Codas of Creation: Emanation Mysticism and Alchemical Regeneration in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life

Abstract

This article gives a mystical interpretation of Terrence Malick’s award-winning film, The Tree of Life (2011), arguing that Malick carefully develops two esoteric patterns to structure his visual language: first, a triadic symbolism of divine emanation and return, and second, a complementary alchemical pattern of ascent and descent portraying the process of regeneration. Far from being a doctrinal presentation of Christianity, as some critics suppose, The Tree of Life engages little known but highly influential bodies of esoteric knowledge to offer a visually complex and symmetrical representation of genesis and alchemical transmutation. With the tree of life presented as an initiatory symbol of the axis mundi, Malick’s film portrays creation as a chiastic process, one point of view staging a triadic structure of emanation mysticism and the other offering a magical variation of this pattern in the human struggle for renewal in time.