World Trees

A gargantuan tree, that can be seen from miles away. It is seen in the center of the world. It is also outside the world, keeping it in its branches. Both are true. The Tree is at the center, wherever the center is defined to be.

The Tree is God. It may not be the Person who designed the world, but it is the root. It is deity not because of agenda, power, or worship, but because it is more real than you. It is the Root of the Real. It preserves harmony and balance and stability purely because it is. If the Tree is sickly, or if it dies, the world follows suit. Perhaps the causality is reversed. Sometimes the death of the Tree does not end the world, but it does change it. Perhaps the Tree can be regrown. Perhaps it left Seeds. Perhaps the God-Tree IS a person, and it must be regrown through the sacrifice of a willing saint.

The rebirth of the Tree is Rebirth and Renewal and the Order of Things. It is Eternity, and the tree might extend into the World Beyond. Its roots certainly grow downward into the Underworld. Its highest branches hold the Heavens. It is not merely that the Tree is the World and Nature. It is not merely God or Eternity. The Tree is Connection and Oneness. If the World is in the Branches, you can walk anywhere from anywhere. If the Tree has flowers and fruits, it grows them all, including those that exist nowhere else. It is not merely an Ash Tree; it's all trees that have ever grown, could ever be grown. Could possibly be grown.

The Tree Is Oneness and Connection to Everything. If you make a Promise in the presence of the World Tree, it is binding. A Promise under the World Tree is a guarantee. It is certainly true that the fruit of the World Tree is a treasure to consume. Perhaps its juices can raise the dead, or perhaps partaking of its flesh can heal any illness, or bestow unimagined magical power and vitality upon the eater. But this is a thing that must be earned. Wisdom can be obtained by suffering or meditating under a Tree, and there are often similar trials to earn the fruits of a tree. To steal a fruit is to curse yourself and your descendants with the First of Crimes. Death is granted instead of rebuked. Corruption is born. You stole Oneness and thus fractured the Wholeness.

Often, the Tree is an idea as much as it is a thing. The Tree is the virtues or founding principles of the world. The schema of Why the World Is. The beacon through which the Light of God is within the world.

There are corruptions of the World Tree. Qlippothic emanations. It divides, it corrupts. It consumes everything into itself, and subverts promises into Faustian regrets. This Tree is healthy because the land is sick. Its fruits birth monsters, its flowers are poisons. It is the model of the world's undoing, the vices and subversions of how the world must work if it is to perservere. Its survival is a curse, its seeds a plague.

The Oneness is subverted. There is one World Tree, but of these counterparts, there could be countless. With no harmony or balance, an invasive species that overgrows like a kudzu.

You have to stop them.