OVERVIEW & LEARNING OUTCOMES

Overview

Place and object myths have been in every story and section we have read up to this point. They don't really exist on their own, but they exist as the settings and nuances we see in other stories. The idea behind Place and Object Myths is that each of these places visited, weapons used, or charms gathered all have significant metaphorical meaning through their symbolic representation. Many times we don't give these things a second glance, and that's okay. The beauty behind this is we don't have to. We already know, subconsciously, what many of these concepts mean. The purpose of this module is to highlight these areas so we can connect and better understand the symbolism locations and objects bring to a story.

Learning Outcomes

Students will be able to reference the symbolic meanings inherent in different places and objects told within myths.
Students will be able to better understand storytelling through the addition of place and object archetypes.
Students will be able to analyze the use of numbers and colors in symbolic meanings through storytelling.

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INTRODUCTION TO MYTHOLOGICAL PLACES & OBJECTS

A painting of a dark cave like setting with humans walking about.
Aeneas and Sibyl in the Underworld. Jan Brueghel the Elder. 1594. Palazzo Colonna, Rome, Italy.

In the world of myth, objects and places are endowed with properties of the sacred, the “other.” This is logical because myths are religious and assume the existence of a meaningful cosmos that is literally charged with the informing energy of the creator. In the modern literary or psychological sense, places and objects in myth are symbols, and like other mythological motifs-the descent into the underworld, the Supreme Being, the femme fatale, and so on-they have archetypal significance. The student of mythology understands quickly that a tree, a garden, a castle, or a city is a material reality that expresses a particular place or culture and at the same time a connotative one that transcends place and time. The cross is at once the one on which Jesus hangs at Golgotha and the sacred tree on which Attis and Odin hang as “victims’ who bridge the world of death and the world of eternity. The rock out of which Arthur pulls his sword is also the maternal rock that is Jesus’ tomb or Mithras' birth cave or the altar on which Isaac is nearly sacrificed.

A drawing of a tree creating a globe with flat land in the middle.
Yggdrasil. Oluf Olufsen Bagge. 1847. Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson.

It is this connotative or archetypally symbolic nature of certain places and objects that makes them, like other archetypes, so useful to the creative artist. When the child hero of the fairy tale enters the dark wood, we know in the depths of our collective being exactly where he or she is. And we recognize the tree that stands alone in the center of the grove or garden. Even in our non mythological age, the poet can, by making use of such symbols, awaken understandings that still sleep in our collective unconscious. As Mircea Eliade writes, “It is through symbols that man finds his way out of his particular situation and 'opens himself to the general and the universal' (The Sacred and the Profane, p. 211)." This process of “opening" is a common concern of the religious person and the creative artist.

The sacred places and objects considered briefly here are only a very few of many. To make the archetypal character of these places and objects clear, they have been arranged according to type.

MYTHOLOGICAL PLACES

THE AFTERLIFE: Introduction

A medieval painting of a Muslim text on the afterlife split into 4 regions with angels on the top left and bottom right, a devil figure bottom left and a man top right.
The Shaykh sees Behesht and Dozakh.. 1577. Stories of the Prophets by Nīšāpūrī, Isḥāq Ibn-Ibrāhīm.

To every culture, life in the next world is a reflection of life in this world. Anthropologists often study the myths of life after death to determine the values of cultures long gone.

Life is a struggle to become someone. We strive to be individuals; we are determined to achieve certain goals, to be successful in whatever objectives we choose. It is difficult, therefore, to accept the idea that death might mean an end to the person we have become. Our instinct to survive leads us to believe that there will be another life after death, another world, a continuation of some kind of existence.
What that other world will be like we cannot know for certain. No one has ever satisfactorily assured all people of the validity and certainty of his/her particular vision of the next world. But this has not prevented people from trying to impart in stories of all kinds their beliefs, their theories, and even their specific, detailed visions of a life after death.

The belief in some sort of afterlife is ubiquitous. The human being finds the concept of total dissipation of self after death more difficult to accept than the notion of conscious existence after death. The Land of the Dead need not be pleasant; one of the earliest literary examples of an afterlife is the one recorded in Homer's Odyssey. The Land of the Dead that Odysseus visits is a place of darkness, sadness, and despair. Yet it is not primarily a place of punishment. The religious Cultures that stress the struggle between good and evil in this world are the ones that divide the afterworld into areas of suffering and bliss. The Christian and Muslim concept of heaven and hell is only one example of this tendency. In the more mystical religions that stress the illusory nature of life, the afterlife may be a distinctly nonphysical realm, even a place where self loses its individual identity in a larger self. In fact, such concepts as nirvana do not include a sense of place and are not properly thought of as myths of the afterlife, any more than is the Christian idea of the Kingdom of God. In one way or another, all afterlife myths, and even the lack of such myths, reflect cultural perceptions of this world.

A spiral painting in blue and green including people and animals.
Spiral Speak. Sam Brown. Unknown Date. Private Collection.

Part of the need for belief in an afterlife can probably be traced to humanity's experience of the cycles of nature. As a functioning part of the organism called Earth, we do not like to be left out. The paths of the sun and the moon, the rhythms of the tides, the menstrual process, and the seasons all suggest a natural return of whatever is lost and lead naturally to the concept of life after death and ultimately some kind of restoration of life.

Perhaps an even more important factor is consciousness itself. Of all species, only humans are capable of conceiving of life as a complete process, including birth and death. It might be said that consciousness of the total life process – of life's beginning, middle, and end as a single plot – is our defining characteristic. Without that consciousness, existence itself-certainly our existence-is threatened. That being the case, it is perhaps ultimately impossible to conceive of the permanent loss of consciousness. Even if we do not go so far as to believe in the physical restoration of our individual lives, we tend to have difficulty conceiving of life without the consciousness by which we perceive it. The afterlife is an almost inevitable result. And it should be noted that more often than not, the souls in the various underworlds-the heavens and hells of world mythology—are nearly always, in death, freed from the restrictions on knowledge of the future that are necessarily associated with the physical life-with mortality itself. In the afterlife individual consciousness comes into its own as part of a larger consciousness that informs all things and all actions.

Some of the theories are philosophically vague-the soul leaves the mortal body and rises to join the immortal stars, or the spirit joins with the creative force from which it came and becomes "one.” Some beliefs are moralistically specific-the sinner's soul is punished by everlasting hell-fire or the body itself is tortured for all eternity. Some cultures suggest that those things which were most pleasurable in this life will be enjoyed for all eternity in the next. They envision a place of everlasting bliss, free from sorrow, work, and pain. The vision of the afterlife of differing cultures provides a graphic picture of which things that culture most valued and which were most abhorred. depending on the system of belief, salvation may be achieved through faith in a supreme being, through good deeds, through right thinking, through charitable works, through the performance of rituals, as a reward for courage in battle, or through ecstatic trances that allow the mortal to transcend the bounds of this physical world. Those who believe that there is an existence after this life have many different visions from which to choose. In this section some of these visions will be explored. In your imagination you can travel with the Greeks to the Elysian Fields, follow the Egyptians to the Underworld, look into the ancient Hebrew City of Shadows or the Christian garden of Paradise. While we examine what they believed and why they believed it, keep in mind what you yourself believe and ask yourself WHY?

THE AFTERLIFE: Hebrew - Fire and Paradise

A cartoonish drawing of people seemingly enjoying themselves or being bored in the afterlife.
Sheol. Jospeh Keppler. 1885. Library of Congress, Washington D.C.

The early writers of the Tanakh were little concerned with an afterlife. In the "Book of Job" the tormented Job complains:

Remember that my life is a breath;
my eye will never again see good.
The eye of him who sees me will
behold me no more;
While thine eyes are upon me, I shall be gone.
As the cloud fades and Vanishes,
so he who goes down to Sheol does not come up;
he returns no more to his house,
nor does his place know him any more.

According to the Tanakh writers the dead were gone and should be forgotten. The hope of Israel lay in the future. Later biblical writers begin to suggest that perhaps the truly good would be someday resurrected, intimating that the punishment for evil behavior was to be forgotten-to languish for all eternity in the shadowy nothingness called Sheol. Eventually the ideas of the Hellenistic era began to influence Judaism and the place of punishment emerged. It was called Gehenna after the valley of Hinnom, south of Jerusalem, where the rubbish of the city was burned. Roasting and suffocating in smoke were the punishments. Those who were consigned to this fiery place were the ones who in life had denied the Divine Law, which had been given to Moses by God himself, and those who had committed the sins of adultery, calumny, and profanity. The suffering of these sinners, however, did not have to last for eternity for, if they declared finally that the Lord God of the Universe was just, they might be released after twelve months. An interesting description of the place of punishment was given by Rabbi Joshua who had been allowed a vision of this terrible place presumably to warn sinners of the fate that awaited them if they did not repent. Rabbi Joshua said that he saw a place full of mountains of fire and at the gates of Gehenna there were sinners hung up by their noses, or tongues, or by their eyelids, hands or feet. There were men being devoured by worms but never being totally consumed. Others had their innards burned by coals of fire or were forced to eat dust. Still others were cast from the fire into ice and back again into the fire. The worst punishment, however, was that the sinners could see the heavenly Paradise which they had lost, called Gan Eden.

Paradise is not a Hebrew word but rather a Greek one. When the Tanakh was translated into Hellenistic Greek in the third century B.C., the Hebrew phrase "garden of Eden" became paradeisos tes truphes or "paradise of delight.” There is little in the Tanakh concerning this lovely garden, but as Christianity grew in strength and numbers, the Paradise promised by Christ was more graphically described.

THE AFTERLIFE: Christian - Heaven and Hell

A painting of three layers of groups of angels above a coffin.

The Assumption of the Virgin. Francesco Botticini. 1475-1476. National Gallery, London, England.

The apostle Paul had a vision of Paradise he said he could not describe since it was beyond the understanding of mortals. After his death, however, his followers were certain that he had written an account of his vision. Although none was ever found, this did not prevent other writers from speculating about its contents, nor prevent some of their speculations from passing into the beliefs of the early Christians. In spite of desperate attempts by theologians to correct the popularly accepted belief of heavenly bliss, the followers of Christ continued to prefer a vision of heaven that included all the physical pleasures of this life as well as a vision of the Heavenly Father as a kindly old patriarch in a flowing white beard.

An illuminated manuscript depicting Hell with demons and fire.

Hell. Herrad of Landsberg. 1180. Hortus Deliciarum. Original destroyed in 1870.

The "Promised Land” or Paradise of the Judaic covenant became the Heaven of the Christian faith. The visual images of this land of the blessed are derived primarily from the book of Revelation, also called the Apocalypse. This “New Jerusalem,” described on the following pages, will replace the heaven and earth after Christ's return at the end of the world. (The events leading up to the end of the world are related in Revelation.) Similar to the afterlife of cultures such as the Egyptians and Romans, Revelation depicts a paradise awaiting the moral and upright who pass the review of their mortal life. It is a heaven free of physical ills but abounding in physical pleasures and treasures. The wicked, whose sins are described in often general, abstract terms, suffer eternal punishment and misery in the lake of fire with Satan, the Christian embodiment of evil.

The author, John, begins with the statement that he is writing "The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to His servants what must soon take place; and he made it known by sending His angel to His servant John, who bore witness to the word of God...” (Rev. 1:1-2) The book of Revelation is filled with symbolic references, with objects, colors and numbers, but their interpretations have puzzled theologians and scholars for centuries. Nonetheless, the faithful followers of Christ have accepted John's vision of the "city of God.”

THE AFTERLIFE: Egyptian - The Underworld

Egyptian tomb painting of Ra traversing the Underworld on a boat.

Plowing the Fields of the Afterlife. c. 1250 BCE. Tomb of Sennedjem, Deir el-Medina, Egypt.

Given its general emphasis on death and rebirth, it is not surprising that in ancient Egyptian civilization the afterlife is a predominant theme. Osiris, the resurrection god, is the central figure in the afterlife myth and in Egyptian mythology as a whole. To die and be properly prepared for the other life is to become one with Osiris in the underworld over which he rules. Thus, at a funeral, the name Osiris was attached to the name of the mummified dead person. In this new identity the individual could be reborn as a soul. Our sources for the Egyptian afterlife myth are the Pyramid and Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead.

The Sumerians were not the only ancient people to send their kings to the next world in regal splendor; from the items found in the tomb of Tutankhamen, a relatively unimportant pharaoh, we know that the Egyptians buried their leaders magnificently. No other civilization seems to have made such elaborate preparation for the afterlife.
The Egyptians believed that when a person was born he was accompanied into this world by a protective spirit called the "ka” which would watch over him in this life and live on with him in the next. Egyptians also had a soul called the “ba.” During life the soul remained in the body-situated in the stomach or the heart-but after death the "ba” could roam the world freely during the day. At night the "ba” had to return to the tomb. To make sure that the "ba" found its proper resting place, the body of the deceased had to be carefully preserved; therefore, the Egyptians went through the elaborate process of mummification.

The mummified pharaohs of Egypt are legendary in popular culture. Many know about the burial rites, but few know what happened in the afterlife. During the burial rituals, preparations had been made for needs and the trials in the next life. For instance, the heart was considered to be the seat of a man's intelligence, his will. The purity of the heart would be tested by the gods below, so while other organs were removed, the heart was left in the body. Often, a gold scarab was placed directly over the heart, or on a necklace over the chest region. The scarab was inscribed with a spell that would help the soul when it arrived in the Underworld.

Papyrus featuring the weighing of the heart against a feather and the judgement of Osiris, including gods, people, and hieroglyphics.

Book of the Dead, Papyrus of Hunefer. Hunefer. c. 1275 BCE. British Museum, London, England.

Once the soul reached the Underworld it underwent tests of purity and morality. It first stood before a committee of "divine assessors," headed by the Underworld's judge, the god Osiris. The soul had to give a negative confession and accounting of his life and conduct. The confession was termed “negative” because each statement was prefaced with the phrase, “I have not,” as in, "I have not stolen.”
Once the moral fortitude of the soul was verified, Anubis, the jackal-headed god of the dead, took the heart of the person. The heart was placed on scales and weighed against the feather of justice, a symbol for Mayet or Maat, goddess of truth. Thoth, the ibis-headed god of wisdom served as / scribe and recorded the verdict. If the scales remained in balance, the heart was indeed pure and free of sin. Once the council of gods had accepted the verdict, the person could pass into the blessed afterlife. However, if the scales did not remain in balance, the heart was impure and fed to Ammut (or Ammit), who was part lion, part crocodile and part hippo.

As with many myths, ideas evolve over time. This story has two different endings as a result. During the Old Kingdom (2686-2182 BCE) only the pharaoh, who was believed to be a descendent of the sun god, Ra, was eligible for the rewards of immortality. Upon his death, his soul went to the east and joined the other gods, particularly Ra. The pharaoh accompanied the Sun god on his daily journey across the sky, riding in Ra's solar barque (boat). By the Middle Kingdom years, the promise of eternal life had been extended to everyone. Once a person's soul had survived the trials and been judged favorably by Osiris and his fellow gods, the soul passed into an afterlife in the Underworld where it spent eternity with family tending a small piece of fertile land.

Papyrus painting featuring a man on a boat with various creatures.

The Underworld Voyage. Joan Hunt. 1998. A Trip to the Afterlife, Cricket Magazine. Carus Publishing Company, Illinois.

During the Middle Kingdom the Underworld became a much more frightening place than had been imagined in the Old Kingdom. It was divided into sections, each of which was guarded by fearful monsters. In these early Underworld texts the journey is made by the soul, but in the developed works which appear on the tombs of the New Kingdom, the theme is the right journey of the Sun. As the latter goes through the subterranean ways it lights up the denizens of the dark. As an imaginative exercise, it is also a journey into the inner reaches of the mind and an attempt to penetrate to the reality which underlies phenomena. The temptation to people the darkness with the unredeemed dead has appealed to nearly every culture (for instance the Underworlds of Homer and Virgil). The Egyptians, too, thought it a place destitute of light and hope, the domain of unregulated power, phantoms, and terror, Nevertheless, the Underworld is one of the abiding symbols of mankind. Life must come from elsewhere and revival of the heavenly bodies must take place beyond human knowledge. The Underworld may be a limbo or a hell, but it is also the source of new life.

The afterlife of the Egyptians has two functions. First it contains a morality element. That is, in order to be eligible for eternal life in the Underworld one had to prove himself to be a good and moral person. Such a prerequisite helps enforce observance of the culture's myth and moral codes in this life. No adherence, no eternal life-at least not a pleasant one. Second, it offers a picture of eternal life that is reflective of the culture's surroundings. For example, kings join their predecessors in the east, a direction associated with birth and rebirth, since that is where the sun is reborn each day. The common man retires to join his family in an eternal version of what he knows best: farming his piece of land. Again, the birth/ rebirth element is visible in the cyclical process of planting, growing and harvesting crops.

THE AFTERLIFE: Greece - Land of the Dead and Elysian

A woodcut depicting a scene from the Odyssey as many men steer a boat in the underworld.

Odysseus Arrives at the Underworld. Theodoor van Thulden. 1633. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus visits the Land of the Dead, providing us with the most complete vision of the Greek concept of the afterlife. The great hero Achilles has become lord over this land, but he reminds the visiting Odysseus that life in any form is better than death: “Would that I were on earth a menial, bound to some insubstantial man who must pinch and scrape to keep alive! Life so were better than King of Kings among these dead men who have had their day and died.” The Land of the Dead is a place marked by emptiness and despair, a land in which the shades of heroes wander aimlessly, longing for a life lost to them forever.

A drawing of a man exiting a boat.

Goethe's Arrival in Elysium. Franz Nadorp. c. 1850.

But another view of the afterlife, which Homer also knew, emerged in the Greek world. In Book IV of the Odyssey we hear of the Elysian Field, where Menelaos, as the husband of a daughter of Zeus (Helen), will be privileged to spend his afterlife:

The Deathiess Ones will carry you to the Elysian plain, the place beyond the world, where is the fair-haired Rhadamanthus and where the lines of life run smoothest for mortal men. In that land there is no snow-fall, nor much winter, nor any storm of rain: but from the river of earth the west wind ever sings soft and thrillingly to reanimate the souls of men.

Gradually this underworld, in which Rhadamanthos, a former king of Crete and son of Zeus and Europa, was to become a judge, would emerge as a place where the dead would be punished or rewarded for their lives on earth. This is the familiar classical Hades, reached when the river Acheron, the River of Woe, is crossed by means of Charon's ferry. Other rivers, such as Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness, and the mysterious Styx, must also be crossed. Hades is presided over by the brother of Zeus, who is himself called Hades. The gates of Hades are guarded by the monster Cerberus.

THE GARDEN, THE GROVE, and THE CAVE

A painting of two people and many animals in a garden.

The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man. Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder. 1615. Mauritshuis, The Hague, Netherlands.

The garden, the grove, and the cave are sacred spaces in myth. Their connotative energy derives from the fact that they are originally associated with the Mother Goddess. They are places of birth (Jesus, the Buddha, Dionysus in some stories). They are places of withdrawal for meditation, which can lead to a second birth (Muhammad, Jesus in Gethsemane). They are enclosed, protective places that, like temples and walled cities, are metaphors for cosmos in the face of chaos. The Tree of Life and other forms of the Cosmic Tree are often found in gardens (the Bodhi Tree, the Tree of Knowledge), forming still another version of union in the tradition of the lingam-yoni conjunction, the tree being the standing phallus in the womb-garden.

THE CITY

A painting of an Ancient Greek city, clad in marble with statues and people, calm weather and a bay.

The Course of Empire: The Consummation of Empire. Thomas Cole. 1836. New York Historical, New York City.

The city, whether Troy, Jerusalem, Thebes, or Uruk, is humanity's stand against chaos. Like so many other constructs in this world, it is feminine in nature – a representation of nourishment and protection, the gateways of which must be guarded against potential invaders. The city is out “mother,” and her fall or corruption is among the most moving of tragedies.

THE MOUNTAIN

A still from an anime containing a mountain with four layers separated by clouds. Each layer is a different color.

Mountain from Iblard Jikan. Dir. Naohisa Inoue. 2007. Studio Ghibli.

The sacred mountain is the mons veneris of Mother Earth. It is the cosmic center on which the temple or the city is placed. It is the spot, nearest to the supreme sky god, where the word-the cosmic energy- can be received by Earth. It is Mount Parnassus, where the oracle of Delphi delivers dire predictions. It is the hill on which Athena builds her acropolis and temple in Athens. It is the mountain on which Moses receives the Ten Commandments, the mountain on which Jesus is “transfigured’ (Mark 9). In India it is the Golden Mountain, Meru – the axis mundi where Shiva sits, the place from which the sacred rivers such as Ganga (the Ganges) flow.

THE LABYRINTH

Detail from a painting including a circular maze with two people out front and a man fighting a minotaur in the middle.

Detail of Theseus and the Minotaur. Master of Tavarnelle. c. 1500s-1525. Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon, France.

The labyrinth appears in the myths of many cultures, but most prominently in the story of Theseus. The word derives from the Greek labrys, meaning ax. Presumably, in Crete, where the labyrinth was built in the form of a double ax by Daedalus to house the half-bull Minotaur, it referred to the sacred double ax used there for sacrifices. The labyrinth has always connoted the idea of a difficult journey into the unknown. To escape from it and from the monster within is to have faced death and been reborn (see the story of Theseus in Greek mythology).

THE TEMPLE

A still from a video game featuring an artist stepped temple covered in palm trees in a desert climate.

Ziggurat of Ur. Old World, Mohawk Games. 2020.

The temple is a microcosmic version of the city, It, too, is feminine, representative also of the Mother Mountain, the maternal womb into which the hero enters and plants his seed. The great cathedrals of Europe are the body of Christ on the horizontal plane and a representation of the cavernous and monumental Mother Mountain on the vertical. Often named after Mary, the Christian version of the Great Mother, they are architectural depictions of the union of the hero and the mother-wife-Mother Church, the church as the bride of the Lamb. The symbols within the church building reinforce this theme: the feminine font into which the pascal candle is plunged on Holy Saturday, the feminine altar-tomb-throne that is the place of the lover-god's sacrifice. The pyramids of Egypt, the Ziggurat of Babylon at the top of which the king marries the Goddess, the towering gopuram of the Tamilnad temples to Shiva and Vishnu and the Goddess, the Chapel Perilous where Galahad rediscovers the blood vessel, the Holy Grail – all are symbols of the feminine cosmic mound, the primeval mound of Earth from which life itself is born.

EUROPE: The Chapel Perilous

An illuminated manuscript of a knight walking in front of a group of people and a castle.

The Chapel Perilous. Thomas Mackenzie. 1920. Arthur and His Knights by Christine Chaundler. James Nisbet & Co, London.

The Chapel Perilous is perhaps related to the Seat (or Siege) Perilous. It is one form of the “Mount of Joy, the maternal place where the womb symbol and later Christian symbol called the Holy Grail was kept. The virginal puer aeternus Galahad may sit in the chapel in his quest for the Holy Grail, just as over the main doors of so many cathedrals the Christ Child as king is depicted seated on the lap of Mary, who thus, like the altar and the church itself, becomes the feminine throne for the seed-bearing hero. The Chapel Perilous appears in several versions of the Grail myth, not always in connection with Galahad.

Students of the Grail romances will remember that in many of the versions the hero-sometimes it is a heroine- meets with a strange and terrifying adventure in a mysterious Chapel, an adventure which, we are given to understand, is fraught with extreme peril to life. The details vary: sometimes there is a Dead Body laid on the altar; sometimes a Black Hand extinguishes the tapers; there are strange and threatening voices, and the general impression is that this is an adventure in which supernatural, and evil, forces are engaged.

Such an adventure befalls Gawain on his way to the Grail castle. He is overtaken by a terrible storm, and coming to a Chapel, standing at a crossways in the middle of a forest, enters for shelter. The altar is bare, with no cloth, or covering, nothing is thereon but a great golden candlestick with a tall taper burning within it. Behind the altar is a window, and as Gawain looks a Hand, black and hideous, comes through the window, and extinguishes the taper, while a voice makes lamentation loud and dire, beneath which the very building rocks. Gawain's horse shies for terror, and the knight, making the sign of the Cross, rides out of the Chapel, to find the storm abated, and the great wind fallen. Thereafter the night was calm and clear.
[Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance: An Account of the Holy Grail from Ancient Ritual to Christian Symbol, New York, 1920, 1957, p. 175.]

MYTHOLOGICAL OBJECTS

THE TREE

An abstract painting of a tree with animals.

The Tree of Life. Carl Jung. 1913-1916. Liber Novus. 2009, W.W. Norton, New York City.

The roots of the sacred tree extend to the depths of the earth, and its branches reach to the heavens. It brings together the temporal and the eternal. Furthermore, it is a symbol of life and of wholeness. The cross of the Crucifixion is a tree; the Buddha found enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree; Osiris was found in a tree; Adonis was born of a tree. Many cultures possess world trees or axletrees, which, like temples and primeval mounds, are the center of the world.

INDIA: The Cosmic Tree

A painting of Buddha sitting under a flowering fig tree.

Detail of Amitabha, the Buddha of the Western Pure Land (Sukhavati). Unknown Artist. c. 1700. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

In the ancient Upanishads the cosmic tree, Asvattha, represents Brahman itself, the cosmos in full bloom. In the Bhagavad-Gita it incorporates the world of humanity.
Indian tradition, according to its earliest writings, represents the cosmos in the form of a giant tree. This idea is defined fairly formally in the Upanisads: 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. Cf. RgVeda: “The branches grow towards what is low, the roots are on high, that its rays may descend upon us!”) The Katha- Upanisad describes it like this: “This eternal Asvattha, whose roots rise on high, and whose branches grow low, is the pure [sukram], is the Brahman, is what we call the Non-Death. All the worlds rest in it!” The asvattha tree here represents the clearest possible manifestation of Brahman in the Cosmos, represents, in other words, creation as a descending movement. Other texts from the Upanisads restate still more clearly this notion of the cosmos as a tree. “Its branches are the ether, the air, fire, water, earth, etc. The natural elements are the expression of this “Brahman whose name is Asvattha.”

In the Bhagavad-Gita, the cosmic tree comes to express not only the universe, but also man's condition in the world: "It is said that there is an indestructible tree, its roots above, its branches below, its leaves the hymns of the Veda; whoever knows it knows the Veda also. Its branches increase in height and depth, growing on the gunas; its buds are the objects of sense; its roots spread out from below, bound to actions in the world of men. In this world one cannot perceive the shape, nor the end, nor the beginning, nor the expanse of it. With the strong weapon of renunciation, one must first cut down this asvattha with its powerful roots, and then seek the place from which one never returns. . . .” The whole universe, as well as the experience of man who lives in it and is not detached from it, are here symbolized by the cosmic tree, By everything in himself which corresponds with the cosmos or shares in its life, man merges into the same single and immense manifestation of Brahman. “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 fruits of his actions. We find the same motif of detachment from the life of the cosmos, of withdrawal into oneself and recollection as man's only way of transcending himself and becoming free, in a text from the Mahabharata. “Sprung from the Unmanifested, arising from it as only support, its trunk is bodhi, its inward cavities the channels of the sense, the great elements its branches, the objects of the senses its leaves, its fair flowers good and evil (dharmádharmavi), pleasure and pain the consequent fruits. This eternal Brahma-tree [brahma-vrksa] is the Source of life [abjíva] for all beings. . . . Having cut asunder and broken the tree with the weapon of gnosis (jananéna), and thenceforth taking pleasure in the Spirit, none returneth thither again.
[Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, New York, 1958, pp. 273-274]

THE STONE

A illustration of a boy in red pulling a sword from a rock.

Arthur Draws the Sword from the Stone. Walter Crane. King Arthur's Knights by Henry Gilbert. T.C. & E.C. Jack, Edinburgh and London.

In myth, the stone is often a place of sacrifice. Again, the symbolism seems to be maternal, or at least feminine, Arthur proves his powers by pulling the phallic sword from the maternal rock. Theseus does the same by removing the sword and sandals from under the rock.

The stone can also be seen in myths with petrification - that is, turning people into stone. This is most prominent in the Perseus myth when he defeats the gorgon Medusa. However, stories of people turning into stone can be found all around the world including European Christian, Icelandic, Asian (Vietnamese, Korean, India, and Filipino), Native North American, and Aboriginal Australian.

AUSTRALIA (ABORIGINAL): Erathipa

A digital sketch of a pregnant woman next to a rock.

Erathipa. Jayla Patton. 2012. Digital.

This fertility stone has a feminine opening on one side.

The tribes of central Australia have... a huge rock known as Erathipa which has an opening in one side from which the souls of the children imprisoned in it watch for a woman to pass by so that they may be reborn in her. When women who do not want children go near the rock, they pretend to be old, and walk as if leaning on a stick, crying: “Don’t come to me, I am an old woman'...

The idea implicit in all these rites is that certain stones have the power to make sterile women fruitful, either because of the spirits of the ancestors that dwell in them, or because of their shape (the pregnant woman, “woman stone'), or because of their origin (svayamm bhū, ‘autogenesis”).

(Mircea Eliade, Pattern in Comparative Religion, New York, 1958, pp. 220-221.)

THE GENITALS

A painting of Cronus, standing, poking Uranus, laying, in the genitals

Detail of The Mutilation of Uranus by Cronus. Giorgio Vasari and Cristoforo Gherardi. c. 1550. Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, Italy.

The loss of genitals is directly associated with the god's role as seed planted in the earth-womb of the Great Goddess. The conjunction of genitals in this case, as in the case of the many Indian depictions of sex acts between Shiva and Parvati – his feminine soul, or Shakti (anima) – and between Vishnu and his spouse, is a symbol of union or wholeness. The Shiva phalus, or lingam (often painted blood red), standing within the temple inner Sanctum, the yoni or Great Goddess vulva, is the iconographic correlative of the essence of the Shivite cult. It is related to the ritual of the flower-bedecked maypole or such mythological images as the Christian Pietå, in which the mythic son-lover is joined with the mother-wife after the Crucifixion. The archetypal image of Arthur's sword in the rock takes another form in the little stone lingam-yoni combinations that are to be found in and around Shiva temples.

NATIVE NORTH AMERICA (APACHE): The Vagina Girls

A black and white drawing of a goddess with hair flowing over her outstretched arms.

Hine-nui-te-po: The Death of Maui. Wilhelm Dittmer. 1907. Te Tohunga: The Ancient Legends and Traditions of the Maoris. George Routledge & Sons, New York.

These types of stories are generally associated with the "vagina dentata," latin for toothed vagina. They exist in many cultures around the world, sometimes associated with the warnings of the danger of unknown women and to discourage rape. However, other times, as seen below, they involve the "taming" of the woman and removal of the teeth. Many times, they involve the Trickster, who represents the basic needs of humans including sexual pleasure. Māui, of Māori mythology (the same one Disney's Moana is based), is killed as a result of the toothed vagina of the night goddess Hine-nui-te-pō.

This Apache tale is almost certainly a patriarchal myth of the taming of the female powers associated in other traditions-India's, for example-with the destructive nature of the Great Goddess of death and rebirth.

Long ago, nearer to the beginning of this world than now, a malevolent and powerful being named Kicking Monster roamed the earth. Kicking Monster had four daughters who were in the shape of women, but in reality they were vaginas. They were the only beings on earth that possessed vaginas, though they lived in a house-all four of them-that itself had vaginas hanging on the walls. But the vagina girls had legs and other body parts and could walk around.

Not surprisingly, knowledge of the vagina girls' existence spread far and wide, and many men of the Haisndayin, the people who came from below, eagerly traveled the road to their house. But as they approached, they were ambushed by Kicking Monster and kicked into the house, from which they never returned.

Then a young hero, little more than a boy and called Killer-of-Enemies, already known for ridding the world of many monsters, heard about this alluring snare and decided to set things right. He outwitted Kicking Monster, slipping past him and entering the house, where he was set upon by the four vagina girls, hungry for intercourse.

Before they could lavish their attentions on him, Killer-of-Enemies asked them the whereabouts of all the men whom the monster had kicked into the house. The girls replied that they had eaten the men, which they liked to do. And they reached lustfully out for the boy hero,

Killer-of-Enemies shouted for them to stop: “Stay away from me! That's no way to use a vagina.” He knew that these four vaginas yearning for him were fined with teeth, with which he too would be chewed and devoured.

He told the vagina girls that first, before any love-making could take place, he had to give them some medicine made from four kinds of berries. It was sour medicine, he warned them, and unlike anything they had tasted before, but it would make their vaginas sweet. Tantalized, the girls ate the medicine and liked it very much.

Its sourness puckered up their mouths so much that they could not chew with their teeth, but could only swallow, Indeed, it made them feel just as though Killer-of Enemies were thrusting into them, and they were bedazzled with ecstasy.

And the medicine not only fooled the vagina girls, but destroyed their teeth altogether. So it was that the boy-hero tamed the toothed vaginas so that they would always thereafter behave in a proper manner.

[David A. Leeming and Jake Page, Goddess, Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 126-127]

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