What the tree meant to the alchemists cannot be ascertained either from a single interpretation or from a single text:
In order to discover this, a great many sources must be compared. We shall therefore turn to further statements about the tree. Pictures of the tree are often given in the medieval texts. Some of them are reproduced in Psychology and Alchemy. Sometimes the prototype is the tree of paradise, hung not with apples but with sun-and-moon fruit, like the trees in the treatise of Michael Maier in the Musaeum hermeticum, or else it is a sort of Christmas tree, adorned with the seven planets and surrounded by allegories of the seven phases of the alchemical process
CW13 ¶ 398STANDING BENEATH THE TREE
Standing beneath the tree are not Adam and Eve but Hermes Trismegistus as an old man and the adept as a youth. Behind Hermes Trismegistus is King Sol sitting on a lion accompanied by a fire-spitting dragon, and behind the adept is the moon goddess Diana sitting on a whale accompanied by an eagle. The tree is generally in leaf and living, but sometimes it is quite abstract and expressly stands for the phases of the process
CW13 ¶ 398THE SERPENT DWELLS IN THE TOP
OF THE TREE IN THE SHAPE OF MELUSINA
In the Ripley Scrowle the serpent of paradise dwells in the top of the tree in the shape of Melusina-“desinit in [anguem] mulier formosa superne.” This is combined with a motif that is not in the least Biblical but is primitive and shamanistic: a man, presumably the adept, is halfway up the tree and meets Melusina, or Lilith, coming down from above. The climbing of the magical tree is the heavenly journey of the shaman, during which he encounters his heavenly spouse
CW13 ¶ 399SHAMANISTIC ANIMA WAS
TRANSFORMED INTO LILITH
In medieval Christianity the shamanistic anima was transformed into Lilith, who according to tradition was the serpent of paradise and Adam's first wife, with whom he begot a horde of demons. In this picture primitive traditions cross with Judaeo-Christian ones. I have never come across the climbing of the tree in the pictures done by my patients, and have met it only as a dream motif. The motif of ascent and descent occurs in modern dreams chiefly in connection with a mountain or a building, or sometimes a machine (lift, aeroplane, etc.)
CW13 ¶ 399MOTIF OF THE LEAFLESS OR DEAD TREE
The motif of the leafless or dead tree is not common in alchemy, but is found in Judaeo-Christian tradition as the tree of paradise that died after the Fall. An old English legend reports what Seth saw in the Garden of Eden. In the midst of paradise there rose a shining fountain, from which four streams flowed, watering the whole world. Over the fountain stood a great tree with many branches and twigs, but it looked like an old tree, for it had no bark and no leaves. Seth knew that this was the tree of whose fruit his parents had eaten, for which reason it now stood bare. Looking more closely, Seth saw that a naked snake without a skin had coiled itself round the tree. It was the serpent by whom Eve had been persuaded to eat of the forbidden fruit. When Seth took a second look at paradise he saw that the tree had undergone a great change. It was now covered with bark and leaves, and in its crown lay a little new-born babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, that wailed because of Adam's sin. This was Christ, the second Adam. He is found in the top of the tree that grows out of Adam's body in representations of Christ's genealogy
CW13 ¶ 400MOTIF OF THE TRUNCATED TREE
Another alchemical motif is the truncated tree. In the frontispiece to the French edition (1600) of Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499), it forms the counterpart to the lion with cut-off paws, which appears as an alchemical motif in Reusner's Pandora (1588). Blaise de Vigenère (1523-?1569), who was influenced by the Cabala, speaks of the “caudex arboris mortis” (trunk of the tree of death) that sent out a red death-ray. “Tree of death” is synonymous with “coffin.” The strange recipe, “Take the tree and place in it a man of great age,” should probably be understood in this sense
CW13 ¶ 401THE MOTIF OF MUTILATION
The motif of mutilation occurs in “Allegoriae super librum Turbae,” Art aurif., I, pp. 140, 151. These amputations have nothing to do with a so-called castration complex, but refer to the motif of dismemberment
CW13 ¶ 401THE HERO PLACED HIS SOUL ON THE
TOPMOST BLOSSOM OF AN ACACIA-TREE
This motif is a very ancient one, and occurs in the ancient Egyptian tale of Bata, preserved in a papyrus of the nineteenth dynasty. There the hero placed his soul on the topmost blossom of an acacia-tree. When the tree was cut down with treacherous intent, his soul was found again in the form of a seed. With this the dead Bata was restored to life. When he was killed a second time in the form of a bull, two persea trees grew out of the blood. But when these were cut down, a chip of the wood fertilized the queen, who bore a son: he was the reborn Bata, who then became Pharaoh, a divine being. It is evident that the tree here is an instrument of transformation. Vigenère's “caudex” is similar to the truncated tree in Poliphilo. This image probably goes back to Cassiodorus, who allegorizes Christ as a “tree cut down in his passion”
CW13 ¶ 401THE TREE APPEARS BEARING FLOWERS AND FRUIT
More frequently the tree appears bearing flowers and fruit. The Arabian alchemist Abu'l Qasim (13th cent.) describes its four kinds of blossoms as red, midway between white and black, black, and midway between white and yellow. The four colours refer to the four elements that are combined in the opus. The quaternity as a symbol of wholeness means that the goal of the opus is the production of an all-embracing unity. The motif of the double quaternity, the ogdoad, is associated in shamanism with the world-tree: the cosmic tree with eight branches was planted simultaneously with the creation of the first shaman. The eight branches correspond to the eight great gods
CW13 ¶ 402THE FRUITS OF THE TREE OF
WISDOM ARE LIKENED TO GRAPES
In the Book of Enoch the fruits of the tree of wisdom are likened to grapes, and this is of interest inasmuch as in the Middle Ages the philosophical tree was sometimes called a vine, with reference to John 15 : 1, “I am the true vine.” The fruits and seeds of the tree were also called sun and moon, to which the two trees of paradise corresponded. The sun-and-moon fruits presumably go back to Deuteronomy 33 : 13f. (DV): “[Blessed] of the Lord be his land[for] the fruits brought forth by the sun and by the moonand [for] the fruits of the everlasting hills”
CW13 ¶ 403GOD HIMSELF APPEARS AS THE FRUIT
OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL TREE
God himself dwells in the fiery glow of the sun and appears as the fruit of the philosophical tree and thus as the product of the opus, whose course is symbolized by the growth of the tree. This remarkable saying loses its strangeness if we remember that the goal of the opus was to deliver the anima mundi, the world-creating spirit of God, from the chains of Physis. Here this idea has activated the archetype of the tree-birth, which is known to us chiefly from the Egyptian and Mithraic spheres of culture
CW13 ¶ 404THE RULER OF THE WORLD LIVES IN
THE TOP OF THE WORLD-TREE
A conception prevalent in shamanism is that the ruler of the world lives in the top of the world-tree, and the Christian representation of the Redeemer at the top of his genealogical tree might be taken as a parallel
CW13 ¶ 404Sometimes the tree is small and young, something like the “grani tritici arbuscula” (little trees of wheat grains), sometimes large and old, taking the form of an oak or the world-tree, in so far as it bears the sun and moon as its fruits
CW13 ¶ 405