THE BOOK OF EARTHS

By

EDNA KENTON

New York: William Morrow & Company

[1928, No renewal]

Maps of the Earth

THE SPANISH PRIEST BEATUS who in the year 798 died in a Benedictine convent in the Asturias, is recognised as the original draughtsman of a remarkable world-map lost except for "copies," ten of which are known to-day. This map-group is known as the Beatus Maps; they all appeared between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries, and obviously derive from one common source, but the source-map has disappeared completely.

It came out originally in Beatus's Commentary on the Apocalypse, about 776, and its aim was, probably, to portray the spread of the Christian faith over the Earth, after the analogy of the world and the kingdom of heaven to a field sown with seed. It was divided into parts or fields, each ruled over by one of the Apostles, whose locality was more or less fixed by tradition, and who was at once the sower of the seed, the tiller of the field, and the reaper of the harvest.

The Osma Beatus map (Plate XXXIV ), although one of the latest (1203), is regarded as one which is in many of its important features most like its prototype. It gives, for instance, alone of all the copies, the pictures of the Twelve Apostles in the regions over which they ruled. It also gives a realistic picture of the inhabitants of the Southern continent or Antichthones, still unknown--those monstrous beings known as Skiapodes or Shadow-footed men, who must always lie or sit in such fashion that their great feet were as umbrellas shading them from the otherwise deadly Sun.

FIGURE 83. Monsters of the Antipodes.
(From Margarita philosophica, 1517.)There were other fabulous races of this austral land; one whose huge lips, instead of feet, protected them from the scorching fire of the Sun; another whose heads had sunk to a plane almost level with their shoulders; and still another whose heads had sunk quite below the shoulders and had become absorbed in the trunk of the body. There were Dog-headed men; Ape-headed men; men without ears; men without tongues; men without noses; men without mouths, or with mouths so small that they sucked their food with great difficulty through a reed. Some never walked at all, but crawled along the ground like serpents, and ate serpents. Of these monstrous races of the Antipodes there were fourteen, we are told.

In portioning out the Earth to the Twelve Apostles, to Peter was given Rome; to Andrew, Greece or Achia; to Thomas, India; to James, Spain; to John, Asia; to Matthew, Macedonia; to Philip, Gaul; to Bartholomew, Lycaonia; to Simon Zelotes, Egypt; to Matthias, Jud; to James the brother of the Lord, Jerusalem; and to Paul, the whole world. All these localities are indicated, and also the place of Paradise, this last by a rectangle from whose centre spring four rivers.

FIGURE 84. AT-O map of the XIIth century. In''Imago Mundi.''
(From Santarem's Atlas, 1849, Plate XIII.)The division of the continents was usually that of the so-called T-O maps, with Asia filling the upper or eastern half (the tops of many of the medial maps were at the East); and with the lower half divided into Europe, on the left, and Africa, in the right-hand quarter. But in the Beatus maps shown here, Southern Asia and Africa were cut by a narrow strip of ocean, below which was supposed to lie the Austral continent, the Antipodes, or Antichthones, source of romance and fable run mad for hundreds of years.

Another of the Beatus maps is the famous one known as the Turin Beatus, of the twelfth century. Unlike the Osma Beatus, its shape is a pure circle--quite likely a departure from the form of the lost source-map, which is believed to have had the ovoid form.

FIGURE 85. The Turin Beatus World-map, c. 1150.
(From Santarem's Atlas, 1848, Plate IX.)

There is no attempt made here at any division of the world among the Twelve Apostles, but the Garden of Eden, the First Parents, the tempting serpent twined about the tree, and Mount Sinai are in evidence. The unknown continent is indicated, but its inhabitants are not shown. In many ways this copy deflects from the original; but the Turin Beatus is famous for its "Wind-blowers," seated on their inflated bags and keeping the universe to its course as they float through the aerial ocean.

IN THE LIBRARY AT STOCKHOLM, among the manuscripts of Marco Polo, fantastic traveller and man of the world of the fourteenth century, lies his own mappa-mundi. It is a combination of the first-century world-map of Pomponius Mela (Fig. 75 ), where the continent of Antichthones was first shown, and the T-O maps of the Middle Ages, but with the odds in favour of Pomponius Mela's division, for Marco Polo gives rather more than half the land of the Earth to Antichthones. Strange to think of this as the travelling map of a tourist of the then known world! But Marco Polo's Travels, glorious romancing, glorious lying as much of it is, did more to popularise the notion that the whole world was habitable, including its unknown areas, than any writer since has succeeded in doing. For we still have unknown, impassable, uninhabitable areas of the Earth, and by what we think--perhaps rightly--of the Polar zones, we can gauge a little the opinions of the ancient world and even of the Middle Ages regarding Antichthones.

FIGURE 86. The World-map of Marco Polo. From one of his manuscripts in the Library at Stockholm.
(From Santarem's Atlas, 1849, Plate I, No. 3.)In any case, thanks to the Crusades, the habit of travel had laid strong hold of man, and a race of new adventurers sprang up over night. Marco Polo's contemporaries began to doubt the myths they had been bred on, and they hurried towards new ones, some of them Marco's own. His Travelspaved the way for travel, and the new adventurers dared farther and farther the still impassable ocean that separated them from what they did not know, and brought back many tales, if not of continents, of groups of islands newly found, and the wildest rumours concerning the strange lands and races that lay beyond them. Less than two centuries after Marco Polo's map was drawn, Ptolemy's model of the Earth, which left out of account its unknown areas, was to be discarded for that of a "true sphere."

FIGURE 87. Title-page of Globus Mundi, originally printed at Strassburg, 1509, showing a trace of the Americas.
(From Globus Mundi, reprinted at Milan (n.d.)
For in 1509 a scrap of a book called Globus Mundiwas printed at Strassburg by an author unknown--probably he will never be known. It was published in Latin and German, and it seems to have been no more than an expository pamphlet or tract to accompany or to be sold with a real globe. This is implied by its amplified title: The World Globe. Exposition or description of the world and of the terrestrial sphere constructed as a round globe like to a solid sphere, whereby every man even of moderate learning can see with his own eyes that there are antipodes whose feet are opposite ours. What makes this extremely interesting is that only seventeen years after Columbus discovered the Americas, a tiny bit of land to the south-west of Africa, labelled N Welt, appeared on a spherical world-map. Another interesting thing about this map is the enormous size given to the African continent, under the lingering influence of the long-time belief in the impassable equatorial zone.

"This device Evidences the Earth to be a Globe" (Fig. 88 ) is a self-explanatory seventeenth-century attempt at popularising a scientific theory; no better but no worse than modern devices for popular education. The proof offered here is the outline of the shadow cast on an eclipsed Moon; if the Earth were an hexahedron, a tetrahedron, or a cube, its shadow on the Moon would not be circular in outline. But we know the shadow cast by the Earth is a circular one; therefore the Earth is a globe! That a cubical, tetrahedral, or hexahedral body rotating in Space at the Earth's supposed speed and in the diverse directions of its movements might tend to trace a curved line was not suggested.

FIGURE 88. ''This device Evidences the Earth to be a Globe.''
(From Cosmographia; Petrus Apianus, 1640.)

THE BOOK OF EARTHS

By

EDNA KENTON

New York: William Morrow & Company

[1928, No renewal]

Tartar-Mongol Worlds

IN Picture-Writing of the American Indians, Garrick Mallery has collected a delightful group of Tartar and Mongol magic drum tops, over which a little time will not be wasted just here. These drums were used--are used--by various Tartar and Mongol tribes in religious ceremonies, and their shamans believe that the sound of one design or figure painted on the stretched skin differs essentially from that of another pattern painted, and that therefore, one drum sounded may kill or torment, while another may heal. Many of these designs are little world-pictures purely.

FIGURE 80. Painted Tartar and Mongol drums.
(From Picture-Writing of the America, Indians; Garrick Mallery, 1894, p. 515.)The upper left-hand design in Fig. 80 , for instance, suggests at first glance not only a two-storied division of heaven and Earth, but a World Mountain and a World Tree. According to Mallery, the two circles with inner dots above the cross-bar represent the Moon and Sun.

Two shamans or priests of magic are pictured on the left, and with them a wild goat and five serpents. On the right are three shamans and a deer.

The upper right-hand design (b) had the same four-quarter division, with a face indicated in the top loop of the axis or tree, and with the upper heavens spangled with stars, suns and moons. Below the cross-bar are a rainbow with stars beneath it, and, above the rainbow, two "heavenly maidens." This magic drum design represents "the bringing of the horse to sacrifice."

The lower left-hand design (c), says Mallery, "is the external delineation of a head without eyes and nose." The shamans who owned this drum said that the circles, two above the cross-bar and six below, all empty, are "representations of drums, and the three human figures are masters or spirits of localities."

The fourth design (d) was explained by the shaman no further than to say that the five wave-lines on either side of the face above the cross-bar are "serpents."

The upper left-hand design in Fig. 81 has above its dividing line two trees. "On each of them sits the bird karagush with the bill turned to the left." "On the left of the tree," Mallery goes on to say, "are two circles, one dark (the moon), the other light (the sun)." But the design as given shows but one. Below the horizontal lines are three animals, a frog, a lizard, and a serpent--all of them watery animals, who appear to be swimming in the waters under the tree-bearing Earth.

The upper right-hand design (b) "has on the upper half two circles, the sun and moon; on the left side four horsemen; and under them a bowman, also on horseback.

FIGURE 81. Painted Tartar and Mongol drums.
(From Picture-Writing of the American Indians; Garrick Mallery, 1894, p. 516.)

The centre is occupied by a picture of a net and sieve for winnowing the nuts and seeds of the cedar tree. On the right side are two trees, beigamin (literally, the rich birch), over which two birds, the karagush, are floating. Under a division on the right and on the left side are oval objects with lattice-figures or scaly skin. These are two whales. In the middle, between them, are a frog and a deer, and below them a serpent. Above, toward the hoop of the drum, is fastened an owl's feather."

The lower left-hand design (c) has, in the upper half, seven figures "reminding one of horses, bura, going to heaven, i.e., their sacrifice." Above them are two light-giving circles, the sun and the moon; on the right of the horses are three trees; under a horizontal line on the left is a serpent, on the right a fish, "the kerbuleik, the whale according to Verbitski, literally the bay-fish."

The lower right-hand design (d) has its upper half divided into three layers, the first of which "is heaven, the second the rainbow, and in the lower stratum the stars." At the left and right are the sun and moon, below, a goat, and three trees." Mallery adds that underneath there was an undefined figure not given in this drawing which the interpreting shaman called "the bura. Some said that it meant a cloud; others that it meant heavenly horses."

The left-hand design in Fig. 82 is divided by four vertical and four horizontal lines. "The latter," says Mallery, "represent the rainbow; the vertical lines borsui. Circles with dots in the center are represented in three sections, and in the fourth one circle." Further than this, the shaman did not interpret.

The right-hand design shows in its upper section five human figures. "These, according to the shaman's own explanation, are heavenly maidens (in the original Turkish, tengriduing kuiz). Below, under a rainbow, which is represented by three arched lines, are portrayed two serpents, each having a cross inside. These are kurmos nuing tyungurey, i.e., the drums are kurmos's. Kurmos is the Altaic word for spirits, which the shamans summon."

FIGURE 82. Painted Tartar and Mongol drums.
(From Picture-Writing of the American Indians; Garrick Mallery, 1894, p. 517.)The shamans of these tribes admit three worlds; the world of the Heavens (hallan jurda); the middle one of the Earth (onto-doidu); and the lower one of Hell (jedăn tiigara); the first the realm of light, the last the realm of darkness. The middle world, or Earth, has for a time been given over by the Creator (Jut-tas-olbohtah Jdan-Ai-Tojan) to the will of the devil or tempter, and the souls of men at death, according to their merit, are sent either to the upper or the lower world. When, however, "the earth world has come to an end, the souls of the two realms will wage a war against each other, and victory must remain on the side of the good souls."

THE BOOK OF EARTHS

By

EDNA KENTON

New York: William Morrow & Company

[1928, No renewal]

The Aztec Universe

THE AZTEC WORLD-PICTURE (Plate XXXIII ) is the first sheet of the "Night Side" of the Codex Ferjvy-Mayer, an old Mexican painted book now in the Free Public Museums at Liverpool. The foundation for the series of paintings is a sort of parchment made of deerskin covered on both sides with a thin coating of an extremely adhesive paste on which the paintings were executed in the usual way--the outlines in deep black and the spaces filled in with colours. It consists of twenty-two folded shapes 17 cm. square. One side Dr. Eduard Seler, its interpreter, calls the "Night Side," the other the "Day Side."

This first sheet is the most interesting and the most famous of the entire manuscript. It represents the Five Regions of the Aztec world and their tutelary deities, spread out like a cross, all their spaces filled with figures of trees, gods, birds, rivers, and symbols of the cosmos, both of its objects and its attributes.

In the Middle Place, says Seler, 1 is the Fire deity, Xiuhtecutli, "the Mother, the Father of the gods, who dwells in the navel of the Earth." From his body four streams of blood flow towards the four cardinal points, and are continued beyond the square space enclosing the centre to the outer corners of the picture, where the signs acatl, "Reed," tecpatl, "Flint," calli, "House," and tochtli, "Rabbit," are seen on shields respectively borne by a quetzal bird, an arara, an eagle, and a green parrot. "These are the four signs by which the consecutive years are named with constant reiteration, because they are the signs which fall on the first days of those years, and therefore, since they are exhausted with the number four, have become symbols for the four cardinal points, East, North, West, and South."

The stream of blood pointing to the sign acatl(Reed), that is, to the East (left-hand above), terminates with a hand painted yellow--"the hand (ray) of the Sun god?" The stream pointing to the sign tecpatl(Flint) ends with the stump leg of the god of the North. The stream flowing towards the sign calli(House) or West (right-hand below) ends in a figure of a chest formed by the vertebrae and adjoining ribs of a skeleton. "For the West is the region of the setting (dead) Sun." The stream flowing towards the sign tochtli(Rabbit) or South ends in a head in whose hair is stuck a downy feather ball, which symbolises the "warrior in the South" and at the same time, the "warrior in the North," the dual god of the two quarters.

PLATE XXXIII. A WORLD-PICTURE OF THE AZTECS
First page of the Codex Ferjvy-Mayer, representing the five regions of the world, and their tutelary deities.
(From Mythology of All Races, 1927, Vol. XI, Plate VI)

Above the upper side of the central square is a sort of platform with steps in the centre; that is to say, to the right of the corner which, owing to the shield with the sign acatl, "Reed," we have to regard as the East corner." At the level of the steps, which are painted red, is shown the image of the Sun. "This can obviously be nothing but the House of the Sun, the East."

Above the left side of the central square is a votive dish in which are a rubber ball, an agava-leaf thorn, and a bone dagger. They are the symbols of sacrifice, of blood-letting, of self-torture, voluntarily made in honour of the gods, but, says Scier, they belong to the gods of the South, and bringing them into the Northern quarter of the heavens means a reversion of the order, or an interchange of North and South."

Above the lower side of the central square is seen a monster descending from above, that is, here, from be-low. It would seem to be tolerably certain that this is intended to represent the Tzitzimim the demons which symbolise the realm of darkness, the eclipse of the Sun. I shall have more fully to explain farther on that the Tzitzimimre originally images of the stars, which, merely because at the solar eclipses the stars become visible in broad daylight, have been made demons of darkness, symbols of the devouring gloom. In any case, here the figure denotes the West, the region of the setting Sun, of the light swallowed up by the Earth."

Above the fourth or right-hand side of the central square is seen "the wide open throat of a monster hieroglyph of the Earth, which in this form is obviously thought of as the taker of life, the mictlampa, the realm of death, i.e., the North."

The flowering tree rising above the picture of the Sun (upper East side) is surmounted by a quetzal bird and guarded by Itztli, the Stone-knife god (on the left), and Tonantiuh, the Sun god, all symbolising the Eastern quarter. This tree, like all in the four quarters, has the form of a cross.

The tree above the left side of the central square is a thorn tree surmounted by an eagle, and is guarded by Tlaloc, the Rain god, and Tepeyollotli, the Heart of the Mountains or the Voice of the Jaguar in the Mountains--symbols of the North.

The tree of the West, growing out of the forehead of the Tzitzimitl, or the dragon of the eclipse, has a stem set with huge upright thorns. Instead of flowers, it bears feather balls at the tips of its branches. "On it is perched doubtless a humming bird," which according to Aztec belief, dies with the dry and revives with the rainy season. The guardian deities are Chalchiuhtlicue, goddess of flowing water, and the Earth goddess Tlazolteotl.

Above the South side (right) is a tree growing out of the open jaws of the monster symbolising the Earth; "its stem is set with notches (or fruit pods?) turned downwards, while the branches bear a kind of star-shaped blossom like that of the tree of the North." On it is perched a parrot, and it is guarded by Cinteotl, the maize god, and Mictlantecutli, god of death.

The deities depicted about the four arms of the St. Andrew's Cross, that is, in the spaces enclosed by the trapezes above the four sides of the central square, are the eight gods of the four quarters. In the central square stands the Fire god; he belongs to the Centre or the Middle Place because he represents the hearth fire which burns in the middle of the house. These nine are the deities of the Five Regions and "Lords of the Night."

Like the Tibetan and Kalmuck worlds, the four quarters of the Aztec world have their four colours, and they are: East, red; North, yellow; West, blue; and South, green. These are the colours also of the years and of the days. The whole figure symbolises the orientation of the world-powers in Space and Time-years and Earth-realms and Sky-realms.

Footnotes

190:1 Codex Ferjvy-Mayer, elucidated by Eduard Seler, 1901, pp. 5-24."

THE BOOK OF EARTHS

By

EDNA KENTON

New York: William Morrow & Company

[1928, No renewal]

The Peruvian Universe

THERE IS ANOTHER "SQUARE EARTH" shown in one of the rarer world-pictures in this collection--the Universe of the ancient Peruvians. Juan de Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayha, a native Peruvian, left the drawing in his Account of the Antiquities of Peru, written about 1620. His manuscript reached Spain, where it lay long forgotten among the treasures of the Biblioteca Nacional at Madrid. Salcamayha was not only a Peruvian, but he is credited with being one of the chosen recipients of the traditions of his people, and in close touch with the final glories of the Ynca empire; for his great-grandparents were living at the time of the Spanish conquest of Peru, and stories of the vanished days came to him almost from the lips of those who had witnessed them.

Salcamayha left no reading of this crudely sketched cosmos, and what follows is based largely on Beuchat's interpretation.

The World, says Beuchat, 1 was called Pacha. It was a square World, with a roof indicated, ridge-shaped, where dwelt the great God. The lowest plane was Earth, which gave support to the four quarters where dwelt the gods.

FIGURE 79. World-picture of the ancient Peruvians
Outside the World, above it, to the left, is a small disc, so Beuchat calls it, but it far more resembles a figure of the Cosmic or Mundane Egg, surrounded, though not en-circled, by five stars. Within, in the centre of the pointed roof, this outer design appears again, much enlarged, slightly rearranged, and with the addition of a single star. In the rearrangement of the design, three of the stars have been connected along a thread, and from these three is suspended the oval figure of Huiracocha, the Creator of the World. On his left is the Sun or Inti; on his right the Moon or Quilla. The bright star below the Sun is Chascaor the planet Venus, and under Venus lies a star representing Catachillay, or the Milky Way. Between the Milky Way and Venus is a group of stars--thirteen--which are the constellations.

Below Huiracochaare five stars, but arranged differently from the group above. One is separated entirely from the other four, but the four are united by crossed lines. Beuchat ventures to believe that these also represent constellations.

Beneath the Milky Way, Catachillay, are a number of concentric semi-circles, which signify the Rainbow; the two wave-lines at the left are Thunder, and below them is the River Pillcomayo. To the right of the river and immediately beneath the rainbowed circle are "eyes," "dont," says Beuchat, "on ne voit point clairmant la signification." Far to the right is an irregular figure labelled mamacocha--"the sea," says Beuchat, and a little above it a black puma. Below these two is mallqui, "a tree." At the bottom of the picture is a rectangle, which represents Coricancha, and above the figures of a man and a woman.

In his manuscript Salcamayha explains Coricancha, accompanying the text with another oval "creation" figure. A certain Ynca, he says, after he and his people had settled at Coricanchaon whose site was reared the Temple of the Sun, "ordered the smiths to make a flat plate of fine gold, which signified that there was a Creator of Heaven and Earth, and that it was of this shape. He caused it to be fixed in a great house, called Couricancha pachaya-chachipac huasin," which is to say, "the golden place, the house of the teacher of the world."

Another reading of this world-picture gives some interesting literal translations of some of the old Indian and Spanish text. Outside of the diagram are two Indian words, Uamadoand Orcorara, followed by a bit of Spanish commentary--"which is to say (quiere decir) three stars all equal." Inside the figure at the peak of the "roof," mingled with the Sun and Moon are many Indian words, with a Spanish translation outside: "Which is to say that this is the image, or pattern, of the maker of both heaven and earth; yet this plate was simply (or crudely) (made) and not to be perceived (easily by all), because there was a lack in all the tablet (or design) of the radiance of the resurrection of Jesus the Lord."

"Lucera" written about the star Chasca, beneath the Sun, and designated by Beuchat as Venus, is a Spanish word meaning "luminous stars," as differing from fixed stars, and is applied to Venus as the morning, and to "Lucifer" as the evening, star. Under Chascaare Indian words and, in Spanish, "This is the luminous star of the morning." To the right, the star beneath the Moon carries several Indian words and, in Spanish, "This is the Evening (star)."

The five stars below Huiracochaare designated by two Indian words, Saramaniaand Chacana, followed by "en general." "Perhaps they mean Cosmogony, but this is only a guess."

The group of thirteen stars signify "summer season." And the corresponding design at the right reads "Clouds in winter (season)." The two wave-lines at the extreme left are in this reading, "Lightning." To their right, the Rainbow, above "El mundo o la tierra"--"the world or the earth."

The seven "eyes" under the "world" are said here to be Indian words.

The "black puma" above the Tree of Life is said to signify hail, "and since hail is bad for crops, they represent it by a little animal."

Footnotes

185:1 Manuel dArcheologie amicaine: H. Beuchat, 1912, pp. 630-631.