The Tree of Life and Knowledege

Gerald Massey found trees of life and knowledge in many ancient cultures. What he found runs to great length, so I shall divide it up using comment boxes to continue the story. If we can understand how the ancients thought, we might just get an inkling of what was really behind the bible story of the Garden of Eden.
Massey (1907):
The Aarru paradise in Amenta is also the garden of the two trees, the same as the Hebrew garden of Eden. A form of Eden is undoubtedly Babylonian, even by name. According to 'the native tradition, the type was localized in Eridu, the place of the eternal tree or stalk at the centre of the circumpolar paradise, or of Eridu in the firmamental water termed “the abyss”. In the mythos the Great Mother is called “ the divine lady of Edin”, and also “the goddess of the tree of life”.
As the tree she brings forth her child, the branch, the same as Hathor does in Egypt. The name of Hathor signifies the house of Horus, as the tree. So the Great Mother Zikum is the house of Tammuz, as the tree that grew in Eridu. But the Egyptian stalk of the uat or papyrus plant is indefinitely earlier than the typical tree.
One fact of itself will serve to show that the biblical Eden was not derived from the Assyrian Edin, because in this garden there is but a single tree, which is apparently the tree of life. The divine lady of Edin is the goddess of the tree of life, and there is no mention of a tree of knowledge. Secondly, the serpent as a type of evil in the book of Genesis is not the Babylonian dragon Tiamat. The biblical dragon is of neither sex, whereas Tiamat is female.
The Hebrew dragon or evil serpent is the Apap of Egypt from Genesis to Revelation. Apap is a water-reptile whose dwelling is at the bottom of the dark waters called the void of Apap, from which it rises in rebellion as the representative of drought. This is the serpent described by Amos: “Though they be hid from my sight in the bottom of the sea, thence will I command the serpent, and he shall bite them” (Amos ix. 3). Another reason. The Hebrew Eden is in a land that was watered by a mist that went up from the ground, and where no rain fell on the earth (Gen. ii. 5-6).
That land above all earthly prototypes was Egypt, which assuredly did not suffer like Babylonia from the “curse of rain”, from which the Akkadian month “As-an” was named. But there was a pre-solar paradise enclosure which had but one tree in it.
This as Egyptian is the paradise of Am-Khemen, which Shu uplifted with his two-pronged prop that images the pole, when he divided earth from heaven and raised the upper circumpolar paradise. Paradise, says Ibn Ezra, is the place of one tree. Mount Hetep in the northern heaven is a kind of typical one-tree-hill. In some of the Mexican drawings there is a point of departure by water from the mount which has a single tree upon its summit. This we look on as the tree which represents the pole, the “one-tree-hill” of a legend that is universal. This typical one-tree-hill is also to be found at Sakapu in Manchuria, where it is represented by a mountain designated “lone tree hill”.
The Norse tree Yggdrasil is single. Nor is there more than one tree or stalk in the garden of Eridu, where the Great Mother is the lady of the eternal tree. The eternal tree was certainly the pole. Its seven branches show it to have been a numerical type of the heptanomis.
Hence we infer that in the circumpolar paradise there was but one tree as a figure of the northern pole of heaven. The Chinese Fu-tree, the self-supporting, is likewise a figure of the pole. Hence it is said to grow on the summit of a mountain in mid-ocean at the north, and it is 300 Chinese miles in height. (Schlegel, Prof. G., Fou-Sang Kono.) There is nothing gained by calling this the tree of the universe instead of the pole. That is only to lose in vagueness all that the astronomers had gained by their definiteness. "