THE BOOK OF EARTHS

By

EDNA KENTON

New York: William Morrow & Company

[1928, No renewal]

The Square Earth of Cosmas Indicopleutes

ONE OF THE STRANGEST OF WORLDS is the Square Earth of Cosmas Indicopleustes, an Egyptian monk of the sixth century A.D., who expended an astonishing ingenuity upon the development of a theory of the universe that would eliminate the increasingly popular notion that the Earth was a sphere. He was filled with a holy hatred of the heresy of the "spherists" and the antipodists, and he evolved at last a figure of the universe modelled upon the design of the Tabernacle built by Moses in the wilderness, which, he pointed out, Moses himself had declared to be constructed upon the pattern of the visible world. His own explanation of it may be read in his Christian Topography.

FIGURE 77. The Square Earth of Cosmas Indicopleustes(6th century A.D.)
(From Flammarion's Astronomical Myths, 1877.)Cosmas says that the Earth is a rectangular plane surface, whose long sides are twice the shorter ones. These are the measurements of the Tabernacle, and of the Table of Shew-bread. This Earth-table is divided into three parts: the habitable Earth, in the middle, the ocean which everywhere surrounds it, and beyond the ocean another surrounding continent, which is now altogether inaccessible to man, but which was once the seat of Paradise and the home of the human race up to the time of the Deluge, when the flood swept the Ark with its few saved men across to the "other Earth." It is true, says Cosmas, that after the Fall Paradise itself had been closed to Adam, but until the Deluge he and his descendants had dwelt on the coast edges of the First Continent of man.

Upon the edges of this outer inaccessible continent rest the four walls of heaven--four perpendicular planes joined hermetically to the edges of the trans-oceanic Earth, and cemented at the top by an enclosing roof, in form like half a cylinder. Its ends rest on the eastern and western sides of the world, and its sides on the north and south. These directions are determined by the Tabernacle Table, which was placed lengthwise from east to west. Here is a bit from Cosmas himself:

FIGURE 78. The Square Earth. Its habitable plane.
(From Flammarion's Astronomical Myths, 1877.)"The Deity accordingly having founded the Earth, which is oblong, upon its own stability, bound together the extremities of the heaven with the extremities of the Earth, making the nether extremities of the heaven rest upon the four extremities of the Earth, while on high he formed it into a most lofty vault over-spanning the length of the Earth. Along the breadth again of the Earth he built a wall from the nethermost extremities of the heavens upwards to the summit, and having enclosed the place, made a house, as one might call it, of enormous size, like an oblong vapour bath. For, saith the Prophet Isaiah (xlix, 22), He who established heaven as a vault. With regard moreover to the glueing together of the heaven and the Earth, we find this written in Job: He has inclined heaven to earth, and it has been poured out as the dust of the earth. I have welded it as a square block of stone." 1

The interior of this "oblong vaulted vapour bath" consists, like the Tabernacle, of two parts, the outer and the inner--the veil of the Tabernacle corresponding to the firmament which divides the universe into two parts, and which is the floor of the upper and the ceiling of the lower story. The first story reaches from the Earth-plane, "the footstool of the Lord," to the firmament, and is the abode of men and angels. The presence of angels is necessary in man's world, not only for the sake of their beneficent effect on him, but also because the Sun, Moon, and stars are carried in their courses, not by the firmament which is motionless, but by angels appointed to this work until the last day.

On the Earth-plane rises a high cone-shaped mountain, which makes possible, in this world-system, the rising and the setting of the Sun, day and night, climates, seasons, etc.

With the universe enclosed within a square box, it was no longer possible for the Sun to sink in western waters, swim under the Earth, and emerge again from the eastern sea. But forever circling the conical mountain of the world, in the arms of its carrying angel, it is hidden from a part of the world all of the time, and thus comes day and night. The length of the days and nights varies, says Cosmas, according as the Sun is close to or far from its mountain screen, and from this cause spring summer and winter, storms, eclipses, heat and cold, and such phenomena. "All the stars are created," he says, "to regulate the days and nights, the months and the years, and they move, not at all by the motion of the heaven itself, but by the action of certain divine Beings, or lampadophores. God made the angels for his service, and He has charged some of them with the motion of the air, others with that of the Sun, or the Moon, or the other stars, and others again with the collecting of clouds, and preparing the rain." Cosmas also says that men are mistaken when they say that the Sun is much larger than the Earth; that it is, in reality, very much smaller; and, by measuring its shadows at the different "climates" of Ptolemy, he concludes that the sun has the size of "two climates."

Above the firmament and beneath the upper vault live the Blessed. Along the outer side of this vault which terminates the world, rest the heavenly waters. The Mosaic account of the Tabernacle and its enclosed Ark, says Cosmas, gives all the measurements and hence all the secrets of the world, and by it alone man may reconstruct the universe within himself and look down upon it, as the Creator surveys his handiwork from the vaulted roof of Cosmas's "vapour bath."

Here are some of the correspondences which Cosmas drew between the pattern of the Tabernacle and that of the visible world.

In the first Tabernacle, "Moses placed in the south of it the candlesticks, with seven lamps, after the number of days in the week--these lamps being typical of the celestial luminaries--and shining on the table placed in the north of the Earth. On this table again he ordered to be placed daily twelve loaves of shew-bread, to typify the three months between each of the four tropics. He commanded also to be wreathed all around the rim of the table a waved moulding, to represent a multitude of waters, that is, the ocean; and further, in the circuit of the waved work, a crown to be set of the circumference of the palm of the hand, to represent the land beyond the ocean, and encircling it, where in the east lies Paradise, and where also the extremities of the heaven are bound to the extremities of the Earth. And from this description we not only learn concerning the luminaries and the stars that most of them, when they rise, run their course through the south, but from the same source we are taught that the Earth is surrounded by the ocean, and further that beyond the ocean there is another Earth by which the ocean is surrounded."

Footnotes

182:1 Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes: Hakluyt Soc. Pub. 1897, p. 30.

THE BOOK OF EARTHS

By

EDNA KENTON

New York: William Morrow & Company

[1928, No renewal]

Systems of the Universe

WHEN THE GREEKS IN THE SIXTH CENTURY B.C. took up the study of the universe, its systems multiplied. The order of the orbits of the heavenly bodies, above all, their disorder, fascinated the Greek mind. Eclipses occurred, but how? A Comet fled through the sky, and did not collide with a sister body--why? How were the Earth, Sun, Moon, and all the stars supported in space? What are the relative distances of the spaces between them? Which were the larger bodies? the smaller? What were the divisions of Space? What were the major combinations of the great elements? How were these combinations effected--and a hundred other questions.

PLATE XXXII. (Frontispiece to Almagestum Novum; Ioannes Riccioli, 1561)
Homer was the first poet of the Greek universe, but Thales was its first philosopher (640-572 B.C.). He believed the Earth was a disc floating "like a piece of wood or something of that kind," on the waters which were the origin of all things, including fire and air as well as Earth; and his interest in eclipses led him into a protracted study of the movements of the Sun and the Moon and their relation to the Earth.

Anaximander (c. 611-545 B.C.) was his contemporary. He gave up the idea that the water was the origin of everything, any more than any other substance known to man. Everything originated "from the nature of the infinite," and to it returned. Hence it followed that this world was not eternal, but merely one of a procession of worlds. He described the figure of Earth as either flat or convex on the surface, but much more like a cylinder or stone column than the thin disc of Thales. Eventually he called it cylindrical, with a height equal to one-third of its breadth. This cylinder, being in the centre of the universe, was stable, in equilibrium, since it had the same relation to every part of- the universe.

FIGURE 66. The Systems of the Universe.
(From Iter exstaticum ceste; Athanasius Kircher, 1660, Plate II.)
Above it were a series of heavens, the first of air, the second of all the stars, the third of the Moon, above that the heaven of the Sun and above all the heaven of the heavenly fire. He had an extremely complicated theory to account for a motionless heaven and moving bodies; he appears to have imagined the Sun, for instance, to be an enormous wheel filled with fire, its rim pierced by a single hole the size of the Earth.

FIGURE 67. The Universe according to Anaximander
(c. 611-545 B.C.)
(From Dante and the Early Astronomers; M. A. Orr (Mrs. John Evershed), 1913.)So, too, the Moon and stars rolled through their heavens; eclipses came from the holes in the Sun-wheel's rim and that of the Moon being partially or wholly stopped up. Quite exactly, his Sun and Moon were vessels filled with fire.

Of course only the upper surface of Anaximander's Earth was habitable; below it the heavenly bodies had their underworld course; for the rest, the horizon marked the limits of the known and the knowable.

He seems to have held too the curious idea that the series of worlds which come out of the infinite and go back into it may be also called gods, since, like gods, they are created, they live, they die, and are again created.

For a hundred years following Anaximander's death, the Greeks were still asking how the Earth was held in balance, and why the heavenly bodies did not fall from their places in the sky and destroy the Earth. Empedocles and Anaxagoras offered this explanation--that a great whirl-wind swept continuously round the Earth, serving the double end of holding the heavenly bodies aloft and of driving them across the sky. Anaxagoras believed that this same whirlwind was responsible for the stars themselves; that they were fragments of the Earth, torn off by the violence of the whirlwind, and that their light came from no more than the heat produced by friction. He also believed that the "heaven of the stars" was far beyond that of the Sun.

As for Empedocles, he re-asserted that everything consists of the four elements, Earth, air, fire, and water, either in a pure, or a combined, or a mixed state merely; and he said further that all these combinations and mixings were brought about by two forces alone, one attracting, and one repulsing, one Harmony, the other Disharmony, one Cord, the other Discord. He had also a very individual idea of the Moon and the Sun; the Moon is air rolled together with fire--it is flat like a disc and gets its light from the Sun. But the Sun, he said, is a reflection of the fire surrounding the Earth; it is not itself of a fiery nature, but merely a reflection of fire, "like that which is produced in water."

FIGURE 68. The Universe of Leucippus(c. 450 B.C.)
(From Dante and the Early Astronomers; M. A. Orr (Mrs. John Evershed), 1913.)Leucippus (c. 450 B.C.) changed Anaximander's figure of the universe considerably. He still held that the Earth's flat upper surface was its only habitable area, but he gave the whole mass of the Earth the shape of a tympanum or kettle drum, flat, with a slightly raised rim--according to this idea man was living on the flat top of the southern hemisphere. Above the hemisphere of Earth was the hemisphere of air, the two surrounded by the crystal sphere which held the Moon. Above the Moon's sphere was the planetary sphere; above this the sphere of the Sun, with the star-zone last, "perhaps outside." He accounted for the inclination of the axis to the horizon by saying that the Earth had sunk towards the south, which is merely the other half of the ancient saying that the Earth is raised towards the north.

FIGURE 69. The Universe of Democritus(c. 430 B.C.)
(From Dante and the Early Astronomers; M. A. Orr (Mrs. John Evershed), 1913.)Leucippus had a disciple, Democritus (c. 430 B.C.), who retained the thin Earth-disc of Thales, but added to it the surrounding rim of his master's Earth-drum. He changed Leucippus's Air-Earth sphere into a sphere of Air, divided horizontally through its centre by the Earth-disc. Thus, like the cylindrical Earth of Anaximander,

it rested on nothing but air. Next the Air sphere he placed the Moon and the Morning Star, then the spheres of the Sun, the planets and the fixed stars.

The Sun, he said, was ignited stone or iron, and the Sun and Moon, each a large solid mass, were none the less smaller than the Earth. Originally, he said, the Sun and the Moon had been two Earths, like this of ours, and each of them, like ours, at the core and centre of a world. But these two worlds had encountered our world, which had absorbed them both, and had taken possession of the "Earth" of each. Comets, he said, are caused by two planets approaching each other closely. The Moon was not only a solid body, but, having once been the "Earth" of another world, it still has mountains and plains and chasms, which cause the markings on its face. Anaxagoras however had said this before him, and had also asserted that the Moon was still inhabited. Democritus also taught that the light of the Milky Way was caused by a great multitude of very faint stars. Later it was said that the Milky Way was a former path of the Sun, which for some obscure reason had changed its course.

It was Pythagoras who numbered and measured and named for the Greeks the five great planets of our system, and who gave them places in the heavens equal in importance to the greater heavenly bodies. And it was Pythagoras who taught that the Earth was a perfect sphere, hanging, if not moving, freely in space, with its whole surface habitable, and with men moving freely on all its sides. For the Earth, he said, balanced in the centre of the world, cannot fall, nor can it let anything which belongs to any part of it fall. There is no below, there is no above, for our North is South to the men of the antipodes; there is nothing but the Centre, where we are, and it is illusion to believe otherwise.

FIGURE 70. The Universe of Pythagoras(c. 540 B.C.)
(From Dante and the Early Astronomers; M. A. Orr (Mrs. John Evershed), 1913.)Number played the principal part in the universe of the Pythagoreans, for, said they, everything in nature is governed by number, since number is the beginning and the end of all relations. There are cosmic principles, they declared, and these cosmic principles are mathematical principles, which are living principles; numbers are the essence of the universe, the very substance of things, the cause and effect of all that is in nature.

Pythagoras separated the planets and affirmed that their distances are in exact proportion to the intervals between musical notes. Combined with the Sun and Moon into a running scale, they make up the sacred number seven, and these seven notes of the cosmic scale constitute, with the mysterious star-sphere, the cosmic octave. As each of the heavenly bodies moves in its path, different to, yet harmonious with all the others, it sounds its own individual note in the great octave that is "the music of the spheres." This music, said the Pythagoreans, is all about us and has been since our infancy, but we live beside it "as one lives beside the cataracts of the Nile"--we never know we hear it.

According to Aristotle, the Pythagorean universe was divided thus:

The Earth was, first of all, a sphere situated in the centre of the universe, and was surrounded by many spheres.

Ouranos or Sky stretched between the Earth and the Moon. It was the region of illusion and change, always filled with whorls of air and shifting clouds.

Cosmos was the region of "the celestial octave," the appointed place for the Sun, the Moon, and the planets. It consisted of seven concentric rings or spheres, in which these heavenly bodies, or "divine beings," lived their conscious, joyous lives.

Olympos was the Star-sphere, the pure-elemental region which completed the cosmic octave.

Beyond Olympos stretched the region of celestial fire.

Beyond the region of celestial fire was Apeiron, Infinite Air, Infinite Space, from which and into which the Cosmos breathes, and through which and by which only it lives.

FIGURE 75. The Five Great Elements.
(From Spha Mundi; Orantius Fineus, 1542.)The Pythagoreans did not fail to take into account the five great elements, from which they believed all things were fashioned. They fitted these five "Causal Beings" into the five regular solids (Figs. 2-6 and ), to whose forms, they said, the component particles of the different elements correspond. The component particle of Earth, for instance, corresponds to the cube; of water, to the icosahedron; of air, to the octahedron; of fire, to the tetrahedron; of ether, to the dodecahedron--the form which had been God's model for the whole universe.

FIGURE 72. ''A Figure of the whole world, wherein are set forth the two essentiall Parts, the eleven heavens, and the foure Elements."A Figure of the Whole World" (Fig. 72 ) is the Pythagorean-Ptolemaic system, much elaborated. It begins by taking into account the "foure Elements," but it extends the number of the imaginable heavens beyond the "cristaline" to two--this was an invention of the medial astronomers. These two additional heavens were the Primum Mobile, or the "First Movable," and "The empyreal heaven, the habitation of the blesed."

Click to enlarge
FIGURE 73. System of the diverse spheres.
(From Cosmographia; Petrus Apianus, 1660.)

This last was the Heaven of Heavens, motionless, incorruptible, the place of the eternal mysteries. None of these spheres consisted, of course, of any materially palpable substance; they were great spherical zones of aethereal space, arranged one within the other, which circled about the motionless Earth at differing rates of speed. Perhaps, instead of "spheres," or "shells," or "zones," these moving regions are better expressed by the term "velocities."

Fig. 73 represents again the same system, even more elaborately inscribed with "correspondences." By aid of these two guides through the "two essentiall Parts" of the whole world--that is to say the eleven heavens and the four elements, the six systems of the universe shown in Fig. 66 can be more or less easily followed.

ONE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PYTHAGOREAN SYSTEM might be mentioned here--the attempt of an otherwise unknown astronomer, Philolaus, to remove the motionless Earth from its place in the centre of the universe and give it an orbit of its own. His reasons, except that he hoped by this to account better for the seemingly contrary movements of the heavens, do not concern us here. But it is a transition-picture. For by moving the Earth from the centre and letting her move in Space, he may have solved one problem, but he raised two new ones. He had left the sacred place, the Centre of the World, empty, and he had disturbed the cosmic octave by adding to it another moving body. Heretofore the Earth had been mute because it was motionless; now movement gave it its own note in a disturbed scale. So in the sacred place he put the purest of the elements, Fire, forerunner of the Central Sun. Then, more to restore the harmony of number, quite likely, than to explain Night and Day, he created another moving heavenly body, the planet Antichthon, or Counter-Earth, and gave it an orbit between the Earth and the Central Fire with one of its faces turned always to the Fire. This gave nine moving bodies, and with the star-sphere as another, the number was increased from the sacred number seven to the sacred number ten. The Earth revolved with one face turned always away from the centre; Antichthon, the new planet, was therefore always invisible. After this rearrangement was completed, explanations purporting to reconcile a geocentric with an ignicentric system were invented plenteously, some of them very interesting ones. "Those who partook of a greater knowledge," wrote Simplicius, "called the fire in the middle the creating power, which from the middle gives life to the whole Earth and again warms that which has been cooled. . . . But they called the Earth a star because it also is an instrument of time, for it is the cause of days and nights, for it makes day to the part illumined by the Sun, but night to the part which is in the cone of the shadow." And he ends by saying that the moon was called the antichthon, because it is "an aethereal Earth."

Some modern students of this confusion have suggested that the Earth and the Counter-Earth or Antichthon might have been intended to be the two halves of a single sphere, cut through a meridian and separated very slightly, with the flat sides toward each other, but with the convex side of Antichthon turned always towards the Central Fire, and the convex side of the Earth turned always away from it. This may be so, but no one knows. For the Pythagorean teachings were at the best obscure, and the Pythagorean text that has come down is scanty and corrupt.

FIGURE 74. The System of Philolaus.
(From Dante and the Early Astronomers; M. A. Orr (Mrs. John Evershed), 1913.)Upper figure: Night on Earth. Only the side turned away from the centre is inhabited; consequently the Central Fire and Antichthon are invisible.

Lower figure: Twelve hours later; Day on Earth. Earth has made half a revolution, and her outer side is now lighted by the sun, which has only moved about half a degree forward in its yearly orbit. Antichthon has also made half a revolution, therefore remains invisible.One Pythagorean, Hicatus of Syracuse, is said to have believed and taught that the heavens, the Sun, Moon, stars, and all the heavenly bodies are standing still, and that nothing in the universe is moving except the Earth, which, while it turns and twists itself with the greatest velocity round its axis, produces all the same phenomena as if the heavens were moving and the Earth were standing still."

As above, so below! Philolaus placed the planet Antichthon or Counter-Earth in the heavens, perhaps five hundred years before the Christian era. In the first century A.D. Pomponius Mela, a Latin cosmographer, convinced that a spherical Earth must have a more or less balanced distribution of land and water, drew the first map on which the mysterious continent of Earth appears in the unknown half of Earth--our antipodes. This continent he inscribed with the name Antichthones, the Unknown. His pen had leaped over the impassable equatorial zone, and had drawn below it a solid, bowl-shaped mass of land which no man had seen, and which no man might ever see. And yet it must be there! It had been long known through travellers that from Greece or from Italy the eastwardly land stretched much farther than the land to the west, and it was therefore quite possible, with no proof of the existence of a great western ocean, that the northern continent of Europe-Asia-Africa might wrap around the sphere until its eastern edge touched the western shore of the known Atlantic. But it was implicitly believed that the known land stopped at the equator; the balancing continent must be therefore at the antipodes.

FIGURE 75. Pomponius Mela's Map of the World, with Antichthones (1st century A.D.)
(From De situ Orbis; Pomponius Mela, 1536.)When Pomponius Mela dropped his second continent to the south, he was a mistaken man, but his Antichthones lingered in the imagination of men--lingered for nearly fifteen hundred years, until Columbus, sailing west--to India--came upon the West Indies and the Americas. The great astronomer and geographer, Claudius Ptolemy, lived in the century after Pomponius Mela. There is a legend that he was a descendant of the Egyptian kings, and knew their secret science of the heavens; certainly he brought about a revival of mathematical geography that had not been in the world since the great Alexandrian period, and he drew his maps upon a form that was to be the model of the Earth up to and through the Middle Ages.

Ptolemy believed the Earth to be a globular body, but the form on which his maps were modelled was one slightly depressed at the north, and sharply cut off a little below the equatorial line by a supposedly continuous Southern Ocean which circled the equator and flowed below it. His historians do not seem to doubt that his knowledge of the regions of the Earth extended as far as the equator, and that he himself knew this fabled zone of fire was both habitable and inhabited. But he confined himself to a map-form that included neither the unknown Polar regions nor the hemisphere of Antichthones.

Next: The Square Earth of Cosmas Indicopleutes

THE BOOK OF EARTHS

By

EDNA KENTON

New York: William Morrow & Company

[1928, No renewal]

Earth The Mundane Egg

THE GREAT MONAD, or the Great Beginning, or the Great Extreme, or the Great Vacuum, or Yin and Yang, or "Heaven," is one of the old, mysterious figures of Earth. It represents all the pairs of opposites that we know--Light and Darkness, life and death, death and re-birth, heat and cold, good and evil, subtle and gross, male-female in Nature, or the great principles Yin and Yang. It is One yet All Things, the great hermaphrodite--"the indivisible monad, of itself generating itself, and out of this were formed all things." It looks like a shell, it looks like an ear; it looks like a tadpole, an embryo, a whirlpool, a claw, a comma, two eyes, strange Moon upon the Sun. It looks perhaps like the Universe itself before the creation of Heaven and Earth. It is the epitome of all the "egg-shaped" figures of Earth. It is animated Chaos, primordial Air dividing into two Airs to generate a multiplied cosmos, for they have the power to make and transmute all things. It is the Ovum Mundi--Egg of the World.

FIGURE 61. The Great Monad.
(From Dragon, Image and Demon; H. C. Du Bose, 1887.)It is never a life or a birth symbol merely; it is always associated with the idea of primal causal cosmic energy. The Japanese mitsu tomoeis a variation of the Great Monad of the Chinese; instead of the two-comma-shaped figure, its "commas" are three.

"The Great Extreme," says the Chinese philosopher Choo-tzse, writing of this ancient symbol, "moved and generated the Light; having moved to the utmost, it rested, and resting, generated the Darkness. . . .

FIGURE 62. The Mitsu Tomoe of the Japanese.
(From Internationales Archiv f Ethnographie; Bd. IX (1896), S. 265.)"The Great Extreme resembles a root which sprouts upwards, and divides into branches, and which also divides and produces blossoms and leaves, generating unceasingly. When the fruit is formed, then, it contains inside, the seed of endless generations, which generates and springs forth. This is the Infinite Great Extreme, which never ceases altogether, but only when the fruit is perfected it ceases to generate for a while. . . .

"In the beginning Heaven and Earth were just Light and Dark Air. This one Air revolved grinding round and round. When it ground quickly much sediment was compressed, which, having no means of exit, coagulated and formed the Earth in the centre. The subtle portion of the Air then became Heaven, and the Sun, Moon, and Stars which unceasingly revolve on the outside. The Earth is in the centre, and is motionless, it is not below the centre.

The Earth is the sediment of the Air; and hence it is said that the light and pure Air became Heaven; the heavy and muddy Air became Earth." 1

Here is a series of Chinese diagrams (Fig. 63 ) illustrating the process of the Creation of the universe from the beginning--the whole infinite mass of Primordial Air when in Chaos. This is represented by the black disc (e), the Ovum Mundior "Mind" of the universe, inherent in which, even in its mingled state, is the Divine Reason. In (f) is shown the separation of the Primordial Air into two Airs, the division of Subtile from Gross, of Light from Darkness. This is the beginning of all things, from which sprang the First God, All Light (a), called Reason, Fate, the Immovable Mover, or the Infinite. From this First God came the Second God, or Light, and the Demon-god or Darkness (b), which, say the Chinese, represent Mind or the two-fold Soul, contained within the body of the visible world (c). To represent the complete being of the animated cosmos the three circles or globes are placed like three bodies, one within the other (d); this is sometimes called the Three-fold Air. The Great Extreme is represented in another form in the upper half of the lower right-hand figure, whose inner circle represents the First God inherent in all things, with the Light and Dark Airs alternating unceasingly. From this ceaseless alternation are generated the Five Elements whose Chinese terms differ considerably from those we have been using--namely, earth, water, fire, air, and ether. For the first one, they say, is termed water, and by some is called black.

FIGURE 63. Chinese Conception of the Creation.
(From Confucian Cosmogony; Thomas MClatchie, Shanghai, 1874.)The second is fire, and by some is termed red. The third is called wood and is therefore termed green. The fourth is called metal and is white. The fifth is called earth, and is presumed to be yellow.

Besides the Great Monad and its associated diagrams, the Chinese had yet another series of diagrams by which, they asserted, it was possible to account for all the changes and transmutations within the forces of Nature. These are the Eight Diagrams of Fuh-he, which, according to him and his disciples, manifest the Mind of Heaven and Earth, whose only purpose is to generate--that is, to change and to transmute. "That which proceeds gradually," they said, "is transmutation [like the growth of a tree]. That which is united in one and is incomprehensible is God. Transmutation is each thing succeeding in order." They tried to explain this further by saying: "That which when at Rest cannot Move, and when in Motion cannot Rest is Matter;. that which Moves yet moves not, Rests yet rests not, is God." They said, too, that the "thirty-six palaces"--the number of units that make up the Eight Diagrams--are no more than merely the strokes of the Light and the Darkness.

Each set of three lines (Fig. 64 ) represents the three powers, Heaven, Earth, and Man, and represents also the exact force exerted by each one in each of the eight combinations. The three undivided lines, for instance, indicate the tireless strength of Heaven, the three divided lines, the divided Earth. Beginning at the top and going to the left, the triads are supposed to read: river or running water, Heaven, wind, Earth, Sun, lake or dormant water, mountain, thunder. The centre of this mirror is said to represent the Sun, surrounded by four constellations, which are in turn encircled by the Eight Diagrams, and these again by the Chinese Zodiac, or Yellow Path of the Sun, with its twelve animal signs--the Mouse, Cow, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Serpent, Horse, Ram, Ape, Hen, Dog, and Pig.

FIGURE 64. The Chinese Zodiac. From a Mirror of the Tang Dynasty.
(From Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1835, Vol. II.)THE FIVE FIGURES OF EARTH as the Mundane Egg, given in Plates XXIX , pl30 , and XXXI , are all of them different, yet all of them the same, and they range in time and region from ancient Egypt to seventeenth-century England. The idea of the "Ophis et Ovum Mundanum" (PlateXXIX, B ) is not to be traced to its source; it is found everywhere, in the open or secret traditions of all races--this concept of the great World Serpent warming, guarding, hatching, sometimes feasting on the Earth Egg. The "Deus Luna" () is one of the old attempts, in varying forms and with more interpretations, to link the great triad of heavenly bodies, Sun, Moon, and Earth, into a figure symbolic of the whole universe. Here the Mundane Egg is held in its fiery vase very much as an acorn is held in its cup. It is guarded by the Moon, which, as a "great white bird," was supposed to rest at night upon the Earth; "like a goose," said the Egyptians, "brooding over her egg."

The third figure (Plate XXIX, C ), as much a World Mountain as a World Egg, is asserted by Flammarion to represent the world-concept of Edrisi, an Arabian geographer of the eleventh century, "who, with many others, considered the Earth to be like an egg with one-half plunged into the water." This is identical with the figure illustrating the "Theory of Two Centres" (Fig. 54 ).

PLATE XXIX. A. Deus Lunus. B. Ophis et Ovum Mundanum.
(From Ancient Mythology; Jacob Bryant, 1774, Vol. Il)

PLATE XXIX. C. Earth as a floating Egg.
(From Flammarion's Astronomical Myths. 1877)
It is also a modern religious rendering of the Northern hemisphere, with Jerusalem and Palestine at the apex of the world.

The last two figures bring us back again to Thomas Burnet and his Theory of the Earth, which emphatically was the theory that it is almost literally, certainly by every analogy, the Mundane Egg.

"There is another thing in Antiquity," said this great English Platonist, "relating to the form and construction of the Earth, which is very remarkable, and hath obtained throughout all learned Nations and Ages. And that is the comparison or resemblance of the Earth to an Egg. And this is not so much for its external figure, though that be true too, as for the inward composition of it; consisting of several Orbs, one including another, and in that order, as to answer the several elementary Regions on which the new-made Earth was constituted. For if we admit for the Yolka Central fire . . . and suppose the Figure of the Earth Oval, and a little extended towards the Poles . . . those two bodies do very naturally represent one another, as in this Scheme, which represents the interiour faces of both, a divided Egg, or Earth. Where, as the two inmost Regions (A. B.) represent the Yolk and the Membrane that lies next above it; so the Exteriour Region of the Earth (D.) is as the Shell of the Egg, and the Abysse (C.) under it as the White that lies under the Shell. And considering that this notion of the Mundane Egg, or that the World was Oviform, hath been the sence and language of all Antiquity, Latins, Greeks, Persians, Egyptians, and others, I thought it worthy our notice in this place."

The unknown author of De Imago Mundihad, it happens, compared not the Earth but the Universe itself to a ball, or an Egg. In his scheme, the shell corresponded to the upper heavens; the white to the upper air; the yolk to the lower air; and the pinguidinis gutta, or drop of grease in the centre, to the Earth. And, even earlier than these, the Venerable Bede had written (in the sixth century A.D.): "The Earth is an element placed in the middle of the world, as the yolk in the middle of an egg; around it is the water, like the white surrounding the yolk; outside that is the air, like the membrane of the egg; and around all is the fire, which closes it in as the shell does. . . . The ocean, which surrounds it by its waves as far as the horizon, divides it into two parts, the upper of which is inhabited by us, while the lower is inhabited by our antipodes; although not one of them can come to us, nor one of us to them." These three analogies are developed differently, but Burnet's figure of the "divided egg" will serve to illustrate all of them (Plate XXX ).

Having divided his Earth-egg to show the order of arrangement of its inner parts, Burnet then closed it up, to represent it entire, with only a reminder of the great abyss under it (Plate XXXI ), on which his whole theory of the Deluge and the dissolution of the Earth rested. Either the great abyss opened (which he doubted), "or the frame of the Earth broke and fell down into the Great Abysse." In the latter case, there would be two effects. This "smooth Earth" in which were the first scenes of the world and the first generations of mankind, which had the beauty of youth and not a wrinkle, scar or fracture in all its body, no Rocks or Mountains, no hollow Caves nor gaping Chanels," would be first submerged during the agitation of the abyss by the violent fall of the Earth into it.

PLATE XXX. ''A DIVIDED EGG, OR EARTH.''
(From The Theory of the Earth; Thomas Burnet, 1697)

Then, when the flood had subsided, "you would see," said he, "the true image of the present Earth in the ruines of the first" (Fig. 34 and Plate XIV ). He compared his "smooth" or primal Earth to an lipileor hollow sphere filled with water, which the heat of fire rarefies and turns into vapours and winds. "The Sun here is as the Fire," he said, "and the exteriour Earth is as the Shell of the lipile, and the Abysse as the Water within it. . . . So we see all Vapours and Exhalations enclosd within the Earth, and agitated there, strive to break out, and often shake the ground with their attempts to get loose. And in the comparison we used of an lipile, if the mouth of it be stopt that gives the vent, the Water rarefied will burst the Vessel with its force. And the resemblance of the Earth to an Egg, which we used before, holds also in this respect, for when it heats before the Fire, the moisture and Air within being rarefied, makes it often burst the Shell. And I do the more willingly mention this last comparison, because I observe that some of the Ancients, when they speak of the doctrine of the MundaneEgg, say that after a certain period of time it was broken."

Another cosmogony worked out along this same analogy is that of the Gnostics, a group that flourished during the first two centuries of the Christian era, who are said to be the descendants in wisdom of other groups far removed. But the Gnostic group was really an aggregation of groups who combined the Christian teachings with a gnosis or higher knowledge through which the inner meaning of Christianity was revealed. Their doctrines were akin to those of Pythagoras, the higher Egyptian, Indian and Chinese teachers, and to those of the Essenes who for centuries before the Christian era had dwelt apart on the shores of the Dead Sea. They strove after the knowledge of God; wisdom was their goal, and the life of man on Earth their study. For gnosis, in the words of Theodotus, is the knowledge of what we were, what we have become, where we were, into what place we have been thrown; whither we are hastening, whence we are redeemed; what is birth, and what is re-birth." Their scheme of the universe has come down to us through "the diagram of Celsus," who called it the diagram of the Ophites, a sect of the Gnostics, with whose beliefs he was most familiar.

In the beginning, said the Gnostics, was the Trinity, Light, Spirit, and Darkness, all intermingled; and from the striving of the Darkness to retain the Light and Spirit, and so to imprison life sparks in matter, and from the striving of Light and Spirit against the power of Darkness, the first great form was produced, Heaven and Earth, symbolised by the World Egg in the womb of the universe. This World Egg was represented as a circle with a serpent twined several times around it, signifying the mysterious force which first set into separating, light-producing motion the mingled Light and Darkness of the Great Monad. The great serpent, they believed, was not the Great Tempter, but the form through which Divine Will and Divine Reason incessantly moved and manifested.

PLATE XXXI. ''THE WHOLE EARTH IS AN EGG''
(From The Theory of the Earth; Thomas Burnet, 1697)
The diagram itself is divided into two great regions, the upper and the lower, separated from each other by the thick black line called Gehennaor Tartarus. The upper region belonged to the supreme Intelligences; it was the world of the ns, or the Pleroma of the Gnostics--the World of Light. Here was perfect harmony, the state of ideal fulness or perfection.

The lower region is divided into two groups, one of ten, the other of seven, spheres, each group of spheres being enclosed within a sphere, and the two separated from each other by the band of Lower Air. The circle enclosing the seven spheres is labelled Leviathan, and represents the Soul of the World, as the body represents the spirit that dwells in it. For it chanced that, one day, the Universal Mother, brooding over the Waters, let a "Drop of Light" fall downwards into chaotic matter, and this was called Sophia, or Wisdom, the WorldMother. The waters of the her being then set in motion, formed a body for Sophia, called the Heaven-sphere. Whereupon Sophia, freeing herself, rose upwards to the Middle Region, below her Mother who was herself the bounding line of the Ideal Universe. Sophia had herself produced Ialdabaoth (child of Chaos, and also identified with Saturn), who in his turn produced a son, and so on, until there were seven in all, the Formative powers of the phenomenal world.

The second group of spheres within a sphere is labelled Behemoth--it is the terrestrial world. Its lower seven spheres carry within them the signatures of seven great animals, and, without, the names of seven angels. The higher three spheres bear only interrogation marks, but they are supposed to belong to Ialdabaoth, the ruler of terrestrial affairs, or perhaps to Sophia herself.

Concerning the signatures of animals inscribed within the seven lower spheres and their relation to the seven angels named outside, Celsus says that the first, a goat, "was shaped like a lion," and was a part of Michael the Lion-like. The second in descending order was a bull--or Suriel, the Bull-like; the third was "an amphibious sort of animal and one that hissed frightfully"--Raphael the Serpent-like; the fourth had the form of an eagle--Gabriel, the Eagle-like; the fifth had the countenance of a bear--Thauthabaoth, the Bear-like; the sixth had the face of, a dog--or Erataoth; "the seventh had the countenance of an ass and was named Thaphabaoth or Onoel."

Might any soul succeed in escaping through these seven spheres and the three empty globes or circles, he must then pass "the fence of wickedness," or "gates" subjected to the world of ruling spirits called Leviathan. Beginning with the lowest, he passed to what was called Ialdabaoth, then to Iao, to Sabaoth, to Astaphs ruler of the third gate, to Alus governor of the second, and to Hors, keeper of the first. Celsus calls this world of Leviathan "circles upon circles."

The Gnostics are famous for their strange symbolic figures. They believed in a Watcher of the World, a Mind that perceived, and they often represented this See-er of the World as a human body pierced with eyes. The extraordinary frontispiece to Riccioli's Almagestum Novum(Plate XXXII ) is by no means a Gnostic picture, but its left-hand figure is a perfect delineation of the myriad-eyed Watcher of the universe.

FIGURE 65. Gnostic Diagram of the Universe.
(From Histoire critique du Gnosticisme; Jacques Matter, 1826, Vol. III, Plate I, D.)

Almagestum Novumappeared at just the time when the whole universe had been turned, so to say, inside out half inside out, at least. For the Ptolemaic system of the universe, by which we know that theory which places the Earth at the centre, with the rest of the heavenly bodies revolving about it, had but lately fallen. Copernicus, after many years of hesitancy, had at last dared, in 1543, to publish his De revolutionibus, which declared the Sun to be at the centre of our world. Eighteen years later Riccioli's Almagestum Novumwas published; and this little time-scheme lends even more interest to its remarkable frontispiece. For between the "'Watcher of the World" and the "Starry One," the two great systems of the universe hang in the balance, one with the Earth, the other with the Sun, in the centre of Space. The first disc is inscribed with the new Copernican system; the second with the ancient Egyptian. At the goddess's feet lies the system known as Ptolemy's. In one hand she holds the Balance, in the other an armillary sphere. In the upper left-hand corner winged beings float, bearing orbs associated with Light; in the upper right-hand corner move the bearers of those heavenly bodies which bring Light into Darkness--the Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, and the flying serpent of the skies.

Footnotes

148:1 Confucian Cosmogony. Thomas MClatchie, Shanghai, 1874.

THE BOOK OF EARTHS

By

EDNA KENTON

New York: William Morrow & Company

[1928, No renewal]

The Wheel of Life

CLOSELY ASSOCIATED with the World Mountains are the many Wheels of Life, by which the ancients sought to picture the relations of parts of the universe to each other and to the whole. There is a hint of this in the Tibetan world-picture, with Mount Meru the axis or hub of the world about which are placed like spokes in a wheel the four quarters of the Earth, with their three islands each, making the sum of twelve radii from the centre. The Wheel of the Zodiac was of course the great original for all such figures, particularly for the Wheels of Life. For uncounted centuries man knew the geography of the heavens better than the geography of the Earth, and whatever life on Earth meant to him, the unfailing procession of the great star-groups of the Zodiac meant certainty, law, order. There were zones written in the heavens long before man stretched his imaginary lines of the terrestrial zones over the Earth--"The circle called the Zodiac," said Plutarch, "is placed under the three that are in the midst, and lies obliquely, gently touching them all." And it is not hard to see how this great circle came to seem to man a mirror of the Earth, a storehouse of its history, its constant Watcher in the sky, and the unerring prophet of its future. The Greeks named this oblique ring of star-groups just behind the Sun when it sets or just before it when it rises, the Zodiac or Path of Animals, because the names and configurations of the groups were mostly those of animals, and by that name we know it. But no one knows how long before the days of the Greeks far earlier astronomers first linked the single groups of stars into the twelve great signs of the Star-bearing Circle.

PLATE XXVI. CREATIO UNIVERSI
(From Physica Sacra; Johann Jacob Scheuchzer, 1731, Vol. q, Plate I).Physica Sacrais an early eighteenth-century Bible illustrated almost text for text, and Plate XXVI is its first illustration, for the first verse of the first chapter of the first book: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth." Outside the Zodiacal Wheel are clouds upon clouds bearing a multitude of spheres, and, in addition, seven numbered diagrams. Fig. I in this Plate illustrates the system of the "eleven heavens," with the Earth the centre of the universe. Fig. II is the Tychonian system; Fig. III, what is known as the semi-Tychonian system; Fig IV, the blazing and effulgent Sun, containing within himself his seven children, Earth and Moon and the five great planets; Fig. V, a group of the heavenly bodies; Fig. VI, an armillary sphere; Fig. VII, an Astrolabe, which is almost to say, "the handle of the stars," and which was called by the old astronomers "the Mathematical jewel."

The Northern and Southern hemispheres of the heavens (Figs. 58 and 59 ) are merely supplementary to Scheuchzer's Creatio Universi. They are taken from an Arabic celestial globe, made of brass, in 1275 A.D., which was deposited in the Museum of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Near the South Pole is an inscription in Cufic characters, stating that it was "Made by the most humble in the supreme God, Mohammed ben Helah, the astronomer of Monsul, in the year of the Hegira." The Zodiac was known to the Arabs, not as The Path of Animals," but as The Girdle of the Castles," and contained, with one or two variations in name, the same signs we have to-day: Aries, Taurus and Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo (this the Arabs called the Ear), Balance or Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricornus, Aquarius, and Pisces.

FIGURE 58. An ancient Arabic Celestial Sphere. Northern Hemisphere.
(From Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1830, Vol. II, Plate A.)There are altogether, including the signs of the Zodiac, forty-seven constellations on these Arabic celestial hemi-pheres. The ones inscribed on the Northern hemisphere are: Little Bear; Greater Bear; The Dragon; Cepheus; Boes; the Northern Crown; The Kneeling Hercules; The Lyre; The Hen, or Swan; The Lady in her Chair, or Cassiopeia; The Bearer of Medusa's Head, i.e., Perseus; The Charioteer; The Charmer of Serpents, or Serpentarius; The Arrow, or Sagittarius; The Flying Eagle, or Aquila; The Dolphin; Part of the Horse (the horse's head); The Greater Horse, Pegasus; The Chain, or Andromeda; The Triangle.

FIGURE 59. An ancient Arabic Celestial Sphere. Southern Hemisphere.
(From Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1830, Vol. II, Plate B.)The constellations inscribed on the Southern hemisphere are: Ketos, the Whale; The Giant, or Orion; The River, or Acarnar; The Hare, or Lepus; the Greater Dog, or Canis; The Dog, or Procyon; The Ship, or Argo; The Hydra; The Flaggon, or Crater; The Crow, or Corvus; The Centaur, or Centaurus; The Beast, or Fera; The Censer; The Southern Crown; The Southern Fish.

OF THE TWO WHEELS OF LIFE (or Fate or Law) to be given here, we begin with the one that seems the simpler. This Chinese Wheel (Plate XXVII ) is almost a Zodiac or "path of animals," of itself. (The Chinese Zodiac, or "Yellow Path of the Sun," differed materially in its signs from the Greek-Arabic one just given; it contained twelve animals: the Mouse, the Cow, the Tiger, the Rabbit, the Dragon, the Serpent, the Horse, the Ram, the Ape, the Hen, the Dog, and the Pig.) Six of the twelve divisions are separating paths or currents, through or over which the traveller passes to the next stage. Four of the remaining divisions are the abodes of beasts, of insects, of fish, and of birds. The other two, separated from each other by one of the spiral-like rivers, are inhabited by Poor Men and Rich Men, or by Mandarins and Tillers of the Soil.

PLATE XXVII. THE WHEEL OF LIFE
(From Dragon, Image, and Demon; H. C. Du Bose, 1887)

The second of these wheels is the one elaborately developed in the Tibetan Wheel of Life (Plate XXVIII) to which is an almost necessary Key. It is a Tibetan version of an Indian painting in one of the abandoned cave-temples of Ajanta, which L. Austine Waddell holds to be "a complete authentic account of human life from the absolute standpoint of the earliest Buddhist philosophy."

FIGURE 60. Key to the Tibetan Wheel of Life.
(From The Buddhism of Tibet, or Lamaism; L. Austine Waddell, 1899.)

The Lamas of Tibet say that Buddha himself originated the Wheel of Life, forming it on the Earth with grains of rice from a "rice-field school room." According to the old story, while tarrying for a while at the Squirrels' Feeding Ground in the Venuvana forest near Rajagriha, Buddha instructed his disciple Ananda, to make a Wheel, for the sake of illustrating what another disciple had seen when he visited other spheres. This Wheel was to have five spokes, between which were to be shown the several hells, animals, ghosts, gods and men. In the middle a dove, a serpent, and a hog were to symbolise lust, hatred, and ignorance. Around the outer rim was to wind "the twelve-fold circle of causation," in regular and inverse order. Beings were to be shown "as being born in a supernatural way as by the machinery of a water-wheel falling from one state and being produced in another." Buddha himself, as an "Enlightened One," liberated from the fate of recurrence on the Wheel, was to be outside of it--one who had escaped. This diagram, made first of rice-grains, was later filled in (second century A.D.) with pictures by the Indian monk Nagarjuna, but these pictures are said to be not his own inventions, but the visual images of Buddha's own parables and allegories.

The Key to the Tibetan Wheel of Life will be found an aid in following the interpretation of it, which is Waddell's, and is given here much abridged. 1

The disc, symbolising the endless cycle of life, is held in the grasp of a monster who represents the horrors of Attachment, the wretchedness of Clinging-to-Life.

The broad tire of the Wheel is filled with the twelve-linked closed chain called the Causal Nexus, or "the twelve-fold circle of causation," i.e., the causes of life and of misery. At the centre or nave lie the three vices or delusions, "the Daughters of Desire," symbolising lust, ill-will, and stupidity, which lie at the core of re-birth, and are here given in the forms of a dove, a serpent, and a pig, coloured respectively red, green, and black. The body of the Wheel, filled with varied pictures, is supposed to be constantly revolving, thereby producing "The Whirling on the Wheel" of Life.

The way of escape is indicated by the twelve "links," and the first link is the connecting link between the old life and the new. It might be denominated Unconscious Will to escape. The links in the causal chain are:

I. A blind she-camel (ignorant unconscious will) led by a driver (Karma). In this picture, however, the first link is represented by a blind old woman led by a man, with its meaning the same. II. A potter modelling clay on his wheel (Conformations and impressions of and on formless clay). III. A monkey (the beginning of Consciousness; the new man is approaching to the human, but is still an unreasoning automaton). IV. A man being ferried across an Ocean (Self-consciousness--the Individual crossing the Ocean of Life). V. An empty house (Understanding achieved through "the empty house of the senses"). VI. The Kiss (or contact with the outside world). VII. An arrow entering a man's eye (Feeling or perception). VIII. A man drinking wine (Desire--or thirst). IX. A man gathering fruit and storing it in baskets (Greed, or the satisfying of Desire). X. A married woman--wife of him whose life is here traced (fuller life, Being, Becoming, even Re-birth and the continuance of Being for another existence). XI. Parent and child (Birth--of an heir). XII. A corpse being carried off to burial (Decay and Death), which leads to I, Unconscious Will for re-birth--and the cycle of the Wheel is begun again.

The ways of "life" or "re-birth" are, from highest to lowest, 1. Gods--the Sura. 2. Titans--the Asura. 3. Man--Nara, or Mi. 4. Beasts--the Du-door "best goers." 5. Tantalised Ghosts--Pretas. 6. Hell--Narakaor Nal-kam.

To live in the first three worlds is superior; to live in the last three is inferior--the highest world being Heaven, and the lowest Hell.

In Heaven, above the Titans, on the aethereal summit of Mount Meru, dwell the gods (Plate XXV ). In the lowest regions of the heavens dwell the "guardian kings of the four quarters"; Dritarashtra, the white guardian of the East; Virudhaka, the green guardian of the South; Virupaksha, the red guardian of the West; and Vaisravana, the yellow guardian of the North.

In the upper right-hand section of the Wheel of Life the Titans (the Asuraor not-gods) have their abode. Since their chief characteristic is pride, this is the world of re-birth for the "proud." The Titans correspond to Satan and his hosts, having been, like Satan, and for like cause, cast out from Heaven.

PLATE XXVIII. THE WHEEL OF LIFE
(From The Buddhism of Tibet, or, Lamaism; L. Austine Waddell, 1899)

THE WHEEL OF LIFE
(From The Buddhism of Tibet, or, Lamaism; L. Austine Waddell, 1899), p. 108

Living at the foot of Mount Meru, they hover forever between Heaven and Earth. The life of the Titans is much longer than the life of men; but it is the fate of every Titan to die warring against the gods for the fruits of the heavenly Parijatatree, whose branches are in Heaven, but whose roots are in their country--"the tree of the concentrated essence of Earth's products." The Jambu tree is, in reality, according to this reading, the "climber" which encircles the aethereal tree, and through it the quintessence of Jambudvip, or the Jambu continent" of Earth is instilled into the ParijataTree.

Man--Naraor Mi--lives in the upper left-hand region, constantly confronting the eight miseries--birth, old age, sickness, death, ungratified wishes and struggle for existence, misfortune and punishment for law-breaking, separation from relatives and cherished objects, offensive objects and sensations. Of all these and other phases of ordinary existence pictures abound within the Wheel--birth in a cottage; children at play; village scenes--people drinking wine under a tree; a flute player; women spinning and weaving; a borrower; two traders; a drunken man; workers tilling a field or gathering fuel in a forest or bent under heavy loads; the accidents of life--a man and a horse falling into a river; crime--two men fighting--another on trial--another suffering punishment; government--a king and his ministers; old age, disease--a doctor feeling a sick man's pulse; death--a corpse and funeral ceremonies; religion--a temple placed above all the other objects within the Wheel--that is, Indra's Palace.

Beasts--lower right-hand quarter--are more miserable than man. They are shown consuming each other and being consumed; hunted by men, overburdened with loads, and filled with fear. Far beneath the waters of this animal world is the region of the Nagasor Mermen (great snakes), their home preyed upon by Garuda, Lord of birds, seeking here the serpents of the deep for food.

The region of the Tantalised Ghosts--lower left-hand quarter, is situated above Hell, and hunger and thirst torture the inhabitants. Always before their eyes there are food and drink and jewels in abundance, but the Pretashave mouths no larger than the size of a needle's eye, throats no wider than a hair's diameter, and through these openings they can never satisfy their huge bodily appetites. Add to this that, when food is taken, it is changed into knives or molten metal, and their hunger and thirst can be realised as incessant and never to be appeased. The little pictures within the Wheel show flames pouring from their mouths--if they touch water, it changes to liquid fire. The great Maudgalyayanaonce descended to the Tibetan purgatory to relieve his mother's distress, but even he could not aid her, and the rice he offered her turned to fiery ashes as she touched it.

Hell, the lowest region, is "situated in the bowels of the human Earth," and is ruled over by Yama, king and judge of the dead, who must himself every day swallow molten metal. His domain is divided into many compartments, each with its special form of punishment for the expiation of different sins. In the upper part of Hell sits Yamawith his good and evil angels, ghosts of the dead, the Weigher, and the Prisoner. Below are the Hot Hells, and the Cold Hells, to each of which the damned are assigned according to their sins. The Hot Hells are sunk in the Earth, beginning at a depth of 11,900 miles, and they reach to a depth of 40,000 miles. They are of deepest black, although each is surrounded by a wall of fire. The Cold Hells are at the very edge of the Universe, circled by icy mountains and supplied with glacier water in which the victims are constantly immersed, until chilblains appear and become great sores and ulcers.

There is an exit from Hell, through a sort of borderland Hell called "the near (to re-birth) cycle." This has four divisions; the first filled with hot ashes and dead bodies and offal; the second a quagmire or "sinking sands," beyond which is a forest of spears, which must be crossed--like the razor-bridge of Mohammed, the Bi-frost of Yggdrasil, the slippery fir-tree of the American Indians, or the wide river of The Pilgrim's Progress. After--if--the bridge is crossed, there comes a river of freezing water whose farther shore is thickly set with tree stumps bearing three spiked leaves which impale the pilgrim. What is left to man after this pilgrimage is called "The Surviving Thing."

Footnotes

140:1 Buddhism, or The Lamas of Tibet; L. Austine Waddell, pp. 105-121.