I had intended to have this up on Monday – Lord Shiva’s Day – however the brief overview for the concept turned itself into a half-written full-length article.

Instead of that, we shall just observe that the Indo-European Sky Father being engaged with in these recurrent iterations of Post/Pillar or Tree, speaks to a significant ritualine purpose – namely, that of what Roger Woodard in his rather excellent ‘Indo-European Sacred Space: Vedic and Roman Cult’ had sought to signify with his coined term of a ‘Columna Mundi’.

Aptly enough, he had introduced this whilst discussing the modern-familiar ShivLing and its Vedic antecedents (including the Skambha that we have also mentioned below), referencing it as an “axis Mundi, as Gonda terms it, and appropriately so, “being an intermediary between the divine world and earthly life””.

Of course, while we are perhaps more used to thinking of the Axis Mundi as a cosmological structure, rather than a (mesocosmic) ritualine one [i.e. wrought in resonance via human hands for human utilization ‘down here’] … and probably not as coterminous with the Sky Father (even if, ‘Yggdrasil’ in mind, still likely linked in some way(s) thereto) – one can nevertheless see how both the concept for the Axis Mundi and what is going on here with an embodied deific within a ritual setting, are expressing something quite linked.

Literally that’s what they both are – ‘links’ between Worlds, the spheres of Divinity and humanity (or, if you prefer, ‘Up There’ and ‘Down Here’ – inter alia).

Thus, one does not necessarily need to directly co-identify the Sky Father with the (cosmological) Axis Mundi in order to see why a ‘similar shape’ is quite resonant for both herein.

Of course, there’s also a few other dimensions to the shape and (often – but not always – wooden) construction; but perhaps we shall save that for the full-length article.

Suffice to say one of them entails a surprisingly direct potential linkage between that element attested via Pherecydes, a complaint of St. Augustine, a remark of Heraclitus, and something I happened to notice over the weekend viz. a verse of the Paippalāda recension of the Atharvaveda.

In any case … here is a brief post – for an Infinite One (c.f. Lingodbhava … inter alia).

ॐ नमः शिवाय