World-Tree

Y G G D R A S I L - Artwork by Robert Dodd

Omphalos (Navel of the World). Axis Mundi (Axis of the World). World-Tree.

These are symbols essentially referring to the same idea: a place where heaven, earth and underworld all come into contact, a place of communication between Earth and Otherworld. I consider it one of the most compelling single images in all mythology, and I was always instinctively fascinated by it. Even in times of my life when I was otherwise not very interested in such things, I always intuitively understood what they referred to. Of course, the idea of a 'holy place' at all signifies a place of connection between the mundane world and the divine world, and almost every religion has some version of it, even if they don't account for it much in their ideas. In Islam, the Kaaba in Mecca, towards which all Muslims bow. For Jews, the Foundation Stone in Jerusalem.

Of course in our post-Einstein world, we know that there is no one center of the physical Universe, but to interpret the World-Tree as a mere axle upon which all things rotate in mechanical fashion is to miss the idea completely. Many peoples revered multiple locations as omphalos or world-trees, and saw no contradiction in that. The Greeks had multiple omphalos sites in addition to the most famous one at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. There were multiple 'centers of  the universe'. Nordic peoples who revered Yggdrasil, the cosmic world-tree, also revered real trees in multiple sites as also places of connection, especially the yew tree which was regarded as related somehow to Yggdrasil. Sacred groves and sacred trees of many peoples can be seen as places of connection, as points of contact with the World-Tree. 

The idea of a World-Tree is a common worldwide mythological constant in shamanic cultures. Norse, Native American, Siberian, and early Indo-European beliefs all made reference to it. Generally speaking it appears in the most archaic, animist, shamanic traditions and tends to dissipate or become more abstract as religion becomes more abstract and more under the control of religious professionals and centralized religious and political authorities. What for the Celts or the Norse was incarnated in living trees became symbolized by human-made stone pillars or other structures for the Romans and Greeks. And these structures were often placed in human centers of power rather than where they might be found naturally. What did the Romans do when they wanted to shift the Celts to the Roman center of power and to destroy their independence? Cut down their sacred groves. The Christians did the same thing when they wanted to shift the center of gravity of the pagan Europeans to Christian Rome rather than their own sacred places. 

This is typical of what you may see as a recurring theme in my posts: that early on the divine was more and more wrested away from local people and places and from eccentric local shamans, druids and mystics; more and more distanced from the real world that they experience; and more and more the province of human power and ideology. More and more the world is perceived as centering on human beings, rather than human beings centering on and revering the world. An inverted World-Tree, we redefine the universe to center on us. It's a coup of sorts, actually; a power grab. They dethrone the actually sacred and put humans and especially the king or political power and authority in its place. The effect of this was to make spirituality more and more something that happens in people's heads or to religious professionals, and to degrade the network, the connections that actually existed through people's contact with sacred places. We can see recapitulations of this process in more recent history, it is always ongoing. The hearth was once the spiritual center of the home in many ways, and a place where essential life processes like cooking and eating happened. When television came along, it became a sort of hearth but not local or grounded in real life anymore - it pointed towards the centers of human power in distant places like New York or Washington. A false omphalos, a false World-Tree. It dragged the focus of people's lives away from the real and local and towards the distant and abstract (and unreal). The same process happens over and over again, it's everywhere.

The World-Tree is fundamentally a network of sorts, a meeting-place. A point of connection between World and Otherworld. There are of course multiple 'terminals' in this network, that is why the Greeks saw no contradiction in having multiple centers of the world. The World-Tree is not a center in space and time, it is a center as a place where the cosmos can come together in connection, because holiness is essentially a sort of relationship one has with what is more than oneself, and a realization that you are connected vitally with this 'more' and a part of it. A tree has its roots in the ground (Underworld) and its branches in this world, and those two branch systems are mirror images of each other, a place where two worlds come together. A human being might also be viewed as a sort of World-Tree in miniature: the Asian idea of chakras arranged along the spine is very similar to the idea of different worlds arranged along the branches and roots of Yggdrasil in Norse mythology.

What is most important to say is that this is not an abstraction and not something that has to be remote from personal experience, though due to our historical conditioning it may seem extremely bizarre to you. The World-Tree is not just some abstract tree in an abstract heaven. You can experience it through real trees (and other things). Initially when I started having visionary experiences connected with trees, I didn't clearly understand what was going on. I had a dream in which I traveled through the roots of trees and it began to make a bit more sense. There is no point in abstractly believing the concept of the World-Tree, as one might believe or have faith in the Christian god despite the lack of first-hand experience: the only point is in actually connecting with it. It's not an idea, it's a place.

I can't tell you where your local holy tree is located, at least not without spending time there myself. I can tell you there probably is one and likely more than one. I can't tell you how you can recapture the ability to identify such places: while it is natural to human beings to be able to identify them (some people having more ability than others), that ability has been squeezed out of us for the most part by our culture, which is the latest in a long line of cultures that has systematically and intentionally alienated people from such experiences. It is probably not that I regained that ability but that I never completely lost it.

Hopefully though, this talk about the World-Tree might rekindle that spark in some. Forget what you have learned. Forget the false World-Trees of television and schools and modern religion. Experience directly.

Trunk of an extremely ancient yew tree in Brittany.