9/22/2023 0 Comments Tree of life biologyTo play consciously on religious tree imagery was no new trick … but still it helped Darwin to seize the imagination of his readers” ( Hellström 2011). We have been stuck with this name ever since, in spite of the fact that Darwin's concept is actually a fusion of the two trees (Knowledge and Life).ĭarwin, of course, did this to “mobilize one of the oldest and richest traditions of imagery available to him. In the process he renamed it the Tree of Life (in probably the book's most quoted passage, wherein Darwin becomes quite poetic), rather than the Tree of Knowledge. In the mid 1800s, Charles Darwin (in the Origin of Species) took this pre-existing tree idea and instead made it represent evolutionary relationships among species. These arcane uses of the Knowledge tree idea were embraced by biology in the 1700s, when both trees and networks were used as metaphors for the relationships among biological species-in modern parlance, these represented affinity or phenetic relationships. (The latter work actually contained 16 trees of knowledge, with each subject having its own root, trunk, and branches.) At about the same time, the Tree of Life also appeared as the central mystical symbol of the Kabbalah of esoteric Judaism, consisting of the 10 Sephirot this is a reinterpretation of the Hebrew Bible, conceptually representing a series of divine emanations from God's creation and the nature of revealed divinity. For example, Joachim of Fiore used the tree as a metaphor for historical relationships in his Liber figurarum of 1202 ( Hestmark 2000) and in his book Arbor Scientiae of 1295 Ramón Llull used it to illustrate the growth and inter-relationships of knowledge ( Gontier 2011 Kutschera 2011). The biblical Tree of Knowledge (technically, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil) was co-opted in Medieval times as a symbol of learning-a metaphor for arranging human knowledge. It has also appeared in biology, as a symbol of phylogenetic history. In addition to its role in Nordic cosmology and Christian theology, it has been recorded in Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek, Siberian, Olmec, Mayan, Buddhist, Tibetan, and Hindu cultures, for example. The message here is that even though things constantly change, and one thing replaces another, the concept of a Tree of Life in one form or another has a long history. Ironically, the cathedral has since been moved, following an extensive fire-and this involved the move of the town's name with it, so that the town of Östra Aros became Uppsala, and the former Uppsala became Old Uppsala. Yggdrasil itself has since been replaced in Nordic lore by the biblical Tree of Life (technically, the Tree of Eternal Life), just as the Uppsala Temple was deliberately replaced when the Christians built the Uppsala cathedral. Such is the way of the modern fast-travelling tourist. They then leave, seeing no other part of the town, and head to Stockholm (which is a fairly recent town, by comparison). These days, most bus tourists to Uppsala stop at the old pagan site (which is now revered more for its series of Iron Age burial mounds) quickly get bored looking at these grass-covered hills, and peer into the nearby ex-cathedral instead. What kind of tree it is nobody knows.” (Possibly a yew.) This tree was likely to have been an homage to Yggdrasil, the Nordic version of the Tree of Life. In the 1070s, Adam of Bremen's Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum noted the presence of a temple, with nearby “a very large tree with widespread branches which are always green both in winter and summer. Nevertheless, my home town of Uppsala is one of the few places that appears on the earliest maps, because it was an important pagan religious site, dating from as early as the 3rd-century CE. Even today, Sweden is not a country known by many tourists (unlike Norway, which has spectacular fjords) and in the past, Sweden was even more poorly known.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |