The Norse world tree that Steiner read as an Atlantean clairvoyant memory of how the human being became a self-conscious ego-bearer.
Yggdrasil, the World Ash is the cosmic tree of Norse myth that Rudolf Steiner, in GA 101, interpreted not as poetry but as a remembered astral picture. The old Druid seers, he held, beheld in the three-rooted ash the very forming of the human nervous system, heart, and speech at the close of Atlantis, the moment when the etheric head sank into the physical head and the clear word I first sounded from within.
Yggdrasil, the World Ash in Anthroposophy is the Norse world tree that Rudolf Steiner read as a clairvoyant memory-image of how the human being became an ego-bearer at the close of Atlantis. In GA 101 (1907), lectured in Berlin, Steiner reads the ash as a picture of the forming nervous system, heart, and speech: Niflheim sends the twelve streams that became the twelve pairs of cranial nerves, Muspelheim sends the fire-sparks that transformed the heart, and the giant Ymir and cow Audhumla figure the new thinking and nourishing man. The tree's three roots, gnawed by the serpent Nidhoggr, tended by the three Norns, fed by Mimir's well of wisdom, stand for sexuality, heart, and speech, the lower nature in constant exchange with the head above. The name itself, Ygg meaning I and drasil from the root of the German verb tragen, to bear, marks the tree as the ego-bearer of the awakening human soul.
In Steiner's Own Words
The new man in the new world is like a tree, an ash that has three roots. One root comes from the north, from Niflheim; the second from the warm Muspelheim; and the third from Mimir's Well. They are fructified from above by the goat, and a squirrel runs down and returns with complaints from below. In this tree the cosmic forces are gathered together. The tree is the 'ego-bearer.' Yggdrasil means ego-bearer. 'Ygg' is 'I', and 'drasil' comes from the same root as the German verb tragen (to bear).
What it Means Today
The world tree as a map of the inner human being is not Steiner's invention alone. In Ego and Archetype (1972), the Jungian analyst Edward F. Edinger read the axis-tree of myth as an image of the ego-Self axis, the living thread connecting the everyday personality to the greater totality of the psyche. Where Jung and Edinger saw Yggdrasil as a picture of psychological centering, of the ego finding its rooted place beneath a crown that reaches into the unconscious, Steiner read the same ash one layer deeper and one age earlier: as a literal clairvoyant memory of the body forming around a newborn I. His claim is testable in an unexpected way. Modern anatomy counts exactly twelve pairs of cranial nerves, the same twelve streams Steiner's seers watched flowing from Niflheim into the head. The squirrel running the trunk, carrying words of discord between crown and root, is the nerve current itself, ascending and descending without rest.
For a reader today, the entry offers a method more than a doctrine. Steiner's instruction is to treat a myth as a script rather than a fantasy, to ask what perception in the soul a story records. Thalira synthesis: read this way, Yggdrasil is the West's own version of the chakra-tree, a vertical anatomy in which sexuality, heart, and speech are the three roots and self-conscious thinking is the crown, the Norse seer and the yogic seer mapping one human being from two ends of the same axis.
Where to Read More