Dead, which is called "the gate of knowledge of the soul of the East":
"I am the pilot in the holy keel, I am the steersman who allows
no rest in the ship of Râ.[75] I know that tree of emerald green
from whose midst Râ rises to the height of the clouds."[76]
Ship and tree of the dead (death ship and death tree)
are here closely connected. The conception is that Râ,
born from the tree, ascends (Osiris in the Erika). The
representation of the sun-god Mithra is probably explained
in the same way. He is represented upon the
Heddernheim relief, with half his body arising from the
top of a tree. (In the same way numerous other monuments
show Mithra half embodied in the rock, and illustrate
a rock birth, similar to Men.) Frequently there is
a stream near the birthplace of Mithra. This conglomeration
of symbols is also found in the birth of
Aschanes, the first Saxon king, who grew from the Harz
rocks, which are in the midst of the wood[77] near a fountain.[78]
Here we find all the mother symbols united—earth,
wood, water, three forms of tangible matter. We
can wonder no longer that in the Middle Ages the tree
was poetically addressed with the title of honor, "mistress."
Likewise it is not astonishing that the Christian
legend transformed the tree of death, the cross, into
the tree of life, so that Christ was often represented on
a living and fruit-bearing tree. This reversion of the
cross symbol to the tree of life, which even in Babylon
was an important and authentic religious symbol, is also
considered entirely probable by Zöckler,[79] an authority
