, and they must understand each other. It takes a long time to do that….| It is the slowest sculpture in the world, and there is, at times doubt as to which is being sculpted, man or tree. (116 -17)
What is bonsai a metaphor of? Of two lovers, as in the story itself. Of teacher and student. Of poet to poem, songwriter to song. Of the ego to the unconscious. Of the human self to God. “Slow sculpture” is a condensed way of expressing my favorite Jung quotation: You can’t grow a tree quickly. And you can’t grow it alone: it always takes two, even if sometimes both of them may be aspects of yourself. Odin hung upon the world tree for 9 days and nights in order to gain knowledge, a knowledge reflected in the well of Mimir at its roots. Life is a matter of how we read: the interpretation we make interprets our fate. Read as an inflated power fantasy, Odin’s act is sinister. But Odin himself speaks of making a sacrifice of himself to himself, which suggests something more, something closer to Sturgeon’s vision of mutual interaction between self and other, a process that can transform both self and other. When that happens, the demonic tree itself may be transvalued, may burst into blossom, bearing what Yeats called the rose upon the rood of time.
References
Davies, Robertson. The Rebel Angels (1981). In The Cornish Trilogy. Penguin, 1992.
Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Translated by Rosemary Sheed. Meridian: New American Library, 1958.
Jung, C.G. “The Philosophical Tree.” Translated by R.F.C. Hull. In Alchemical Studies, volume 13 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967. 251-349.
Sturgeon, Theodore. “Slow Sculpture.” In Slow Sculpture, volume XII of The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon. 2009.