At the apex is a bird with coins and the Sun. The leaves of the tree are coins and people. The ceramic base is guarded by a horned beast with wings. Also found in Sichuan, from the late Han dynasty (c 25 – 220 CE) is another tree of life. At the top is a strange bird-like (phoenix) creature with claws. At the base was a dragon, and fruit hanging from the lower branches. Dating from about 1200 BCE, it contained three bronze trees, one of them 4 meters high. The one who eats the fruit receives immortality.Īn archaeological discovery in the 1990s was of a sacrificial pit at Sanxingdui in Sichuan, China. A Taoist story tells of a tree that produces a peach every three thousand years. In Chinese mythology, a carving of a Tree of Life depicts a phoenix and a dragon the dragon often represents immortality. In a different context from the one above, the tree of life represents the spiritual realm, where this duality does not exist. The latter represents the physical world with its opposites, such as good and evil and light and dark. The fruit produced by the tree nourishes an ever-advancing civilization.Ī distinction has been made between the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The concept can be broken down still further, with the Manifestation as the roots and trunk of the tree and his followers as the branches and leaves. The concept of the tree of life appears in the writings of the Baha'i Faith, where it can refer to the Manifestation of God, a great teacher who appears to humanity from age to age. In fact, no textual evidence pertaining to the symbol is known to exist. The name "Tree of Life" has been attributed to it by modern scholarship it is not used in the Assyrian sources. Assyrilogists have not reached consensus as to the meaning of this symbol. It was apparently an important religious symbol, often attended to by eagle-headed gods and priests, or the King. The Assyrian Tree of Life was represented by a series of nodes and criss-crossing lines. Servants stood on each side of the tree with one of their hands up as if they are taking care of the tree. The branches of the tree were equally divided on the right and left sides of the stem, with each branch having one leaf, and one leaf on the apex of the tree. In ancient Armenia, the Tree of Life was a religious symbol and was drawn on walls of fortresses and carved on the armor of warriors. The Egyptians' Holy Sycamore also stood on the threshold of life and death, connecting the two worlds. They were said to have emerged from the acacia tree of Iusaaset, which the Egyptians considered the tree of life, referring to it as the "tree in which life and death are enclosed." A much later myth relates how Set killed Osiris, putting him in a coffin, and throwing it into the Nile, the coffin becoming embedded in the base of a tamarisk tree. ![]() In Egyptian mythology, in the Ennead system of Heliopolis, the first couple, apart from Shu and Tefnut (moisture and dryness) and Geb and Nuit (earth and sky), are Isis and Osiris.
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