Trees of Life Across the Traditions

Many traditions place a tree at the centre of the world. It does one of three jobs. It is an axis joining heaven, earth and the underworld. It is a diagram of how the divine branches out into creation. Or it bears a fruit that gives life or knowledge. Later the tree became a way of drawing any order that branches: kinship, logic, the sciences, and in 1859 the descent of species. This note collects the versions Source Library holds as plates, woodcuts, manuscript pages and paintings, with links to the books they come from.

Kabbalah: the ten sefirot

In Kabbalah the Tree of Life (Etz Chaim) is a figure of ten sefirot, the attributes through which the infinite (Ein Sof) becomes knowable, joined by twenty-two paths, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Christian Hebraists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries printed it again and again, usually with Hebrew and Latin labels side by side.

Older still is the hand-drawn tree in a fifteenth-century copy of Isaac of Acre’s Me’irat Einayim, and the library holds the Latin compendium that carried these figures into Christian Europe, Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala denudata (1677).

The inverted tree

Robert Fludd drew the same ten sefirot as a tree growing downwards: the root is the crown, Keter, set in light, and the branches reach down through the orders of angels to the world. The image at the head of this note is his. The idea is older than Fludd and is not only Jewish. The Katha Upanishad and the Bhagavad Gita (15.1) describe an eternal aśvattha, a sacred fig, “with roots above and branches below,” whose leaves are the Vedic hymns.

Norse: Yggdrasil

In the Eddas, Yggdrasil is an ash that holds the worlds together. An eagle sits in its crown, the serpent Níðhöggr gnaws one of its three roots, a squirrel runs messages between them, and the Norns water it from the well of Urðr. In the Hávamál Odin says he hung on “the windy tree” for nine nights, wounded with a spear, and took up the runes.

Siberia: the shaman’s tree

Among the peoples of Siberia the world tree was something a shaman climbed. The Finnish scholar Uno Holmberg, writing in 1927, gathered the evidence: the Yakuts set up rows of trees for the storeys of heaven, one for each level the shaman passes, and the Dolgans raised a pole with crosspieces topped by a two-headed bird, the Lord of the Birds, at the summit of the world.

Prussia: the oak at Romowe

The pagan Prussians and Lithuanians kept sacred groves into the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Early modern historians described their chief sanctuary, Romowe, as an evergreen oak holding the images of three gods, with a fire kept burning before it. Christoph Hartknoch engraved the scene in 1684. His source was the sixteenth-century chronicler Simon Grunau, whose account historians treat as largely invented, so the picture records what Prussian scholars believed rather than what the sanctuary looked like.

The picture travelled. A German translation of the Edda printed in 1777, now in the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica in Amsterdam, reprints the oak of Romowe among its plates of northern religion: Die isländische Edda.

Assyria: the sacred tree

A stylised palm flanked by winged figures or rearing animals is among the commonest motifs in the reliefs of the Assyrian palaces. What it meant is still argued: the king, the god Ashur, or the order of the world. Austen Henry Layard, who excavated Nimrud, described it in Nineveh and Its Remains (1849):

This tree, evidently a sacred symbol, is elaborately and tastefully formed; and is one of the most conspicuous ornaments of Assyrian sculpture.

Egypt: the goddess in the sycamore

In the Egyptian Book of the Dead a goddess, Nut or Hathor, stands in a sycamore fig and gives the dead water and bread, so that they need not go thirsty in the next world. The Papyrus of Ani, written around 1250 BCE, paints her among the fruit, pouring water for Ani as he kneels below.

A second Egyptian tree recorded time. On the ished or persea tree of Heliopolis, Thoth and the goddess of writing, Seshat, wrote the king’s name on the leaves and fruit, one for each year of his reign. The Ramesseum at Thebes shows Ramesses II seated before the tree while Atum, Seshat and Thoth write. John Gardner Wilkinson drew the relief in 1841.

China: the sun tree and the money tree

Chinese myth places Fusang, a giant mulberry, at the eastern edge of the world. Ten suns rested in it, and one at a time rode out across the sky. The bronze trees buried at Sanxingdui in Sichuan around 1200 BCE, with birds perched on their branches, have been read as this sun tree. Over a thousand years later, tombs in the same province held bronze “money trees” hung with coins and immortals, set on ceramic bases shaped like mountains.

Han dynasty painters drew Fusang itself. On the silk banner laid over the coffin of the Lady of Dai at Mawangdui (before 168 BCE), the sun with its crow sits at the top right, and smaller red suns hang among the twisting branches below it. On the Wu Liang shrines in Shandong (mid-second century CE) the archer Yi aims at the sun-crows perched in the tree; in the myth he shot down nine of the ten suns when they all rose at once.

Mesoamerica: trees in the Codex Laud

Across Mesoamerica a tree stood at the centre of the world and one at each of the four directions, holding up the sky. For the Maya the central tree was the ceiba. The Codex Laud, a pre-conquest divinatory screenfold now in the Bodleian Library, sets a deity before a tree above a row of day signs from the 260-day count. Which of these trees are direction trees is a question for the codex’s commentators; the scene of a seated deity before a tree recurs across the codices of the Borgia group.

Eden, the Cross and the Tree of Jesse

Genesis puts two trees in the garden, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Medieval artists often gave the serpent a woman’s face. Legend held that the wood of the Cross came from the tree of life, and Revelation 22 returns it to the end of the Bible, beside the river of the heavenly city.

The Tree of Jesse makes a family tree out of Isaiah 11:1, “a rod out of the stem of Jesse”: a vine rises from the sleeping Jesse through the kings of Israel to the Virgin and Child. The religious orders borrowed the form to draw their own descent from a founder.

See also the river and tree of life in a 1702 history of the Old and New Testaments, and the woodcut of Christ on the tree of life that Jung reproduced in Psychology of the Unconscious.

Islam: the Waqwaq tree

Arabic and Persian geographers placed the island of Waqwaq at the eastern edge of the world. On it grew a tree whose fruit were human figures, said to call out “waq waq” before they fell. The Kitāb al-Bulhān, a book of divination and wonders compiled in Baghdad around 1400, paints the tree hung with its human fruit, and a copy of Zakariyā al-Qazwīnī’s cosmography, The Wonders of Creation, paints it twice.

The Qur’an (53:14) names a tree at the edge of the seventh heaven, the lote tree of the boundary (Sidrat al-Muntahā), which the Prophet passed on the night of his ascension. The books that illustrate the ascension (Miʿrājnāma) paint it. In this fourteenth-century page the tree is the great gold trunk on the right.

Paradise has its own tree in the hadith, Ṭūbā, so large that a rider could travel in its shade for a hundred years. The Timurid Miʿrājnāma made at Herat in 1436 paints the Prophet’s visit to the gardens of paradise, where houris on camels greet each other among flowering trees. The painting does not label any of them as Ṭūbā.

Java: the kayon

In the Javanese shadow play (wayang kulit) the first and last figure on the screen is not a character but a tree. The kayon or gunungan (“mountain”), a leaf-shaped puppet carved with a tree, animals and often a gateway, is planted in the centre before the play begins, waved to mark a change of scene, and planted again at the end. It stands for the world in which the story takes place.

Tibet: the refuge tree

Tibetan Buddhist schools paint their whole lineage as a tree. A single trunk rises from a lake; on its branches sit the teachers of the lineage, the buddhas, the meditational deities, the protectors and the scriptures. Practitioners visualise this assembly when they recite the refuge prayer at the start of practice.

Alchemy: the philosophical tree

Alchemists described the growth of metals as the growth of a tree, the arbor philosophica. One picture shows how the images travelled. The Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit, a German manuscript of the early fifteenth century, paints a crowned woman with a fruiting tree growing from her head between the Sun and Moon. The printed Pandora of 1588 cut the same composition in wood.

Pandora also sets a tree of the Sun and a tree of the Moon, gold and silver, on either side of the Rebis, the two-headed figure of the united opposites; their blossoms are suns and moons with faces. A German compilation of 1667, the Dreyfaches hermetisches Kleeblat, turned the tree into a chart: each band on the trunk is a named operation of the work, from putrefaction to the Stone.

Böhme’s trees, in the Embassy of the Free Mind

Jacob Böhme (1575–1624), a shoemaker of Görlitz, opened his first book, Aurora (1612), by likening the whole of philosophy and theology to a great tree. His followers drew the soul as a tree growing out of the dark world, through fire, into light. The pictures in this section all belong to the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, the library of the Embassy of the Free Mind in Amsterdam.

One Böhmist figure of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil had a long life. A hand from a cloud holds a tree whose branches end in hands, with the sun among its leaves and its roots in three globes. It appears as the frontispiece of a pietist devotional book of 1700 and again, hand-coloured, in the Geheime Figuren der Rosenkreuzer printed at Altona in 1785–88.

Trees of knowledge, logic and kinship

The tree also became a way to draw an argument. Porphyry’s Isagoge (third century) divides substance step by step, body, living thing, animal, rational animal, down to a single man. Medieval scribes drew the division as a tree, and the figure travelled wherever Aristotle’s logic was taught. An Arabic logic manuscript in the library runs it from substance (al-jawhar) through body, living thing and animal to man (al-insān), and at the root one man, Buṭrus: Peter.

Ramon Llull’s Arbor scientiae (1295–96) arranges all knowledge as a forest of sixteen trees, from the elemental to the divine, each with roots, trunk, branches, leaves, flowers and fruit. Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies carries the arbor consanguinitatis, a tree for counting degrees of kinship, which canon lawyers later used to decide who might marry whom.

The only illustration in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is a branching diagram. In chapter four he wrote:

The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth.

Living sacred trees

Some sacred trees are living trees. In India shrines are built under the banyan and the pipal, the aśvattha of the Gita. Bernard Picart’s plate of 1723 sets temples, offerings and ascetics beneath “le grand Arbre des Banians,” the first item in its key.

The gods’ paradise has its own tree, the wish-granting kalpavṛkṣa or kalpataru, which yields whatever is asked of it. On the temples of central Java it is carved again and again: a stylised tree under a parasol, birds in its crown, guarded by kinnaras, half-bird musicians of heaven.

The Buddha reached enlightenment under a pipal at Bodh Gaya, and the earliest Buddhist sculpture shows the tree, an empty seat or a pair of footprints in his place. In West Africa, R. E. Dennett photographed a tree planted over a grave, which then became sacred.

Trees the library does not yet show

A search of the library’s images, the Internet Archive and Wikimedia Commons on 16 October 2026 found no usable public-domain picture of these:

• China: Jianmu, the tree by which the gods climb between heaven and earth. The illustrated Shanhai jing in the library draws the fish-bodied people who live west of it, but not the tree.
• Iran: Gaokerena, the white haoma tree of immortality growing in the cosmic sea.
• Islam: Ṭūbā named as such.
• The Baltic: the Latvian sun tree (Austras koks) of the folk songs.

More trees from the collection are in the image gallery.