I would like to welcome you to episode 23 of the Symbolic World podcast. On this episode, I will be

playing for you a discussion I proposed last year on the symbolism of the tree. I follow that

symbolism from the beginning of Genesis all the way to the end of revelations and looking at also

at different popular traditions which came about on this particular structure.

Hopefully, through this discussion, people can see how coherent a lot of these stories are

and how they fit together like a giant puzzle.

And so enjoy.

Music. This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world. Now, to understand the symbolism of the tree, you really need to understand more encompassing symbolism.

And so as I discuss the tree, I'm going to join other symbols together so that you can really get a sense of a cosmic vision of how the tree fits into a cosmic image.

Okay.

Now, as usual, if you really want to understand biblical symbolism, you have to start in Genesis.

And ideally, you have to start in Genesis and ideally you have to

start in the creation story now a tree is an image of order it's an image of

hierarchy okay it's an image of how things come together towards one. So you can imagine the

trunk of a tree as a kind of axis. And then you can imagine the branches of the tree as the

repeating pattern of the tree. So a tree is a, the branch of a tree has the same structure of a tree.

And as the branch separates into smaller, into smaller branches,

the same structure appears on the tree as the basic tree in itself.

Okay.

And so it is an image of this cosmic connection of everything together.

Okay, so it is an image of order. Now, the idea of the tree can be

order as it comes towards one, but it can also be order as it separates into the many. Okay.

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