Sumerians and Babylon Tree of Life
The oldest name of
Babylon, Tin-tir-ki, meant ‘
the place of the tree of life’. To the Babylonians, it was
a tree with magical fruit, which could only be picked by the gods. The earlier Sumerian traditions played a major role in Babylonian culture.
The early Sumerian art (around 2500 BC) depicts pictures of a pole or a tree called the ‘axis mundi’. Guarding this tree is a snake or a pair of intertwined snakes.
Babylonians have the concept of the
‘navel of the world’, the place of the connection of different spheres. This vertical dimension, axis mundi, is the connection between
three cosmic spheres: heaven, earth and underworld. The sacred mountain, the temple, the sacred city are all considered to be this
Sacred Space, the axis mundi, the connection of the
three cosmic dimensions.
Assyrians and Tree of Life
Assyrians substituted the tree for the caduceus with coiled snakes circling around the wood of the wand. Here we see
a snake symbolising an
underworld consciousness, passing through earth, climbing a stick, transcends to a winged reality, a heavenly creature. Wings on a wand became a
symbol of transformation and transcendence.
Egyptian Tree of Life
In
Egyptian mythology, the first couple are Isis and Osiris. They have emerged from the acacia
tree of Iusaaset, which the
Egyptians considered the
tree of life.
Egyptians considered the
Tree of Life to be the tree in which life and death are enclosed. The direction East was associated with the direction of Life, the direction of the rising Sun, and the direction West was seen as the direction of death, of under-world, because Sun sets in the West.
Egyptian creation myths refer to
a serpent and a primordial egg, which contained a bird of light.
Tree of Life and its Meaning