Where you meet,
Today I am going to talk to you about a very common motif in shamanic cultures and that is the World Tree.
The motif of the World Tree,
You can find that from pretty much all continents.
You can find it from European myths,
From Native American myths,
From South American myths,
To Africa and to Asia,
To Hinduism.
It's a very very common idea and a concept.
From many Finno-Ucric and then from Samayedi myths,
You can find the World Tree and it connects the land of the living to the land of the dead and to the highest spirits.
There is a Samayedi legend that the Mother Earth gave the shaman drum for the shamans for the only purpose that shaman could travel inside the trunk of the World Tree between the different worlds.
World Tree is also a symbol in Tengrism and Tengrism it is a shamanic practice from Central Asia.
So it can be found from Turkic people and Mongols.
In Korean mythology,
World Tree is connected to the crown of Sila.
These crowns,
They are beautiful handmade crowns that were made sometimes between 5th and the 7th centuries and they have these different symbols in them.
So there are these shapes of deer antlers and they are believed to represent Korean shamanism,
Where deer is one of the totem animals and when there is the World Tree that is believed to be a connection of ancient Siberia and Eurasia and Korea.
In Finnish mythology we also have Maemampul,
The World Tree.
In Finnish folklore it is usually described to be a giant pine tree and the top of it is connected to the Northern Star.
So it is an invisible pole and it holds the three worlds together like in many Uralic myths,
Ancient Finns believe that the world was made of three levels.
There was Ulinen,
The upper world,
Where all the highest spirits lived.
The Käskinen,
The middle world,
Where humans lived with animals and the little spirits.
Then there was the underworld,
Place of the dead.
So the shaman,
He would travel inside this invisible tree,
Between these levels.
It wasn't necessarily seen as a physical tree,
It was more a spiritual idea.
Then in Scandinavian Deutsches,
There is Yggdrasil,
Which is an ash tree and the first mentions of it comes from Eta poems of course.
There are three wells in the roots of Yggdrasil.
There is Hyrkimir,
The trembling cotron.
There is Urbarpur,
The well of fate.
There is Mimir's prune,
Mimir's well.
In the top there lives Verhoenir,
The falcon who sees everything.
Then in the bottom there lives the dragon Nidhödr and Radarösk,
The squirrel is the messenger between the two.
We can also find world tree from Mesoamerican cultures.
We can find these myths from Mayans,
From Zabal,
From Olmec cultures,
From Aztec and Mitztec cultures as well.
For the Mayans the world tree was a Chaypa tree and it was called Yax-inix-chay and it means the blue-green tree of abundance.
It was believed that the tree because it branched into all four directions east,
West,
South,
North,
It is also connected to elements and each element was connected to one direction.
In the Mayan architecture the trees they replanted next to the ceremonial places to each of the four directions.
They are connected to the vertical and horizontal dimensions and it is based on the idea the way human body perceives the surrounding world.
It is really interesting.
In many Native American cultures the world tree was a spruce tree.
So you can see here that in each culture the world tree was a tree that was common in the environment.
In Latvia the world tree was known as Alstraskox.
It means the tree of dawn.
And there is cuckoo sitting in this tree and they were cuckooing.
And the amount of cuckoos that would determine it,
People's fate.
In Lithuania the world tree was also a very common symbol and it was used as in embroideries and it was used to decorate plates and household furniture and doors and such.
In Ireland there were tribal trees and they were called as Pilei and these trees they were cut down by the enemies during the tribal wars.
You can find world tree from South Asian religions from Hinduism.
There is Kalpagirks which means the wish fulfilling tree.
Then there is also African connection with Yoruba.
In Yoruba fate the first tree that was ever planted connected Orishas to the human world.
