Above and Below: The Cosmic Tree and the Deep Well of the Unconscious
by John K. Lundwall
In December of 1995 NASA chose a dark and uncluttered pin-point of sky in Ursa Major and directed the eye of the Hubble Telescope towards it. Over a period of ten days or approximately 150 orbits NASA photographed this pin-point of sky, layering the images as they went. The goal was to peer into the deepest well of space in hopes of glimpsing farther than science had ever seen before; perhaps to see even the distant rim of the universe? The image that the Hubble Telescope slowly produced astounded even the most prosaic and skeptical of minds. First bright swirls and globs appeared: galaxies! Then, innumerable dots began to fill in the dark spaces, until a grand canopy was painted by a telescopic lense. Each dot was not a star, but a galaxy containing billions and billions of stars. The image is called the Hubble Deep Field. In it NASA did not find the edge of the cosmos, but glimpsed an unexpected and mind-numbing view of eternity (see appendix, figures 1-2).
Eternity is an uncomfortable idea for modern science. Numerous theories are afoot predicting the size, mass, and shape of our universe. Surely there is an end, a perimeter, something that can be seen and measured? Until recently, the estimated number of stars in the universe was thought to be about the number of grains of sand on one earth-bound beach. But a recent study by Doctor Simon Driver, an Australian astronomer, has pushed this number to at least 70 sextillion (a seven followed by 22 zeros) or more than ten times the number of sand particles in all the beaches and deserts on our world. Even this number, Driver admits, might be a drop in the bucket: “The actual number of stars could be infinite” (CNN.com July 23, 2003). To date, the whole grand architecture of the cosmos--its size, mass, and shape, and how it works--is still mired in profound mystery.
As incomprehensible as these images and numbers are, perhaps even more astounding is the fact that ancient cultures, almost as far back as we look, understood that the entire scope of nature was planted atop an infinite well of energy and potentiality. Without a Hubble Telescope, at least a few inner-searching minds of the very ancient past had already intuited the deep fields of cosmos–above and below.
In ancient mythology this grand and apt understanding was represented by the Cosmic Tree, often called the World Tree or Tree of Life. Eliade traces the ancient and mythic image of the Cosmic Tree to every continent on the planet. He writes:
The most widely distributed variant of the symbolism of the Center is the Cosmic Tree, situated in the middle of the Universe, and upholding the three worlds as upon one axis.... It may be said, in general, that the majority of the sacred and ritual trees that we meet within the history of religions are only replicas, imperfect copies of this exemplary archetype, the Cosmic Tree. Thus, all these sacred trees are thought of as situated in the Center of the World. (Eliade, Images 44).
According to Eliade the Center is the mythological space that is the sacred point of orientation for a society–its axis-mundi. The sacred center is the point in which a “break-through from plane to plane [heaven and earth] has become possible and repeatable” (Eliade, Sacred 30). This ancient notion was fundamental to culture and civilization, thus every act of settlement or new founding was a cosmogonic act, a planting of a new World Tree in the garden of cosmos. Eliade describes that the Scandinavian colonists, for example, viewed the cultivation of new land as “only a repetition of a primordial act, the transformation of chaos into cosmos by the divine act of creation” (Eliade, Sacred 31). Furthermore, it appears that the ancient state itself was sacral in nature, and every city, town, and village was built around a sacred Center–a temple, an altar, a grove or tree–in cosmological repetition of the mythological structure of the universe.
The Cosmic Tree was a symbol of the universe--not just the visible universe of which the Hubble Telescope attempts to reveal--but of all the planes and possibilities of existence. The Tree thus represented the underworld by its roots, the material world by its trunk, and the heavenly world of gods and powers by its branches. The Tree also represented the point of creation, the place where all energies meet to transform thought into form. In this light, the Cosmic Tree was also compared to the “Divine Egg, Hidden Seed, or Root of Roots,” the “Pillar or Pole,” and the “Cosmic Mountain or primeval mound” (Cook 9).
Numerous pages and volumes could be written about the Tree symbolism in ancient civilization, but what concerns use here is the fact that the Cosmic Tree in ancient myth is almost always associated with a spring, well, or source of living waters. This association is direct: the two images are oft times synonymous, or are analogous in space and time. Thus the Tree is often growing over the top of a well, or is literally planted by a spring or river (see appendix, figures 3-6). The World Tree of the Norse was named Yggdrasil and had at its base a stream and surrounding it a river. Zeus’s oak tree was planted on Mount Olympus and had the same water features; likewise the tree atop Mount Meru of the Hindus; as well as the tree in the Hebrew Garden of Eden. The Cuna Indian’s Saltwater Tree could be added to the list, as well as the sacred cedars and palms of Egypt growing forth from the Nile; or in the Book of the Dead, the great life-giving lotus rooted in the eternal well underneath the throne of Osiris. Wherever we look in myth the Tree and the Spring are wedded.
Not only in mythology are these cosmic images bound, but in the mythological requirements of mortar, stone, and sacred space of ancient temple architecture. Lundquist writes that ancient temples are “often associated with the waters of life that flow forth from a spring within the building itself... or as having been built upon such a spring” (Parry, ed. 98). This is so because the temple is most often associated with either the primordial hillock or the Cosmic Tree, both of which rise out of the waters at the primal cosmogonic moment. Thus the great Eninnu Temple built by Gudea is called the “foundation of the abyss”, and this is similar to the Jewish temple on Moriah, which too was built over the abysmal waters (Parry, ed. 83-91). This architectural feature is worldwide (see appendix, figures 7-9). According to Varner this practice dates as far back as the megalithic age. Varner notes that a well or water source is found many times in stone circles (Varner 14), and Janet and Colin Bord in their landmark study of sacred wells in the British Isles quote Burl: “Wherever an avenue of stones is associated with a stone circle it almost invariably leads from a source of water, indicating the importance of water in the ceremonies that took place in the rings” (Bord and Bord, qtd. 11). Varner also observes that the standing stones of circles or sacred avenues are themselves symbolic representations of trees (Varner 14).
These associations are no coincidence. The Cosmic Tree is the archetypal paradigm for both the structure and potentiality of all cosmic processes. Wherever there is a moment of creation, a point of creation, there is an organization of form (the Tree) predicated upon cosmic laws, rules, and energies which endlessly bubble up from the depths (the Waters). Perhaps, and ironically, these associations also intuit the leading edge of modern physics and Chaos Theory, which posits that wherever there is chaos there is also an underlying geometric pattern. This understanding is revealed through fractals (George, Pacifica Notes). In other words, chaos is not just disorder and particle bedlam–but rather a non-harmonic field of possibility (the Waters) which, due to the Mandlebrotian nature of chaos, finds nodes or spikes of energy in which harmonic forms can be created (the Tree).
Clearly what is suggested by the mythological paradigms of the Cosmic Tree and Living Waters is a fairly sophisticated view of natural processes and relationships that occur in the material world and in the macrocosm above, all this without satellites, super-computers, or government grants. Ancient astronomers would not have been surprised by the metaphysics the Hubble Deep Field image suggests. The universe is just such a place–an infinite well of waters that, no matter how far you look, cannot be wholly seen or understood. Perhaps most of it is simply out of view, just like the dark waters of a deep well. Again, and curiously, this notion too is being looked at in modern physics, which theorizes that over 90% of the universe is made of dark matter, a substance and/or property that is unseen and unknown (Morris 91-92).
Ancient mythology is not finished with these images, however. The Cosmic Tree and the Living Waters certainly represent an understanding of the material world and of mythological relationships within that world. Perhaps more surprising, is the fact that these images were also used to describe man! Whatever can be represented in the macrocosm is also reflected in the microcosm, for both share the same roots (see appendix, figures 10-11).
The universe was the macrocosm. Man was the microcosm. What existed in one existed in the other, as the ancient mysteries explained, “As above, so below.” Macrocosm and microcosm were linked in what Jacob Needleman calls a “hierarchy of purposeful energies” (Needleman 18) which ordered the cosmos from the cosmic tree branches to the primordial waters. In this hierarchy man was a fulcrum point, both created and creator. This concept of microcosm is no idle metaphor, but an essential paradigm of ancient thought. Paraclesus writes:
Man is heaven and earth, and lower spheres, and the four elements, and whatever is within them, wherefore he is properly called by the name of microcosmos, for he is the whole world...know then that there is also within man a starry firmament with a mighty course of planets and stars that have exaltations, conjunctions and oppositions. (Young, qtd. 12)
If the cosmos has deep fields like the Hubble telescope reveals, and is always associated with the primordial waters of creation and chaos through the fount, spring, or well, then man too has these features (exaltations), shares in this structure (conjunctions), and participates in these energies (oppositions). This notion is not lost upon Carl Gustav Jung, who was an avid reader of Paracelsus. Jung writes, “Not only is the image of the macrocosm imprinted upon him [microcosmic man] as a psychic being, but he also creates this image for himself on an ever-widening scale” (Jung, Undiscovered Self, 43).
Jung understood that man as microcosm meant that there was a cosmic correspondence, metaphorically speaking, between the tree and the spring or well within him. Like Needleman, Jung sees man at the fulcrum point of this cosmic picture. Jung explains, “In my picture of the world there is a vast outer realm and an equally vast inner realm; between these two stand man” (Jung, Modern Man, 122). Jung sees these realms as polarities: man can only view one realm at a time at the sacrifice of the other. Yet as polarities, both rely upon the energies of each other in the form of tension. This tension is beautifully illustrated through the metaphor of cosmic processes. Thus Jung deliberates that the psyche is a “star-strewn night sky, whose planets and fixed constellations represent the archetypes in all their luminosity and numinosity. The starry vault of heaven is in truth the open book of cosmic projection, in which are reflected the mythologems, i.e., the archetypes” (Jung, Psyche, 125).
Here Jung lays out the diagram of inner man. There are both “planets” and “fixed constellations” that move upon the firmament that is man’s psyche. It is helpful, in fact, to know a little astronomy when interpreting such language. The night sky is a place of grandeur, to be sure, but also a place wherein it is easy to get lost. To help define all those blinking dots a band of sky called the zodiac was created by ancient civilizations and divided up into constellations. These constellations are fixed groupings of stars along the plane of the ecliptic. This is important because the plane of the ecliptic is that band in the sky where all the moving luminaries transit, i.e. Jung’s “planets”. In fact, the sun, moon, and inner planets could all be tracked along this plane and their movements measured against the background of fixed constellations or zodiac.
Jung uses this metaphor of both moving and fixed luminaries in the midst of the firmament in microcosmic man to describe what is occurring within him. The fixed constellations are the ever present deep well of space from which the transiting “planets” are measured and moved towards man’s psyche. In other words, the zodiac in man is the collective unconscious–that communal realm from which the moving luminaries emerge.
The moving luminaries or planets are themselves archetypal images and fantasies transiting into and through the personal unconscious waiting for the right moment within the domain of man, and in the words of Paraclesus, to “conjunct” with the conscious self in hopes of creating a new “exaltation” in which individuation occurs. Jung writes these “germinal luminosities shining forth from the darkness of the unconscious” are the lumen naturae, that which illuminates consciousness (Jung, Psyche, 121).
As any reader of Jung will know, the unconscious reveals itself through fantasies and dreams. And it is no coincidence at all that one of the principal dream images that occurs across cultures and throughout time is the image of the tree. Jung believed that the image of the tree “most often appeared in dreams at critical periods in an individual’s life, times when there was a pressing need for a supporting image of growth and integration” (Cook 27).
Ironically, Jung himself had such a dream. In his Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung relates that in 1928 he was brooding over another dream from which he painted a mandala he called “Window on Eternity.” The picture was in association with his idea that “the goal of psychic development is the self. There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self” (Jung, Memories, 196-197). One night, Jung dreamed that he was in a “dirty, sooty, city” in the middle of winter and darkness. After some time walking through the city Jung came to realize his goal was up above, on some cliffs, where he believed the true city to be built. Climbing atop the cliffs Jung saw a broad square, divided and measured. In the center of the square was a round pool, in the middle of the pool an island, and on the island a single magnolia tree, blossoming and blazing like the sun (Jung, Memories,197-198).
This dream is so akin to Chief Black Elk’s dream pictured in figure 5 of the appendix, wherein Black Elk found himself in the center of the world where there was a sacred lake and four rivers, and in the center “grew one mighty and flowering tree” (Cook, qtd. 8). Or the Jewish prophet Lehi, who dreamed of a “dark and dreary waste” wherein was set the world, and not far off a mighty tree ripe with white fruit exceeding “all the whiteness I had ever seen” (1 Nephi 8:2-12). This tree was also compared to a “fountain of living waters” (1 Nephi 11:25).
After reviewing so many dreams of this sort, and studying mythology and religions, Jung realized that the image of the tree was a central archetype. Cook writes:
It was because the all-embracing image of the Cosmic Tree, standing at the center with its roots and boughs uniting heaven and earth, was the most fitting symbol for the unconscious source (the root), the conscious realization (the trunk) and the ‘trans-conscious’ goal (the crown) of individuation, which upon the human plane is a continuation of the cosmic process itself. The unconscious could not choose a more fitting image to embody life’s transformative processes and regenerative powers. (Cook 27)
Of course, what Cook misses in this grand symbol of the microcosm is the association with the waters which are ever present with the image of the tree. These waters are the depths from which the roots draw their nutriment, and can be considered none other than equal to the fixed stars of the zodiac or the collective unconscious. We therefore can rewrite this microcosmic schematic in the following terms: Man has a “vast inner realm” represented by the Cosmic Tree and Living Waters. The Living Waters are the primordial waters of creation, filled with infinite possibility and potentiality, the invisible template of forms, the Chaos from which the matrix of Creation is made. For Jung this is the collective unconscious. The Cosmic Tree has roots burrowed deep down into the primordial waters drawing up sustenance, connections, and energies. For Jung this is the personal unconscious. These roots transform the waters into sap, drawing them up into the trunk of the tree and bringing them up into the light of the world. The trunk for Jung is the personal conscious, the aware self standing between the deep fields of space above and below. Finally, if man is successful in integrating the energies from deep within into his conscious self, balancing the tensions in a process of self-renewal, growth, and illumination, than the sap itself transcends the trunk and reaches the upper branches budding into the fruit of a new creation. For Jung, the crown of the Cosmic Tree is individuation.
This is just a brief history of an image and idea found in astronomy, myth, architecture, alchemy, and psychology. The common link between all of them is the synonymous structure of the macrocosm and microcosm represented by the Cosmic Tree and its Fount of Living Waters. The Hubble Deep Field is an analogous image which posits every galaxy is a Tree, yet behind every pinpoint of darkness exists a deep well, an “ever widening scale” of possibility, beyond which science has not the ability to measure or even understand. Meanwhile, inner man is also such a place. Every harmonically integrated point in consciousness is a microcosmic Tree, yet behind every pinpoint of darkness within the psyche there also exists a grand stellar firmament from which fixed constellations and planets conjunct and move in an ever flowing current of archetypes and energies. In elegant yet efficient symbolism, the Cosmic Tree and the Spring or Well remind us of the connections within ourselves; connections which share so much with what is above and below.
Works Cited
Bord, Janet and Colin Bord. Sacred Waters: Holy Wells and Water Lore in Britain and Ireland. London: Paladin Grafton Books, 1985.
CNN.com. Star Survey Reaches 70 Sextillion. Wednesday, July 23, 2003. Article found at .
Cook, Roger. The Tree of Life: Images for the Cosmos. London: Thames & Hudson, Ltd. 1979.
Eliade, Mircea. Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1991.
–. The Sacred and the Profane, the Nature of Religion: the Significance of Religious Myth, Symbolism, and Ritual within Life and Culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. 1957.
George, Dawn. “Session I: Chaos Theory.” Pacifica Graduate Institute. Carpinteria, California, January 2005.
Jung, Carl Gustav. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
– Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Florence, KY: Routledge, 2001.
– On the Nature of the Psyche. Florence, KY: Routledge, 2001.
– The Undiscovered Self. Florence, KY: Routledge, 1957.
Morris, Richard. Cosmic Questions: Galactic Halos, Cold Dark Matter, and the End of Time. New York: John Wiley & Sons Inc. 1993.
Needleman, Jacob. A Sense of the Cosmos: Scientific Knowledge and Spiritual Truth. New York: Monkfish Book Publishing Company, 2003.
Nemiroff, Robert J. and Jerry T. Bonnell. The Universe, 365 Days. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 2003.
Parry, Donald, ed. Temples of the Ancient World. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1994.
Varner, Gary R. Sacred Wells: A Study in the History, Meaning, and Mythology of Holy Wells & Waters. Baltimore: PublishAmerica, 2002.
Young, Louisa. Book of the Heart. Westminster, MD: Doubleday, 2003.
Posted by john at May 6, 2005 12:31 AM
