Tree of extinction

As I'm trying to wrangle the many many contexts in which one reads of a "tree of life" into one argument, I decided, on a whim, to search for "tree of extinction." (Part of my argument, as you know, is that Charles Darwin was drawn to the tree as a model for the history of species precisely because trees naturally lose many branches.) 

Something came up! The article, just half a year old, is "Mutilation of the tree of life via mass extinction of animal genera," and it argues that we are already well into the sixth extinction. Whole genera of animals have gone extinct in recent centuries, at a far swifter rate than before and much too quickly for evolution to fill the gaps. And many more are at risk. It's a powerful, urgent argument, but the accompanying illustration undermines it. 

With images of extinct genera on the withered branches, it sort of corresponds to Darwin's tree of life, which includes extinct as well as living species. But their point is not that this is business as usual. We're supposed to imagine that the same fate may await the genera represented in the green canopy above. Where the image undermines their argument is that the tree in the picture looks perfectly healthy. We expect the lower part of the trunk of a tree to be branchless. And if higher branches die off, too, we expect that that's just part of the tree's growing higher still, generating a new canopy.

Behold the tree II

Once you start noticing them, trees are everywhere. Like in the so-called Reidersche Tafel, a c. 400 Italian ivory carving (housed now in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum) which represents one of the first extant representations of the resurrection and ascension of Christ.

I've seen it before, but just reencountered it in John Dominic Crossan and Sarah Sexton Crossan's Resurrecting Easter: How the West Lost and the East Kept the Original Easter Vision, part of my Lenten reading. The Crossans' story is that it took Christian iconography a long time to find ways of representing the resurrection, which, after all, isn't directly described in any of the canonical gospels. (The Gospel of Peter obliges.) The Reidersche Tafel is shown as they work their way from symbolic depictions through a series of images in which Jesus awakens, steps out of and finally hovers above the tomb. But that happens centuries later than this carving, which leads to a detour on how the discovery of the tomb and the erection of a church above it (perhaps shown here) ushered in a period where representing the tomb took the place of the event. But this isn't just the tomb yet.

This is again a symbolic depiction of the actual moment of resurrection. Here the solution is the olive tree growing luxuriantly out of the very top of the tomb with birds feeding on its fruit ... This is the resurrection as the Tree of Life for the world; and this olive tree visually links the Resurrection, on the left, to the Ascension on the Mount of Olives, on the right (Acts 1:12). ([HarperOne, 2018], 49)

It is an exquisite tree, a marvel of art and technique. But is it really also a representation of the resurrection? That would be grand! The other accounts of the iconography of the tree I've found (on a rather cursory search) present it as representing the church, the two birds its Jewish and Gentile members. And the Tree of Life isn't usually depicted as an olive. But this carved wonder is definitely doing more than just filling out the space as beardless Jesus gets a hand on his way into the sky, and clearly growing out of the tomb. Fascinating!

Darwinian trees

This is all quite interesting, no doubt, but what on earth am I doing in the weeds of phylogenic trees in a book about religion? 

It's cool to suggest that when Charles Darwin acknowledged that the simile of a great tree used to show the affinities of all the beings of the same class ... largely speaks the truth, he had a different truth in mind than many might suppose. Common descent is part of it, but he was more interested in the process of natural selection, which he saw illustrated by the way a tree grows. For Darwin a tree isn't a happy family...

At each period of growth all the growing twigs have tried to branch out on all sides, and to overtop and kill the surrounding twigs and branches, in the same manner as species and groups of species have tried to overmaster other species in the great battle for life. (On the Origin of Species [1859], 130)

While this fratricidal scene seems a little exaggerated, competition is the law of Darwinian life. (The second chapter of Origin is called "Struggle for Existence.") While he refers to vigorous and feebler buds, one might add that this refers not to anything about their nature - they're exactly the same plant - nor how hard each "tries." It's the accidents of light and position, wind and other life forms that make the selection, in turn shaping the environment which will determine who makes it in the next generation. Translated to the different beings of a class, there will be more variation among them than among a tree's buds and twigs, but the role of environment in determining who thrives remains central. And extinction. As we've seen, it was in realizing the role of extinction that Darwin sketched the famous "I think" tree/coral/seaweed drawing.

The environment is abstracted away in the sole diagram in On the Origin of Species, but then it's not a tree in the robust biological sense of the simile Darwin will countenance a few pages later. (Diagram and simile don't refer to each other. But the claiming of the tree simile comes as Darwin summarizes the chapter on "Natural Selection," emphasizing that natural selection can, as "the view that each species has been independently created" cannot, account for the "truly wonderful fact" that "all animals and plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other in group subordinate to group," as shown in the diagram. (129))

Each of the diagram's little starbursts represents a flurry of variation of which at most two variants survive... Only fifteen of the numberless variations make it to the present (fourteen thousand generations, though it could be ten times more), and they trace back to only three of the eleven starting lines! If this is a tree of life it's also a mausoleum. If translated back to an actual tree, each of those twigs that didn't make it is on or in the ground below.

Most references to Darwin's "tree of life" miss all these nuances, but it seems to me that enumerating the differences can be helpful, both for appreciating trees and for appreciating the contingent tangle of life which trees can seem particularly well to represent. But helpful for thinking about religion of trees? Yes - because this unnuanced view is widely held as part of "dark green religion." And because helping themselves to ancient religious notions of "cosmic trees," as such folks do, adds ideas of coherence, harmony, completeness and even progress to a story far more tragic and contingent - and sublime in a different way.

My purpose isn't to debunk but to complicate and enrich, but I find myself sounding a little shrill here. Ever the Weberian I don't see myself taking sides but rather pointing out "inconvenient facts" for all parties so readers can make up their own minds.

So for Darwin, the history of life isn't like a single-trunked tree, its growth all vertical out of a single source, but more like this diagram from an article about the implications of lateral gene transfer called "Uprooting the Tree of Life" - although it still maintains a more tree-like form than the latest representations below. And perhaps there is more cooperation within and among trees than he could imagine. 

Still, I do have sympathies of my own of course! I guess I'm struggling to work out where to put them. Obviously my sympathies shape the kind of story I tell - what I include, what I let complicate and enrich what - but am I working toward a culminating all-encompassing insight? That unplanned use of the word "sublime" three paragraphs ago, for instance, and another word I didn't but was tempted to use: "tragic." And those ideals I've been problematizing - verticality, centrality, fullness, balance. Those are things many a tree-reverer sees in trees (and why fashionable thinkers prefer rhizomes). Am I saying they're not there, or there is some different profounder way?

And by what right do I favor some views over others? I'm no botanist, and spend more time thinking about trees than being with them. Still, my hope is that readers won't take my reflections as ungenerous attacks from a place of superiority but as insights from a place of grateful learning. My hoped response: you've given me ways to see more, to articulate what I've long known.

Back to the Darwin question. If Darwin's "tree of life" isn't what the deep green religionists think it is, and if it's been superseded by no longer tree-like diagrams among scientists anyway, why mention any of it? Because Darwin's tragic tree is truer than The Giving Tree, and Doolittle's swarm mangrove is truer still - truer in the sense that they let you see more of what really goes on among trees, and this is something profound. Like Darwin I'm complicating and enriching: 

The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. (130)

And because - here I'm stretching even more - this truer awareness brings us closer to elements of the non-modern religions of trees, too, which are formed and informed by relationships with trees more attuned to contingency and tragedy, to the realities of lateral intervention and to the wonder of their continued treeing forth.

Extinct branches

The ceiling of a central gallery in the Natural History Museum in London has since 2009 offered visitors "TREE," a work by Tania Kovats commissioned for Charles Darwin's 200th and the Origin of Species 150th birthdays. This is a "wafer-thin" slice of an actual tree - a two hundred year old oak - inspired by the famous drawing in Darwin's notebooks of 1837 which seems to capture the moment 

he discovered the theory of evolution. The museum's video about the making of "TREE" ends with the superposition of Kovacs' work, the source tree while still standing, and Darwin's sketch. I can't find images of what it looks like from right underneath it but the one below at least offers a tree's eye view. It must be most impressive and a little sinister, the museum's largest botanical specimen!

Kovats' work is simply called "TREE" but, despite her requests, is described by visitors and ultimately the museum too the way Darwin's doodle is, as a "tree of life." And yet it's not even clear that Darwin's drawing represented a tree. One scholar has argued that Darwin's model was coral. It seems more likely that the image of a tree of life was a preexisting one which Darwin made use of, as is suggested by the way he uses the image in Origin of Species 22 years later. 

The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. . . . As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.

The twiggy drawing wasn't in fact the first in that notebook in which Darwin was feeling his way toward the theory of evolution. Two others appear a few pages before, each of the three corresponding to a central element of the emerging theory. Adaptation, gaps in the fossil record, and - for this third one - extinctions. When more than just the evocative "I think" is included in your image, we see ongoing thought.

The original image seems designed to make sense of the "immense gap of relation" between A (bottom right) and B (top), relative to the smaller but also different gaps between B and C, and between B and D. Beside the image come two later thought bubbles which lead to the epiphany that the process described "requires extinction." (text) Maybe he made the later connection between his theory and representations of species affinities as a tree with the inescapability of extinctions in mind - a way to recognize kinship with the defunct.

There have been many problems identified in thinking of all of life as a tree, not least because of the implications of lateral gene transfer. But I'm intrigued that part of the value Darwin saw in the tree simile was the fact that trees lose branches: "the great Tree of Life ... fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications." As a botanist Darwin appreciated that trees grow through loss. 

My main inspiration in these reflections is an article I stumbled on by Nils Petter Hellström, “The tree as evolutionary icon: TREE in the Natural History Museum, London,” Archives of natural history 38.1 (2011): 1–17, and rabbit holes it led me to.

Roerich

I haven't been back to the Nicholas Roerich Museum since covid (last time was February 1, 2020) and was surprised to find the whole place redesigned. The furniture and mostly Himalayan statuary which made it feel like someone's parlor have been replaced by cases of sketches and drawings. The windows have been covered, too, for the sake of the art, no doubt, but still a shame: the paintings glowed in natural

light, too. Now it feels a little like an underground space, or a space station! (A virtual tour of the old layout is still viewable.) All that said, Roerich's colors still dazzle like presentiments of another world. The sketches - like these for paintings of religious figures (1924-33) - are delightful. And a mosaic company in 2021 executed designs of Roerich's, including the "Tree of Life" above, planned for a memorial to his teacher Arkhip Kuindzhi in 1913.

Heavenly orchard

Being in Canterbury, NH for the Church of the Woods, we couldn't not take a look at Canterbury Shaker Village. Still it felt a little odd to celebrate the now silent community which cleared the forest to make 

their busy, joyful life here for almost two centuries. It's all silent now. The Shakers having been celibate, there are no descendants. Canterbury's last member "passed to the Summer Land" in 1992, where they all may now be in the presence of mystical trees. 

Hannah Cohoon, "The Tree of Life" (1854), Polly Collins, "An Emblem of the Heavenly Sphere" (1854), Polly Collins, "A Tree of Love, A Tree of Life" (1857), in Sharon Duane Koomler, Seen and Received: The Shakers' Private Art (Hancock Shaker Village, 2000)

Inverted trees

It's been a while since I read Mircea Eliade - what a trip! I used to assign The Sacred and the Profane regularly (with critiques), and The Myth of the Eternal Return long before that, but haven't spent time with Patterns in Comparative Religion (1949) in ages. The reason now? There is a section called "Vegetation: Rites and Symbols of Regeneration," which brings together many accounts of trees and other plants in traditions from around the world, especially ancient and folkloric ones. (It's summarized in Sacred and Profane 147-51.) We learn of Yggdrasil and tree marriages and rituals and celebrations around May Trees, how trees facilitate shamanic ascents and the birth of the Buddha and the connection of the wood of the Cross to Eden. Sacred trees are the consolidation of the most ancient sacred sites, which brought together a stone, a tree and water. 

 

[T]he tree represents - whether ritually and conceretely, or in mythology and cosmology, or simply symbolically - the living cosmos, endlessly renewing itself. 

(trans. Rosemary Sheed [London: Sheed and Ward, 1958], 267)

Patterns offers the pleasure of the encyclopedic polymath, moving weightlessly across time and space to surface unexpected commonalities. While protesting that it’s all really bafflingly complicated, Eliade regularly reassures us that it's actually all quite simple. Helpfully he provides a summary of the main "grouping" of "vegetation cults": 

(a)   the pattern of stone-tree-altar, which constitutes an effective microcosm in the most ancient stages of religious life (Australia; China; Indochina and India; Phoenicia and the Aegean);

(b)  the tree as image of the cosmos (India; Mesopotamia; etc.,);

(c)   the tree as a cosmic theophany (Mesopotania; India; the Aegean)

(d)  the tree as symbol of life, of inexhaustible fertility, of absolute reality; as related to the Great Goddess or symbolism of water (Yaksa, for instance); as identified with the fount of immortality (“The Tree of Life”), etc.; 

(e)   the tree as centre of the world and support of the universe (among the Altaics, Scandinavians, etc.); 

(f)    mystical bonds between trees and men (trees giving birth to men; the tree as the repository of the souls of man’s ancestors; the marriage of trees; the presence of trees in initiation ceremonies, etc.);

(g)   the tree as symbol of the resurrection of vegetation, of spring and of the “rebirth” of the year (the “May” procession for instance, etc.) (266-67)

Each of these is divided into several sections, which overflow with examples and bleed into each other. A type is introduced and immediately needs to be reasserted as the assembled examples don't quite dovetail. Is this scholarly candor on Eliade's part or gaslighting? He claims to have followed the evidence - and on an unprecedented scale - rather than working with an a priori definition of religion. Eliade writes from the position of one who has discerned the "patterns" modern scholars, whose impoverishing historicism occludes the experience of the sacred, don't even realize are there. His method, I suppose, tries to teach us how to see the wood for the trees - or at least to see as he sees. 

Vegetation cults, above all, must be interpreted in the light of the original bio-cosmological conception that gave rise to them. That they appear so various is often [/] merely an illusion of modern vision; basically they flow from one primitive ontological intuition (that the real is not only what is indefinitely the same, but also what becomes in organic but cyclic forms), and converge towards one object – that of assuring the regeneration of the powers of nature by one means or another. (314-15)

That move to unity, wiping out all the historical specificity it claims to honor, is part of what's knocked Eliade out of syllabi. In a recent reflection on Patterns in a series of articles on "Undead Texts," Laurie L. Patton summarizes the critique nicely: 

[F]or the more historically minded scholars, Eliade’s transhistorical treatment of the modality of the moon eclipsed all particular references to the moon, at particular moments in history by particular people. The symbolic moon erased the real moon occurring in real contexts. (Public Culture 23:2 [2020]: 385-96, 391)

These methodological criticisms were given further urgency as we learned of Eliade's early fascist sympathies. His pseudo-theological paeans to the sacred and its contrast with the disenchanting imperatives of "Semitic" thought now appeared not just wrong but dangerously so. (The last few years I taught Eliade in "Theorizing Religion" it was to wonder what made his fascist simplifications so appealing to the US of the Cold War but also of the counterculture - and, if you let it, to anomic today, too.) Still, Patton thinks Eliade - especially the Eliade of Patterns - endures in the shadows, recalling

the long conversations I have had with colleagues who whisper in small confessions that they still read it or that they still like it even though they do not cite it. This alone is fascinating to me—the way in which one has to both own and disown an intellectual legacy. (392) 

Patton is conflicted, or intrigued, too, musing that the search for universals (she calls it "comparative" and "form") might have potential to be as radical and moral an act of social responsibility and justice as a turn away from it (390). She winds up commending Patterns for the ways it is more like Eliade's literary works than the theoretical works, an enjoyable experience of artifice (393). 

Patton may be thinking precisely of the way the detailed cases Eliade enumerates in Patterns don't quite congeal, revealing the pathos of his perhaps unscholarly quest for an underlying order beyond the painful illusions of history. (His novels' protagonists are all on this quest.) This hide-and-seek method can be quite seductive. 

"In the midst" of Paradise stood the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and God forbade Adam to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge: "...for in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death." [Gen 2:9, 17] Yet God makes no mention of the Tree of Life. Is this last simply the same as the Tree of Knowledge, or - as some scholars believe - was the Tree of Life "hidden" only to become identifiable and therefore accessible at the moment when Adam should snatch at the knowledge of good and evil, or, in other words, wisdom? I am inclined to this second hypothesis. (287) 

Eliade explains that he's inclined to this hypothesis because "immortality is not easy of attainment" but I think he's inclined also because his understanding of the phenomenology of religion is all about hidden and lost things. Eliadian "hierophanies" (manifestations of the sacred) are always "camouflaged" in the profane. Nothing we experience in this world of evanescence is ultimately real - but sometimes it can express or signify or imply it. 

This goes for all the trees conjured up in Patterns, too, which are as eclipsed by Eliade's account of them as the actual moon is by his symbolic moon.

No tree or plant is ever sacred simply as a tree or plant; they become so because they share in a transcendent reality, they become so because they signify that transcendent reality. (324)

For Eliade, trees are venerated when and were they are because of the "power" they express - but this is not an arboreal power. In their verticality and the way they grow new leaves each year (his symbolic trees are all deciduous), they "represent ... the living cosmos" but this cosmos is somehow beyond the world of actual life! 

None of the emblems attached to trees can be interpreted in a naturist sense for the simple reason that nature itself was something quite different in Mesopotamian thought from what it is in modern thought and experience. We need only remind ourselves that to the Mesopotamians, as to primitve man in general, no being, no action that means anything has any effectiveness exceptin so far as the being has a heavenly prototype, or the action reproduces a primeval cosmological one. (273)

"Primitive" and "primeval" for Eliade aren't terms of derision but of purity. Unlike "historical man," the primitive man (a k a homo religiosus) wanted to live in the real, and knew it to be something requiring constant regeneration through rituals which abolish inevitably corrosive time. 

This makes trees (well, "trees") especially signficant, for in them, more than anything else in our experience, we witness that what is truly "real," what is "indefinitely the same," needs to be cyclically recreated over and over, "endlessly renewing itself." This "living cosmos" has no growth - only regrowth. The trees Eliade likes are already fully grown, "world trees" linking - vertically of course - all the levels of reality. But the one who truly understands them religiously also knows that they are not ultimately real either. His discussion of May Tree rituals, involving cutting and burning of trees (and people too), is extensive, but most revealing here is his commending of the "Indic" views which describe a world tree - and the need to uproot it. He quotes approvingly from the Bhagavad Gita [xv. 1-3] one of several places in Indian tradition where the non-ultimacy of the trees we know is implied by the "world tree"'s being "inverted." "

"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..." (273-74)

The sage and mystic know that this tree isn't "indestructible" after all, and learn to "cut the tree at its roots" and leave the "cosmos" altogether. While his evidence points in many directions, Eliade darkly suggests that only "Semites" think to seek immortality in this world rather than to transcend it. (He thinks Christianity is, or ought to be, cyclical and sacrificial, about incarnation and resurrection.)

I'm not sure what to make of Eliade's strangely ambivalent celebration of the sacredness of trees, but I'm tempted to let students wrestle with it. Seeing the ways in which arboreal life ultimately remains hidden from Eliade might challenge us to ask ourselves whether we can really engage them as persons rather than symbols...