Being, Kabbalah, and the Assyrian Sacred Tree

Being, Kabbalah, and the Assyrian Sacred Tree Stylised trees were part of the iconography of religion in ancient Mesopotamia, as far back as the fourth millennium. By the second millennium B.C.E., the image of the tree 'is found everywhere within the orbit of the ancient Near Eastern oikumene, including Egypt, Greece, and the Indus civilisation’. While its precise religious significance has been unclear, Simo Parpola suggests that ‘its overall composition strikingly recalls the Tree of Life of later Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist art.’ The implication being that there is some kind of cultural continuity behind the progress of this symbol. i The symbol, as it interests us here, dates from around the middle of the second millennium B.C.E. At about that time there is a new development of the symbol of the tree. The Late Assyrian form of the Tree appeared during the reign of Tukulti-Ninurta I, of the thirteenth century B.C.E. The rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the first millennium spread the symbol throughout the Near East, and it survived until the end of the millennium. This form of the tree is the one most familiar to students of Assyriology and those who have visited the Assyrian galleries in the British Museum, with its garland of cones, pomegranates, or palmates surrounding either the crown of the tree, or its trunk. The importance of this symbol is made clear by the fact that it appears on royal garments, jewelry, official seals, as well as the royal wall paintings and sculptures found in the royal palaces. Indeed in the famous throne-room of Ashurnasirpal II (now in the British Museum), it is the central motif, standing directly behind the throne. ii There are literally hundreds of examples of the Late Assyrian Tree motif, and they exhibit a wide degree of variation. iii However Parpola argues that ‘its characteristic features stand out even in the crudest examples and make it generally easy to distinguish it from its predecessors’. He describes it as follows: Essentially it consists of a trunk with a palmette crown standing on the stone base and surrounded by a network of horizontal or intersecting lines fringed with palmettes, pinecones, or pomegranates. In more elaborate renditions, the trunk regularly has joints or nodes at its top, middle, and base and a corresponding number of small circles to the right and left of the trunk. Antithetically posed animal, human, or supernatural figures usually flank the tree, while a winged disk hovers over the whole. Until the publication of Parpola’s paper, despite painstaking analyses of this symbol, very little was found to explain its meaning and function, largely due to the fact that there is an almost total lack of textual evidence concerning the tree. Some work by the Assyriologist Irene Winter however has shown that the Tree represents the divine world order, and that the Assyrian king maintained this order on earth as the vice-regent of the god Aššur. iv Parpola points out that the observation was made some time ago that the king may take the place of the Tree between the winged genies, and that ‘whatever the precise implications of this fact, it is evident that in such scenes the king is portrayed as the human personification of the Tree. v As personification of the Tree, then the king represented the ‘realization of that order in man… a true image of God, and the ‘Perfect Man’. vi Parpola argues that the Tree symbol in Assyria had a dual function in Assyrian Imperial art. As well as symbolizing the divine world order which the Assyrian king maintained, it could also relate to the king, resulting in his portrayal as the Perfect Man. This would account for the prominence of the Tree as an imperial symbol, providing legitimation for the rule of Assyria, and justification of the king as absolute ruler. vii Since there are no references to such an important symbol in contemporary written sources, this ‘can only mean that the doctrines relating to the Tree were never committed to writing by the scholarly elite who forged the imperial ideology but were circulated orally.’ viii Parpola also suggests this implies a stratification of knowledge in Assyria, and that ‘only the basic symbolism of the Tree was common knowledge, while the more sophisticated details of its interpretation were accessible to a few select initiates only. ix Parpola argues that ‘the strictly esoteric nature of Kabbalah and the fact that its secret doctrines were for centuries, and still are, transmitted almost exclusively orally are the principal reasons why next to nothing was known about it until the late Middle Ages. The esotericism of Kabbalah and its fundamentally oral nature are stressed in every Kabbalistic work, ancient and modern’. He suggests that beyond the parallel of an esoteric and oral aspect to both Mesopotamian and Kabbalistic lore, there is also a strong parallel between the Assyrian Tree and the Sefirotic Tree. x He also suggests that the entire doctrinal structure of Kabbalah revolves around the diagram of the Sefirotic Tree, which ‘strikingly resembles the Assyrian Tree’. xi As we shall see, it is probable that they are two products of the same body of ideas, the first traceable to the 13th century B.C.E., and the latter with a less clear early history, resurfacing in the Middle Ages of our own era. The Sefirotic Tree is so-called on account of the elements known as Sefirot (countings or numbers) which are represented in the diagram by circles, numbered from one to ten.‘ They are defined as divine powers or attributes through which the transcendent God, not shown in the diagram, manifests himself.’ xii Parpola describes the tree thus: The Tree has a central trunk and horizontal branches spreading to the right and left on which the Sefirot are arranged in the symmetrical fashion: three to the left, four on the trunk, and three to the right. The vertical alignments of the Sefirot on the right and left represent the polar opposites of masculine and feminine, positive and negative, active and passive, dark and light, etc. The balance of the Tree is maintained by the trunk, also called the Pillar of Equilibrium. The other two pillars are known as the Pillar of Judgement, and the Pillar of Mercy. Parpola suggests that the Sefirotic Tree has a dual function, like the Assyrian Tree. It is both a picture of the macrocosm, giving an account of the creation of the world, accompanied in three successive stages by the Sefirot emanating from the transcendent God. It also charts the cosmic harmony of the universe upheld by the Sefirot under the constraining influence of the polar system of opposites. In short, it is a model of the divine world order, and in manifesting the invisible God through His attributes, it is also, in a way, an image of God. Its other function is to refer to man as a microcosm, the ideal man created in the image of God. Interpreted in this way, it becomes a way of salvation for the mystic seeking deliverance from the bonds of flesh through the soul’s union with God. The arrangement of the Sefirot from the bottom to the top of the diagram marks the path which he has to follow in order to attain the ultimate goal, the crown of heaven represented by the Sefirah number one, Keter. So, given the striking resemblance between the Assyrian Tree and the Sefirotic Tree, both in terms of appearance and its symbolic content, is there in fact a lineal connection? Parpola argues that this is likely. The Kabbalah seems to have originated on Babylonian soil in renowned rabbinical schools, and these were later ‘the major centres from which the Kabbalistic doctrines spread to Europe during the high Middle Ages.’ xiii He points to known Jewish borrowings from Mesopotamia during and after the Exile to Babylon, including the fact that the Jewish calendar remained based on the Neo-Babylonian system of intercalation. xiv Further evidence points to the ‘foundation stone’ of Kabbalism, the Sefer Yezirah, having been composed sometime between the third and sixth centuries, and the emergence of the Kabbalah as a doctrinal structure can now be traced ‘fairly reliably’ to the first century A.D. xv Some Kabbalistic doctrines, such as the location of the Throne of God in the Middle Heaven, ‘are explicitly attested in Mesopotamian esoteric texts.’ xvi The connections of Kabbalah with Jewish apocalyptic esotericism and mysticism of the post-exilic period have never been questioned, and its affinities with Platonism, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, and Sufism were noted long ago and stressed by many scholars; the crucial question of the evolution of Kabbalistic doctrines, specifically their dependence on external influence(s), however, has remained a matter of controversy. While Kabbalists themselves have consistently stressed the antiquity of their tradition and vehemently denied the existence of any kind of historical development in Kabbalah… modern scholarship has tended to see the emergence of historical Kabbalah as a gradual process heavily influenced by Neoplatonic and especially Gnostic thought. However this is no longer the case: Parpola notes that this picture has been changed significantly by recent research, and that it is now ‘generally recognized that there is considerable Jewish influence on the emerging Gnostic literature, not the other way around,’ and that ‘several doctrinal features of Kabbalah previously attributed to Gnosticism in fact belong to a genuine Jewish tradition reaching… down to the first century A.D., if not earlier. xvii Nevertheless, none of this constitutes proof of the existence of the hypothetical Assyrian precursor, as Parpola concedes.

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