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The Book of Earths

The Book of Earths (36)

The Book of Earths

This is a compendium of theories of the shape of the Earth, along with a great deal of 'Earth Mystery' lore. Richly illustrated, the Book of Earths includes many unusual theories, including Columbus' idea that the Earth is literally pear-shaped, modern theories that the Earth was originally tetrahedral, and so on. Kenton also covers many traditional theories including the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians, Hindu and Buddhist cosmology, and those of the Peruvians, Aztecs and Mongols.


Bibliography

THE BOOK OF EARTHS

By

EDNA KENTON

New York: William Morrow & Company

[1928, No renewal]


BIBLIOGRAPHY

A list of some of the books which were helpful in this study of man's conceptions of the figure of Earth and its relation to the Universe.

ARISTOTLE, De Coelo. Tr. by Thomas Taylor. On the Heavens. London, 1807.

------ De Mundo. Tr. by Thomas Taylor. On the World. (In the Metaphysics, pp. 585-621. London, 1842.)

BEAZLEY, C. RAYMOND, The Dawn of Modern Geography. John Murray, London, 1897-1906. 3 vols.

BERRY, ARTHUR, A Short History of Astronomy. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1899.

BEUCHAT, H., Manuel d'Archeologie amicaine. Paris, 1912.

BLUNDEVILLE HIS EXERCISES. London, 1606. 3rd edition.

BRINTON, DANIEL G., The Lenape and Their Legends. (In Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature, No. 5. Philadelphia, 1885.)

------ A Primer of Mayan Hieroglyphics. Univ. of Penna. Publ. ser. in Philology, Literature and Archeology, Vol. III, No. 2, 1894.

------ The Myths of the New World. D. McKay, Philadelphia, 1896. 3rd edition.

BUDGE, E. A. WALLIS, The Egyptian Heaven and Hell. (In Books on Egypt and Chaldea, Vols. XX-XXII. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., London, 1906.)

------ The Babylonian Legends of the Creation. British Museum, London, 1921.

------ The Babylonian Legends of the Deluge. British Museum, London, 1920.

BURNET, THOMAS, The Theory of the Earth. London, 1697.

CHURCHWARD, JAMES, The Lost Continent of Mu. William Edwin Rudge, New York, 1926.

CICERO, Somnium Scipionis. Tr. by C. R. Edmonds. The Dream of Scipio. (In Of Offices or Moral Duties. Bohn's Classical Library. London, 1853.)

CODEX FERJVY-MAYER. An old Mexican picture manuscript in the Liverpool Free Public Museums. Elucidated by Eduard Seler. Berlin, 1901-1902.

COLUMBUS, CHRISTOPHER, Select Letters. Tr. by R. H. Major. (In Hakluyt Society Works, No. 11, London, 1847. 2nd edition.)

COOK, THEODORE ANDREA, Spiral Forms in Nature and in Art. John Murray, London, 1903.

------ The Curves of Life. Henry Holt and Co., New York, 1914.

COSMAS INDICOPLEUSTES, Topographia Christiana. Tr. by J. W. McCrindle. Christian Topography. (In Hakluyt Society Works, No. 98, London, 1897.)

CUNEIFORM TEXTS from Babylonian Tablets, etc., in the British Museum. Pt. XXII, Plate 48. British Museum, London, 1906.

DANTE, The Divine Comedy. Various editions.

DELAMBRE, J. B. J., Histoire de lAstronomie ancienne. Paris, 1817.

------ Histoire de lAstronomie du Moyen-Age. Paris, 1819.

DIXON, ROLAND B., Maidu Texts. (In American Ethnological Society Publications, Vol. 4. Leyden, 1912.)

DREYER, J. L. E., History of the Planetary Systems from Thales to Kepler. University Press, Cambridge, 1905.

DU BOSE, HAMPTON C., Dragon, Image and Demon. A. C. Armstrong & Co., New York, 1887.

EDDA, THE PROSE OR YOUNGER, of Snorre Sturleson. Tr. by G. W. Dasent. Stockholm, 1842.

EVERSHED, MARY A. ORR, Dante and the Early Astronomers. Gall and Inglis, London, 1913.

FLAMMARION'S ASTRONOMICAL MYTHS. Edited by John Blake. Macmillan & Co., London, 1877.

FLUDD, ROBERT, Utriusque Cosmi Majoris scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica, Physica atque Technica Historia. 1617-1629.

------ Microcosmi Historia. 1619.

------ Medicina Catholica. Frankfort, 1629.

------ Summum Bonum. 1629.

FOLKARD, JR., RICHARD, Plant Lore, Legends and Lyrics. Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, London, 1884.

FONVIELLE, W. DE, Histoire de la lune. Paris, 1886.

GARDNER, MARSHALL B., A Journey to the Earth's Interior, or Have the Poles Really Been Discovered? Aurora, Ill., 1920. 2nd edition.

GREEN, WILLIAM LOWTHIAN, Vestiges of the Molten Globe. Edward Stanford, London, 1875.

HAKLUYT SOCIETY WORKS. 1847-

HOMER, Iliad. Various editions.

------ Odyssey. Various editions.

HOMMEL, FRITZ, Der Babylonische Ursprung der yptischen Kultur. Diagram of Babylonian Universe, p. 8. Munich, 1892.

------ Diagram of Babylonian Universe. (In Aufsse und Abhandlung, th. iii, p. 346. Munich, 1901.)

INTERNATIONALES ARCHIV F ETHNOGRAPHIE. Bd. IX, S. 265. Leyden, 1896.

JENSEN, P. C. A., Die Kosmologie der Babylonier. Diagram of Babylonian Universe in Appendix. Strassburg, 1890.

JOB. The Book of Job.

JOURNAL ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY of Great Britain and Ireland, 1908. "The Babylonian Universe Newly Interpreted," by William Fairfield Warren, pp. 977-983.

KEPLER, JOHANN, Harmonices Mundi. 1619.

KINGSBOROUGH, EDWARD KING, Antiquities of Mexico. London, 1830-1848. 9 vols.

KIRCHER, ATHANASIUS, Mundus Subterraneus. Amsterdam, 1678. 2 vols.

------ Iter exstaticum coeleste. Norimburg, 1660.

------ Arca No Amsterdam, 1675. 3 vols.

------ Physiologia Kircheriana Experimentalis. Amsterdam, 1680.

KIRFEL, W., Die Kosmographie der Inder. Bonn, 1920.

LENORMANT, FRANIS, Les origines de lhistoire, etc. Tr. by Mary Lockwood. The Beginnings of History According to the Bible and the Traditions of Oriental Peoples from the Creation of Man to the Deluge. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1882.

LEWIS, GEORGE CORNEWALL, An Historical Survey of the Astronomy of the Ancients. London, 1862.

LITCHFIELD, MARY ELIZABETH, The Nine Worlds. Ginn & Co., Boston, 1890.

LOCKYER, J. NORMAN, The Dawn of Astronomy. Cassell & Co., London, 1894.

LUCRETIUS, De Rerum Natura. Tr. by H. A. J. Monroe. On the Nature of Things. (In Bohn's Classical Library, London, 1864.)

MCBRIDE, JAMES, The Symmes Theory of Concentric Spheres. Cincinnati, 1826.

MCLATCHIE, THOMAS, Confucian Cosmogony. Shanghai, 1874.

MAHABHARATA, THE. Tr. from the Sanskrit by Pratap Chandra Roy. Calcutta, 1883-1893. 18 vols.

MALLERY, GARRICK, Picture-Writing of the American Indians. Extracted from the Tenth Annual Report of the United States Bureau of Ethnology. Washington, D. C., 1894.

MASPERO, GASTON, The Dawn of Civilization. Diagram of Babylonian Universe, p. 543. D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1894.

MEAD, G. R. S., Fragments of a Faith Forgotten. Theosophical Publishing Society, London, 1906. and edition.

MEISSNER, BRUNO, Die Kultur Babylonien und Assyrien. Diagram of Babylonian Universe, Vol. II, p. 109. Heidelberg, 1920. 2 vols.

MEMOIRS OF THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY. Vol. II, pp. 163-392. New York, 1900.

MILL, HUGH R., The Siege of the South Pole. Frederick A. Stokes Co., New York, 1905.

MILLER, KONRAD, Mappa Mundi: Die testen Weltkarten. Stuttgart, 1895-1898. 6 vols.

MILTON, Paradise Lost.

MOREAUX, THPHILE, Astronomy To-day. Tr. by C. F. Russel. Methuen & Co., London, 1926.

------ LAtlantide, a-t-elle-existe? Paris, 1924.

------ Un jour dans la lune. Paris, 1912.

MYER, ISAAC, Qabbalah. Philadelphia, 1888.

MYTHOLOGY OF ALL RACES. Edited by Louis Herbert Gray. Marshall Jones Company, Boston, 1916-1928. 13 vols.

NARRIEN, JOHN, An Historical Account of the Origin and Process of Astronomy. London, 1833.

NEWBROUGH, JOHN BALLOU, Oahspe, A New Bible in the Words of Jehovih. Oahspe Publishing Co., Boston, 1891.

NICHOL, JOHN, Thoughts on Some Important Points Relating to the System of the World. Edinburgh, 1848.

NORDENSKID, A. E., Periplus, An Essay on the Early History of Charts and Sailing Directions. Tr. by F. A. Bather. Stockholm, 1897.

OLCUTT, W. T., Starlore of All Ages. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1911.

ORCHARD, THOMAS N., Milton's Cosmogony. Longmans, Green & Co., London, 1913. See also 2nd edition, 1915.

PHILPOT, MRS. JOHN H., The Sacred Tree, or The Tree in Religion and Myth. Macmillan & Co., London, 1897.

PLATO, Timaeus and Critias. Tr. by H. Davis. (In Bohn's Classical Library, London, 1849.)

PLOTINUS, Select Works. Tr. by Thomas Taylor. (In Bohn's Philosophical Library, London, 1 895.)

PLUTARCH, On the Apparent Face in the Orb of the Moon. (In his Moralia. Various editions.)

PORDAGE, JOHN, Theologica Mystica, or the Archetypous Globe. London, 1683.

RADAU, HUGO, The Creation Story of Genesis. Diagram of the Babylonian Universe, p. 56, 1902.

RAFINESQUE, CONSTANTINE S., Wallamolum or painted traditions of the Linipe Indians, translated by C. S. Rafinesque in 1833; with a fragment on the history of the Linipi since about 1600 when the Wallamolum closes. A transcript from the original manuscript, in the MSS. Division of the New York Public Library.

RECORDE, ROBERT, The Castle of Knowledge. London, 1556.

SANTAREM, V. DE, Atlas composde mappemondes et de cartes hydrographiques et historiques depuis le XIejusqu au XVIIesile. Paris, 1849.

SCOTT-ELLIOT, W., The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria. With Maps. Theosophical Publishing Society, London, 1925.

SELER, EDUARD. See CODEX FERJVY-MAYER.

SINGER, CHARLES. The Scientific Views and Visions of Saint Hildegard. (In Studies in the History and Method of Science, edited by Charles Singer, Vol. I. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1917. 2 vols.)

SPENCE, LEWIS, Atlantis in America. Ernest Benn, London, 1925.

STEVENSON, EDWARD LUTHER, Terrestrial and Celestial Globes. Published for the Hispanic Society of America by the Yale University Press, New Haven, 1921. 2 vols.

SWEDENBORG, EMANUEL, The Earths in the Universe. The Swedenborg Society, London, 1875.

SYMMES, AMERICUS, The Symmes Theory of Concentric Spheres. Louisville, 1878.

TEED, CYRUS REED, The Cellular Cosmogony, The Earth a Concave Sphere. Guiding Star Publishing House, Estero, Fla., 1905.

TEIT, JAMES, The Thompson River Indians of British Columbia. (In Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. II, pp. 163-392. New York, 1900.)

UNITED STATES BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY, Annual Reports, 1879.

WADDELL, L. AUSTINE, The Buddhism of Tibet, or Lamaism. Luzac & Co., London, 1899.

WARREN, WILLIAM FAIRFIELD, Paradise Found. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, 1885.

------ The Universe as Pictured in Milton's Paradise Lost. Abingdon Press, New York, 1915.

------ The Babylonian Universe Newly Interpreted. (In Journal Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1908, pp. 977-983.)

WEGENER, ALFRED, Die enstehung der continente und ozeane. Tr. by J. G. A. Skerl. The Origin of Continents and Oceans. Methuen & Co., London, 1924.

WHISTON, WILLIAM, A New Theory of Earth. London, 1690.

WHITEHOUSE, OWEN C., Diagram of the Babylonian Universe. (In his article on "Cosmogony" in Hastings's Dictionary of the Bible, Vol. I, p. 503. Edinburgh, 1898.)

WRIGHT, JOHN K., The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades. American Geographical Society, New York, 1925.

The Tetrahedral Earth

THE BOOK OF EARTHS

By

EDNA KENTON

New York: William Morrow & Company

[1928, No renewal]


The Tetrahedral Earth

THE LAST FIGURE OF EARTH in this collecting of its endlessly changing forms is, so far as I know, the latest figure of Earth to be drawn; it differs in all ways from any other world-picture we have here. Plate XLVIII is a drawing of the Earth as a Tetrahedron or three-sided pyramid; it appeared in the New York World, October 24, 1926, as an illustration to a review of Thphile Moreux's Astronomy To-day. It is not "scientific"; it is just an example of how a "guess" takes a form, even in this age. It has an interesting story, this figure of Earth; and so we begin, far enough back.

"Continents rise and sink as if through some gentle act of respiration. They move in long undulations which may be compared to waves of the sea."

This sounds as if some mild mystic were speaking, but it is Elis Reclus, French geographer, writing of The Earthin 1870. Twenty years later Clarence Dutton, American geologist, coined a term, the Theory of Isostacy, for the fast developing theory of the floatation of the earth's crust, or floating continents.

PLATE XLVII. (<i>From Vestiges of the Molten Globe</i>; William Lowthian Green, 1875)
PLATE XLVII. (From Vestiges of the Molten Globe; William Lowthian Green, 1875)

Less than ten years ago Alfred Wegener, in The Origin of Continents and Oceans, advanced this theory. The continents are masses of sial or "continental rock," moving through the sima--that rock forming the substratum of the ocean bed, which he compares in its viscosity to sealing wax; it is, that is, an extremely viscous fluid, offering a very great resistance to any change of form, but inevitably yielding, under constant pressure, to the passage of the continental masses. Very simply and fantastically imaged, it is as if the continents were enormous leaves or flowers or branches springing from some great parent stalk or trunk imbedded in the very earth of Earth, and floating upwards through the ocean depths to the watery surface and far beyond it.

And yet it is almost this very figure--the inverted pyramidal plant figure of the floating continents--which William Lowthian Green worked out in 1875 with the aid of a "model crystal," a tetrahedron with its sides depressed and its four corners thereby slightly raised. His hypothesis is that during the process of the Earth's cooling, and because of what he calls "the tetrahedral collapse of the Earth's crust in the southern hemisphere," the assumed spheroid form of the Earth (giving a minimum of surface for a given volume) tended to develop into a tetrahedron (giving a maximum of surface for a given volume), with the continents as the edges and the ocean beds as the sides. "Thus," says Green, 1 "a general view of the crystal, the six-faced tetrahedron [Fig. 20 ], supposed to be three-fourths covered by water attracted towards the centre of gravity of the figure, represents generally all the continents and oceans on the globe in their actual relative positions. As there are four acute solid angles on the crystal, so there are four and only four continents or masses in relief on the globe, and as there are four obtuse angles on the crystal, so there are four and only four grand depressions or oceans on the globe."

Try to find any general reference to "Green's theory"; scientists knew of it, of course, but otherwise it is as if it appeared like a comet in the sky of 1875, not to appear again for over fifty years.

Moreux spoke of it, however, in his Astronomy To-day, and thanks to the way he spoke of it, we have this last picture of a tetrahedral Earth. He takes up one by one the unsolved problems of the Earth and the heavens, and it is an amazing array of the unknown. The dozen or so movements of the Earth is a puzzle; the irregularity of those movements is a puzzle, the Earth's real centre of gravity is a puzzle, the planetary system individually and as a whole is a puzzle, the "respiration" of the Earth is a puzzle, the Earth-Moon system would be the puzzle of puzzles if it were not for the fact that the still unknown actual figure of the Earth is the puzzle that tops them all. It is more of a problem to-day than it was in 1885.

For in 1885 that which was to solve it did no more than to tangle again all the laboriously disentangled threads. The discovery of invar in that year, an alloy of nickel and steel whose expansion and contraction at ordinary temperature is almost nothing, seemed to make possible for the first time, at least in our recorded history, the accurate measuring of the supposed oblate spheroid on which we live. The invar wire was the unerring instrument by which scientists began again the painstaking re-measuring of the Earth. "At the present time," says Moreux, "the survey of the Earth has been carried out in all possible directions, and the results have made the problem only more puzzling. It is found that, even between the same latitudes, meridian arcs are not all of equal lengths, and dissymmetry is everywhere; it becomes more pronounced still when the two hemispheres are compared; and the equator itself, instead of being accurately a circle, like the largest circle of a spheroid, has different radii of curvature at different longitudes." 1

Since astronomers must, in all their practical calculations, make use of the mathematical elements of this globe so-called, they have, for themselves, determined on a set of average values not too far removed from the unknown real ones, which for the time serves them fairly well. But geographers and geologists, says Moreux, are not interested in this merely approximate solution of the enigma. "By considering the matter closely, they have found that certain systematic variations which occur in pendulum observations and in the value of gravity point more and more to the truth of an old theory which was long ignored. It was suggested by Green in 1875;" and then he re-states Green's hypothesis:

"According to this theory, the Earth would tend, in the process of cooling, to take the form of a tetrahedron or triangular pyramid, with four faces and four corners or coigns. The seas would occupy the depressions and form the faces of the pyramid, while the continents would be situated round the coigns and would reach out along the edges.

"The facts seem to be in considerable agreement with this supposition. Three of the coigns are in the northern hemisphere; to use the picturesque expression of Suess, they are the Scandinavian, Canadian, and Siberian 'bucklers,' the last being situated near Yakutsk. Moreover, these projecting continents are of very ancient formation, and their ramifications extend more or less uninterruptedly as far as the South Pole. The opposite faces consist of the Southern Atlantic, the Indian and the Pacific Oceans. Lastly, the fourth corner forms the Antarctic continent, to which there corresponds, on the opposite face, the frozen Arctic Ocean." 1

These are the words that gave the image that produced this latest figure to be drawn of the Earth, a tetrahedron or three-sided pyramid, with four continents and four oceans, spinning in space. It is worth noting here that Green says of his "crystal model": "Crystallographers are aware that the six-faced tetrahedron with convex faces may geometrically as well as in nature and fact, approach to the form of a sphere, and that many diamonds possessing that crystalline figure are hardly distinguishable from spheres, but yet may be true six-faced tetrahedrons."

PLATE XLVIII. THE TETRAHEDRAL EARTH<br> (From <i>The Sunday Magazine</i>, New York World, Oct. 24, 1926)
PLATE XLVIII. THE TETRAHEDRAL EARTH
(From The Sunday Magazine, New York World, Oct. 24, 1926)
Without committing himself at all to the tetrahedral figure of Earth as established, Moreux adds that "the tetrahedral theory accounts for the inequality of the polar radii, and at the same time gives a more satisfactory explanation than any rival theory does of certain facts of astronomy which are inconsistent with the Earth's being a true ellipsoid of revolution." So, too, he says, the general plan of the Earth's relief and main lines of fractures or crumplings on its surface would, by this theory, be the logical consequence of the contracting process which began during the first of the geological eras and has continued according to the same laws ever since.

Be very sure that science to-day is committed to nothing but "guesses" on the still unknown figure of the Earth. We are doing to-day, in the last analysis, no more than that first man, whoever and wherever and whenever he was, who said, "Perhaps it is like this," and set down his crude lines of an island in a sea. We know a great many facts about a great many things, and a great many things about a great many facts; and this multitude of facts and things is just exactly our confusion. The facts are facts, but they are contradictory facts; they have not fused into the one great truth about the one Earth of which we know--a little. We have girdled the globe in ships on the surface of its waters, we have rounded the unknown line of its curve under its waters, and we are making our own curves through its air as we fly above it. But no man has ever seen the Earth. It is invisible. We talk of the secrets of the frozen North; they are no more than a handful of the secrets of the Earth. It lies over the Sun and under the Moon, giving everything, but forever withholding the sum of everything--the right image of its own true, unimaginable form.

What is Earth?

A geoid.

What is a geoid?

An Earth-shaped body.

What is an Earth-shaped body?

A geoid.

What is Earth?


Footnotes

257:1 Vestiges of the Molten Globe; William Lowthian Green, 1875, p. 5.
259:1 Astronomy To-day; Thphile Moreux, 1926, p. 65. 259
260:1 Astronomy To-day; Thphile Moreux, 1926, p. 66.

Earth a Hollow Sphere

THE BOOK OF EARTHS

By

EDNA KENTON

New York: William Morrow & Company

[1928, No renewal]


Earth a Hollow Sphere

WITH THE Symmes Theory of Concentric Sphereswe take up, for the first time, a cosmogony of the nineteenth century. In this flight through worlds we have spanned not only the centuries but the oceans and continents of the Earth. We are in the year of our Lord, 1818, in America, and at St. Louis, Missouri, on the western bank of the mightiest river of the Earth. We are on the continent whose aboriginal inhabitants have, running through all their mythologies and traditions, the tradition and myth of a "hollow Earth," and we are about to consider, in their order, three modern American theories of the figure of Earth, all of them based on the assumption that this planet is a hollow sphere, habitable within.

PLATE XLII. THE THREE WORLD OCTAVES<br> (From <i>Utriusque Cosmi</i>; Robert Fludd, 1621. Vol. I)
PLATE XLII. THE THREE WORLD OCTAVES
(From Utriusque Cosmi; Robert Fludd, 1621. Vol. I)

A brief circular announced the first of these:

Light gives light to light discover--ad infinitum

St. Louis (Missouri Territory)

NORTH AMERICA, April 10, A.D., 1818

TO ALL THE WORLD:

I declare that the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one

within the other, and that it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees. I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in this undertaking.

JNO. CLEVES SYMMES
Of Ohio, late Captain of Infantry.

N. B. I have ready for the press a Treatise on the Principles of the matter, wherein I show proofs of the above position, account for the various phenomena, and disclose Dr. Darwin's "Golden Secret."

I ask one hundred brave companions, well equipped, to start from Siberia in the fall season, with reindeer and sleighs, on the ice of the frozen sea; and I engage we find a warm and rich land, stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals, if not men, on reaching one degree northwest of latitude 62; we will return in the succeeding spring.

J. C. S.

Symmes never reached, nor even began his journey to reach, the "north polar Verge of the world," let pass its interior. In 1822 and again in 1823, he petitioned the Congress of the United States to equip for him two vessels "of 250 or 300 tons burden," and in 1824 even sought aid from the General Assembly of the State of Ohio. Naturally no such request was even considered by an American Congress or Legislature. In 1829 he died, and over his grave, at Hamilton, Ohio, was erected a monument surmounted by a hollow globe open at the poles, inscribed: "He contended that the Earth is hollow and habitable within."

Where Symmes got his notion that the Earth has a concave, habitable surface seems to have interested nobody. But it is interesting to consider that three "concave" cosmogonies have sprung up within less than a century on this continent whose aborigines believed in the hollowness of their "great Island." The Montagnais held the earth to be pierced through and through; that the Sun set by entering one hole and hiding inside the Earth during the night; that it rose by emerging from the opposite hole. Numberless tribes have the tradition that formerly their race lived underground, until some adventurous youth climbed upwards by some great vine to the outer surface of the Earth, and, finding it delightful and habitable, returned and brought their people out of the "concave." Indian gods fell from Heaven, through the Earth; and vanished races were those who had returned to their first homes. How much of this Symmes had picked up through fraternising with the western Indians, or whether he had ever heard any of this tradition from them, we shall probably never know.

In 1826, "A Citizen of the United States," otherwise James McBride, published, at Cincinnati, a little book called The Symmes Theory of Concentric Spheres, giving thesis and proofs.

PLATE XLIII. THE SYMMES THEORY OF CONCENTRIC SPHERES<br> (From <i>The Symmes Theory of Concentric Spheres</i>, compiled by Americus Symmes, 1878)
PLATE XLIII. THE SYMMES THEORY OF CONCENTRIC SPHERES
(From The Symmes Theory of Concentric Spheres, compiled by Americus Symmes, 1878)
"According to Symmes's Theory, the earth, as well as all the celestial orbicular bodies existing in the universe, visible and invisible, which partake in any degree of a planetary nature, from the greatest to the smallest, from the sun down to the most minute blazing meteor or falling star, are all constituted in a greater or less degree, of a collection of spheres, more or less solid, concentric with each other, and more or less open at their poles; each sphere being separated from its adjoining compeers by space replete with aerial fluids; that every portion of infinite space, except what is occupied by spheres, is filled with an aerial elastic fluid, more subtle than common atmospheric air; and constituted of innumerable small concentric spheres, too minute to be visible to the organ of sight assisted by the most perfect microscope, and so elastic that they continually press on each other, and change their relative situations as often as the position of any piece of matter in space may change its position; thus causing a universal pressure, which is weakened by the intervention of other bodies in proportion to the subtended angle of distance and dimension; necessarily causing the body to move towards the points of decreased pressure."

Symmes believed that the planet "which has been designated the Earth," is composed of at least five concentric spheres, with spaces between each, an atmosphere surrounding each, and each habitable upon both its surfaces. Each sphere was widely open at its poles, and the north polar opening of the outer sphere whose convex surface man inhabits, he believed to be about four thousand miles in diameter. The southern polar opening he estimated to be half again as large.

Each of the spheres composing the Earth is according to this theory lighted and warmed "according to those general laws which communicate light and heat to every part of the universe." This light and heat might not be so bright or so intense as ours; and the probability of this is indicated, he says, in those high northern latitudes, where the "Verge" begins, by the paleness of the Sun and the darkness of the sky; yet he does not doubt that they are sufficiently warmed and lighted to support animal and vegetable life.

His "mid-plane-space" theory is interesting, and Gardner's diagram (Plate XLIV ) makes it very clear. Each sphere has a cavity, or mid-plane-spacenear its centre--the medial line, that is, which would split its crust or shell into inner and outer layers--filled with this light, subtle, elastic aerial fluid, "partaking somewhat of the nature of hydrogen gas; which aerial fluid is composed of molecules greatly rarefied in comparison with the gravity of the extended or exposed surfaces of the sphere." It is this mid-plane-spacewhich gives the sphere lightness and buoyancy, and the aerial fluid with which it is filled may possibly, he conjectures, serve for the support of animal life.

Clouds formed in the outer air of the planet would probably float through the vast polar openings in the form of rain or snow. The great winds or typhoons, known on the Earth, might have their force supplied by winds sucked into one polar opening, and emerging through the other, thus performing the circuit of the sphere.

PLATE XLIV. GARDNER'S DIAGRAM OF SYMMES'S EARTH<br> <i>Showing the five concentric spheres, with their polar openings at the Verges of the World. their separating atmospheres, and their mid-plane spaces</i>.<br> (From <i>A Journey to the Earth's Interior</i>; Marshall B. Gardner, 1920)
PLATE XLIV. GARDNER'S DIAGRAM OF SYMMES'S EARTH
Showing the five concentric spheres, with their polar openings at the Verges of the World. their separating atmospheres, and their mid-plane spaces.
(From A Journey to the Earth's Interior; Marshall B. Gardner, 1920)
He argues his hollow Earth by analogy--to hollow stalks of wheat, the hollow quills and feathers of birds, the hollow bones of animals, and the hollow hairs of our heads. This would be, he says, "the most perfect system of creative economy, a great saving of stuff." And, this early in the history of north polar exploration, and from the evidence of whalers and fishermen in the northern seas regarding the migration of birds, animals, and fish to and from the north polar zone, he is arguing for a warm and habitable region beyond the ice-packs, "where the fresh waters furiously contend with the salt." He develops at great length the precise manner in which light and heat from our Sun might, by reflection and refraction, penetrate into every part of the interior shells. It is even possible, he suggests, that, "near the Verges of the polar openings, and perhaps in many other parts of the unfathomable ocean, the spheres are water quite through (at least all except the mid-plane-spacesor cavities), which being the case, light would probably be transmitted through the spheres."

Symmes believed that man, in his efforts to reach the North Pole, had always failed just on the "Verge"; that once past the ice barrier and headed inevitably for the interior of the hollow shell, he would find himself almost at once in a temperate zone. The path to the interior, he says, would be a tortuous one, by way of "the winding meridians of the Verge."

THE KORESHAN COSMOGONY is another "hollow Earth" theory, which was first given out in 1870 by Cyrus Reed Teed. The chart given in Plate XLV contains all the principal diagrams by which the theory is illustrated.

This second of modern American cosmogonies holds that the Earth we live upon and think we "know" to be the outer surface of a sphere, is, in reality, its concave surface; that we are actually living enclosed within a hollow shell, however much our collective senses and our collective science seem to Evidence the contrary. This, Teed affirms, is because we have been taught for centuries that the Earth is a globe filled with molten matter on whose cooled crust we live; that it is but a speck in infinite Space, a dot in a vast ocean of worlds, revolving on its own axis every twenty-four hours and thus creating its own days and nights in its yearly revolutions around the Sun; that the Moon shines a borrowed light; that comets appear, fly off into space, and return; that above and around and below our solar system stretch the orbits of other worlds to illimitable distances; that our Sun, the centre of our system, has a diameter of 866,000 miles, is distant from the Earth 93,000,000 miles, and has a volume or bulk 1,300,000 times that of the Earth; that the planet nearest the Sun, Mercury, is 36,000,000 miles distant from it, and 57,000,000 miles distant from the Earth, and so on until we reach the planet Neptune which is 2,800,000,000 miles from the Sun and guards the outermost boundaries of our universe.

The Koreshan cosmogony, on the other hand, "maintains and demonstrates that the universe is a unit; it is an alchemico-organic structure, limited to the dimensions of 8,000 miles, diameter. According to the great law of analogy we hold that its form is cellular, that all life is generated in a cell--omne vivum ex ovo. The earth's shell, composed of metals and minerals, is about 100 miles in thickness, constituting a gigantic voltaic pile, the basis of the great galvano-magnetic battery, furnishing the negative elements of the cell for the generation and supply of the sun's fuel. The concave surface of the earth alone is habitable. Superimposed upon the strata of the shell and emplaced in their static planes are the three atmospheres. At the centre we find the positive pole of the great battery--the central sun, around and with which the heavens revolve in twenty-four hours. All the energies of the physical universe are engendered through the relation of the positive centre to the negative circumference; a great complex battery of physical unity is thus attained and perpetuated." 1

This shell, one hundred miles in thickness, is composed of seven metallic, five mineral, and five geologic strata. The seven metallic layers or lamin are "the seven notable metals," of which gold constitutes the outer rind of the shell. Beyond this is--nothing.

The inner surface of the shell is land and water, a concave expanse inhabited by every form of life. That we live on a concave surface, this cosmogony undertakes to Evidence by exactly the same phenomenon which "Evidences" the Earth's surface is convex--the disappearance of a ship "around" the world. Within the shell are the three atmospheres, of which the outermost, the atmosphere in which we exist, is composed chiefly of oxygen and nitrogen. The next or middle atmosphere is composed of pure hydrogen; and the one above of "aboran." Within this is the solar sphere, and within the whole and nucleus of all, the astral or stellar centre. Thus the starry nucleus is the centre of Space, and the metallic plates or laminthe circumference of Space. The heavens do not surround the Earth, but the Earth, the heavens.

In and occupying these atmospheres are not only the Sun and stars, but also "the reflections called the planets and the moon. The planets are mercurial disci moving by electro-magnetic impulse between the metallic laminor planes of the concave shell. They are seen through penetrable rays, ultra electro-magnetic, reflected or bent back in their impingement on the spheres of energy regularly graduated as the stories in the heavens." And, later on, they are further described as "little focal points of energy, partially materialized spheres in process of combustion. Their diameter is very small. Jupiter is nothing like the concept in the usual theory. The real planets are discs of mercury in the earth, between the metallic shells. They focalise the sun's energies in the atmosphere above us. They are what their names indicate--plan-ets--little planes." Of these mercurial discs there are seven.

Comets are not great streams of fiery matter; they are tiny things, broken up bits of crystalline energies spirating about the central solar sphere. "They do not fly off into space and return. They plunge into and feed the sun."

PLATE XLV. CHART OF THE KORESHAN COSMOGONY<br> (From <i>Cellular Cosmogony</i>; Cyrus Reed Teed, 1898)
PLATE XLV. CHART OF THE KORESHAN COSMOGONY
(From Cellular Cosmogony; Cyrus Reed Teed, 1898)
Neither is the Sun 886,000,000 miles in diameter, nor distant from the Earth 93,000,000 miles, since it is a body contained within the concave Earth. Given the Earth's diameter of 8,000 miles, the Sun's diameter would not be over 100 miles, or its distance from the concave habitable surface over 1000 miles. "The sun, moon, stars, including Sirius, Arcturus, Procyon, all the great nebul and comets, in short, all the things that exist in the heavens above, are contained in the shell. They are not worlds, or systems of worlds; they are not wanderers or erratic orbs, but points of generation of energy, every one of which has a distinctly different function belonging and necessary to universal perpetuation."
FIGURE 99. ''<i>All things shew great through vapoures or myste</i>.''<br> (From <i>The Castle of Knowledge</i>; Robert Recorde, 1556.)
FIGURE 99. ''All things shew great through vapoures or myste.''
(From The Castle of Knowledge; Robert Recorde, 1556.)The revolution of the Sun and not the rotation of the Earth is the cause of day and night. Instead of appearing to rise above a convex surface, the Sun simply comes into our sphere of vision in the course of its revolution, and, at sunset, "goes out over the earth beyond the sea of hydrogen and arc of the heavens."

As to the Moon, which is an interesting part of this reversed cosmogony, it is to be first of all understood that there is uninterrupted reciprocal interchange of substance from centre to circumference of the shell; from the positive pole of the great battery--the central one," to the shell itself, described before as "a gigantic voltaic pile, the basis of the great galvano-magnetic battery, furnishing the negative elements of the cell for the generation and supply of the sun's fuel." For energy, it is explained, "is the destruction of matter as matter, and matter is the result of the destruction of energy as energy."

The origin of the Moon is in the Earth's shell, a sphere of energy derived from the planets and from the energies generated in the concave crust of the Earth. "The moon we see is projected or reflected from the great concave mirror, the metallic laminin the circumference; this moon is a sphere of force in the physical heavens, a sphere of crystalline energy upon which is implanted the picture of the earth's surface. The visible moon is a gravosphere or X-ray picture of the crust; hence we see light and dark places upon it, produced from the earth's surface and the geologic strata. The real moon is the laminof the earth's shell. The sun is the centre, the moon the circumference; the image or focalisation of each we see in the physical heavens. The moon does not shine borrowed light direct as in the Copernican system. But the sun and moon are two great lights; each shines with a light of its own, the light of the moon being derived from thousands of qualities of solar energies, after utilization, transmutation, and metamorphosis in the great shell."

The figures of Earth in this cosmogony are at first bewildering, until the eye becomes accustomed to the trick of "reverse." In the upper left-hand sphere (Plate XLV ) we are looking at the "geography" of a concave surface--downwards as into a bowl. In the upper right-hand spherical figure, we are looking at "the heavens in the Earth." The central spherical figure shows the three atmospheres which are the cause of day and night. It is a cross-sectional view of the "gigantic electro-magnetic battery with the sun as the perpetual pivot and pole." It is the southern hemisphere of the "cell." The smaller spheres show--upper left and right--the summer and winter solstices; lower left, the actual position of the Earth and its poles; lower right, the orbits of the planetary mercurial discs inthe Earth's shell.

In this cosmogony, the Earth is not "supported"; it is suspended; it is dependent wholly upon its centre. It is eternal; it is the footstool of God and necessary to His Own existence; but it is All; "it is the ultimate and outermost limit of expression of the divine mind." Beyond its outer plate of shining gold there is nothing.

These are two of the three modern theories of the Earth as a hollow shell, differing widely from each other, but having as a common ground the habitability of the concave surface. The first conceives the Earth to be a body composed of at least five concentric spheres or shells, with enormous polar openings through which light and heat enter from the exterior Sun. The second affirms that the Earth is a single shell containing within itself the whole universe--the atmospheres, the planets, the heavens with the stars and Moon and Sun, and that on its concave surface man lives without ever knowing that he is enclosed within his world, like a bird in a cage. The third theory says that the Earth is a single shell, habitable on both its surfaces, with polar openings and an interior Sun.

This theory of the figure of the Earth was first published in 1913, in Marshall B. Gardner's A Journey to the Earth's Interior, or Have the Poles Really Been Discovered. Plate XLVI shows the exterior of his working model, and Fig. 100 is a diagram of the Earth bisected through its polar openings and showing the interior Sun.

According to these figures, the Earth's shell is a solid mass about 800 miles thick, with its own centre of gravity. Within as without there is land and water, their distribution inside being probably the reverse of the distribution without. That is, the Pacific and Atlantic ocean areas indicate great interior continents (perhaps the lost continents Atlantis-Lemuria-Pan-Mu!), and the space occupied by our continents are probably the places of the interior seas.

At each polar axis there is a great opening, about 1400 miles in diameter, around which both the exterior and interior waters, whose currents flow both ways, pour over "the lips of the world." Over this great curve, says Gardner, mariners might float, or flying men fly, with no more realisation--except for disturbances to their compass needles--that they were describing a half circle about a Titanic waterfall, than a voyager realises he is rounding the globe at any single stage--or total of stages--of a world-voyage. "They would only know that they had actually passed over the lip by the peculiar behavior of the magnetic needle and by the fact that they would see above them--as above them would mean toward the actual centre of the earth--the interior sun, which of course would be shining whether the voyagers came under its influence during the day or during the arctic night."

PLATE. XLVI. <i>The Earth according to Gardner, as it would appear if viewed<br> from space shorting the North Polar opening in the planet's interior. which is hollow and contains a central sun instead of an ocean of liquid lava</i>.<br> (From <i>A Journey to the Earth's Interior</i>, Marshall B. Gardner, 1920)
PLATE. XLVI. The Earth according to Gardner, as it would appear if viewed
from space shorting the North Polar opening in the planet's interior. which is hollow and contains a central sun instead of an ocean of liquid lava.
(From A Journey to the Earth's Interior, Marshall B. Gardner, 1920)

No mariner has ever rounded this hypothetical lip, entered the great "concave," and emerged to tell his tale. But, says Gardner, messages from the Earth's interior have drifted and constantly do drift out to us by way of the contrary current. He cites log after log of North Polar expeditions, from the first to the last, all of them filled with curious contradictions and "unexplainable" phenomena; the "warm current flowing from the polar regions," the migrations northwards--instead of south--of birds and animals to feed and breed; the greater wealth of animal and vegetable life in the higher latitudes of the arctic regions than in the lower; the "red pollen of plants that grow--where?" scattered on icebergs and glaciers; the trees--some of them green-leaved--washed down in the warm polar current; the "case after case where the mammoth has floated out from the interior incased in glaciers and bergs and has been frozen in crevasses in the interior near the polar openings, and then carried over the lip by glacial movements into Siberia." From the noted evidence of fossil remains, complete coniferous trees, the presence of butterflies and bees, gnats and mosquitoes, incalculable shoals of fish, the musk-oxen and reindeer, the millions of birds--including the sandpiper, the "red snow," fresh-water ice, the recurrent appearances of "extinct" species--the mammoth, the mastodon, the mylodon, to say nothing of the remains of the rhinoceros, hippopotamus, lion, hyena, arid other tropical species all around the North Polar region, he concludes a common origin, beyond the curve of the polar sea, after it has dipped below our horizon and has begun to flow, still north as we would say, yet south, into the Earth's interior.

The interior Sun which warms this inner Earth may be perhaps 600 miles in diameter. It is the central nucleus of the old nebular hypothesis; but, instead of throwing off a series of rings, each of which, breaking, formed a sphere and eventually a planet revolving around the central nucleus or Sun, the original nebula, says Gardner, "did not break up into a solar system, but condensed into one planet," this Earth. The spiral nebula is the first stage, he says, of a planetary body; the shell-like nebula with its central "star" or Sun is the second stage; the oblate spheroid with its central Sun and the two openings "which are always left when the nebula cools into a planet," is the third stage. One planet, that is, is like another. As, for instance, Mars and Earth.

The "ice caps" of Mars have accounted, until comparatively recently, for the clearly discernible bright spots at its poles. Of late astronomers have begun to doubt that Martian "ice" could send light-flashes across so many million miles of space. Gardner says that what we see is no more or less than the light from Mar's interior Sun, and that now and then, in observed brilliant points like stars flashing from the midst of the polar caps, we have caught the direct cosmic ray from Mars.

FIGURE 100. <i>Diagram showing the earth as a hollow sphere with its polar openings and central sun. The letters at top and bottom of diagram indicate the various steps of an imaginary journey through the planet's interior. At the point marked</i> ''<i>D</i>'' <i>we catch our first glimpse of the corona of the central sun; at the point marked</i> ''<i>E</i>'' <i>we see the central sun in its entirety</i>.<br> (From <i>A Journey to the Earth's Interior</i>; Marshall B. Gardner, 1920.)
FIGURE 100. Diagram showing the earth as a hollow sphere with its polar openings and central sun. The letters at top and bottom of diagram indicate the various steps of an imaginary journey through the planet's interior. At the point marked''D'' we catch our first glimpse of the corona of the central sun; at the point marked''E'' we see the central sun in its entirety.
(From A Journey to the Earth's Interior; Marshall B. Gardner, 1920.)
The Aurora Borealis is another unexplained phenomenon--those pulsating aerial fires of the north, which have their counterpart in the Aurora Australis at the South Pole. Gardner says that the scientists themselves know that the theory of their being the result of magnetic or electrical discharges does not explain them. The nearer the Pole, the more magnificent is the display--and he quotes Flammarion on them: "This light of the earth, the emission of which towards the poles is almost continuous . . ." It is just simply that, says Gardner, the light of the Earth; the light of its interior Sun, which pours through the lips of the Earth into the northern and southern skies. Nothing but interior storms of great violence, which choke the orifices for a time with dense clouds, can hold back the almost continuous stream of light. He quotes from Nansen's Farthest Northin this connection. Nansen saw one night a marvelous Aurora. A brilliant corona circled the zenith with wreaths of streamers in several layers, all tending upward towards the corona which every now and then showed a dark patch in its centre towards which all the rays converged: "The halo kept smouldering and shifting just as if a gale in the upper atmosphere were playing a bellows to it." For a time it appeared as if the celestial storm abated; then the gale seemed to increase; it twisted the streamers into an inextricable tangle, until at last everything merged "into a chaos of shining mist." There are phrases in Nansen's description of this display which delight Gardner; "bellows," "gale," "storm." As a matter of intelligent explanation, he says, the light from the central Sun was being reflected from the higher reaches of the Earth's atmosphere, and the reflection was being interfered with by a violent storm in the interior of the Earth. Great clouds were in rapid process of formation and dissipation near the polar openings, so that at one moment the rays of the central Sun shot clearly through, at the next moment they were blackened and hid.

Instead of departing for the interior of the Earth by way of Siberia, as Symmes begged to be aided to do, Gardner would pick up some Eskimos--whose ancestors, according to their own tradition, came from the "inside" where it is always light--some dogs and some sleds at God-haven, Greenland, and then proceed north along its coast to about 82 or 83. What warm air, or warm water, the expedition would encounter would come from the north, and, if it were summer, mosquitoes would be the plague of plagues. From the coast of Grant Land or Peary Land, it would start on the last lap of the journey across the open polar sea. The Aurora Borealis would be no longer in the north, but directly overhead, and there would come a midnight perhaps that was strange day--their ship would be surrounded by an angry reddish light and a strange atmosphere. For the travellers would have passed far enough over the lips of the world to see, no longer the exterior Sun, but the inner Sun which never sets. It is no longer moving from east to west. It is stationary, or practically so, in "the centre of the world."

In that interior world, Gardner surmises, is the treasure house of all of the species of flora and fauna--and probably all of the races of man--that through millions of years have followed each other in endless procession over the exterior surface of the Earth; appearing, abiding for a while, and then passing away. Warned by great climatic changes on the outside, or by the tremors that precede great geological changes, they would have retreated, a few of the "saved," to the hidden cities of refuge within the globe. So that here would be all of the myriad "missing links" in the disconnected story of the fractured outer Earth.

The return, incidentally, to the exterior would be no easier than the departure from it. For at each orifice the contrary waters endlessly struggle to pass, and it might very well be that the traveller caught in the wrong current would not be able to make the cross to the right one on which he could float easily out.


Footnotes

244:1 Cellular Cosmogony, Cyrus Reed Teed, 1905, p. 172.

The World Octaves

THE BOOK OF EARTHS

By

EDNA KENTON

New York: William Morrow & Company

[1928, No renewal]


The World Octaves

IT WAS HIS PROLONGED OBSERVATION of the movement of Mars (Fig. 95 ) that led Kepler to discover the true form of the planetary orbits, till then considered to be perfectly circular, and it was during the last year of his observations (1596) that he hit upon his beautiful "solution" of the "cosmographic mystery." He believed in the harmony of the spheres, and all his life he sought for some true and simple law binding the members of the solar system together. His first step was to discover the law connecting the relative distances of the planets, some simple ratio of distances that would do away with the complex and multiplied epicycles and excentrics with which Ptolemy and his successors had troubled, if not the heavens, the minds of men.

PLATE XL. THE MUNDANE MONOCHORD<br> (From <i>Utriusque Cosmi</i>: Robert Fludd, 1621. Vol. I)
PLATE XL. THE MUNDANE MONOCHORD
(From Utriusque Cosmi: Robert Fludd, 1621. Vol. I)

By accident he was brought finally to seek this law of distances through simple geometry. A diagram he had drawn during a lecture, to illustrate the cycles of the great conjunctions of the planets, reminded him, in a sudden flash of illumination, of the "five regular solids," the "five mathematical bodies" (-6); and for the rest of his life he worked on the theory that these beautiful solids bore within themselves a proportion answering to the several distances of the planets from each other. That is, if we describe a circle around a cube and another inside it, or a circle about a tetrahedron and another within it, the distances between these circumscribed and inscribed circles will show the proportional distances of the planets each from the other between which these five solids fit.

Between the six planetary spheres there are five intervals, and Kepler placed the five solids between the spheres as follows:

Saturn
Cube
Jupiter
Tetrahedron
Mars
Dodecahedron
Earth
Icosahedron
Venus
Octahedron
Mercury

That is, the sphere of Jupiter is inscribed in a cube to which the sphere of Saturn is circumscribed; the sphere of Jupiter is circumscribed to a tetrahedron in which the sphere of Mars is inscribed, and so on. The rest is mathematics.

In Kepler's beautiful drawings of his solids (), which, more than plane figures, he said, must belong to Space, he assigned to each form that one of the great elements whose "component particle" corresponded. Within a crystalline cube he placed a mountain, a tree, a sprouted and leafing plant, and tools for tilling the Earth. Within the tetrahedron he placed fire; within the dodecahedron the firmament; within the icosahedron water and the inhabitants of water; within the octahedron "flying birds."

Kepler's "intervals" were not only spaces for the five mathematical bodies; they were also "notes" in an harmonic universal scale. His harmony of the spheres was not only the harmony of movement but the result of movement--sound. It was unimaginable that the grand revolutions of the spheres through Space were made in silence; unimaginable also that the ears of men could hear the prodigious concert of the whole universe in its rapid revolution. As they must close their eyes against the Sun, too bright to see, so must their ears be closed against a harmony too vibrant to endure.

Yet, if the ears of man may not hear the music of the spheres, his eyes may follow the paths of celestial sound, said Robert Fludd, and straightway began to "draw" the music of the spheres. "This," he wrote at the top of the first figure of his series of World Octaves, in his Musica Mundana(Plate XL ), "is the world monochord, with its proportions, harmonies and intervals of its extra-mundane movement accurately spaced as herein depicted." Earth--the mute because motionless Earth of the Pythagoreans--plays its part through the division of the elements, Earth, Water, Air, and Fire.

PLATE XLI. MAN AND THE WORLD OCTAVE<br> (From <i>Utriusque Cosmi</i>; Robert Fludd, 1621. Vol. I)
PLATE XLI. MAN AND THE WORLD OCTAVE
(From Utriusque Cosmi; Robert Fludd, 1621. Vol. I)
Only when the Earth's atmosphere reaches the zone of the Moon is the first note struck of the great C major scale. Beyond the seven zones of the Moon, the Sun, and the five planets, and above the firmament of the fixed stars, the divisions of the upper heavens correspond to those of the Earth below.

Plate XLI is the second of the series, taken up again in his Microcosmi Historia, in which man is shown as participator in the heavenly scale. Here is a single octave, instead of two, as in the preceding drawing; its scale given in terms of mind or reason, rather than in terms of the elements and the heavenly bodies. From A, the Absolute Mind or Essence of the Godhead, or Unity, or Spirit, it descends through B, the creative or active intellect, the first vehicle of the mind, to C, mind and intellect in the rational spirit (or the passive intellect), to D, the rational spirit together with mind and intellect in the median soul, to E, the median soul floating in the aethereal liquid (in other words, the Living Light combined with Mind), to F, the Body (or man), which is the receptacle of all things.

And then, having given the two-octaved universe--Heaven and Earth, and the one-octaved universe stretching from the Godhead to man, he drew a third figure (Plate XLII ) of the three-octaved universe, with its three great scales of correspondences, rising one above the other, each corresponding exactly, note by note, to the other two, whether higher or lower. Sound, he says, is the connecting link between the three worlds; for sound is the language of the mind. Vibration is the secret of creation, and through it all secrets may be revealed, if the sleeping mind and memory of man is ever wakened through its power.


Wheels upon Wheels

THE BOOK OF EARTHS

By

EDNA KENTON

New York: William Morrow & Company

[1928, No renewal]


Wheels upon Wheels

BELOW IS A GROUP OF EIGHT FIGURES whose whole interest lies just in their association. With their science we have nothing to do here, since they are old attempts, most of them, to account for the observed aberrations of movement among the heavenly bodies. Wang Chung, an old Chinese philosopher, expressed a part of this still unsolved problem very oddly and simply indeed. Writing of the complex movements of the Sun and the Moon in relation to the heavens, he said: That Heaven turns sideways to the left "like a millstone"; that the Sun and Moon move to the right, but are swept by Heaven to the left; that their real movement is towards the east, but they are carried by Heaven towards the west, where they "go down"; that they resemble ants creeping to the left side on a millstone turning to the right, but that the millstone, being much swifter than the ants, compels them to follow it to the right.

Old astronomers, however, employed two devices to aid them in their calculations; one to account for the seeming difference observed in the speed of the Sun's movement in its orbit; the other to account for the seeming alternation of direction in the movements of the planets.

PLATE XXXIX. <i>Kepler's diagram of The Law connecting the relative distances of the planets</i>.
PLATE XXXIX. Kepler's diagram of The Law connecting the relative distances of the planets.

The Sun, for instance, when describing a certain segment of its orbit, travelled at a greater speed--or so it seemed--than when it moved in the corresponding opposite quarter. To the Sun, therefore, was given a place in the heavens called the Excentric sphere--it was another theory of two centres. For it was assumed that all the heavenly spheres were not concentric, did not, that is, have the Earth's centre as a common centre; and that the centre of one sphere of revolution might be a point a little removed from the centre of the Earth. According to this theory, when the Sun was near the Earth, its speed would appear much greater than when it was moving at a distance farther away.
FIGURE 93. <i>The excentric sphere of Mahmud ibn Muhammed ibn Omar al Jagmini</i> (c. 13th century A.D.)<br> 1. The Sun. 2. Excentric sphere. 3. Surrounding sphere. 4. Complement of the surrounding sphere. 5. Centre of the world. 6. Centre of the excentric sphere.<br> (From <i>The History of the Planetary Systems from Thales to Kepler</i>; J. L. E. Dreyer, 1906.)
FIGURE 93. The excentric sphere of Mahmud ibn Muhammed ibn Omar al Jagmini(c. 13th century A.D.)
1. The Sun. 2. Excentric sphere. 3. Surrounding sphere. 4. Complement of the surrounding sphere. 5. Centre of the world. 6. Centre of the excentric sphere.
(From The History of the Planetary Systems from Thales to Kepler; J. L. E. Dreyer, 1906.)

FIGURE 94. <i>The</i> '<i>'Guiding Spheres</i>'' <i>of Nasir-Eddin Atti</i><br> (13th century A.D.)<br> (From <i>The History of the Planetary Systems from Thales to Kepler</i>; J. L. E. Dreyer, 1906, pp. 269-270.)
FIGURE 94. The''Guiding Spheres'' of Nasir-Eddin Atti
(13th century A.D.)
(From The History of the Planetary Systems from Thales to Kepler; J. L. E. Dreyer, 1906, pp. 269-270.)

1. Epicycle of the Moon. 2. Surrounding sphere, destined to keep the diameter from apogee to perigee in its place, always coinciding with the diameter of the sphere (4); "Let us give it a suitable thickness, but not too great, so as not to take up too much space." 3. Sphere which corresponds to the smaller sphere, and the diameter of which is equal to the distance of the centre of the deferent in the Ptolemaic system from the centre of the Earth. 4. Sphere with a diameter twice as great as (3). 5. Carrying sphere concentric with the world and occupying the concavity of the sphere (6), the equator of which is in the plane of the lunar orbit.(2) and (4) and (5) revolve in the same period, that in which the centre of the epicycle performs a revolution; (3) revolves in half that time, while (6) revolves in the opposite direction with the same speed as the apogee of the excentric.

The figure now shows how the epicycle moves to and fro along the diameter of (4), and during the revolution of the circle (5) describes a closed curve, about which Nasir-Eddin justly says that it is somewhat like a circle but is not really one, for which reason it is not a perfect substitute for the excentric circle of Ptolemy.



FIGURE 95. <i>The movement described by Mars, 1580-1596</i>.<br> (From <i>Astronomia Nova</i>; Johann Kepler, 1609.)
FIGURE 95. The movement described by Mars, 1580-1596.
(From Astronomia Nova; Johann Kepler, 1609.)To account for the seeming alternation of direction in the movements of the planets, the theory of the Epicycle was evolved. This meant, briefly, that a planet did not move directly in the circumference of its revolving sphere or cycle--as, for instance, the Sun moved in its excentric sphere, but in an epicycle or small circle that revolved around a fixed point in the larger circle and carried the planet with it; "fixed to its inner surface," says an old Arabian astronomer, "like a pearl on a ring, touching the surface in one point." For a time these devices of the excentric and the epicycle seemed to work fairly well; but after a while the astronomers found themselves entangled in such a maze of centrics and excentrics, cycles and epicycles, and spheres heaped upon spheres, that they never found their way out of the labyrinth they had themselves constructed, and eventually the system that was to account for all the mysteries of the heavenly movements fell of itself.

FIGURE 96. <i>Theory of three centres and the movement of Venus</i>.<br> M. Centre of the world. E. Centre of the excentric. S. Centre of the equant. The centre of the star-bearing circle at the top is the centre of the epicycle.<br> (From <i>TheoricNovlt;/i>; Georg Peurbach, 1581.)
FIGURE 96. Theory of three centres and the movement of Venus.
M. Centre of the world. E. Centre of the excentric. S. Centre of the equant. The centre of the star-bearing circle at the top is the centre of the epicycle.
(From TheoricNov Georg Peurbach, 1581.)Dante's favorite description of the heavens was "wheels upon wheels," and Jagmini's diagram (Fig. 93 ) shows the "excentric wheel" of the Sun, itself a solid spherical body the edges of whose wheel touch two other surfaces, in the common centre of which is the Earth. But the centre of the excentric sphere is not "the centre of the world.
FIGURE 97. <i>The relation of the harmony of the Microcosmos to the Macrocosmos</i>.<br> (From <i>Microcosmi Historia</i>; Robert Fludd, 1621.)
FIGURE 97. The relation of the harmony of the Microcosmos to the Macrocosmos.
(From Microcosmi Historia; Robert Fludd, 1621.)" For there were "pulls" in the heavens that resulted in constantly shifting centres. Nasir-Eddin Atti, great Arabian astronomer of Jagmini's century, attempted to account for the various lunacies of the heavens by, literally, "the spots on the moon." These spots, he assumed, are caused by other bodies moving in its epicycle and un-equally exposed to its light, and this phenomenon he calls "the anomaly of illumination." The movements of the five planets, particularly those of Mercury and Venus, required, he said, "the introducing of a system of guiding spheres," and this theory, when fully worked out (Fig. 94 ) gave him, for the path of Mercury, not the excentric circle of Ptolemy, nor a circle at all, but a curious closed curve with unequal radii which he described as "somewhat like a circle, but not really one."
FIGURE 98. The Balance.<br> (From <i>Mundus Subterraneus</i>; Athanasius Kircher, 1678, Vol. II.)
FIGURE 98. The Balance.
(From Mundus Subterraneus; Athanasius Kircher, 1678, Vol. II.)


The Earths in the Universe

THE BOOK OF EARTHS

By

EDNA KENTON

New York: William Morrow & Company

[1928, No renewal]


The Earths in the Universe

OF ALL THE MYSTICAL COSMOLOGISTS Emanuel Swedenborg wrote the longest scroll of correspondences between Man, Earth, and Heaven. His whole cosmology was founded on the Grand Man, who contained within himself the universe, and testified to the mystics's truth that "all things are created double, one against another"; that "there is no herb on earth to which a star does not correspond in heaven." But, unlike Hildegard, Swedenborg did not leave behind him his pictured conceptions of the cosmos, of the Grand Man, or of the multiplied Earths of the heavens. There is a little book of his, The Earths in the Universe, which reads like a fairy story, and should have had at least its frontispiece. His "Earths in the Universe" are the planets. He begins with the "Earth or planet" Mercury, following it with the Earth or planet Jupiter, and after these, in their order, come the Earths or planets Mars, Saturn, and Venus. Then he discourses on the spirits and inhabitants of the Moon, and the "five Earths of the starry heavens."

"That the universal heaven resembles one man," he says, "who is therefore called the GRAND MAN, and that all and singular the things appertaining to man, both his exteriors and interiors, correspond to that man or heaven, is an arcanum not as yet known to the world, but that it is so, has been abundantly Evidenced. To constitute that Grand Man, there is need of spirits from several earths, those who come from our earth not being sufficient for this purpose, being respectively few; and it is provided of the Lord, that whensoever there is a deficiency in any place as to the quality or quantity of correspondence, a supply must be instantly made from another earth, to fill up the deficiency, so that the proportion may be preserved, and thus heaven be kept in due consistence."

The inhabitants of the Earth or planet Mercury, he says, have a relation, not to terrestrial objects, but to the memory of things abstracted from these objects. The spirits or angels who are from the Earth Jupiter, "in the GRAND MAN have relation to the IMAGINATIVE PART OF THOUGHT, and consequently to an active state of the interior parts; but die spirits of our earth have relation to the various functions of the exterior parts of the body, and when these are desirous to have dominion, the active or imaginative part of thought from the interior cannot flow in; hence come the oppositions between the spheres of the life of each." The beings of the Earth Mars have relation, in the Grand Man, to "the longitudinal sinus, which lies in the brain between the two hemispheres thereof, and is there in a quiet state, howsoever the brain be disturbed on each side." The inhabitants and spirits of the Earth Saturn have relation, in the Grand Man, to "the middle sense between the spiritual man and the natural man, but to that which recedes from the natural and accedes to the spiritual." The spirits of Venus have relation, in the Grand Man, to "the memory of things material, agreeing with the memory of things immaterial." The spirits and inhabitants of our Earth have relation, in the Grand Man, to "natural and external sense, which sense is the ultimate wherein the exteriors of life close, and rest as in their common basis."


St. Hildegard's Universe

THE BOOK OF EARTHS

By

EDNA KENTON

New York: William Morrow & Company

[1928, No renewal]



St. Hildegard's Universe

THERE IS ANOTHER UNIVERSE of the Middle Ages in which the Earth is like the heart." This is the Universe of Saint Hildegard of Bingen, who lived from 1096 to 1179 or 1180. Saint Hildegard would have been a remarkable woman in any age; in her own she had no parallel.

Abbess of a Benedictine convent near Bingen on the Rhine, she was the first of a great line of women mystics. She founded two convents, was the author of many letters and three books--possibly five--was for those days a physician in her own right, and wrote a long treatise on the nature and properties of herbs. She was interested in statecraft, was a musician and a poet, and over half a hundred hymns are credited to her. Her health was not good, but she governed her convent, wrote her books, healed her sick and ailing, corresponded with the wisest men of her age, and travelled hundreds of miles--in the twelfth century! And with all this, she led the contemplative life.

In that contemplative active life her curious system of the universe blossomed, and in her letters and her books she left the records of her mystical visions of its structure and meaning. These records usually begin with, "The Living Light sayeth . . ." It was her name for God, but it was in "The Shade of the Living Light" that she had her perceptions of the universe, and it is interesting to read her simple account of these "Lights." "From my infancy until now in the seventieth year of my age," she says, "my soul has always beheld this light, and in it my soul soars to the summit of the firmament and into different air. . . . The brightness which I see is not limited by space, and is more brilliant than the radiance around the Sun. . . . I cannot measure its height, length, breadth. Its name, which has been given me, is 'Shade of the Living Light.' . . . With that brightness I sometimes see another light for which the name Lux Vivenshas been given me. When and how I see thisI cannot tell; but sometimes when I see it all sadness and pain is lifted from me, and I seem a simple girl again, and an old woman no more."

In Hildegard's universe, the Earth was the centre, and spherical, around which were arranged concentric shells or zones. The inner zones are spherical, the outer oval or egg-shaped, and the outermost (Fig. 92 ) so formed as to suggest the acuminated sphere that symbolises the fifth element, quintessence of the other four. This point that tapers into outer space is in the East, which is the top of the diagram. One of her drawings shows, says Singer, that she believed the antipodean surface of the Earth to be uninhabitable, "since it is either beneath the ocean, or in the mouth of the Dragon."

In the interior of the Earth, she believed, are two vast spaces shaped like truncated cones, where punishment was endured, and from whence great evil came forth.

FIGURE 92. <i>Hildegard's first scheme of the Universe</i>. Slightly simplified from the Wiesbaden Codex B, folio 14 r.<br> (From ''The Scientific Views and Visions of Saint Hildegard,'' by Charles Singer; in <i>Studies in the History and Method of Science</i>, ed. by Charles Singer, 1917. Vol. Fig. 2.)
FIGURE 92. Hildegard's first scheme of the Universe. Slightly simplified from the Wiesbaden Codex B, folio 14 r.
(From ''The Scientific Views and Visions of Saint Hildegard,'' by Charles Singer; in Studies in the History and Method of Science, ed. by Charles Singer, 1917. Vol. Fig. 2.)
The Earth itself was composed of the four elements, which are represented, curiously unequal in proportion and shape. Their arrangement is not orderly, and this very disorder illustrates one of Hildegard's fundamental doctrines regarding the relation of this world to the universe. Before man's fall, the elements were united in an harmonious combination, and Earth was Paradise; after that catastrophe, the harmony of the universe was disturbed, with the centre of all the trouble on this planet which has ever since remained in its now familiar state of chaotic confusion or mistio, as Hildegard's age called it. This mistioshe represents vigorously enough by the irregular distribution of the elements over the Earth. "Thus mingled will they remain until subjected to the melting pot of the Lord Judgment, when they will emerge in a new and eternal harmony, no longer mixed as matter, but separate and pure, parts of a new heaven and a new Earth."

Around this world, says Singer, 1 is spread the atmosphere, the aer lucidusor alba pellis, also circular. Through this alba pellisno Earth creature can penetrate. Later Hildegard seems to have divided this first zone of air into two, the aer tenuisor atmosphere whose outer part is the inner zone of the clouds, and the fortis et albus lucidusque aer, where certain fixed stars are placed.

Beyond this are four outer zones belonging to the four winds, indicated by the breath of supernatural beings.

PLATE XXXVII. <i>Nous pervaded by the Godhead embracing the Macrocosm with the Microcosm</i>.<br> From ''The Scientific Views and Visions of Saint Hildegard,'' by Charles Singer. In <i>Studies in the History and Method of Science</i>, ed. by Charles Singer, 1917, Vol. I, Plate VII.
PLATE XXXVII. Nous pervaded by the Godhead embracing the Macrocosm with the Microcosm.
From ''The Scientific Views and Visions of Saint Hildegard,'' by Charles Singer. In Studies in the History and Method of Science, ed. by Charles Singer, 1917, Vol. I, Plate VII.
They also correspond confusedly to the four elements and to the four regions of the heavenly bodies.

The first is the aer aquosus, corresponding to water, and containing the east wind. In its outer part float clouds, expanding, contracting, and being blown this way and that, thus concealing or revealing the heavenly bodies.

Beyond the aer aquosus, or watery zone, is the purus aether, or zone of air, and containing the west wind. Of all the zones it is the widest, and the long axis of this zone and the remaining outer zones is from east to west, thus fixing the path of movement of the heavenly bodies. It carries in it the constellations of the fixed stars, the Moon, and the two interior planets, Mercury and Venus.

Beyond the zones of east wind and water and of west wind and air is the umbrosa pellis, or ignis niger, the zone of the "dry" and the "earthy," of the north wind, thunder, lightning, and storms. It is a dark, narrow shell which is the storehouse of "the treasures of the snow and of the hail."

The outermost shell is the lucidus ignis, zone of fire, of the south wind, and of the three outer planets, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn--also, in Hildegard's first scheme, of the Sun.

The movements of the four outer zones about each other, which carry the heavenly bodies, are caused by the four winds; and the elements peculiar to each zone are here comparatively pure. Each zone has also its own special mentalcharacter, and has a specific influence on the mind and the body of man. For, says Hildegard, "And again I heard the voice from heaven saying, 'God, who created all things, wrought also man in His own image and similitude, and in him He traced (signavit) all created things, and He held him in such love that He destined him for the place from which the fallen angel had been cast."

Plate XXXVII is an illustration from her Liber Divinorumrepresenting her second vision, which shows Nous, the "world-spirit," animated and controlled by the God-head, with arms outstretched embracing the macrocosm with the microcosm. Only the head and the feet of Nous are visible, for the body is covered with the disc of the universe. In this picture of her universe, the zones are seven: they are, from without inwards, says Singer:

a. The lucidus ignis, containing the three outer planets, the sixteen principal fixed stars, and the south wind.

b. The ignis niger, containing the sun, the north wind, and the materials for thunder, lightning, and hail.

c. The purus aether, containing the west wind, the Moon, the two inner planets, and certain fixed stars.

d. The aer aquosus, containing the east wind.

e. The fortis et albus lucidusque aerwhere certain other fixed stars are placed.

f. The aer tenuis, or atmosphere, in the outer part of which is the zone of the clouds.

From all these zones with all their contents, elements, winds, Sun, Moon, planets, fixed stars, and the great animals or qualities of the heavens, are rained down influences upon the figure of the macrocosm.

Singer quotes a passage from Hildegard's Liber Divinorum to illustrate all this, and most of it can be followed in Plate XXXVII , and in Fig. 92 .

"In the middle of the disk [of the universe] there appeared the form of a man, the crown of whose head and the soles of whose feet extended to the fortis et albus lucidusque aer, and his hands were outstretched right and left to the same circle. . . . Towards these parts there was an appearance of four heads, a leopard, a wolf, a lion, and a bear. Above the head of the figure, in the zone of the purus aether, I saw the head of the leopard emitting a blast from its mouth, and on the right side of the mouth the blast, curving itself somewhat backwards, was formed into a crab's head . . . while on the left side of the mouth a blast similarly curved ended in a stag's head. From the mouth of the crab's head, another blast went to the middle of the space between the leopard and the lion, and from the stag's head a similar blast to the middle of the space between the leopard and the bear . . . and all the heads were breathing towards the figure of the man. Under his feet in the aer aquosusthere appeared as it were the head of a wolf, sending forth to the right a blast extending to the middle of the half space between its head and that of the bear, where it assumed the form of the stag's head; and from the stag's mouth there came as it were another breath which ended in the middle line. From the left of the wolf's mouth arose a breath which went to the middle of the half space between the wolf and the lion, where was depicted another crab's head . . . from whose mouth another breath ended in the same middle line . . . And the breath of all the heads extended sideways from one to another. . . . Moreover, on the right hand of the figure in the lucidus igni, from the head of the lion, issued a breath which passed laterally on the right into a serpent's head and on the left into a lamb's head . . . similarly on the figure's left in the ignis niger, there issued a breath from the bear's head ending on its right in the head of [another] lamb, and on its left in another serpent's head . . . And above the head of the figure the seven planets were ranged in order, three in the lucidus ignis, one projecting into the ignis niger, and three into the purus aether. . . . And in the circumference of the circle of the lucidus ignis there appeared the sixteen principal stars, four in each quadrant between the heads. . . . Also the purus aetherand the fortis et albus lucidusque aerseemed to be full of stars which sent forth their rays towards the clouds, whence . . . tongues like rivers descended to the disk and towards the figure, which was thus surrounded and influenced by these signs."

In Hildegard's fourth vision--of the influence of the heavenly bodies and the pure elements on men, animals, and plants, she saw, from the upper fiery firmament, the lucidus ignis, ashes as it were cast to the Earth, which produced rashes and ulcers in men and animals and fruits. From the ignis nigershe saw vapours (nebul descending, which withered the plants and dried up the earth. Against these descending influences the purus aetherstruggled, seeking to hold back the plagues of disease and drought.

PLATE XXXVIII (From <i>Uriusque Cosmi</i>; Robert Fludd, 1621. Vol. I)
PLATE XXXVIII (From Uriusque Cosmi; Robert Fludd, 1621. Vol. I)
From the fortis et albus lucidusque aershe saw certain clouds descend to the Earth and infect men and beasts with a pestilence, but this plague the aer aquosusopposed, so that all were not destroyed. In the aer tenuisshe saw its moisture as if it were boiling above the surface of the Earth, rousing the force of the Earth, and compelling it to bring forth its fruits by aid of the cosmic rays.

In the whole of her scheme of the universe, the winds are of prime importance. Were it not for the winds, which, she said, are the wings of God's power, the other three elements, the fires of the south, the waters of the west, and the great shadows of the north would burst over the Earth and destroy it. Or, were the four winds to move forward at once, the elements themselves would be split asunder, and the waters of the sea would be dried up. As man's body, she said, is held together by the soul, so the firmament is held together by the winds, which are, like the soul, invisible.

In developing her theory of the correspondence of the microcosm to the macrocosm, of man to the universe and God, she set down many of its details. The firmament corresponds to the head of man, in which, from the top of the cerebral cavity to "the last extremity of the forehead," are seven marked spaces all equal, which correspond to the seven planets, all of which, says Hildegard, are equally distant from each other in the heavens. The Sun, Moon, and stars she compares to his eyes; air is his hearing, the winds his smelling, the dew of heaven his tasting, and the sides of the world his arms and his touching. The Earth is like the heart of the cosmos, for it, like the heart of man, can be stirred by emotion; and, as the heart of man, moved by joy or sorrow, excites the brain to cause tears to flow, so the Earth, when the Moon begins to wax and wane, sends up her tears, the fogs of her oceans and seas.


Footnotes

220:1 "The Scientific Views and Visions of Saint Hildegard;" Charles Singer: In Studies in the History and Method of Science, Vol. I, 1917, pp. 22-36.
Next: The Earths in the Universe

Dante's Universe

THE BOOK OF EARTHS

By

EDNA KENTON

New York: William Morrow & Company

[1928, No renewal]


Dante's Universe

COLUMBUS WAS OF GENOA a century after Dante had died at Florence. Probably he had never read his countryman's Divina Commedia; even if he had, he might have seen little of value or significance in Dante's cosmology. Dante had one, however, and his scheme brought back into modern times, that most ancient of the figures of Earth, the hills of the gods, the antipodal mountains.

But, in Dante's Earth-figure also, as in Columbus's, the mountains have shifted. If Columbus, for some strange reason--and his reason is not at all clear--had put his mountain of Paradise at the western end of the Earth, Dante's two mountains give a still odder figure. In his Paradise Found, Dr. Warren has worked out this construction of Dante's Earth, showing that the Mountain of Paradise has slipped all of 30 below the equator. He bases this construction mainly on a few lines regarding the location of the Mountain of Purgatory (Purgatorio, Canto iv, 67-70): "Zion stands with this mountain in such wise on the earth that both have a single horison and diverse hemispheres;" and he adds: ". . . no careful reader of the Divina Commedia can fail to see that its 'Mount Zion' and the Purgatorial Montagna malagevole altissima et cinta de mareare simply unrecognised 'survivals' of prehistoric thought--antipodal world-mountains once situate at the poles, but here relocated to suit the demands of sacred medial geography. They are the Su-Meru and Ku-Meru of India figuring in Christian poetry."
FIGURE 90. <i>The Earth of Dante</i>.<br> <i>a</i>. City of Jerusalem. <i>b</i>. Mountain of Purgatory. <i>c</i>. Inferno within the Earth.<br> (From <i>Paradise Found</i>; William Fairfield Warren, 1885.)
FIGURE 90. The Earth of Dante.
a. City of Jerusalem. b. Mountain of Purgatory. c. Inferno within the Earth.
(From Paradise Found; William Fairfield Warren, 1885.)Another construction of Dante's universe is given (Fig. 91), from Studies in the History and Method of Science, edited by Charles Singer. It is Caetani's diagram of Dante's Hell, Purgatory, Earthly Paradise and the nine Heavens. Dante describes Hell as a funnel or inverted cone descending in nine diminishing whorls through the hemisphere until the centre is reached, which is also the centre of the universe, and is situated just under Jerusalem, the centre of the habitable Earth. Or, according to Caetani, he pictures it as a circular mountain, cone-like. Purgatory, Dante places at the antipodes, that is, on an island in the ocean of the uninhabitable Earth.

FIGURE 91. <i>Dante's Scheme of the Universe</i>.<br> Slightly modified from Michelangelo Caetani, duca di Sermoneta, <i>La materia della Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri dichiarata in Vi tavole, Monte Cassino, 1855</i>.<br> (From <i>Studies in the History and Method of Science</i>, ed. by Charles Singer, 1917, Vol. I, Fig. 4.)
FIGURE 91. Dante's Scheme of the Universe.
Slightly modified from Michelangelo Caetani, duca di Sermoneta, La materia della Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri dichiarata in Vi tavole, Monte Cassino, 1855.
(From Studies in the History and Method of Science, ed. by Charles Singer, 1917, Vol. I, Fig. 4.)From this island springs a mountain ascending in a series of stages up to the summit on which is Eden, the Earthly Paradise, home of the First Pair. Paradise includes all the spheres of heaven, through all of which Dante ascends, finding himself always on the planet that governs each sphere, until at last the Empyrean Paradise is attained, which crowns the universe.

Two regions, of air and of fire, must be crossed before the sphere of the Moon, the first star, which bounds the region of fire, is reached; and on the lower right-hand quarter of Earth is the dark forest in which Dante spent a night before he began, or in which he began, his journey. At its end he is at the foot of a hill, confronting three great beasts, from whom he is rescued by Virgil, who is to be his guide through Hell and Purgatory. The poets enter the Inferno at twilight--a world of eternal night whose ruler is the Moon. They go through the ten Pits until in the very centre of the Earth they see Lucifer, its king, at this centre of gravity, encased in eternal ice.

The passage through the centre of Earth is one of the greatest difficulty, and above it is ocean only, except for the Island of Purgatory. This division of land and water is explained to Dante thus: When Lucifer fell, all the land which existed in the mysterious hemisphere fell with him, and "fled for fear of him" escaping in what way it might around the globe, settling finally in the inhabited hemisphere. It is possible that the Earth in the interior fled also, but in the opposite direction, to form an island of land in the Purgatorial hemisphere. But, between land and land, there was left an empty space, and up this space they might climb to the island of refuge. Then comes the ascent of the stages of Purgatory to Paradise, and the flight through the heavenly spheres, until at last from the Heaven of the Stars the universe lies spread out under their feet, and Dante sees below him the purgatorial Earth, heart of the cosmos, "small and round as a threshing floor."


Earth, Heart of the Cosmos

THE BOOK OF EARTHS

By

EDNA KENTON

New York: William Morrow & Company

[1928, No renewal]


Earth the Heart of the Cosmos

THE COSMIC HEART--centre of life in the universe as man's tiny heart is his centre of life--meant to the ancient Aryans "Breath," the ceaselessly ascending and descending spiral which is the life-sustaining symbol of the universe. To the ancient Egyptians the cosmic heart was the Mind: "It is He (the Heart) who brings forth every issue, and it is the tongue that repeats the thoughts of the Heart." To the Chinese the heart of the universe was Buddha; it was also "the skilful workman," who made all the different conditions of existence in the ten regions of space; it was the "universal essence" from which everything in the universe came into being. Heaven and Earth, with this heart, they said, pervades everything.

PLATE XXXV. THE EARTH OF THE MYSTICS--THE HEART OF GOD (From Theologia Mystica, or, The Archtypous Globe; John Pordage, 1683)
PLATE XXXV. THE EARTH OF THE MYSTICS--THE HEART OF GOD (From Theologia Mystica, or, The Archtypous Globe; John Pordage, 1683)

Man obtains it, and then it is the heart of man; when things obtain it, then it is the heart of things; when grass, trees, birds, and beasts obtain it, then it is the heart of each of these. And the heart of man, they said, is simply the inborn Buddha, which belongs to everything that has conscious existence, that infinitesimal particle of the divine that gives and sustains all. Somewhere, then, in the universe this divine heart of the cosmos pulsated, and if the Earth was the centre of the cosmos, then the Earth was its heart and its life.

Just as the unknown author of De Imago Mundihad worked out his scheme of the universe on the image of the Cosmic Egg, John Pordage, an Englishman of the seventeenth century, developed his mystical theory of the "Archtypous Globe" as the Cosmic Heart. Plate XXXV gives his drawing of the Eternal World, wherein the Holy Trinity do manifest themselves, as in a clear Chrystalline Glass or Mirrour." In it, he discerned three distinct places, the Outward Court, the Inward Court, or Holy Place, and "the Inmost Court, or the Abysmal Eye in the centre of the Heart of God, . . . which essential Eye ofGod, looking into itself, and finding nothing besides itself, by dilating itself, gives a beginning and an end to itself; which beginning and entring into, and joyning with one another do constitute and form the Globe of Eternity. . . for the Eye, turning it self inwards into it self, comes to know it self, and to see, feel, and taste it self; and if it look outward, it sees nothing but it self neither, because as the Eye is God, so is the Globe nothing but the dilation of the Eye. . . for the natural formation of a Globe or sphear is by the Centre's dilating and expanding of it self; a circumference being nothing else but a centre dilated, or a central emanation bounded by it self. . . . I am ashamed to present you such a dead lifeless figure of it; but no pen can decipher it on paper, it is only the Spirit of the Eye that can open it self, and give you the living and ravishing sight of its own essentiality without similitudes or figures, though I can express it outwardly no better than I have in the foregoing figure."

Pordage explains the tiny "figure in the Margent," as typifying the Holy Trinity. The Eye in the midst of the Heart represents the Father, the Generator of the Son who is the Heart of the Father; and the out flowing exit of powers, like a breath, represents the Holy Ghost proceeding from the Father, through the Heart of the Son. Thus the birth of the Holy Trinity is manifested in the opening of the Eye, to be a Trinity in Unity; the Eye is in the Heart, and the Heart is the Eye's Centre, and the Spirit is a proceeding Spirit from the Eye and Heart; and thus they are one in another, in one Essence, and undivided and inseparable; the Father is one with the Son, and the Son with the Father; and the Spirit proceeds from the union of these both, and abides one with them. Wheresoever the Eye is, there is the Heart; and wheresoever the Eye and Heart are, there the outgoing of powers streams forth from them."

Map makers are not usually mystics, and certainly there is no indication that Petrus Apianus, distinguished German mathematician and astronomer of the sixteenth century, was proposing to do more than make an extraordinarily beautiful world-map according to a pattern he himself explains. On Ptolemy's figure of Earth, Apianus made his famous "cardiform projections" towards the poles, and obtained his heart-shaped map of the world. This is one of the earliest maps on which the just discovered western continents appear under the name of the Americas. (See Frontispiece Plate XXXVI .)


The Earth of Columbus

THE BOOK OF EARTHS

By

EDNA KENTON

New York: William Morrow & Company

[1928, No renewal]


The Earth of Columbus

IT IS ONE OF THE LITTLE IRONIES of life that the man who more than any other popularised the notion that the Earth was "shaped like a ball," himself believed it was shaped like a pear. Privately Columbus affirmed that the Earth was pear-shaped. We find this in his letters, and in the writings of his contemporaries. One of these latter, Pietro Martire, who accompanied Columbus on the voyage of 1498, in his Decades of the newe worldepublished in 1555, said that "the Admirall" declared such things, "the which because they seeme contrarye to the oppinions of all the Astronomers, I wyll touche them but with a drye foote as sayeth the Evidencerbe. . . .
FIGURE 89. <i>The pear-shaped Earth of Columbus</i>.<br> (From <i>Paradise Found</i>; William Fairfield Warren, 1885.)
FIGURE 89. The pear-shaped Earth of Columbus.
(From Paradise Found; William Fairfield Warren, 1885.)For he sayeth, that he . . . conjectured, that the earth is not perfectly rownde; But that when it was created, there was a certeyne heape reysed theron, much hygher than the other partes of the same. So that (as he saith), it is not rownde after the form of an apple or a bal (as others thynke) but rather lyke a peare as it hangeth on the tree. And that Pariais the Region which possesseth the super-eminente or hyghest parte thereof nerest unto heaven. In soo muche that he earnestly contendeth, the earthly Paradise to bee situate in the toppes of those three hylles, which wee sayde before, that the watche man sawe owte of the toppe castell of the shippe: And that the outragious streames of the freshe waters which soo violently issewe out of the sayde goulfes and stryve soo with the salte water, faule head-longe from the toppes of the sayde mountaynes."

Columbus himself, in a letter to Ferdinand and Isabella regarding his third voyage, wrote: 1

"I have always read that the world comprising the land and water was spherical, and the recorded experiences of Ptolemy and all the others have Evidenced this by the eclipses of the moon and other observations made from East to West, as well as the elevation of the Pole from North to South. But as I have already described, I have now seen so much irregularity that I have come to another conclusion respecting the Earth, namely, that it is not round, as they describe, but of the form of a pear, which is very round except where the stalk grows, at which part it is most prominent; or like a round ball, upon part of which is a prominence like a woman's nipple, this protrusion being the highest and nearest the sky, situated under the equinoctial line, and at the eastern extremity of this sea. [He is in the Gulf of Paria, to the north or the north-west of the mouth of the Orinoco.] . . . Ptolemy and the other philosophers who have written upon the globe thought that it was spherical; . . . but this western half of the world, I maintain, is like half a very round pear, having a raised projection for the stalk, as I have already described."

When Columbus wrote this letter to his royal helpers, he supposed himself to be in Asia's easternmost waters, but he was really in the northern part of South America, which he himself went on to describe as the Paradise of the Earth or the Mountain of the World. But the World Mountain of Columbus had dropped from its northern quarter to the western.


Footnotes

208:1 Select Letters of Columbus: Hakluyt Soc. Pub., and ed. pp. 134-138.

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