COVER ARTICLE: Botanical Determination of the Middle Eastern Tree of Life

Abstract

Early myths and religious beliefs that account for the origin of life and human aspirations to attain immortality are often ignored or scorned by natural historians, as they tend to contradict modem Darwinian views of natural creation and current biological understandings of the aging process. Allusions to an immortalizing 'tree of life' in the mythic traditions of Mesopotamia, the Levant, and India are therefore thought to arise from the hopeful and imaginative yearnings of superstitious peoples rather than historical realities. Linguists and comparative mythologists have long recognized, nevertheless, that references to such a plant appear recurrently in mythic, artistic, and historical records of IndoEuropean, Semitic and Hamitic peoples (Cambell 1991:9-17; Cook 1974; James 1966:129162; Parpola 1993). This observation convinces some commentators that ancient beliefs in an immortalizing 'plant of the gods' may have a material or logical basis in human history. Some historians have hypothesized that the concept of a tree of immortal life derives from the widespread practice of ingesting psychotropic plants to heighten or distort human perceptions of reality (Ruck 1986; Ruck, Staples, and Heinrick 2001; Schultes 1992; Smith 2000; Wasson 1986). Whether this is this is the case or not, no single plant has ever been identified that could have served the same purpose for so many different peoples throughout Europe and Asia.