Massey - 'Ancient Egypt' - "The tree of Hathor was a tree of life in Egypt.     It was the sycamore-fig tree; from the fruit of which a divine drink of the mysteries was made.     Therefore it was a tree to make one wise, which became a tree of wisdom or abnormal knowledge.      The tree of Nut was the tree of heaven and eternal life, hence it was designated the eternal tree.     As herein suggested, the two trees originated as a dual symbol of the two poles in Equatoria.     These were continued in two tree-pillars called Sut-and-Horus by Ptah in his making of Amenta.     Again they are repeated in the garden or cultivated enclosure of Eden.      Here they are called the tree of knowledge and the tree of life.     As shown in the vignettes to the Book of the Dead, the tree or eatable plant and the water supplied the elements of life to the manes in the lower paradise.     The goddess Nut pours out the water and offers the fruit of the tree to Ani and his wife, when he has reached the garden of Amenta (Pap. of Ani, Plate 16).     The pole had been the tree first planted in the astronomical mythology.      It was the tree of Nut, or heaven, in the stellar phase, and being astronomical it was naturally the tree of knowledge.      But in the making of the nether earth a second tree was planted in the garden eastward.     The mythos now was solar, and this was the tree of dawn, the tree of wet or dew, which was a veritable tree of life in Egypt.      It was the emerald sycamore of Hathor in her character of goddess of the leafy-green dawn.

      In some of the Egyptian drawings the goddess Nut is represented in the tree of knowledge, gathering baskets-full of figs from the sycamore-fig tree, and presenting them to the souls of the departed.     At other times she offers fruit directly from the tree itself.      Nut in the tree offering its fruit to the pair in the garden, who are Ani (male) and Tutu his wife, in the papyrus of Ani (Plate 16), are the nearest likeness to the woman tempting Adam to eat the fruit of the tree; and Nut is the goddess feeding souls with the fruit of the tree of life here figured as the sycamore-fig tree.     No name of species is given to the tree of knowledge in the book of Genesis, but we assume it was the fig-tree that furnished the leaves from which the loin-girdles of the primal pair were made.     And the fig-tree as now traced was the sycamore-fig of Egypt.      This was the tree of Hathor in the Aarru-paradise.     Moreover, the goddess Iusaas, (Isis) the consort of Atum-Ra and mother of the coming son, Iusa, or Iu-em-hetep, was a form of the cow-headed or cow-eared Hathor, lady of the sycamore-tree in the temple of the sun at Annu.

      The tree of the upper paradise was held to have been thorn less.     As it is said in the Persian Revelation, on the nature of plants and trees, "before the coming of the destroyer, vegetation had no thorn or bark about it.     And afterwards when the destroyer came, it was coated with bark and grew thorny" (Bundahish, ch. 27, West).     Thus the tree in the celestial paradise was differentiated from the tree in the earthly paradise, which became thorny as the result of Adam's fatal fall.      Egypt is not a cloudy land, though there is sufficient morning-mist, however thin and filamental, for the golden rays of the sun to blend with the azure tints of upper heaven and produce a greenish colour from the mixture of the two.      This was represented as the great green sycamore of dawn, of Hathor or Nut, which in Egypt was a tree of life that struck its roots down to the eternal springs and would find moisture even in a Sahara of desert sand.     And from this tree of heaven the earth was watered with refreshing dew.     This imagery of Egypt is virtually repeated in the book of Genesis (2:5-6) when the writer tells us that "Iahu-Elohim had not caused it to rain upon the earth, but there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground".      The sycamore of dawn is mentioned in the Ritual.     It is also spoken of as the sycamore in the eastern sky (Pyramid Texts, Pepi, I, 174). Few things in literature are more lovely than the way in which the imagery of dawn was thus utilized as the road to travel by in attaining the other upper land of life.     So far as the Babylonian and Assyrian versions of the mythos have been recovered we find no written account of the creation of man or the placing of the man in the garden of Eden "to dress it and to keep it".