The sacred tree and a bee

The sacred tree motif...may be associated with a bee in a Hittite text: "An eagle is perched on the branches of the tree above, wrapped around the roots of the tree is a snake below, a bee hangs at the middle of the tree"...

From "Apiculture in Hittite cuneiform texts". Here is my symbolic depiction of the above passage. Cool, right?

This tree is usually interpreted as "the world tree", "a colossal tree, located at the centre of the world, which supports the heavens, thereby connecting the heavens, the terrestrial world, and, through its roots, the underworld"...

The World Tree, often has an eagle in its crown and serpent /dragon in its roots. As in Hittite mythology. And Germanic mythology where we find Yggdrasil. 1897 depiction by Ernst Hermann Walther

Here are examples of the depiction of "the world tree" from Serbian epic poetry.

Excerpt from a Serbian folk poem which talks about the tree of life with Falcon (Perun) sitting on its top and Serpent/Dragon (Veles) coiling around its roots:

Here is another variant of the same poem about the Tree of Life with Eagle (Perun) sitting on its top and Dragon (Veles) coiling around its roots. This one narrated by the tree of life itself:

It is commonly believed that the eagle symbolises the heaven and the serpent symbolises the underworld...But the world tree can also be interpreted as "the tree of life". Basically "everything between the earth and the sky"...

In which case the eagle symbolises rain (god) and serpent symbolises sun (god)...I talked about this symbolism of eagle and serpent in my post "Eagle snake struggle" in which I analysed the symbolic meaning of the Eagle-Snake struggle mosaic from the palace of the Emperor Justinian I  (527-565), Istambul.

Basically this is a complex animal calendar marker for the thunderstorm season in Europe Apr/May -  Sep/Oct, which is also when migratory snake eagles and snakes can be seen in South Eastern Europe... 

BTW if you look at the above thunderstorm chart, and if you look at the Hittite part of Anatolia, you will see that Apr/May is also the start of the main thunderstorm season there too...

Eagle (Rain) and Snake (Sun)...Whose balance is needed if we want (the tree of) life to flourish. And between them, bees...Without whom...

In Polesye, area along Belarus and Ukraine border, there is a belief that God created bees "to live til the end of the world" and that "when all bees die, the world will end"... More Slavic bee folklore can be found in my post "Bee"... 

You can find lots and lots of posts about eagles and their link to thunder/rain and about snakes and their link to sun on my blog

BTW, I talked about bee as an animal calendar marker in Asia Minor, in my post "Deer and bee", about this Silver tetradrachm from Ephesus minted c. 390–380 BC.

All this helps us understand the Hittite myth about the disappearance of Telipinu, the god of agriculture. His disappearance caused all fertility to fail, both plant and animal. Everyone is looking for him, but finally it is the bee who finds the god after everyone else gave up search. And by finding the missing Telipinu, it is the bee that brings the fertility back to the world...

It is interesting that bees reappear in the spring, when the winter is finally over, and are one of the main signs that the winter (infertile time of the year) has ended and summer (fertile time of the year) had began...

One more thing about Hittites and bees:

Amulet of a bee goddess, 700 - 600 BC. Found in excavations of Kamiros, Rhodes, Greece. One of the nicknames of Persephone, The Queen of the Underworld, was Melitodes ("sweet as honey"), and the priestesses of Demeter and Persephone, were known as Melissae ("bees")...

You can read more about this in "The Eleusinian Mysteries and the Bee"...

Interestingly, Hittites believed that bees were "the gift of The Sun Goddess of the Earth", Hittite equivalent of Persephone, The Queen of the Underworld...

You can read more about this in "Apiculture in Hittite cuneiform texts"...

Both of these Queens of the Underworld were also linked to land fertility...

That's it. To read more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, start here…Then check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am way way behind...