The same cosmic blueprint turns up in Mayan temples, Sumerian texts, and Viking rune stones: a colossal tree holding the universe together. This episode explores the World Tree, or Axis Mundi, and its strict three-level architecture, with a giant bird in the heavenly canopy, humans and hoofed animals on the trunk, and serpents, dragons, and water creatures in the underworld roots. It looks at the eternal war between bird and snake in Norse Yggdrasil, the Sumerian Huluppu tree, and the Akkadian myth of Etana.

The discussion then traces the motif to Paleolithic roots and Central Asian shamanism, follows it across the Bering Strait to the Maya ceiba tree and the Milky Way, and examines the tree as a generative engine producing golden apples, the Jewish tree of souls, and the infernal Zaqqum tree of Islamic cosmology. It closes with how the sacred map shrank into fairy tales like ATU 301, The Three Stolen Princesses.

• Ratatoskr, the insult-carrying squirrel, and the eagle and dragon at either end of Yggdrasil
• Why scholars believe the bird-versus-serpent story is inherited rather than independently invented
• Shamanic drums made from the World Tree’s wood as vehicles for travel between realms
• Why the Maya depicted the tree trunk as an upright caiman
• Ladon, the Golden Fleece, the Garden of Eden, and the treasury of souls as variations on one geometry