The Mother, the Tree, and the Empire

Jeremiah 10:3–4 For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe.They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.

Isaiah 40:19–20 The workman melteth a graven image, and the goldsmith spreadeth it over with gold, and casteth silver chains.He that is so impoverished that he hath no oblation chooseth a tree that will not rot; he seeketh unto him a cunning workman to prepare a graven image, that shall not be moved.

Isaiah 44:14–17 He heweth him down cedars, and taketh the cypress and the oak, which he strengtheneth for himself among the trees of the forest: he planteth an ash, and the rain doth nourish it.Then shall it be for a man to burn: for he will take thereof, and warm himself; yea, he kindleth it, and baketh bread; yea, he maketh a god, and worshippeth it; he maketh it a graven image, and falleth down thereto.He burneth part thereof in the fire; with part thereof he eateth flesh; he roasteth roast, and is satisfied: yea, he warmeth himself, and saith, Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire:And the residue thereof he maketh a god, even his graven image: he falleth down unto it, and worshippeth it, and prayeth unto it, and saith, Deliver me; for thou art my god.

Deuteronomy 16:21 Thou shalt not plant thee a grove of any trees near unto the altar of the LORD thy God, which thou shalt make thee.

The Christmas tree is not a Christian symbol in origin, meaning, or theology. Its roots do not lie in the life, teachings, or symbolic world of Jesus of Nazareth, but in pre-Christian fertility cults of the ancient Mediterranean, most notably the cult of Cybele and her consort Attis. The decorated pine tree associated with Christmas emerges from a religious worldview fundamentally opposed to the core claims of biblical Christianity.

Long before Christianity, the pine tree functioned as a sacred object in the Phrygian cult of Attis. Attis was understood as a vegetation god whose life, death, and partial return were ritually reenacted each year. According to the tradition preserved and analyzed by James George Frazer, Attis was believed to die beneath a pine tree, to be transformed into or embodied by that tree, and to persist within it in a suspended, undecaying state. The pine was not a symbol in the modern sense; it was treated as the living body or corpse of the god himself.

Each year, a pine tree was cut down, wrapped, adorned, mourned, and ritually honored. This act represented the killing of the god. The mourning that followed expressed the grief of the Mother, Cybele, and the community. The rites did not culminate in a true resurrection, but in the assurance that life would continue cyclically through repetition. Attis does not conquer death; he is absorbed into nature and preserved within it. His vitality returns only as the seasons turn again.

The choice of the pine was deliberate. As an evergreen, it does not visibly die in winter. It bleeds resin when cut. It appears immortal while being wounded. In the cultic imagination, this made it an ideal vessel for a god who dies but does not truly rise, who persists but does not redeem. The pine embodies continuity without victory, survival without transformation.

Cybele, the Great Mother (Mother of abominations on the Earth), presides over this system. She does not save, redeem, or restore creation once and for all. She governs an eternal cycle of birth, decay, sacrifice, and renewal. Within her cult, life is maintained only through repetition and loss. Death is not defeated; it is managed. This is a cyclical cosmology, not a redemptive one.

This worldview stands in direct contradiction to early Christian theology. Christianity does not teach cyclical regeneration through nature. It teaches linear history, historical incarnation, and a once-for-all act of redemption. Christ dies on the cross not to renew the cycle of life and death, but to break it. His resurrection is not seasonal, symbolic, or repetitive. It is definitive. Death is conquered, not ritually postponed.

The earliest Christians did not celebrate the birth of Christ, did not venerate trees, and did not employ evergreen symbolism. The New Testament contains no sacred arboreal imagery connected to Jesus, and early Christian writers repeatedly warned against incorporating pagan rites and objects into worship. Trees, poles, and decorated wood were explicitly associated with idolatry in the Hebrew Scriptures, from which Christianity emerged.

The pine tree entered Christian culture much later, not through theology or revelation, but through cultural accommodation after Rome severed Christianity from its Hebraic roots. As Christianity became institutionalized within the Roman world, it absorbed existing customs rather than transforming them at their source. The evergreen tree, already charged with religious meaning in Europe, was recontextualized rather than rejected.

In this light, the Christmas tree is not a misunderstood Christian symbol but a borrowed one. Its deeper symbolic ancestry lies not in the cross of Christ but in the pine of Attis; not in redemption but in recurrence; not in the defeat of death but in its endless return. Christ dies on the cross to save humanity, not so that the adversary’s ancient pattern of death-through-nature and the Mother who governs it might be quietly reinstalled in Christian space in the form of a decorated tree.

Rome’s Great Mother sits enthroned

Rome did not encounter the cult of Cybele and Attis as a foreign curiosity; it consciously adopted it as part of its own sacred ancestry. Roman tradition traced its spiritual legitimacy eastward, and Phrygia held a privileged place in that imagination. The Great Mother, Cybele, was formally brought to Rome during the Second Punic War, not as a metaphor but as a physical object: a black meteoritic stone believed to embody the goddess herself. This stone was installed with full state ceremony on the Palatine Hill, near the heart of Roman power. From that moment, Cybele was no longer merely an imported deity; she became Mater Deum, the Mother of the Gods, protector of Rome and guarantor of its destiny.

This matters because Rome did not abandon this maternal cosmology when it later embraced Christianity. The language changed, but the underlying religious instincts remained. The title “Mother Church,” the emphasis on Rome as the spiritual womb of the world, and the persistence of solar imagery all reflect continuity with older imperial religion rather than fidelity to the God of Israel. Sun symbolism, long associated with Roman power and cosmic order, was never fully relinquished. The solar serpent, the unconquered sun, and the imperial axis linking heaven and earth continued to shape Rome’s religious self-understanding.

The pine tree of Attis belongs squarely within this inherited worldview. In the Phrygian cult, the pine was not decoration but incarnation. It was the body of the dying god, cut, adorned, mourned, and ritually preserved. Life was sustained not through redemption but through repetition. Death was not defeated but endlessly managed. This is the same logic that underlies the concept of the axis mundi, the cosmic pillar or world-tree that mediates between heaven and earth. Long before the cross became a Christian symbol, the vertical axis was already sacred as a structure of cosmic mediation. The cross was not originally a sign of salvation; it was a sign of alignment, power, and order in pagan cosmology.

Christianity shattered this framework. The God revealed in the Hebrew Scriptures does not dwell in trees, or cosmic cycles. He forbids images precisely because they are believed to be inhabited by spirits/demons/fallen angels. He enters history once, suffers once, and redeems once. Christ dies on a cross not to affirm the axis mundi but to overturn it. The cross becomes holy only because it is the place where God submits to death and then destroys it from within. Redemption is not cyclical, seasonal, or symbolic. It is historical, linear, and final.

Rome could not destroy this faith. Martyrdom only strengthened it. So Rome absorbed it. In doing so, it severed Christianity from its Hebraic roots, increasingly defined itself over against Judaism, and gradually reintroduced the very religious patterns the gospel had rejected. This was not accidental. Roman religion had always been imperial, incorporative, and adaptive. When Christianity became the religion of the empire, it was reshaped to serve imperial continuity.

The historical record bears the weight of this transformation. Rome persecuted and killed Christians who refused to bow to images. Later, it persecuted Jews, confined them to ghettos, and fostered theological hostility that echoed into modern atrocities, even while elements within the institution assisted Nazis in evading justice. This trajectory is not incidental; it reflects a Christianity reabsorbed into Roman religious logic rather than governed by the suffering Messiah of Israel.

The Christmas tree stands as a quiet witness to this rupture. It is not Christian in origin. It belongs to a religious system centered on the Mother, the dying god, and the eternal return. Its presence in Christian worship space reflects accommodation, not revelation. It gestures back to Attis, not forward to Christ.

To return to the worship of the true God is not to defend Rome, its popes, or its power. It is to remember the martyrs who refused images, who refused spirits inhabiting wood and stone, who refused to trade the living God for imperial religion. It is to remember that the one who conquered death was not a pope, not an institution, not an empire, but the crucified and risen Christ. He did not bleed so that ancient gods could be renamed and reinstalled. He gave himself once, for all, to end the cycle forever.