Glass BD^I
Book. l/h
Copyright N°
COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT
NORTH POLAR ZEMITN
THE BABYLONIAN UNIVERSE Illustrating pages 33-40 The upright central line is the polar axis of the heavens and earth. The two seven-staged pyra- mids represent the earth, the upper being the abode of living men, the under one the abode of the dead. The separating waters are the four seas. The seven inner homocentric globes are respectively the domains and special abodes of Sin, Shamash, Nabu, Ishtar, Nergal, Marduk, and Ninib, each being a "world-ruler " in his own planetary sphere. The outermost of the spheres, that of Anu and Ea, is the heaven of the fixed stars. The axis from center to zenith marks '* the Way of Anu "; the axis from center to nadir " the Way of Ea." See Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. xxii, pp. 138- 144; xxiii, opposite p. 388; and xxvi, pp. 84-92.
The Earliest Cosmologies
THE UNIVERSE AS PICTURED IN THOUGHT BY
THE ANCIENT HEBREWS, BABYLONIANS,
EGYPTIANS, GREEKS, IRANIANS,
AND INDO-ARYANS
A GUIDEBOOK FOR BEGINNERS IN THE STUDY OF ANCIENT LITERATURES AND RELIGIONS
BY WILLIAM FAIRFIELD WARREN, S.T.D., LL.D.
h
Member of the Royal Asiatic Society; Corporate Member of the American
Oriental Society; President of Boston University 1873-1903; Author of
"The True Key to Ancient Cosmology and Mythical Geography,"
"The Cradle of the Human Race," etc., etc., etc.
New York: EATON & MAINS Cincinnati: JENNINGS & GRAHAM
Copyright, I909, ky EATON tc MAINS.
SEP 3 7909
RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED
WITH FRIENDLY PERMISSION
TO
C. H. W. JOHNS, M.A., Litt.D.
QUEENS' COLLEGE
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
ENGLAND
CONTENTS
PAGE
Dedication 3
Illustrations 9
Preface 11
CHAPTER I
The Hebrew Universe as Commonly Pictured
A typical representation 19
Inconsistency in interpretation 21
Lack of thoroughness 21
Antecedent probabilities 22
A profession of faith 24
The declaration of an astronomer 25
CHAPTER II
The Hebrew Universe as Pictured by Schiaparelli
An improved reconstruction of the system 26
International interest therein .' 26
Diagram less inclusive than its title 27
A double firmament and the reasons therefor 29
Embarrassing questions 30
God's will effective below but not above the earth 32
CHAPTER III The Babylonian Universe Newly Interpreted
Seven diagrams representing the Babylonian universe 33
No two of the seven alike 33
A new interpretation needed 34
The twelve conditions to be met 34
A diagram that satisfies each of the twelve requirements 38
Origin of this remarkable world-concept 40
CHAPTER IV
The Biblical, Rabbinical, and Koranic Universe in the
Light of the Babylonian
Was the Biblical universe essentially Babylonian? 41
An argument against the supposition 41
5
6 CONTENTS
PAGE
Considerations favoring the supposition 45
The Rabbinical world-view 49
The Koranic 52
Mohammed's six ascents into the seventh heaven 53
CHAPTER V The Egyptian Universe
A pioneer's first representation 58
A contemporary criticism 60
Picture embodying some later modifications 62
Difficulties remain 64
Traces of agreement with the Babylonian system 66
Steindorff discovers but fails to correlate the Counter-earth 68
CHAPTER VI The Homeric Universe
A claim that the Homeric earth is a sphere 70
Other parts of his universe more or less Babylonian 73
Where further evidence may be found 73
The irremovable "thresholds" above and below the earth 75
Testimony of Herodotus to Babylonian influence 76
An ampler present-day claim 77
CHAPTER VII The Indo-Iranian Universe
The world-concept of the Surya Siddhanta 79
Sevenfold division of the Northern hemisphere 81
Sevenfold division of the Southern hemisphere 83
Substantial identity of Indian and Iranian world-concepts 85
The seven "island continents" 86
A puzzling passage made plain 93
CHAPTER VIII The Buddhistic Universe
Four chief deviations from the parent system 95
Nine points of agreement with it 95
Both agreements and deviations should be further investigated. 99
Two pictures of the Buddhistic universe 100
One with quadrangular DvTpas, the other with circular 100
More detailed description of this world-view in the Appendix . . 100
CONTENTS 7
CHAPTER IX Recovered Trace op Two Lost Spheres
PAGE
Two lunar and two solar spheres 101
Discriminations hitherto neglected 102
Difficulty of the task 103
It should nevertheless be undertaken 103
A long-standing problem in Egyptian cosmology 104
Its solution 107
CHAPTER X Points and Problems for Future Studt
The prehistoric world-concept 109
Myths as beginnings of a philosophy of nature 110
Why hard to understand 112
Their seeming lack of harmony often unreal 112
Mythical representations of the world's axis 113
Also of the cosmic water-system 115
And of inter-mundane highways 116
The lunar sphere as bridge from underworld to upper 118
The Zodiac, when invented, and where 119
The answer to these questions becoming clearer 126
APPENDIX
I. The Mandala Oblation 133
II. Homer's Abode of the Dead 157
III. Homer's Abode of the Living 178
IV. The Gates of Sunrise in the Oldest Mythologies 192
V. The Homeland of the Gandharvas 197
VI. The World-Tree of the Teutons 200
VII. Problems Still Unsolved in Indo- Aryan Cosmology 205
VIII. Index of Authors 217
IX. Index of Subjects 221
ILLUSTRATIONS
Universe of the Ancient Babylonians frontispiece
PAGE
The Hebrew Universe, drawn by Whitehouse 20
The Hebrew Universe, drawn by Schiaparelli 27
The Egyptian Universe as described by Maspero 59
The Egyptian Universe as later drawn by him 63
The World of Homer 169
Rootage of the Teutonic World-Tree 203
Original diagrams illustrative of the Earth of the Iranians, the Earth of the Indo-Aryans, the Navel of the Earth, the Earth of Dante, and the Earth of Columbus, are given in The Cradle of the Human Race.
The diagrams by Whitehouse, Schiaparelli, and Maspero, repro- duced in the following pages, are used with the kind permission of their publishers.
PREFACE
In the judgment of those who have seen it the following treatise sheds a new light on not a few important questions. It ought to prove helpful to all students of ancient thought, pre- eminently to all teachers of ancient literatures. It deals with a theme fundamental beyond all others. Back of every religion, and of every philosophy or science worthy of the name, lies a "world-view" — a concept in which are in- cluded all localities and all beings supposed in that religion or philosophy or science to exist. In proportion to its clearness and complete- ness, it in every case groups and mentally pictures these localities and beings in certain relations to each other, and thus also in their total unity as a universe. The science which critically investigates and expounds the world- view of any people, or of any system of doctrine, is called Cosmology; the branch which does this for a group or class of world-concepts is known as Comparative Cosmology. The present work may be regarded as an introduction to this fascinating study.
For more than three decades it has been the
duty and the delight of the writer to inquire
11
12 PREFACE
into the world-concepts of the most ancient peoples of the earth, and to interpret these concepts as clearly as possible to successive classes of eager-minded students. Almost at the very beginning of this comparative study there began to be reached results noticeably divergent from current teachings in various fields of scholarship; results so illuminative and mutually self-supporting, however, that in the year 1881 I was led to publish a paper entitled The True Key to Ancient Cosmology and Mythical Geography. Eminent scholars, not only in this country but also in Great Britain and on the continent of Europe, welcomed the essay with generous interest and appreciation. In 1885, in a work on The Cradle of the Human Race, further studies in the ancient cosmologies were published on both sides of the Atlantic. A few years later, in the Journal of the American Oriental Society for 1901, I set forth the view of the Babylonian heavens and earth opened to me by the "True Key"; illustrating it more fully in the same Journal for the year 1902, and for the year 1905. Though this new view (pictured in the frontispiece of the present volume) differed toto ccelo (and tota terra) from all previously presented, it at once received attentive consideration from some of the most authoritative of Assyriological scholars. Three such, all university professors of international reputation, representing respectively Paris, Ox-
PREFACE 13
ford, and Munich, eagerly expressed their partial or full indorsement. One of them wrote : "Your paper is full of light. I believe you have dis- covered what was really the orthodox cos- mological system of the Babylonians, and at the same time the origin of the Pythagorean system." So self -evidencing has the new inter- pretation proved that, in the eight years since it was proposed as a substitute for the various older teachings, not one writer has to my knowledge questioned its complete agreement with ancient Babylonian thought.
In this recovered Euphratean world-view my recent pupils have found such assistance toward a ready understanding of the biblical and other ancient cosmologies that they have repeatedly urged me to print more of the comparative studies that have proved helpful to them. So immense, however, is the field, and so frag- mentary must be the contribution which any one man can hope to make, that I have hesitated to issue what I have prepared. Almost daily new light is reaching the investigator of pre- historic times and peoples, so that any new archaeological deduction is liable to need for its best statement some modification before it can be carried through the press and through the judgment day that awaits every book sufficiently comprehensive to be of interest to many and diverse specialists. In the world of scholars, as elsewhere, however, obligations are mutual,
14 PREFACE
and owing, as I do, to other pioneers all that I myself have come to see, I cannot refuse to make such return as I may be able. The book has been forty years, I suppose, in the making, but no doubt I could spend forty more upon it and still find each new touch suggesting and demanding yet another.
The ten chapters of the work cover all the nations from whose literary remains we can hope for any important light on the world- concepts of generations yet earlier. The Chinese are not included, for the reason that as yet the Sinologues have found in Chinese literature no system of cosmology clearly distinguishable from the Buddhistic and manifestly antedating it. Following the lead of my lamented friend, Mr. Terrien de la Couperie, an increasing number of scholars are coming to ascribe the beginnings of Chinese civilization to a pre- historic colony of immigrants from the basin of the Euphrates. If this view shall ultimately find general acceptance, it will, of course, be easy to believe that the pre-Buddhistic world- view of this ancient nation, like that of so many others, was identical with that of the Babylonians. (See Richthofen, China, Bd. i, 404ff.)
In an Appendix I have given certain mis- cellaneous papers pertinent to the general theme. But the most helpful supplement to the dis- cussions presented in the ten chapters will be
PREFACE 15
found in the work already mentioned, The Cradle of the Human Race (usually cited by its short title, Paradise Found), of which a new and enlarged edition (the twelfth) is nearly ready for the press.
I cannot close this foreword without grateful mention of some of the colleagues and friends to whom I am indebted for valued private assistance in the preparation of the pages that follow — assistance kindly given in personal con- ference, or in correspondence, or oftenest of all in both interviews and letters. It must be understood, of course, that the mention com- mits no one of the named to any of the inferences I have drawn from the information courteously communicated. To obviate the embarrassment of attempting to arrange the list according to the measure of my debt, the alphabetical order is adopted:
Professor Philippe Berger, College de France, Paris; Ernest A. Wallis Budge, Litt.D., F.S.A., British Museum, London; Rev. Professor R. H. Charles, D.D., Trinity College, Dublin; Pro- fessor Judson B. Coit, Ph.D., Boston University; Professor T. W. Rhys Davids, Ph.D., LL.D., London University; Professor Fritz Hommel, Ph.D., S.T.D., University, Munich; Professor E. Washburn Hopkins, Ph.D., LL.D., Yale Uni- versity; Professor Herbert A. Howe, A.M., Sc.D., University Park, Colorado; Professor A. V. W. Jackson, L.H.D., LL.D., Columbia University,
16 PREFACE
New York City; Professor Morris Jastrow, Jr., Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania; Rev. C. H. W. Johns, M.A., Fellow Queens' College, Cam- bridge, England; Professor E. Kuhn, Ph.D., University, Munich; Professor Charles Rockwell Lanman, Ph.D., LL.D., Harvard University; Professor Ernst Leumann, Ph.D., University, Strassburg; Professor Thomas Bond Lindsay, Ph.D., Boston University; Professor David Gordon Lyon, Ph.D., D.D., Harvard University; Professor A. A. Macdonell, Ph.D., Director India Institute, Oxford; Professor G. C. C. Maspero, D.C.L., College de France, Director of Excavations, Cairo, Egypt; Professor H. G. Mitchell, Ph.D., S.T.D., Boston; Professor W. Max Mliller, D.D., Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Professor Laurence H. Mills, M.A., D.D., Uni- versity of Oxford; Directeur L. de MillouS, Musee Guimet, Paris; E. W. B. Nicholson, M.A., Librarian Bodleian Library, Oxford; Theophilus Goldridge Pinches, LL.D., London University; Professor Archibald H. Sayce, D.D., LL.D., Queen's College, Oxford; Rev. Jefferson E. Scott, Ph.D., S.T.D., Ajmere, India; Professor Wil- helm Spiegelberg, Ph.D., University, Strassburg; Professor E. B. Tylor, LL.D., F.R.S., University of Oxford; Rev. William Hayes Ward, D.D., LL.D., New York; Professor William Marshall Warren, Ph.D., Boston University; Mrs. Pro- fessor George Arthur Wilson, Ph.D., Syracuse University.
PREFACE 17
As I write these names I am painfully re- minded of not a few others equally entitled to appreciative mention, whose honored bearers, no longer with us, have risen to loftier viewpoints in the universe than any we on earth can reach. Ever sacredly cherished shall be their memory.
Postscript. — Since the foregoing was written Dr. C. H. W. Johns has laid me under new and deeper obligation by carefully reading the entire manuscript of the work and kindly expressing his unqualified approval of its fundamental positions.
Boston University. W. F. W.
CHAPTER I
THE HEBREW UNIVERSE AS COMMONLY PICTURED
Under the word "Cosmogony," in the excel- lent new Dictionary of the Bible edited in five volumes by Dr. James Hastings, may be found a good representation of the Hebrew conception of the universe as ordinarily interpreted. The article is from the pen of Principal O. C. White- house, and it is illustrated by the diagram here reproduced.
Let us examine this picture. In the center of a sea that is limitless in every direction, we are shown a thick circular disk to represent the Earth. Between its upper and lower sur- faces there is an hermetically closed cavern to represent Sheol, the general abode of the dead. Around the disk's edge on the upper surface there is a ring of very lofty mountains. To this ring there is fitted, all the way round, and by a water-tight joint, a huge metallic vault, hemispherical in form; this represents the sky. Heaven and Earth do not include the universe, it will be noticed; for below the earth-disk, and above the sky-vault, in every direction, however far thought may go, there are waters infinite. To aid our comprehension of the deluge-narrative certain sluiceways are
19
20
THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
represented as extending upward through the earth-disk, special pains being taken, as of course was necessary, to avoid flooding the Sheol-cavity. In the sky-vault certain orifices
- — ■ the Firman. -
— == = -Tc-h 6-m — R-3-frfrati-
m$mm
THE UNIVERSE OF THE HEBREWS According to Whitehouse
are placed and carefully marked "Windows." Just under the vault on one side there is a ringed dot, marked "Sun," opposite to which are three asterisks denominated "Stars." Just
WHITEHOUSE'S HEBREW WORLD 21
above these, and, like the others, hugging the vault, is a new (or old) "Moon," which, with some unexplained perversity, turns her illu- minated side away from the sun. All these nocturnal role-players may well account them- selves superfluous, for to the blazing sun there has been given no discoverable retreat to which he may retire when disposed to leave the field and the hour to his lesser colleagues.
What now is the evidence upon which this representation is put before us as a true ac- count of the Hebrew and older Babylonian heavens and earth? Simply a few manifest metaphors torn from their context in the lan- guage of the Old Testament poets. Let us hear our interpreter: "The Hebrews thought of the world as a disk (Chug, cf . Isa. 40. 22) ; and to this earthly disk corresponded the heavenly disk (also called Chug, cf. Job 22. 14; Prov. 8. 27)." In this statement he seems incon- sistent with himself, for if the earth is a disk, and heaven a disk, it is plain that the latter cannot be (as his diagram represents it) a hemispherical "vault, or arched dome." Put- ting the case in another way, we must insist that if, in the passage relating to heaven, he makes "Chug" mean something spherical or hemispherical, he must — to be consistent — make "Chug" also mean something spherical or hemispherical when applied to the earth.
A little earlier in his article Dr. Whitehouse
22 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
argues as follows: "Numerous passages may be cited to prove that the Hebrew Semite regarded the sky as a solid vault, or arched dome. In Job 37. 18 it is compared to a firm molten mirror, the hue of which in Exod. 24. 10 is described as resembling sapphire, while from Amos 9. 6; Job 26. 10, 11; Prov. 8. 27, 28, we gather the additional details that this solid compacted vault, or arched dome, was sup- ported on the loftiest mountains as pillars (Job 26. 11). It was also provided with win- dows and gates (Gen. 7. 11; 28. 17; 2 Kings 7. 2, 19; Psa. 78. 23). Above this solid rakia ('firmament') flowed the upper or heavenly waters (Gen. 1. 7), which descended in rain through these openings (Psa. 104. 3; 148. 4; 2 Kings 7. 19)."
These precious "details," and this precious textual proof of their correctness, seem to have been handed down from editor to editor, with faithful repetition, from the date of the first Bible Dictionary ever issued. And, not with- out countenance from the same predecessors, the author assures us that his picture of the Hebrew universe accurately represents the Baby- lonian as well.
For the sake of a change, if nothing more, let us hope that the next writer on this subject will begin with the question of antecedent probability. Nature knows nothing of disks, hardly anything of discoids. A disk is a product
WHITEHOUSE'S HEBREW WORLD 23
of measurably advanced art. On the other hand, primeval men saw spheres and spheroids on every hand. The sun and moon are visible globes. The sand grain and the bowlder, the hailstone and the dewdrop, the seeds of grass, the fruit of trees, the egg of bird and beast and fish, the sky which incloses all, and the eye which discerns all, are spheres or spheroids. What so natural as to think the earth a sphere? What so unlikely as the supposition that the artless ancestors of any ancient people ascribed to the earth the form of the mathematical solid bounded by two parallel circular planes in horizontal position, and the segment of a hollow cylinder in position perpendicular? Amer- ican Indians at the time of their discovery were found possessed of the idea that the earth is a ball1 — why should we not freely ascribe so natural a concept to the ancient Hebrews? It was found even among the savage Battaks of Borneo.2
But the fair and sufficient criticism to be passed upon all our accepted expounders of Hebrew cosmology is that they fail in thorough- ness. By a slightly more extended and thor- oughgoing application of their exegetical method they could further show, and with equal cogency, that among the Hebrews the heavens were
*H. H. Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States, vol. iii, p. 536. aL. Frobenius, Die Weltanschauung der Naturvdlker, Weimar, 1898, p. 124.
24 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
thought to contain a supply of wax, or of some similar substance, with which at appropriate times the Almighty "sealeth up" the stars (Job 9. 7) ; also, that the earth was believed to possess at least one ear (Isa. 1. 2: "Give ear, O earth!"). One would think it time to have done with such wooden literalism as that which we are criticising; but, unfortunately, even our very latest Encyclopaedia Biblica, that edited by Professor Cheyne, brings us in the cosmo- graphic portions no relief. Our young people are entitled to some better guidance in this field of study. Pending its arrival, the present writer avails himself of the opportunity to re- new his profession of faith that both Baby- lonian and Hebrew thought were adjusted to an earth utterly un-disklike in form, and to a system of heavens above heavens whose com- position was as far removed from earthly metals as it was from the silk or the goat's hair of Psa. 104. 2, and Isa. 40. 22. Despite all that the rehearsers of traditional cosmology say, or rather because of what they say, and because of the inconsistencies in which they con- tinually involve themselves, one long-interested student believes that their attempted recon- struction of the Hebrew and earlier Semitic universe is pitiably mistaken, and that the eminent American astronomer, Newcomb, is far nearer the truth when he pens this deliberate public statement: "Not enough credit has been
WHITEHOUSE'S HEBREW WORLD 25
given to the ancient astronomers. There is no time within the scope of history when it was not known that the earth is a sphere, and that the direction down, at all points, is toward the same point at the earth's center." If after the word "sphere" he had written, "or other unsupported solid," he would have stated the exact truth.
Soon after the foregoing was written, a distinguished Italian astronomer published a new and improved representation of the Hebrew world, and to a consideration of this we will pass in our next chapter.
CHAPTER II
THE HEBREW UNIVERSE AS PICTURED BY SCHIAPARELLI
In the year 1903, Dr. G. Schiaparelli, director of the Brera Observatory in Milan, published in Italian a work entitled Astronomy in the Old Testament. The following year a German translation with certain emendations was issued at Giessen. A year later there appeared at Oxford an " Authorized English Translation, with many Corrections and Additions by the Author." In this book of 184 pages we have at the time of this writing the latest published attempt to portray the world-concept of the ancient Hebrews.
In most respects the work well deserves the warm international welcome so promptly ac- corded it. It would be exceedingly difficult, I think impossible, to find another astronomer as skilled in Old Testament studies, or an Old Testament scholar by profession equally dis- tinguished in astronomy. The only really weak chapter in the book is the second, the one relating to the Old Testament cosmos as a whole, and even here there are some improve- ments on the corresponding points in the inter- pretations criticised in our opening chapter.
26
SCHIAPARELLI'S HEBREW WORLD
27
The author's cut representing the Hebrew universe, with his accompanying explanations, is here reproduced.
HEAVEN, THE EARTH, AND THE ABYSSES According to the writers of the Old Testament. — Schiaparelli
Explanatory Key :
ABC = the upper heaven; ADC = the curve of the abyss; AEC = the plane of the earth and seas; SRS = various parts of the sea; EEE = various parts of the earth; GHG = the profile of the firmament or lower heaven; KK = the storehouses of the winds; LL = the store- houses of the upper waters, of snow, and of hail ; M = the space occupied by the air, within which the clouds move; NN = the waters of the great abyss; xxx = the fountains of the great abyss; PP = Sheol or limbo; Q = the lower part of the same, the inferno properly so called.
On this illustrative picture it must be re- marked in the way of friendly criticism that while, on page 38, the author speaks of it as representing the total universe as conceived of by the Old Testament writers, it in reality
28 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
omits all the heavenly bodies. It is therefore simply a picture of the earth and its immediate belongings. On another page the author him- self incidentally refers to it as representing "the central and immovable part of the universe." A part is never the whole. Where is the moon which was made to rule the night? And where the sun, which our author describes as "the most magnificent work of the Almighty"? Where are " Arcturus and his sons," the "bands of Orion," the Pleiades with their 1 'sweet influences' ' ? Where are the innumerable stars which God showed to Abraham, promising him that like them his seed should be innu- merable? Did no Hebrew ever notice the Milky Way and account it a part of the universe of God? We really cannot consent to think of Job and David and Isaiah as having been lifelong prisoners under a "firmament" which, as described in all seriousness by an American divine as late as in 1899, "was like a brass dome, or cover, beaten out, and shut down around the edge of the earth like the cover of a dinner platter."
Schiaparelli by no means denies to the ancient Hebrews a knowledge of the heavenly bodies, but his diagram, though professedly including "Heaven," contains no hint of them. His "firmament" is some improvement on the brass one just referred to, for he is careful to state that it is "transparent, allowing the light of
SCHIAPARELLFS HEBREW WORLD 29
the stars to pass through." But it is still "a vault of great solidity." It still has in all literalness "flood-gates, or portcullises," and rain can fall only when these are opened. In fact, he states that "the main duty" of this solid firmament "is to support the upper waters, holding them suspended on high, above the earth, and separated from the lower waters of the continents and seas and abysses." More- over, as he well adds, "considering the spherical and convex shape of the firmament, the upper waters could not remain above without a second wall to hold them in at the sides and at the top. So a second vault above the vault of the firmament closes in, together with the firmament, a space" — the space marked LL in his diagram. Instead, therefore, of Dr. White- house's celestial ocean upheld by the firma- ment above the sun, moon, and stars, our present interpreter gives us a celestial tank, situated somewhat below the sun, moon, and stars, but bottomed by the firmamental "vault of great solidity," and topped by a "second vault" of like character.
For one I strongly suspect that King Solomon would have betrayed some disturbance of mental serenity had a wise man from the West appeared at his court and presented this diagram of the cosmical water-system, intimat- ing, no matter how politely, that it represented the cosmology taught in the schools of Jeru-
30 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
salem and believed in by her reigning king. If not too impatient, he very likely would have asked some embarrassing questions. For example: "How is it that this firmament of yours is pervious to the winds stored up in KK, but impervious to the waters stored up in LL? Again, if these upper waters require for their support a vault of great solidity, how is it that they do not immediately rush down to GG, causing the air confined in KK to rise and gather in the space between B and H? If such a downrush of the waters is prevented by a metallic partition welded water- tight to each of the two vaults all the way round at the base of the supported waters, in what one of our Hebrew authors, O wise man of the West, did you find it mentioned? And what name was given to so important a part of the world's structure?" Lucky would such a wise man from the West have been if the incensed king had courteously forborne to apply to him one or more of the mordant re- marks ascribed to the royal pen in the book of Proverbs. But, surmises apart, who does not find it exceedingly difficult to understand how our author can quote, as he does, such Old Testament passages as the following : "When the clouds are full, they spread rain over the earth" (his own translation of Eccl. 11. 3); "The clouds drop water" (Judg. 5. 4); "He draweth up the drops of water which distill
SCHIAPARELLI'S HEBREW WORLD 31
in rain . . . and drop upon men abundantly" (Job 36. 27); and still give us this traditional overhead water-tank notion as a just repre- sentation of Old Testament ideas on the subject of rain-production?1
That our author should have found a firma- ment of great solidity necessary as a support for the "upper waters/' and a second firmament above that needed to keep the waters from flowing off the convexity of the first, is the more remarkable, since in two cases, discussed in the very same chapter, he ascribes to the Hebrews a naive acceptance of an original divine decree or a continuous exercise of God's omnipotent will as an all-sufficient explanation for that which would seem to be a more strik- ing violation of this same law of gravitation. The first is the case of the supposed feeding of mountain springs from the sea, which Schiaparelli insists was considered as occur- ring through subterranean channels only. Re- specting this he says: "That the lower waters should overcome the laws of natural gravity, and rise again from subterranean depths to the surface, was considered as a result of the omnipotence of God (Amos 5. 8)." This is on
1 Hebrew scholars do not all agree that by "the waters above the firmament" (Gen. 1. 7) rain-water is meant. Keerl, for example, argues through more than thirty pages that in the mind and meaning of the sacred writer the "upper waters" were the primordial substrate out of which the sun, moon, and other planets were formed (Die Schdpfungs- geschichte, Basel, 1861, pp. 352-388). This uncertainty as to the mean- ing of the very term under discussion is overlooked by most interpreters.
32 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
page 29. On page 27 we have the second case, that of the earth, which he says, "has no need of a base or support outside of itself," for although "all the mass of the earth, in- cluding the lower waters, is suspended in space and rests upon nothing/ ' its remaining so suspended was to the Hebrew mind sufficiently accounted for by the one thought that the whole mundane system was "simply fixed unalterably by the divine will." One cannot help wondering how our author would explain why the divine will was considered so much more efficacious below the earth than above it, and why, if the lower waters had no need of support, the upper ones could be kept up in their place only by a material arch of great solidity. May we not also ask him, and the whole array of traditional cosmologists, how they know that the Hebrews did not think of the waters under the earth as vaporous, and as usually vaporized to the point of invisi- bility like the corresponding waters above the earth? Even in the days when Exod. 20. 4 was written human thought had some degree of self-consistency.
CHAPTER III
THE BABYLONIAN UNIVERSE NEWLY INTERPRETED1
Few studies in ancient cosmology can more entertain or instruct the investigator of to-day than a careful comparison of the seven dia- grams published as correct pictures of the Babylonian universe in the works named be- low.2 No two of the seven agree. Moreover, the first represents the Zodiac as at a vast distance above the sphere of the fixed stars —a proceeding which at the start disarranges all ordinary astronomic ideas. Equally un- picturable in my imagination is the seventh of the series, the world sketched by Radau. Again and again have I tried to construct it in thought, but every time have failed. Even Jensen in his great work gives us for "the place of the Convocation of the Gods" (Du-azag)
1 This chapter was printed in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for October, 1908, and by courteous consent of the Council of that body is here reproduced.
2 The reader is earnestly requested to turn to these diagrams and to note their striking divergences:
1. Isaac Myer, Qdbalah, Phil., 1888, p. 448.
2. Hommel, Babylonischer Ursprung der Aegyptischen Cvltur, 1892, p. 8.
3. Hommel, Aufsatze und Abhandlungen, 1901, Th. iii, 347.
4. Jensen, Kosmologie der Babylonier, 1890, Appendix.
5. Maspero, Dawn of Civilization, 1892, p. 543.
6. Whitehouse, article "Cosmogony," Hastings, Dictionary of the Bible.
7. Hugo Radau, The Creation-Story of Genesis, 1902, p. 56. Professor HommePs second is a marked improvement on his first.
In connection with it he prints a generous reference to the present writer.
33
34 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
dnly a pitch-dark cavern in the thin crust of his sea-filled hemispherical earth, and has no place for Hades but another cavern located in the same thin crust and oddly enough far above the cave of the gods!1 Surely there is a call for new attempts to think the thoughts of these ancient Semites after them.
For the reconstruction of the Babylonian universe we have no less than twelve most valuable data derived from the study of ancient Babylonian texts. These will now be enumer- ated, and that the enumeration may command the greater confidence I shall connect with each of them one or more references to equiva- lent statements by experts of high authority in this field. Here follow the data:
1. In the Babylonian conception of the universe the earth occupied the central place. Winckler expressly calls the earth "the accepted center" of the planetary system of this people.2
2. The northern half of the earth was viewed as the upper, the southern as the under. The former was associated with light and life, the lat- ter with darkness and death. Winckler remarks : "The South and the Underworld are identical."3
1 Jensen's diagram, Anglicized in terminology and much enlarged, may- be seen in Worcester's Genesis in the Light of Modern Knowledge, oppo- site page 109.
2 Himmels- und Weltenbild der Babylonier als Grundlage der Weltanschau- ung und Mythologie aller V biker, von Dr. Hugo Winckler, Leipzig, 1901, p. 34.
'"Identisch ist also Siiden und Unterwelt auch hier wie bei unserer kosmischen Ausrichtung der Erdachse." — P. 24.
THE BABYLONIAN UNIVERSE 35
3. The upper or northern half of the earth was regarded as consisting of seven stages (tupukati), ranged one above another in the form of a staged pyramid. Speaking of the staged temple of Nippur, Sayce observes: "It was a model of the earth, which those who built it believed to be similarly shaped, and to have the form of a mountain whose peak penetrated the clouds."1
4. In like manner the antarctic or under half of the earth was supposed to consist of seven stages corresponding to those of the upper half. As Jensen expresses it: "The seven tupukati of the underworld are a fac- simile of the seven tupukati of the overwork!."2
5. Like the quadrilateral temples modeled
^Gifford Lectures, London, 1903, p. 374. See also Boscawen, in the Oriental and Biblical Journal, Chicago, 1884, p. 118. For interesting parallels see W. R. Letherby, Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth, London, 1892. The existence in Egypt of a type of pyramid with sloping stages, and the clear traces in India of a conception of the earth as spheroidal in figure despite a series of rising zones or retreating mountain-terraces upon its surface, suggest that the stages of the Babylonian earth should not be mentally pictured as necessarily implying their possession of the sharply angular outline presented by a staged temple, or by the figure in our diagram. It is quite possible that in Babylonian thought the quadrangularity of the earth was largely a conscious and deliberate emphasizing of the cardinal points of the heavens and earth, and that its pyramidal form in architecture was as conscious and deliberate a deviation from supposed reality as are with us the parallel meridians and fiat zones of a Mercator's Chart of the World. Moreover, as the celestial spheres are of a substance so crystalline as to be absolutely invisible to men, so the rising stages of the earth are to be viewed as less and less grossly material, until at length all appearance of mate- riality vanishes, leaving the highest as invisible (save in the case of a divinely sent trance, Gen. 28. 12) as are the heavens in which they are lost.
2 Die Kosmologie der Babylonier, Strassburg, 1890, p. 175.
36 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
after it, the earth of the Babylonians was four-cornered. In this particular it agreed with the conception ascribed to the ancient Egyp- tians, Hebrews, Chinese, and to the Indo- Aryans of the Rig-Veda period.1
6. In Babylonian thought, Winckler says, "there were seven heavens and seven hells."2 This belief is one of untraceable antiquity. Writing on this subject, Hommel remarks: "The idea of the seven heavens seems to go back to the beginnings of Semitic culture."3
7. Above the seventh heaven was another, the "highest heaven," that of the fixed stars; called by the Babylonians the "heaven of Ami," after the name of the oldest and highest of their gods.4
8. This eighth heaven was divided by the Zodiac into two corresponding portions, an upper, or Arctic, and an under, or Antarctic. At the pole of the former Ami had his palace and throne.5
1 Sayce, loc. cit. Also, Encyclopaedia Biblica, ii, col. 1148. C. Puini, in Rivista Geograf. Ital., 1895, p. 12. H. W. Wallis, The Cosmology of the Rig-veda, London, 1887, p. 112. F. L. Pulle, Cartografi-a deW India, 1901, p. 18.
2 "Was die obere Welt hat, hat auch die untere. Es giebt demnach sieben Himmel und sieben Hollen oder Hollenstufen." — Op. cit., p. 34. Also, E. Bischoff, Babylonisch-Astrales im WeltbUd, etc., Leip., 1907, pp. 28, 29, 34, 36, 40, 104, 156, 161.
3 Die Astronomie der alten Chaldaer. In Ausland, 1891, p. 381.
4 Winckler, p. 34. Also, A. Jeremias, Das Alte Testament im Lichte des alten Orients, Leipzig, 1904, p. 10.
5 Winckler, p. 36. Jensen, p. 24. A. Jeremias, p. 27: "Der Sitz Ami's ist der nordlich vom Tierkreis gelegene Himmel mit dem Nordpol des Himmels als Mittelpunkt. Dort ist sein Thron."
THE BABYLONIAN UNIVERSE 37
9. In Babylonian thought the north pole of the heavens was the true zenith of the cosmic system, and the axis of the system upright; consequently, as among the ancient Egyptians and Indo-Aryans, the diurnal movements of the sun and moon were regarded as occurring in a horizontal plane. Speaking of the Baby- lonians, Maspero says: "The general resem- blance of their theory of the universe to the Egyptian theory leads me to believe that they, no less than the Egyptians, for a long time believed that the sun and moon revolved round the earth in a horizontal plane."1
10. Proceeding outward from the central earth, the order of the seven known planets was as follows: Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.2 That their respective distances from the earth were not uniform was already known. Such at least seems to be the opinion of Winckler, and certainly is that of Hommel.3
11. In order to pass from the upper half of the earth to its under half, that is, from the abode of living men to the abode of the dead, it was necessary to cross a body of water which on every side separated the two abodes.
1 Davm of Civilization, p. 544. Cf. Robert Spence Hardy, Legends and Theories of the Buddhists, London, 1866, pp. 85-89 ;L. A. Waddell, The Buddhism of Thibet, 1895, p. 78.
2 Winckler, p. 35. Hommel calls it "die uralte feste Anordnung." Aufsatze und Abhandlungen, iii, 375-383.
3 See Winckler, p. 34. "In immer grosserem Abstand von der Erde" is the language of Hommel in his Insel der Seligen, p. 38.
38 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
This explains the language of Dr. A. Jeremias where he says: "When one sails out upon the ocean, one finally comes down into the Under- world."1
12. According to Diodorus Siculus (ii, 31), the Babylonians considered that twelve desig- nated stars south of the Zodiac stood in the same relation to the dead as do the twelve corresponding stars north of the Zodiac to men still in the land of the living. This representa- tion clearly makes the living and the dead the residents respectively of antipodal surfaces of one and the same heaven-inclosed earth. In like manner, in the Creation Tablets (V, line eight), Anu and Ea are antipodally located gods, the former having his palace and throne at the north pole of the heavens, the latter his palace and throne at the south pole.2
Such, then, according to latest scholarship, are the fundamental features of the ancient Babylonian world-concept. The task of com- bining them is simple. One can but wonder that there should have been such mistakes and such delay in effecting the due adjustment. In the diagram prefixed as a frontispiece to this volume each requirement of the twelve
i Op. cit., p. 10. Also, his "Holle und Paradies bei den Babylonier" (Der alte Orient, Jahrg. 1, Heft 3), S. 14ff. Also, F. Jeremias, in Chante- pie de la Saussaye's Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte, 2d ed., 1905, Bd. i, 275. Tiele, Histoire Compare" e des Anciennes Religions, p. 177.
sWinckler, Altorientalische Forschungen, Leipzig, 1902, p. 201.
THE BABYLONIAN UNIVERSE 39
enumerated propositions is fully met. The upright central line represents the polar axis of the heavens and earth in perpendicular position. The two central seven-staged pyra- mids represent respectively the upper and lower halves of E-KUR, the earth. The seven dotted half-circles above the earth represent the "seven heavens" of the planets; the cor- responding hemispheres below the earth the "seven hells." The outermost sphere — the upper half cut away, as were the seven heavens, to show the interior of the system — is of course the all-including starry sphere, the sphere girdled by the many-mansioned Zodiac,1 and made scintillant by the appointed astral Watchers who keep their patient vigils one half above the living, one half above the antip- odal dead.
How wonderful a world-view was this! How perfect the symmetries of the system! Its duplex center lived on in Pythagorean thought as "Earth and Counter-earth."2 Doubtless it influenced Plato when in the Timaeus he said, "To Earth, then, let us assign the form of a cube." It still lives on in the four-cornered earth of the New Testament, and in that of the Mohammedan teaching. Its heavens
>The "lunar mansions" of astrology are all within the Zodiac.
2 The often misunderstood x^v aQd avrixOuv. O. F. Gruppej Die kosmische Systeme der Griechen, Berlin, 1851, p. 82. Correctly under- stood by Cicero, Tusc. Disp., i, 28, 68. The "double earth" of ancient Egyptian cosmography is another parallel.
40 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
lived on in the "homocentrie" "crystalline spheres" of the Greek astronomers, and through the influence of Ptolemy's Almagest shaped the thinking of all savants, philosophers, and poets till the days of Copernicus. Dante's heavens are those of Ptolemy, and Ptolemy's are those of the ancient worshipers of Anu and Sin. Their music is still audible, their form still visible, in Milton's Ode to the Nativity. But while the presence of this highly mathe- matical world-concept is thus traceable through millenniums, its origin was among a people antedating the Babylonians. A truer name, therefore, for the system would be the Pre- Babylonian. The East Semites received it from their predecessors in the possession of the Euphratean valley, the Akkado-Sumerians. At least, such is the opinion and the teaching of our highest experts.1 Did the system origi- nate among these non-Semitic predecessors in the valley? This has been assumed, but no man can pretend to know.
1 H. Zimmern, Die KeUinschriften und das Alte Testament, 3. Aufl., 1902, S. 349.
CHAPTER IV
THE BIBLICAL, RABBINICAL, AND KORANIC UNIVERSE IN THE LIGHT OF THE BABYLONIAN
In the opening chapters of this book we saw- good reason to challenge the correctness of the commonly accepted representation of the Hebrew heavens and earth. May not the now recovered Babylonian world-view help us to a better understanding of the conception which underlies the thought and language of the Old and New Testament writers?
To my mind the strongest argument in favor of the current representation, and therefore the strongest assignable reason for denying that the biblical universe was substantially identical with the Babylonian, is found in those biblical passages in which, as in the account of Korah and his company (Num. 16. 31, 32), the earth is represented as opening her mouth and engulfing living men, who then are declared to have "gone down alive into Sheol." Such language harmonizes so well with the idea that Sheol is an underground cavern, to be reached only through a rift in the overarching earth-crust, that Whitehouse and Schiaparelli and the rest seem for the moment justified in their depictions. As an
41
42 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
argument, however, such passages have little weight.
In the first place, it is plain that a rift through the solid earth of the Babylonians would as effectually carry engulfed men into the under- world as would a somewhat shorter rift through the upper half of the hollow disklike earth presented us by Whitehouse and Schiaparelli.
In the second place, if Sheol was really be- lieved to be an enormous cavern in the bowels of the earth, reached in Korah's case by an extemporized entrance, where was the ordinary and normal entrance for Korah's countrymen in general? Barbarians have been known to point out cave-mouths supposed by them to lead to an underworld, but no biblical writer has a hint respecting any such earth-piercing path divinely provided for all ghosts descending to Sheol. Granting the existence of such a path, where was its upper end, its entrance- gate? In the territory of which tribe was the uncanny rift, the rendezvous of all the newly dead? If it was beyond the bounds of the Holy Land, to what unhallowed heathen land were the pious and unpious ghosts of Israel compelled to journey in search of the tunnel- mouth through which they could hope to reach their long home and be gathered to their fathers? Such questions need no answer; they belong to a world utterly foreign to Hebrew thought.
BIBLICAL, RABBINICAL, AND KORANIC 43
Possibly some one will deny the need of any such tunnel in the case of ghosts, and claim that according to Hebrew belief the disem- bodied spirit in the moment of its disembodi- ment received power to penetrate the soil and the unrifted rock overarching the Sheol cavity. But this is to go quite beyond the evidence. Nowhere do the biblical writers claim or imply that solid material barriers impose no limita- tions upon the free movements of a disembodied human spirit. Furthermore, in case the soil and every part of the solid earth were as freely traversable by disembodied human spirits as the present supposition implies, the need of any cavern for the assembled and assembling spirits in the heart of the earth would be quite done away. Matter-filled space would be as availa- ble as any other.
In the third place, the most ancient known pictures of a human soul after separation from the body represent it as winged, and birdlike.1 Illustrations in Egyptian art are numberless. Babylonian texts imply the same representa- tion. In perfect accord with this idea are the words found in the psalm traditionally con- sidered the oldest and most impressive in the Bible, the ninetieth, wherein we read that our fleeting life is soon cut off, but as soon as it is
1 See G. Weicker, Der Sedenvogd in der alten Literatur und Kunst. Eine mythologisch-archaologische U titer suchung. Mit 103 AbbUdungen im Texte. Leipzig, 1907.
44 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
cut off "we fly away." Verily, wings were a strange equipment for penetrating the geologic strata beneath our feet!
Finally, if we may trust the exegesis of the apostle Paul, his countrymen, like the Baby- lonians, considered a passage across the ocean the same thing as a descent to the deep abodes of the dead. A comparison of Deut. 30. 11-13, with Rom. 10. 6-8, shows that he interprets the one transit as the perfect equivalent of the other.1
1 A word may be expected touching rakia, the term translated, or as many have already said, mistranslated, in Gen. 1, by the term "firma- ment." It would require a book many times larger than the entire Pentateuch to contain all that biblical scholars have written in attempted explanation of the word. Did it really mean to the writer the visible sky conceived of as a solid material vault constructed to "support," or to "keep back the waters of the heavenly ocean"? Most have said, yes; but many, no. Schiaparelli, as we have seen, pictures the structure as double, so also does Radau ; but while Schiaparelli makes both vaults celestial in location, Radau makes one celestial, but the other its sub- terrestrial counterpart (The Creation-Story of Genesis, pp. 51ff.). Most interpreters have described the rakia as a solid; some, however, have claimed that it should be conceived of as a "fluid." Some, like Basil, seem to describe it as of a substance altogether impalpable and super- sensible. O. M. Mitchel translates it "vacuity," and understands it to mean the vacuity resulting from the separation of the parts of the nebula out of which the solar system was formed and their aggregation around the different planetary centers and their common center (The Astronomy of the Bible, pp. 190f.). A German contemporary of his, Professor J. H. Kurtz, of Dorpat, created much discussion by arguing at length, in his book on Bibel und Astronomie (1853), in favor of iden- tifying rakia with the atmospheric air enveloping our planet. Long before him, however, an English physician, Dr. Samuel Pye, in his Mosaic Theory of the Solar or Planetary System (1766), had gone yet farther in this direction, and had paraphrased Gen. 1. 6, 7 as follows: "And God said, Let there be a firmament, an expanse, an atmosphere, in the midst of the waters, that are upon the surface of the earth, and of every primary planet, and the waters that by means of these atmospheres will be raised and suspended above the waters on their surfaces; and let it, on each of them, divide the waters from the waters. And God made
BIBLICAL, RABBINICAL, AND KORANIC 45
Passing now from negative considerations to the question, What view of the universe was held by the writers of the Old and New Testa- ment? six points of fundamental import should be noted:
First. Inasmuch as the Hebrews were younger kinsmen of the East Semites and their tribal territories in Canaan long under earlier Baby- lonian influence, and inasmuch as their earliest calendrical terms and adjustments, such as the
a firmament, or expanse, an atmosphere, to the earth, to every other planet, and comet; and (as exhalations proceed from the surface of its body) to the sun itself; and divided the waters (or fluid matter) which were under the firmament, from the waters, or fluid matter, which were above the firmament, on each of them, and it was so" (pp. 12, 13). Besides the above interpretations, I have seen it described as a "line," a "circle," a "plate," a world-wide surface "without thickness," a "region," the "first," the "third," or again the "eighth" of the Ptolemaic spheres, and so on. In 1904, Dr. A. Jeremias, in Das alte Testament im IAchte des alten Orients, p. 78, identified the rakia with the Zodiac (Tierkreis), but in his second edition (1906) he inclines to favor Winckler's lately published view (Forschungen, iii, 387), according to which the total Earthrealm (Erdreich) is, or rather was, before the Priestly Writer forgot himself and got his "ideas mixed," the rakia separating the upper and the under waters. This somewhat resembles Radau's view. From a reference in Jeremias, I infer that something analogous is to be found in J. Lepsius, Das Reich Christi, pp. 227f. (1903), a work which I have not seen. If any reader is unable to content himself with a free choice from among the foregoing interpretations, he has still an alternative remaining, for in three differently edited editions of the article in Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, sub voce, it is solemnly stated that the rakia is a species of power, and (despite Gen. 1. 8) one which should be carefully distinguished from the heavens, "the former being the upheaving power, the latter the upheaved body." In the same article, strange to say, the same writer describes this identical rakia as that "in which they" — the sun, moon, and stars — "are fixed as nails, and from which consequently they might be said to drop off (Isa. 14. 12)." A fast-setting sun, "fixed as a nail" in "the upheaving power" of the heavens, would certainly be an interesting object for contemplation ! The advent of E. W. Maunder's Astronomy of the Bible (1908) permits us to hope that a new and better day is dawning.
46 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
names of the months, the beginning of the year, etc., were of Euphratean origin, there is a strong antecedent probability that their astronomic and cosmologic ideas also were directly or indirectly derived from the Baby- lonians (or from the ancestors of both peoples), and corresponded to the Euphratean.1
Second. The Hebrew use of a plural term for the heavens, sometimes intensified to "the heaven of heavens," precisely corresponds with the immemorial Babylonian usage, and implies in the thought of the Hebrew writers a plurality of heavens. Professor Salmond, after a recent reexamination of the whole question, wrote: "In view of the evidence, the most reasonable conclusion is that the conception of the heavens which pervades the Old Testament and the New (not excepting the Pauline writings, though Saint Paul mentions only the third heaven and Paradise) is that of a series of seven heavens"2
Third. The biblical references to the "four corners (ywiai) 0f the earth," and cognate expressions, imply a conception of the earth corresponding in this particular to the Baby-
* For an excellent estimate of the influence of Babylonia on Israel, see Robert William Rogers, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, New York, 1908, pp. 92ff., 140ff., et passim.
2 Hastings, Dictionary of the Bible, ii, 334. Writing of "Paradise," the same author says: "There is abundant evidence that the belief in a plurality of heavens prevailed among the Jews. But it is doubtful whether it was a belief in a threefold heaven. The evidence is rather to the effect that the prevailing, if not the only, conception among the Jews of our Lord's time was that of a sevenfold heaven." — Hastings, Sii, 671.
BIBLICAL, RABBINICAL, AND KORANIC 47
Ionian as above interpreted. Even the "New Earth" in the Apocalypse is in the form of a foursquare terraced city, whose length and breadth and height are equal (Rev. 21. 16).
Fourth. The Old and New Testament pas- sages that contrast the depth of Sheol or Hades with the height of the heavens, and those which speak of "The Kingdom of the Heavens," or of Christ as having "passed through the heavens," or of him as being "made higher than the heavens" — not to speak of others — acquire a new interest and a new pertinency the moment they are interpreted in harmony with the cosmological views first dis- coverable among the ancient Babylonians, but later — with only trifling modifications — current in the teachings of all the historically known Hellenic astronomers.1
Fifth. The already noticed equation of an over-sea voyage (Deut. 30. 11-13) and a descensus ad inferos (Rom. 10. 6-8) is no slight indication that in Hebrew thought the relation of the upper to the under world was precisely the same as in the Babylonian. So in Job 38. 16, 17, the uninterrupted passage of the poet's thought from "the recesses of the sea" to the
1 On the essentially Babylonian "homoeentric spheres" of Pythagoras, Parmenides, Eudoxus, Kallippus, Plato, Aristotle, and the rest, see J. L. E. Dreyer, History of Planetary Systems from Tholes to Kepler, Camb., 1906, pp. 21, 36, 87, 178, 188, 257, 259, 279, 289, 298ff. S. Op- penheim, Das astronomische Weltbild im Wandel der Zeit, Leip., 1906. Troels-Lund, Himmelsbild und Weltanschauung im Wandel der Zeit, 2te Aufl., Leip., 1906.
48 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
"gates of death" may well be another indica- tion of this habitual association of the two realms — just as in Homeric thought the realm of Aides ever borders upon that of Poseidon.1
Sixth. Philo of Alexandria, the most dis- tinguished contemporary of Jesus among Jewish teachers (born B.C. 20), regarded the universe as made up of the seven concentric planetary spheres, together with the all-including eighth sphere, and the central earth around which all revolved.2
On the whole, then, there are excellent reasons for believing that the universe of the Old and New Testament writers, like that of the earliest traceable Semites, was not of the "dish-and-cover" pattern, but rather of the old upright-axled and poly-uranian type. Professor Salmond goes so far as to say, "The evidence is all in favor of the affirmative" — that is, in favor of the opinion that the conception of a series of heavens is found in the Scriptures. Then he adds: "But the evidence which bears out the existence of the idea of a plurality of heavens also favors the idea of a sevenfold series of heavens."3 A study of the apocryphal literature only reinforces the evidence. Take for an example the Slavonian "Book of the Secrets of Enoch." Robert Henry Charles,
iSee also Job 26. 5; Psa. 69. 15; and Jonah 2. 2, 6. 2 See James Drummond's article on "Philo" in Hastings, Dictionary of the Bible, Extra Volume, p. 200.
'Hastings, Dictionary of the Bible, ii, pp. 321, 322.
BIBLICAL, RABBINICAL, AND KORANIC 49
everywhere recognized as the foremost authority on this newly discovered work, remarks: "The detailed account of the seven heavens in this book has served to explain difficulties in Old Testament conceptions of the heavens, and has shown beyond the reach of controversy that the sevenfold division of the heavens was accepted by Saint Paul, and by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, and probably in the book of Revelation."1 The ancient apocry- phal treatise known as The Ascension of Isaiah describes each of the seven heavens with no less particularity.
Passing to authentic Rabbinical literature we find the counterpart to all this; that is to say, a clear recognition of the sevenfold division of the space below the earth. And, as in the Babylonian conception, so also in the Rab- binical, each underworld as one descends is vaster than the last. And as in the Indo-Aryan conception the south-polar demons spend half the year in darkness and half in the blaze of the sun,2 so in the Rabbinical the occupants of the lowest hell have as torments alternating heat and cold, each six months in duration. This, of course, helps to identify the location of the Rabbinical Inferno as at one of the terrestrial poles. In all descriptions of such
*In Hastings, Dictionary of the Bible, i, 711. See also, Charles, The Book of the Secrets of Enoch, pp. xxx— xlvii. 2 The Cradle of the Human Race, p. 199.
50 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
regions we are apt to meet with details and amplifications more or less fantastic, and in the present case they are not lacking. The Jalkut Rubeni, for example, gives the following: "The seven abodes of Sheol are very spacious; and in each there are seven rivers of fire and seven rivers of hail.1 The uppermost abode is sixty times less than the second, and thus the second is sixty times larger than the first, and every abode is sixty times larger than that which precedes it. In each abode are seven thousand caverns, and in each cavern seven thousand clefts, and in each cleft seven thousand scorpions; each scorpion hath seven limbs, and on each limb are one thousand barrels of gall. There are likewise seven rivers of rankest poison, which when a man toucheth he bursteth; and the destroying angels judge him and scourge him every moment, half the year in the fire, and half the year in the hail and snow. And the cold is more intolerable than the fire."2
It hardly need be added that the heavens of Rabbinical tradition were seven;3 and that "in the Rabbinical point of view, the superb
1 Gehenna, as well as Sheol, has "seven departments, one beneath the other." The Jewish Encyclopaedia, vol. v, 217. But in The Chronicles of Jerahmeel Sheol is the highest and "Gehinnom" the lowest of the seven divisions of the one underworld. Gaster's translation, London, 1899, p. 38.
a Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judenthum, vol. ii, p. 345 (English transla- tion, vol. ii, p. 52).
'Eisenmenger, op. tit., i, 460. See also notes of Wetstein, Adam Clarke, or Stanley on 2 Cor. 12. 2. American Journal of Theology, January, 1908, p. 99.
BIBLICAL, RABBINICAL, AND KORANIC 51
throne of King Solomon, with the six steps leading up to it, was a symbol of the highest heaven with the throne of the Eternal above the six inferior heavens (1 Kings 10. 18-20). "l In the Rabbinical descriptions of the heavens and hells one striking feature has often caused remark. The two regions are said to "adjoin or touch each other" (Jewish Encyclopaedia, ix, 517). But if the abode of God is almost infinitely above our earth, and the abode of the lost as far below, how can the two be said to "join."? In this many writers have found only contradiction and absurdity. A glance at our diagram of the Pre-Babylonian Universe removes every difficulty and reveals entire consistency of thought. By showing that the heavens and hells are simply the upper and nether halves of the earth-inclosing spheres of the universe, the diagram gives optical demon- stration that each heaven and each correspond- ing hell must be in mutual contact at every point of their equatorial junction.2
1 McClintock and Strong, Cyclopaedia, vol. iv, p. 122.
2 One other feature in Rabbinical cosmography has much perplexed modern investigators. Many writers have referred to it; among others just lately Dr. A. Jeremias in his ATAO, 2d ed., p. 557n. From Baba Bathra, ii, 25b, he quotes the following, but has no explanation to offer: "The sky surrounds the earth like Aksadra (encircling three sides, but not the north side); and people explain this by saying, On that side there is no sky; i.e., it is open, the sky has a hole in it." So long as we conceive of the four cardinal points of the compass as lying in the plane of our own level horizon, a statement of this kind is, of course, an in- soluble enigma. On the other hand, the moment we adjust north and south to the zenith and nadir of the heavens, as did the ancient Semites, the reason is perfectly clear why in the sky visible to the Hebrews an
52 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
Should any reader desire further light upon this particular world-view, he is recommended to turn to the article entitled "Hebrew Visions of Hell and Paradise/' printed in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain, in the volume for the year 1893. Therein the author, M. Gaster, Ph.D., translates for the first time into English a number of ancient texts in some of which Moses is represented as by God's permission and help making a tour of inspection through the seven heavens, the hells, and Paradise. Wonderful regions are found and beings of incredible dimensions.1
Closely related to the Rabbinical world- concept is that of the Koran and of the accepted expounders of the Koran. This can occasion no surprise to anyone who considers the extent to which the Koran is a rifacimento of Rab- binical ideas and traditions. The hells are
orifice should be said to be in the north and nowhere else. There only could an opening afford a permanent passage from earth to the heavenly regions.
1 A. Wunsche gives a still more recent demonstration of our thesis in Ex Oriente Lux, ii, 1906, pp. 113-168. Just after the above was written Dr. Erich Bischoff published his admirable treatise, Bdbylonisch-Astrales im WeltbUde des Thalmud und Midrasch, Leipzig, 1907. Therein, pp. 39, 40, he refers to the close neighborhood of heaven and hell in the Rab- binical teaching and explains it precisely as I have suggested above. Had he represented the upper and lower halves of the earth as antipodal counterparts — as he does the two heaven-halves — he would have escaped his difficulty in harmonizing the "telluric" hell with the "cosmic" one (confessed on p. 39). Moreover, had Orelli, in his criticism of Bischoff (Theol. Literaturzeitung, 1905, Nr. 24), understood and explained the terraced form of the sky-piercing Babylonian earth, he might much more easily have come to an agreement with him as to the unreason- ableness of tracing so remarkable a Semitic conception to India, and to seven "V egetationsstufen des Himalaya" (p. 156n).
BIBLICAL, RABBINICAL, AND KORANIC 53
seven; and their names, with references to Koranic passages, may be seen in Professor Palmer's Introduction to his translation of the Koran (p. lxx), or in Hughes's Dictionary of Islam, article "Hell."1 The heavens are also seven; and if they had been a series of seven visible platforms connected by marble stair- ways, the lowest of the platforms resting on the summit of Mount Sinai and the highest standing high above the highest clouds, they could hardly have been pictured more realis- tically in the thought of the faithful. How perfectly acquainted with the supernal regions the naive believer felt himself to be, is well seen in the accepted account of Mohammed's ascent to the seventh, and of his repeated passages up and down between the sixth and seventh.2 In the Mishkatu '1-Masbih the story is told as follows :
Whilst I was sleeping upon my side, Gabriel came to me, and cut me open from my breast to below my navel, and took out my heart, and washed the cavity with Zamzam water, and then filled my heart with faith and science. After this, a white animal was brought for me to ride upon. Its size was between that of a mule and an ass, and it stretched as far as the eye could see. The name of the animal was Boraq. Then I mounted the animal, and ascended until we arrived at the lowest
1 Hughes adds: "For most of these circumstances relating to hell and the state of the damned, Mohammed was in all probability indebted to the Jews and, in part, to the Magians, both of whom agree in making seven distinct apartments in hell."
2 See Hughes, s. v. "Mi'raj," p. 251.
54 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
heaven, and Gabriel demanded that the door should be opened. And it was asked, "Who is it?" and he said, "I am Gabriel." And they then said, "Who is with you?" and he answered, "It is Mohammed." They said, "Has Mohammed been called to the office of a prophet?". He said, "Yes." They said, "Welcome Mohammed; his coming is well.", Then the door was opened; and when I arrived in the first heaven, behold, I saw Adam. And Gabriel said to me, "This is your father Adam; salute him." Then I saluted Adam, and he answered it and said, "You are welcome, O good son and good Prophet!" After that Gabriel took me above, and we reached the second heaven; and he asked the door to be opened, and it was said, "Who is it?" He said, "I am Gabriel." It was said, "Who is with you?" He said, "Mohammed." It was said, "Was he called?" He said, "Yes." It was said, "Welcome Mohammed; his coming is well." Then the door was opened; and when I arrived in the second region, behold, I saw John and Jesus (sisters' sons). And Gabriel said, "This is John, and this is Jesus; salute both of them." Then I saluted them, and they returned it. After that they said," Welcome, good brother andProphet." After that we went up to the third heaven, and asked the door to be opened; and it was said, "Who is it?" Gabriel said, "I am Gabriel." They said, "Who is with you?" He said, "Mohammed." They said, "Was he called?" Gabriel said, "Yes." They said, "Welcome Mohammed; his coming is well." Then the door was opened; and when I entered the third heaven, behold, I saw Joseph. And Gabriel said, "This is Joseph; salute him." Then I did so, and he answered it and said, "Welcome, good brother and good Prophet." After that Gabriel took me to the fourth heaven, and asked the door to be opened; and it was said, "Who is that?" He said, "I am Gabriel." It was said, "Who is with you?" He said, "Mohammed.". It was said, "Was he called?"
BIBLICAL, RABBINICAL, AND KORANIC 55
He said, "Yes." They said, "Welcome Mohammed; his coming is well." And the door was opened; and when I entered the fourth heaven, behold, I saw Enoch. And Gabriel said, "This is Enoch; salute him." And I did so, and he answered it and said, "Welcome, good brother and Prophet." After that Gabriel took me to the fifth heaven, and asked the door to be opened; and it was said, "Who is there?" He said, "I am Gabriel." It was said, "Who is with you?" He said, "Mohammed." They said, "Was he called?" He said, "Yes." They said, "Welcome Mohammed; his coming is well." Then the door was opened; and when I arrived in the fifth region, behold, I saw Aaron. And Gabriel said, "This is Aaron; salute him." And I did so, and he returned it and said, "Wel- come, good brother and Prophet." After that Gabriel took me to the sixth heaven, and asked the door to be opened, and they said, "Who is there?" He said, "I am Gabriel." They said, "And who is with you?" He said, "Mohammed." They said, "Is he called?" He said, "Yes." They said, "Welcome Mohammed; his coming is well." Then the door was opened; and when I entered the sixth heaven, behold, I saw Moses. And Gabriel said, "This is Moses; salute him." And I did so; and he returned it and said, "Welcome, good brother and Prophet." And when I passed him, he wept. And I said to him, "What makes you weep?" He said, "Because one is sent after me, of whose people more will enter Paradise than of mine." After that Gabriel took me up to the seventh heaven, and asked the door to be opened ; and it was said, "Who is it?" He said, "I am Gabriel." And it was said, "Who is with you?" He said, "Mo- hammed." They said, "Was he called?" He said, "Yes." They said, "Welcome Mohammed; his coming is well." Then I entered the seventh heaven, and, behold, I saw Abraham. And Gabriel said, "This is Abraham, your father; salute him." Which I did, and he returned it
56 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
and said, "Welcome, good son and good Prophet." After that I was taken up to the tree called Sidratu '1-Muntaha; and behold its fruits were like waterpots, and its leaves like elephants ears. And Gabriel said, "This is Sidratu '1-Muntaha." And I saw four rivers there; two of them hidden and two manifest. I said to Gabriel, "What are these?" He said, "These two concealed rivers are in Paradise; and the two manifest are the Nile and the Euphrates." After that, I was shown the Baitu '1-M'amur. After that a vessel full of wine, another full of milk, and another of honey, were brought to me; and I took the milk and drank it. And Gabriel said, "Milk is religion; you and your people will be of it." Mtev that the divine orders for prayers were fifty every day. Then I returned, and passed by Moses; and he said, "What have you been ordered?" I said, "Fifty prayers every day." Then Moses said, "Verily, your people will not be able to perform fifty prayers every day; and verily, I swear by God, I tried men before you; I applied a remedy to the sons of Israel, but it had not the desired effect. Re- turn, then, to your Lord, and ask your people to be released from that." And I returned; and ten prayers were taken off. Then I went to Moses, and he said as before; and I returned to God's court and ten prayers more were curtailed. Then I returned to Moses, and he said as before; then I returned to God's court, and ten more were taken off. And I went to Moses, and he said as before; then I returned to God, and ten more were lessened. Then I went to Moses, and he said as before; then I went to God's court, and was ordered five prayers every day. Then I went to Moses, and he said, "How many have you been ordered?" I said, "Five prayers every day." He said, "Verily, your people will not be able to perform five prayers every day; for, verily, I tried men before you, and applied the severest remedy to the sons of Israel. Then return
BIBLICAL, RABBINICAL, AND KORANIC 57
to your Lord, and ask them to be lightened." I said, "I have asked him till I am quite ashamed; I cannot return to him again. But I am satisfied, and resign the work of my people to God." Then, when I passed from that place a crier called out " I have My divine commandments, and have made them easy to My serv- ants.".
CHAPTER V
THE EGYPTIAN UNIVERSE
In the year 1888 an eminent Egyptologist published in France and in America his con- ception of the world-view of the ancient dwellers upon the Nile. Finding it clearer and more confidently set forth than any I had previously seen, I immediately made it, and the criticisms to which at the time I considered it open, the subject-matter of a lecture. This was given before a class of graduate students in Boston University early in 1889. In the "Outline" sheets distributed to the auditors illustrative diagrams were inserted. From the outline then used the following paragraphs are a verbatim extract:
The cosmology of the Egyptians has received almost no attention at the hands of professed Egyptologists. No treatise on the subject has yet been published. In a number of articles on other subjects Maspero has incidentally set forth the opinion that the Egyptians considered the form of the earth to be that of a flat oblong quadrangular slab with Egypt in its center. At each of the four corners there was an incredibly high post, forked at the top; these four pillars supported an immense "slab of iron" which constituted the firma- ment of heaven. Above this was a celestial ocean, the source of rain. The setting sun in returning to the east was not supposed to pass under the earth-slab nor
58
THE EGYPTIAN UNIVERSE
59
yet over the heaven-slab, but to slip through a hole in the mountain of the sunset; and embarking on a horizontal river to float between two parallel semi- circular mountain ranges which extend on the same general level as the earth-slab from the west point of the horizon round beyond the north point to the east point. This nocturnal voyage required twelve hours, during which time the sun was neither above nor be- neath either heaven or earth, but in Douaout,1 a region of darkness to the north of both.
Here follows a ground plan of the Egyptian earth according to Maspero (Fig. A) :
■~-,--^5
FIGURE A
Adding now the pillars for the heaven-slab, we have the following (Fig. B) :
Adding now the slab and the Douaout, as Maspero conceives it, we have the following (Fig. G) :
FIGURE B
FIGURE C (1) Bakhu, "Mountain of the Sunrise." (2) Appitto. (3) Mountain of sunset. (4) Unnamed. (5) Supports of heaven. (6) Egypt at center of earth-slab. (7) Iron heaven.
1 Commonly spelled Duat, or Tuat.
60 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
To find the fullest exposition, see Revue de FHistoire des Religions, Nov. and Dec, 1888, pp. 266-270. For a less satisfactory exposition, in English, see his article entitled "Egyptian Souls and their Worlds," in the New Princeton Review, July, 1888, pp. 23-36.1
This interpretation we cannot accept. It is not a critical construction of the data of Egyptian cosmology as furnished by the texts. ... It is sufficiently refuted by the following considerations :
I. The natural sky is so manifestly concave that no people has ever yet been found to believe it to be a flat slab, of iron or of any other matter.
II. The Egyptians had certain designations for heaven which expressed its curved form. See Brugsch, pp. 199, 200.
III. A people as intelligent as the ancient Egyptians in earliest historic ages cannot possibly have believed in the literal existence of four wooden or iron sky-props taller than the highest course of sun or star, and strong enough to sustain an iron slab as wide and long as the visible heavens, with an equally extended ocean above it.
1 "Earth was not to the Egyptians what it is to us, a globe carried safely through space by the laws of gravitation; everybody in Egypt knew that it was a fiat, oblong, quadrangular slab, more like the upper board of a table than anything they could imagine. It was surmounted by a flat iron roof stretching at some distance from it and supported by four strong pillars which prevented it from falling and crushing what was underneath. Thus the world was like a two-storied house, the various parts of which might be connected, as they are in our houses, by a staircase, or ladder. The Egyptians supposed that there was somewhere in the West a tall ladder which went up straight from earth to heaven. . . . Nobody was allowed to climb it unless he knew the password, and, even after giving it, those poor souls were in danger of never reaching the top who were not helped by the hand of some piteous divinity. Once on the solid floor of the firmament, they traveled north- ward until they came to the brink of the Boreal Ocean ; there they found the ferryboat or the ibis of Thot, the judge Osiris and his assessors, the Islands of the Happy, where they settled forever and ever amongst the indestructible stars, as indestructible as any of them." — From the above cited article in the New Princeton Review.
THE EGYPTIAN UNIVERSE 61
IV. The four heaven-pillars of the Egyptian mythology are never located by the Egyptian texts, as according to Maspero they would have to be, in four opposite directions from Egypt, but always in the remotest north. See Paradise Found, p. 74, and Brugsch's statement that I have there quoted. This fact alone is fatal to Maspero's entire interpretation.
V. In all Egyptian pictures where Shu is represented as supporting heaven upon his upstretched hands, he is placed directly under its middle or center. This in Maspero's interpretation would make middle Egypt his proper mythological standing ground. His proper sta- tion, however, according to all mythological texts, is in the highest north — in fact, at the terrestrial pole. See Brugsch, pp. 208-210. Compare the chapters in Paradise Found which treat of the "Navel of the Earth" and "Navel of the Heavens," and of the "Pillars of Atlas."
VI. Nearly every eminent Egyptologist except Mas- pero holds that the ancient Egyptians were acquainted with the true figure of the earth, and that they had all the astronomical knowledge necessary to enable them to orient pyramids and temples to a hair's breadth, and to harmonize the solar and lunar years. Brugsch, Chabas, Lieblein, and Lefebure are of this opinion. Lieblein, in fact, confidently maintains that the texts show that the ancient Egyptians already understood and believed the heliocentric theoiy of the universe. See also Rawlinson's Herodotus (Am. ed.), vol. ii, pp. 278, 279.
At the time the foregoing demurrer was written and placed in "manifolded" copies in the hands of my students, no man was esteemed a higher authority in the peculiar cosmography of Egypt than Maspero. It would be difficult to name a higher to-day. His exposition of
62 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
the Egyptian universe in the writings above named, and in his Etudes, remained unchal- lenged by any professor of Egyptological studies. It is not surprising, therefore, that as recent and reliable a cosmologist as J. L. E. Dreyer, in his History of Planetary Systems, still describes the world of the Egyptians as "a large box," and their stars as "suspended by cords." In the year 1895, however, in his work entitled The Dawn of Civilization, Maspero himself introduced into his earlier teachings some modifications, and presented a picture of his own devising to illustrate his riper view of the Egyptian cosmos. This picture we here reproduce for the study of the reader.
His description in this revised form reads as follows: "They imagined the whole universe to be a large box, nearly rectangular in form, whose greatest diameter was from south to north, and its least from east to west. The earth, with its alternate continents and seas, formed the bottom of the box; it was a narrow, oblong, and slightly concave floor, with Egypt in its center. The sky stretched over it like an iron ceiling, flat according to some, vaulted according to others. Its earthward face was capriciously sprinkled with lamps hung from strong cables. Since this ceiling could not re- main in mid-air without support, they invented four columns, or rather four forked trunks of trees, to uphold it, similar to those which main-
THE EGYPTIAN UNIVERSE
63
tained the primitive house. But it was doubt- less feared lest some tempest should overturn them, for they were superseded by four lofty peaks rising at the four cardinal points and connected by a continuous chain of moun-
THE EGYPTIAN UNIVERSE (According to Maspero.) Section taken from Hermopolis. barque of the sun on the celestial river.
To the left, the
tains. . . . These were not supposed to form the actual boundary of the universe; a great river, analogous to the Ocean-stream of the Greeks, lay between them and its utmost limits. This river circulated upon a kind of ledge
64 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
projecting along the sides of the box a little below the continuous mountain chain upon which the starry heavens were sustained. On the north of the ellipse, the river was bordered by a steep and abrupt bank which soon rose high enough to form a screen between the river and the earth."
The modifications here introduced are slight and of doubtful merit. The sun is made to set, not at a horizon level with the Sahara, but at one only "a little below" the level of the suspended stars in the zenith of the observer. Who can believe that the builders of the pyra- mids, watching a sunset, saw any such non- existent mountain heights to the west of them? And who can believe that any people capable of identifying to-day's sun with the sun of yesterday, and capable of inventing a real boat and a hidden world-river for the purpose of accounting for his reappearance in the east after his disappearance in the west, would be ignorant of the fact that the moon and stars also travel across the sky to their setting, and that consequently they cannot possibly be cabled or chained to an immovable sky-canopy of iron? It is hard to be patient with an author who can soberly ascribe such incredible crudities to the finders and the users of the Sothic year.1
1 It seems quite time that some qualified expert should give us a thorough study on "The Nile of Heaven." How utterly unlike the
THE EGYPTIAN UNIVERSE 65
The latest writers on Egyptian science and religion — Breasted, Budge, Petrie, Erman, Stein- dorff, Von Strauss-und-Torney, Wiedemann, Spiegelberg, Schack-Schackenburg, Naville, and the rest — give us no noticeable improvement on Maspero's world-picture.1 The cosmology which they express, or more commonly content them- selves with implying, is in most cases simply inconstruable in thought. And since all our translators of the original Egyptian texts are men who neither expect nor search for any intelligible world-concept in those texts, it is not to be anticipated that other investigators, unable to decipher technical terms and to test conjectures, will soon be able to help our baffled minds. However, now that we have discovered some unsuspected unity and ration- ality in the cosmological thought of the ancient Babylonians and their predecessors, may we not hope that at an early date some young and uncommitted Egyptologist will feel impelled to investigate the question whether the Baby-
celestial Nile of Maspero's picture is the Nile of heaven in the following text given in Erman's Religion of the Egyptians, p. 68: "Thou didst create the Nile in the depth and dost lead him hither at thy pleasure to give nourishment to men. Thou didst create the life-nourishment of all distant lands and didst set a Nile in heaven that it may flow down to them ; he forms waves upon the mountains like an ocean and moistens their fields. How beautiful are thy decrees, thou Lord of Eternity. The Nile of heaven didst thou give over to the strange peoples and the animals of the desert, but the Nile from the depth comes for Egypt." 1 Wiedemann ascribes to the Egyptians a belief in three Sheols : one above the earth, one on the earth, and one under the earth. Die Toten und ihre Reiche im Glauben der alien JSgypter, Leipzig, 1900, S. 19.
66 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
Ionian world-idea may not prove something of a clue to the Egyptian?
Light is already coming, and as of old from the east. The fact that Lepsius found what seemed to him evidence of a plurality of heavens in Egyptian thought is encouraging. Many things in Brugsch favor the supposition that the Egyptian cosmos resembled the prehistoric Euphratean. For example, he finds that the stars are over the heads of the inhabitants of Hades,1 and this precisely answers the last of the twelve requirements in Babylonian cos- mology. If, as the Assyriologists unanimously assert, a cosmological symbolism underlay the pyramidal structures of Babylonia, why not also those of Egypt? And if, as Sayce says, it was the four-cornered and pyramidal earth which was intentionally imaged in sanctuaries in the valley of the Euphrates, why not also in those others in the valley of the Nile?2 Winckler affirms that the culture of Babylonia and that of Egypt are no more to be regarded as distinct than are the civilizations of two modern civilized states.3 In the same passage
1 Religion und Mythologie der alten Mgypter, p. 204.
20. D. Miller, "The Pyramidal Temple," in the Oriental and Biblical Journal, Chicago, vol. i, pp. 169-178. Also, Boscawen, in the same, 1884, p. 1 18. Also other references in Cradle of the Human Race, p. 228ff . Flinders Petrie does not fail to remind us that under its sloped casing the Great Pyramid of Cheops is a seven-staged one. See The Academy, London, April 18, 1891.
3 Himmels- und Weltenbild, S. 30, 31. For a fuller and more technical treatment of these matters, see "Astronomisch-Mythologisches," in his Altorientalischen Forschungen, Bd. ii. Also, Hommel, Grundriss der
THE EGYPTIAN UNIVERSE 67
he shows that their astronomic divisions of world-time were identical. Even Maspero, as we have seen, notices the singular agreement found in the most ancient thought of the two peoples with respect to the horizontal motion of the sun. Each people applied to its under- earth — that far-off original of Dante's pendent Purgatorio Mount — terms strikingly descriptive of the inverted pyramid of our diagram. Among the terms applied to the Egyptian Amenti are, "mountain," "pyramid," "hidden mountain," "inverted precinct." Nor should it be forgotten that, corresponding to the Semitic expression "heaven of heavens," Naville has found in a Litany of Ra the counterpart expression, "The Hades of Hades."1 Furthermore, as in Mithra- ism, and in that survival of Babylonian lore which scholars call Sabeanism, so in the oldest Egyptian teaching, the "Ladder of heaven," according to St. Clair, had just seven steps.2 Corresponding hereto, in the Book of the Dead, chapter 144, we read of "seven halls" in the
Geographie und Geschichte des alten Orients, 2d. Aufl., 1904, S. 113ff. Alfred Jeremias, Der alte Orient und die dgyptische Religion, in the scientific supplement of Leipziger Zeitung, No. 91, 1905; new ed., Leip., 1907.
1 The Amenti of Amenti.
2 George St. Clair, in Biblia, Meriden, March, 1905, p. 371. When the Mithraic ladder had eight rounds, reference was expressly made to the heaven of the fixed stars as answering to the eighth. Franz Cumont, Mysteres de Mithra, Brux., 1899, i, 117. On the Egyptian Heaven- ladder, see Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians, i, 167f., 490; ii, 92, 241. As it afforded room for three abreast, a remarkable parallel may be found described and pictured in Sir Monier-Williams, Buddhism, pp. 414-419.
68 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
underworld. The latest published studies by English as well as by Continental experts re- confirm the traditional view of the derivation of the Egyptian culture from the valley of the Euphrates.1
It is the opinion of the present writer that in the end it will be found that, whatever the crudities and confusions of the magic texts and popular conjurations, the astronomy and cos- mology of the learned priests in Egypt through all traceable ages corresponded in every essential with the astronomy and cosmology taught in the Euphratean valley. When that time of insight shall come, let due honor be paid to Professor Eduard Roth, who in the face of an unbelieving generation of Egyptologists boldly affirmed that the doctrine of an eightfold series of heavens, seven of them planetary and one sidereal, all concentric and geocentric, was the genuine Old-Egyptian doctrine.2 Even he was anticipated by Guigniaut, a French savant whose learning entitled him to rank with the best cosmologists of his age.3
Since writing the foregoing I have been gratified to notice that in his recent course of lectures in this country Professor Steindorff, of Leipsic, has all unconsciously set forth in a single sentence what I am representing as hav-
1 Egypt and Western Asia in the Light of Recent Discoveries, by L. W. King and R. H. Hall, London, 1907, pp. 32-44.
2Geschichte unserer abendlandischen Philosophic, Bd. i, 167, 199; ii, 88. 3 Creuzer-Guigniaut, Religions de I'Antiquiti, vol. i, 488n.
THE EGYPTIAN UNIVERSE 69
ing been in all likelihood the time original world-view of the Egyptians. In reporting what seems to him a chaos of discordant con- ceptions of the cosmos, he incidentally remarks that according to some texts, "Under the earth is supposed to lie a counter-earth, which is made exactly like the earth and the heavens17 — our earth and heavens he means of course — uand which is peopled by the dead111 Let us hope that the worthy successor of Ebers may soon find in this conception of an underworld which is the perfect antipodal counterpart of our overworld the solution of many a problem.2
i Religion of the Ancient Egyptians, 1905, p. 35.
2 Long ago Pierret translated an oft-occurring Egyptian expression: "la double terre." Mythologie igyptienne, Paris, 1879, p. 74. On this Gerald Massey remarks: "It has been assumed by some Egyptologists that the 'two earths,' or 'the double earth,' were limited to the division of space into south and north by the passage of the sun from east to west. But in the making of Amenti the one earth was divided into upper and lower, with a firmament or sky to each, and thus the earth was dupli- cated." Ancient Egypt, London, 1907, p. 411. (Italics mine.) Here the true conception seems clearly expressed, but he just misses the true relation of the two earths as antipodal, for on page 410 he places the lower and its firmament "within the earth"; a mistake which appears again on page 413, in his criticism of Maspero's description of the uni- verse. On page 347 he even misses the true relation of the celestial hemispheres in passages where they are clearly pictured by reversed signs as upper and lower, and where their right relation has been sug- gested by Renouf and others.
CHAPTER VI
THE HOMERIC UNIVERSE
It is not greatly to the credit of Western scholarship that from the time of the Revival of Learning in Europe until well into the last quarter of the nineteenth century, no inter- preter of Homer suggested as a permissible conjecture the idea that the earth of the Iliad and Odyssey is an unsupported sphere or spheroid in the center of the starry sphere. When, in the year 1881, this idea was presented, first in the New York Independent, and a little later in the Boston University Year Book, volume ix, Dr. L. R. Packard, professor of the Greek language and literature in Yale Univer- sity, wrote: "If it is true, all our books and maps are wrong, and we must admit that all scholars have been mistaken in their under- standing of the ancient records." The general incredulity showed that fuller proof was needed. Accordingly, in 1885, in my work on The Cradle of the Human Race, I gave a more extended exposition of the entire subject, an exposition based upon a critical examination of every cosmographical datum found in the Homeric poems, and upon a study of all explanations which previous interpreters of repute had pub-
70
THE HOMERIC UNIVERSE 71
lished — the whole constituting a treatise of more than fifty octavo pages. In this it was shown that if the cosmographical statements and implications in Homer are to have any harmonious interpretation, the interpreter will have to proceed upon the theory that the earth of the poems is a sphere. So convincing was the demonstration that many eminent scholars on both sides of the Atlantic at once accepted the new doctrine.1 Indeed, since its publica- tion, the writer has not seen one attempt to answer his arguments or to reestablish by fresh evidence the former teaching that the Homeric earth is a "flat disk," having within it, or to the west of it on a level with its central plane, a cavern-like realm of Hades.
Of course, an interpreter may say, with Professor William Cranston Lawton, "Dr. War- ren's hypothesis accounts for the statements of Homer more clearly than any other," and still decline to find in the hypothesis indubitable proof that the Greeks in Homeric times, or even that one of their bards, held the conception of a spherical earth. Professor Lawton him- self, with characteristic frankness, remarks: "In my own mind I vacillate between accepting it and incredulity as to Homer's having any clear geometrical ideas and theories at all."2
1 See "Reception Accorded to the True Key to Ancient Cosmology, in the Appendix to The Cradle of the Human Race, pp. 450-457.
2 Art and Humanity in Homer, New York, 1896, p. 183.
72 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
Of course, also an interpreter may say, as many have, We are not concerned to find an Interpretation that harmonizes all the cosmo- logical statements of the poems, and for the reason that any discrepancies discoverable in those statements are welcome evidence in sup- port of our thesis that the poems are composite productions, written by many different authors, and reflecting the cosmological views of dif- ferent epochs. The author of our latest and best American handbook of Homeric antiquities, Professor Seymour, does not join this com- pany. While admitting the poet's use of earlier material, he says: "These poems have such unity as cannot easily be explained if they are the work of several poets/' And he refers his readers to my interpretation as affording a way in which Homer may not only be harmonized with himself, but also harmonized with Pindar.1 To reproduce in this place my Homeric studies of 1885 would give to our present chapter a disproportionate length and signifi- cance. Suffice it, therefore, to say that they presented from the Iliad and Odyssey what is to many convincing evidence, not only of a
1 Life in the Homeric Age, by Professor Thomas Day Seymour, New- York, 1907. Professor Seymour not only commends Friedrich Blass's admirable defense of the unity of the Homeric poems, but also adds: "The stamp of a great personality seems to lie upon each. But during recent years scholars have been so busy in searching for proofs of the different authorship of different parts of the poems that they have overlooked indications of unity of purpose, of spirit, and of execution" (p. 15).
THE HOMERIC UNIVERSE 73
spherical earth, but also of a plurality of heav- ens.1 Furthermore, a clear reference to the upright axis of the heavens and earth was found in the pillar of Atlas.2 A unitary cos- mical water-system closely corresponding to that of the Indo-Iranians was brought to view.3 New light was thrown upon the nightly journey of the sun from west to east.4 Finally, Hades was identified as an inverted country, beneath our earth yet not within it.5
In compensation for the brevity of this sum- mary, one of the discussions referred to is reproduced in the Appendix to the present volume. Also a paper on "Homer's Abode of the Living/' printed in the Boston University Year Book of 1885.
Comparing now the Homeric universe with the far-off Babylonian, we discover in the
1 The Cradle of the Human Race, pp. 338-350.
2 Pp. 350-358. On page 191f. reference was also made to the thor- oughly Babylonian doctrine of Anaxagoras, Anaximenes, and other Ionic philosophers, as to the primeval coincidence of the terrestrial zenith with the celestial pole, and the horizontal motion of the sun in its daily circuits around the perpendicular axis of the universe. This feature of early Greek teaching is well brought out in the article on "Astronomy" in Daremberg and Saglio, Dictionnaire des Antiquites Grecques et Romaines, Paris, 1S75.
3 Pp. 254-256, 333-335. « Pp. 336-338.
6 Pp. 467-487. That this Homeric conception of the underworld, as identical with the southern hemisphere of the earth, was still current centuries after the age of Homer, is evident from a remarkably clear cosmographic passage in the pseudo-Platonic Dialogue of Axiochus (371A). See comments in J. A. Stewart, The Myths of Plato, London, 1905, p. 110. Unwarrantable interpolations by the translator render the version of the passage by George Burges (in Bonn's Plato, vi, 53) quite worthless.
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former no mention of "seven" (or eight) as the number of the heavens, nor is there mention of the earth as four-cornered. On the other hand, however, we do find, in both systems, (1) the geocentric feature, (2) the plural heavens feature,1 (3) the perpendicular world-axis, (4) the earth-encompassing Ocean-stream, and (5) the outre mer Hades, under yet not within the earth. Taken together, the five correspondences are certainly striking evidence of a common origin of the two world-views.
The most noticeable point of disagreement is perhaps this, that while in Babylonian thought the earth terminates in the second heaven, and furnishes a palace floor for Shamash in his own particular sphere, it seems in the Odyssey to terminate in Kalypso's isle, at the "navel of the sea." Curiously enough, how- ever, the seeming disagreement includes a very remarkable common feature; for, like as the Babylonian symbol of Shamash shows the four- faced world-fountain from which all waters proceed, so in Kalypso's isle the same super- natural fount pours its fourfold flood toward four opposing points of the horizon.
Possibly another obscure point in Homer's cosmos may yet receive at least a partial illu- mination from the Babylonian. Interpreters
1 Tilak goes yet farther and says: "The Greek mythology speaks of the seven layers of heaven over one another." — The Arctic Home in the Vedas, 1903, p. 291.
THE HOMERIC UNIVERSE 75
have never quite known what to make of Homer's two world-thresholds, the one above and the other underneath his earth. These cannot be dismissed as the momentary fancy of a single poet, for they figure in Hesiod as well. How would they fit into the Babylonian world-view?
Perfectly. In our diagram we have seen that the great world-highway for gods traveling through the celestial spheres was called "The Way of Anu." Corresponding to this, beneath the earth, was "The Way of En-ki, or Ea." Along this latter w^ere the seven world-gates successively passed by Ishtar in her descent to visit the Queen of the Nether World. In the Journal of the American Oriental Society, in my first article on the Babylonian and pre- Babylonian cosmology, I suggested that the OZam-doors of Psalm 24 were the celestial counterparts of those passed by Ishtar; and this suggestion was unhesitatingly indorsed by Professor Sayce. But if such were the two series of world-doors, the one high above the earth, and the other as deep beneath it, the upper and under "thresholds" mentioned by Homer and Hesiod would perfectly fit the first or the last of the doors in each direction.1
Originally, other agreements between the Homeric and the Babylonian world-view may
1 The upper series of these world-doors is clearly and correctly con- ceived of by J. A. Stewart in his Myths of Plato, p. 351.
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well have existed; agreements which, at a later period, were gradually lost in the successive editings of the poems by redactors schooled in the later systems of Greek astronomy and cosmology. In any case, it is reasonable to conjecture that, long anterior to the Homeric age, the Greeks received their cosmology, as they did their alphabet, from Asiatic neighbors, who represented, and in their commercial and political intercourse diffused, the ideas and the teachings of the earlier Babylonian and pre- Babylonian culture. The Father of History, himself a Greek, did not hesitate to say that his countrymen "received from the Babylonians" even their division of the day into twelve hours and their instruments for accurately measuring them.1
Scarcely had I laid down my pen after writing the foregoing sentence when a new monthly issue of the Edinburgh Review of Theology and Philosophy came to hand. In it, fresh from the pen of the well-known translator of the Code of Hammurabi, Dr. C. H. W. Johns, of Cambridge University, stood the following: "What evolutionary process lay behind the
1 Herodotus, ii, 109. That is a testimony of antiquity; here is one of to-day: "When Thales, the Ionic philosopher, astounded the Ionic- Greek world by foretelling a solar eclipse, he borrowed his wisdom from the Babylonians, as Pythagoras drew his philosophy, with its symbolism of numbers, from the same Semitic source." Professor J. A. Craig, in Winckler's History of Babylonia, New York, 1907, p. 143. On the far- reaching influence of the Babylonians over Greek culture see Muller's Handbuch der Massischen Alterthumsurissenschaft, vi, 453-457.
THE HOMERIC UNIVERSE 77
Babylonian religious thought is lost for us in the mists of prehistoric time. We may indeed amuse ourselves by speculating as to its pro- gressive development, but we shall find it more useful to estimate exactly its nature and poten- tialities as the finished product, which alone we can know, and can now know so fully. It spread throughout the world, with local variations; Egypt and early Arabia, Elam and Iran, Persia, India, China, the Mycenaean culture, Etruscan and early American, prehistoric Europe, North Africa, Spain, and Crete show such marked traces of it that it may fairly be regarded as common to mankind. The only excuse for calling it Babylonian is that in Babylonia we find its oldest presentation, and that the clearest and fullest ; while astronomy is so fundamentally its ground-stuff that the home of astronomy must have the credit of its production. It is a philosophy of the cosmos — a religion . . . written on the sky itself, like the revelation Hume demanded."1
In such language something of the enthu- siasm of a cuneiform decipherer is doubtless to be seen, but where to find a really scholarly present-day estimate of the influence of Baby- lonian and pre-Babylonian ideas upon human thought and human history expressed in terms more sober, I scarcely know. Certainly the
1 Review of Theology and Philosophy, Edinburgh, vol. iii, p. 78.
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latest estimates presented by German scholars are often less moderate rather than more.1
J F. Delitzsch, Bdbd und Bibd. Winckler, Die Babylonische Kvltur in ihren Beziehungen zur unsrigen. A. Jeremias und H. Winckler, Irn Kampfe urn, den Alten Orient ; Wehr- und Streitschriften, Leip., 1907. C. Fries, "Babylonische und griechische Mythologie," in Neue Jahrb. fur das klassische Altertum, ix, 689fi\; "Untersuchungen," in Beitrdge zu alten Geschichte, iv, 227ff. ; and "Appdl," in the Nationalzeitung, Beilage of Oct. 5, 1906.
CHAPTER VII
THE INDO-IRANIAN UNIVERSE
In any attempt to determine the earliest world-view of the East Aryans the safest method is doubtless to begin with the oldest conception of the universe definitely set forth in Hindu or in Old Persian literature, and from this to work backward and upward in the interpreta- tion of any cosmographical data presented only incidentally and fragmentary in sources of an earlier date. Pursuing this course, one must first give attention to the world-concept set forth in the Surya-Siddhanta, a Sanskrit treatise mentioned with other astronomical works at least fourteen hundred years ago.
In this work the earth is described in express terms as "a globe," unsupported in empty space, central in its relation to all heavenly bodies, and with its polar axis — like the Baby- lonian— perpendicular in position. At its upper or northern pole an extremely lofty mountain lifts itself high into the heavens, while at the southern or under pole a corresponding moun- tain projects downward an equal distance. The former is represented as the mountain of the gods {sura), the latter as the mountain of the demons (asura). The two are the opposite
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ends of one stupendous material mass which, as a kind of core, extends directly through the earth from highest to lowest point.1 A girdle of oceanic waters surrounds the globe at the equator, separating the upper from the lower hemisphere. On or near the equator, equidis- tant from each other, are four notable cities which belong respectively to four large divisions of the upper hemisphere called "varshas." In consequence of the perpendicular position of the polar axis, the plane of the movements of the sun and moon around the earth is necessarily horizontal. North is synonymous with up, and south with down; yet the author fully understands that "up" and "down" are wholly relative terms; and he expressly states that "Everywhere upon the globe, men think their own place to be uppermost."2
Here, then, a thousand years before the days of Columbus, we have a perfectly clear-cut presentation of the earth as spherical, or rather spheroidal, in figure. Considering the age and country in which it appears, one must pro-
1 The name here given to this earth-core is Meru, but in other Sanskrit writings this name is almost invariably restricted to the upper end, that is, to the "Mountain of the gods," otherwise known as Su-Meru, that is, Meru the Beautiful. On the great antiquity of the word Meru, see Cradle of the Human Race, p. 183 ; also p. 236.
2 See Surya Siddhanta, tr. by Ebenezer Burgess, with notes by W. D. Whitney, New Haven, U. S. A., 1860. Also the translation by Pundit Bapu Deva Sastri, Calcutta, 1861. — Sloka 53, chapter xii, reads as follows: "Everywhere upon the globe of the earth men think their own place to be uppermost ; but since it is a globe in the ether, where should there be an upper, or where an under side of it?"
THE INDO-IRAXIAN UNIVERSE 81
nounce the concept of great interest. Though strictly Indian, it cannot essentially misrepre- sent the Iranian conception, for in this also we find, with other correspondences, an upright world-axis, and the two antipodal polar moun- tains: Sacred Hara-Berezaiti in the North, and Arezur, dark mount of demons, in the South.
The Surya Siddhanta, as we have seen, incidentally alludes to four of the nrythological "varshas" into which the surface of the upper hemisphere was supposed to be divided. This leads to the inquiry: How many such divisions were supposed to exist, and what were their names? This double question is fully an- swered in Sanskrit and Iranian documents of unknown antiquity; and as the number given in the Iranian tradition, seven, is the same as in the Indian, the evidence is strong that a sevenfold division of the northern or upper hemisphere was held and taught at a time prior to the separation of the primitive Indo- Iranian stock into its later Hindu and Persian branches. The further fact that in the two gradually differentiated languages the names of the individual divisions bear no resemblance to each other seems good evidence, so far as it goes, that neither people, in some period subsequent to their separation, borrowed its scheme from the other.
The Iranians called their geographical divi- sions "keshvares." The names and respective
82 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
locations of the seven are given in well-known Avestan texts; also their relation to the Holy Mount. Like the varshas, the keshvares were supposed to be separated from each other by stupendous mountain ranges impassable by man. In both systems, the Persian and the Hindu, the highest and divinest division was the one out of whose center rose the heaven-piercing Mountain of the Gods. The productions and scenery of this region were little short of heav- enly. Its form in both systems was that of a perfect square. The Iranians called it Kvaniras, the Indians Ilavrita. In studies published in the year 1885/ the present writer gave diagrams showing the agreements and disagreements of the two mythological maps. These diagrams were the first ever attempted on a polocentric projection. After examining them and the accompanying exposition, Professor F. Spiegel, foremost of Iranists then living, wrote as follows: "So far as the argument moves within the circle of my studies, I can assure you of my perfect agreement. Your exhibition of the arrangement of the Indian dvlpas and Iranian keshvares has essentially corrected my own unclear ideas on this subject. Also of the correctness of your opinion respecting the cosmical water system of the prehistoric Indians and Iranians I am perfectly convinced." Thus far we have occupied ourselves with
i The Cradle of the Human Race, pp. 152, 159.
THE INDO-IRANIAN UNIVERSE 83
the earth's upper hemisphere merely; how now was the under hemisphere pictured in Indo- Iranian thought?
Notice, first of all, the perfect symmetry of the two halves of the upper hemisphere which- ever way we may imagine it divided by a vertical plane passing through its axis. Imagine the face of a mariner's compass painted on the horizontal top of holy Hara-Berezaiti, or of Su-Meru, and then let the division by the vertical plane be on the line marked north and south, and each half of the divided hem- isphere would be a perfect counterpart of the other. Let it be on the line marked east and west, and again each half would be a perfect counterpart of the other. Even on a line connecting the northeast and southwest, or the northwest and southeast angles of the moun- tain, the result would be the same. This fact suggests that, in a world so symmetrically constructed as this, we should antecedently expect to find that a plane halving the globe on the line of the equator would in like manner show the southern half to be a perfect counter- part of the northern. The fact that in the Surya-Siddhanta the two polar mountains are described as opposite and perfectly similar ends of one and the same outcropping earth-core, suggests the same idea of geographic cor- respondence throughout the two hemispheres. This antecedent expectation is further strength-
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ened when it is noticed that in the same treatise the parallelism is carried so far that a south- polar star is placed as far below the south-polar mount as the north-polar star is above the Mountain of the Gods. The full confirmation of the expectation seems to come when we dis- cover that, at least in Indian thought, the divisions of the under hemisphere were in number precisely the same as the varshas of the upper hemisphere, namely seven; and that while these underworld divisions were called patalas, nothing in the etymology of the name, or in the extant descriptions of the regions, is in the least inconsistent with the require- ments of the law of perfect symmetry else- where found prevailing throughout the system. But if this law holds, the seven patalas, in form and collocation, must be exact counterparts of the varshas; only, like the polar mountain about which they are grouped, inverted in "position. In no case is it permissible to picture them as dark caverns in the heart of the earth, as so many writers have done. The Vishnu Purana (bk. ii, ch. v) and the Mahabharata (Udyoga Parva, sect, xcviii) describe them as "excellent regions," as surpassingly beautiful, and as illuminated by our circling sun and moon. In the Story of Suparaga1 we read of a voyage which a merchant ship made to one of the patalas. Upon the surface of the earth,
1 Speyer, The Jatakamala, pp. 126, 127.
THE INDO-IRANIAN UNIVERSE 85
therefore, and not within it, they must have been located.
Passing now from the earth to the regions above and below it, we find named and described in the sacred books of the Indians seven heavens, including Brahma's, above and adjacent to the central earth. Corresponding to these we also find seven subcelestial hells. It is true that the Code of Manu speaks of twenty-one hells, but as Professor Hopkins, of Yale, well re- marks: "The oldest Purana, the Markandeya, has but seven, a conception older than Manu's, or the later lists of thousands. The Padma Purana has also seven hells."1 The same num- ber of heavens and hells is traceable in the Avestan literature,2 and we may therefore safely infer that the untraceably ancient con- ception of seven concentric planetary spheres revolving about an upright axis of earth and heaven was an essential part of the prehistoric Indo-Iranian world-idea.
The "dvlpas" now demand our attention. In the cosmography of the Puranas we are given elaborate accounts of seven parts of the
1 The Religions of India, p. 443, cf. 478. Already "in the Rig- Veda the heavens, the earth, and the lower regions are all conceived as divided sevenfold." — Bal Gangadhar Tilak.
s "Parsi mythology knows also of seven heavens," remarks Darmesteter in his Introduction to the Vendidad, Sacred Books of the East, vol. iv, p. lx. In the Bundahish, ch. xxviii, the abodes of the demons are so correlated with the seven planets as to show that they are of the same number (S. B. E., vol. v, 114). Even in the literature of the Jains we find the seven-staged heaven. (S. B. E., vol. xlv, p. 222.)
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universe denominated dvipas.1 What and where were these? The word has been ex- plained by Sanskrit etymologists as signifying "between waters." Accordingly, Indianists have usually translated it "island." Every island is certainly "between waters." The question arises, then, Where, and what, are these seven islands of the Indo-Aryan world?
Light begins to dawn when we discover that they are all concentric and geocentric. Remarkable islands!2 But are they flat con- centric rings like those surrounding the planet Saturn? So say most modern scholars. Indeed, I know of no dissentient authority. Books have been issued with the picture of a target- board consisting of a bulPs eye and six or seven surrounding rings, as a true diagram of the Hindu universe. Even Thibaut in his right scholarly treatise gives us nothing better.3 Can this be correct? Are the surfaces of the seven islands, like the rings of the target-board, in a common plane? In other words, are the
1 Their names are: Jambu, Plaksha, Salmali, Kusa, Krauncha, Saka, and Pushkara. The Vishnu Purana adds : "They are surrounded severally by seven great seas — the sea of salt water (Lavana), of sugar-cane juice (Ikshu), of wine (Sura), of clarified butter (Sarpis), of curds (Dadhi), of milk (Dugdha), and of fresh water (Jala). Jambu-dvipa is the center of all these; and in the center of this is the golden mountain Meru."
2 Dr. Whitehouse might easily claim that dvipa should be translated firmament, for in his view of Gen. 1. 6 the one function of a firmament is to serve as a separating barrier "between waters" above and below. This would at once give us seven firmaments as a feature of the Indo- Aryan world.
3 See Grundriss der Indo-Arischen Philologie und Alterthumskundet 1889, p. 21.
THE INDO-IRAXIAX UNIVERSE 87
islands of a common height? The Puranic writers say, No. On the contrary, their respec- tive heights, measured from the horizontal plane of the earth's center, seem to follow some law of progression, arithmetic or geo- metric. How, then, are we to view them in their relation to each other?
In a prize essay, written by Babu Shome, a native Hindu, and printed in the Asiatic Re- searches as long ago as 1849, is found a state- ment which may prove to be the key to the total Indo-Iranian system. It presents a con- ception of the cosmos fascinating in interest — one far more complex and highly developed than Western scholars have ever credited to the Hindu of any age. At the same time it is very reassuring to remember that the author of the essay was not seeking to gain credit for his countrymen, or for their prehistoric ances- tors. On the contrary, the title he gave to his essay was, "Physical Errors of Hinduism." He had become a Christian, had become ac- quainted with the astronomic and geographic science of the Western nations — in fact, had become a teacher in a Christian college — and the whole aim of his treatise was to expose the utter untenableness and irrationality of the orthodox Hindu teachings in the realm of science. Furthermore, his representation of the Hindu teaching of his time is the more trustworthy from the fact that he bases it,
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not on literary products of distant times, but on the authentic teaching of the leading pundits then living in Calcutta.
The universe-conception set forth by Shome as fit only for scornful repudiation is one which, if it had been found in a dialogue of Plato, would long ago have been world-famous as a supreme creation of poetic or mythopoeic imag- ination. It would also have been hailed by all competent commentators as a vastly more convincing proof of the influence of Pythagorean teachings upon Plato than any we now find and prize in the Dialogues that have reached us. The task of presenting the conception in words is far from easy.
First of all, one must recall to mind the Indo-Aryan earth (Jambu-dvipa), with its up- right polar axis, its upper and under polar mountains, its seven symmetrically arranged varshas in the upper hemisphere, all separated by boundary ranges of mountains of cosmic proportions; its seven symmetrically arranged patalas in the under hemisphere, all also sep- arated by boundary ranges of cosmic propor- tions: each hemisphere in these respects the exact counterpart of the other. Next, one must conceive of Plaksha as a yet larger globe, also upright as to its polar axis, but including in the center of its capacious interior Jambu- dvipa with all its varied populations. This new globe must, furthermore, in its divisions
THE INDO-IRANIAN UNIVERSE 89
everywhere correspond to Jambu-dvlpa — hem- isphere to hemisphere, varsha to varsha, patala to patala, boundary range to boundary range. In it the inhabitants must be taller than those of Jambu, their lives longer, their powers more godlike.
Then at double the distance of Plaksha from Jambu one must think of a vastly greater globe including in the center of its capacious interior both the others, and answering to them in its divisions— hemisphere to hemisphere, varsha to varsha, patala to patala, boundary range to boundary range throughout. This is Salmali, the third of this wonderful series. Its inhabitants must notably outshine and outlive the inhabitants of Plaksha.
Again, far out beyond, above and beneath Salmali must be imaged Kusa, and as before the number, shape, and mutual relations of its varshas and patalas must precisely correspond to those of the inner dvipas respectively. To this in like manner the remaining fifth, sixth, and seventh must one by one be added, each following the same law of subdivision, each removed from the last by twice the distance of the last preceding; each filled with suitable mythologic populations ; until with the seventh, the all-including Pushkara, the series is com- plete. With this the mental picture of the world -whole lacks but one final feature, the almost infinitely remoter loka-loka, the star-
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studded shell of Brahma's primal universe-egg. In such a universe a mathematic mind would find its paradise. In it a right line in any direction from the center point of Jambu-dvlpa, if sufficiently produced, would pass through an identically shaped and bounded varsha, or patala, in each of the seven concentric spheres. Conversely, to close our description as Babu Shome closes his: "The seven divisions in each of the continents (dvipas) are separated by seven chains of mountains and seven rivers, lying breadthwise, and placed at such inclina- tions in respect to one another that if a straight line be drawn through any chain of mountains or rivers and its corresponding mountains or rivers on the other continents, and produced toward the central island (Jambu-dvlpa), it would meet the center of the earth."1
This incomparably complete world-concept the just quoted author contemptuously dis- misses as "a monstrous picture of geographic nonsense." Might it not more fittingly be styled the consummate flower of all mythological world-making, ancient or modern?
What can have been its origin, what its history?
1 Asiatic Researches, vol. xi, p. 411. In the following expression of the doctrine of celestial and terrestrial correspondences we seem to find a late Persian survival of the older cosmological idea: "Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and shadow of something that is in the [celestial] sphere. While that resplendent thing (the prototype that is in the sphere) remaineth in good condition, it is well also with its shadow."— Desatir, The Book of Shet, quoted in Upham's History and Doctrine of Buddhism, p. 21.
THE INDO-IRANIAN UNIVERSE 91
Before this question every science dealing with the past is silent. That such a concep- tion of the universe cannot have been a modern or a mediaeval product of Indian musing is absolutely certain. It shimmers through the ancient Vedas, wherein we read of the seven heaven fortresses cleft asunder by Indra, and of the " seven-bottomed ocean" below.1 That it antedated the rise of Buddhism and Jainism seems clear from the differing conceptions and misconceptions of it found in the earliest extant documents relating to these largely illiterate sects.2 That its essential features ante- dated the separation of the East Aryans into Iranians and Indians is well-nigh demonstrated
1 Bergaigne, La Religion Vidique, ii, 140. In the Vedic texts the idea that the earth is a flat disk "nowhere occurs." — Zimmer, Altindisches Leben (Prize Essay), Berlin, 1879, p. 359.
2 It is surely not strange that a cosmos so complex as this should have been misconceived by mendicant monks. No map can correctly picture it. With only his staff for a pencil, and the level ground for a drawing board, the best an ancient teacher could do was to mark out seven concentric circles as an equatorial section of the dvipas, and require his pupil to learn their names and the names of the beings that peopled them. Or perhaps he sometimes would fill his seven concentric tracings with water and let these rings represent the sea-like spaces between the dvipas so that the intervening earth-rings might represent the more solid dvipas themselves. Even without such a prompting to misunder- standing, it would not be strange if the uninstructed or half-instructed should often have come to conceive of the dvipa-world as a series of seven islands, ringlike in shape, concentric, each (except the innermost) flat, and in a single horizontal plane. Such seems to have been a common imagination among the Buddhist monks. Through these it was grad- ually spread over a large part of southeastern Asia, though here and there traces of something more adequate to the original thought are discoverable. Unfortunately, this "target-board" picture of Indian cosmography was early communicated to the European public, and is still accepted as the original and orthodox system of Hindu teaching.
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by the number and character of the corre- spondences traceable between the cosmologies of the two peoples. In both we find the seven heavens with their respective regents, the Zodiac of twelve signs, the sevenfold division of the earth, the antipodal mountains at the two poles, and a unitary cosmic water-system in each case starting from and returning to a point directly above the sacred Mountain of the North. The seven concentric spheres certainly carry us back to ancient Babylon, as do also the names of the Iranian months.1 Furthermore, the correspondences in Indian thought of sphere to sphere, and of all to the terrestrial center-sphere, are but a fuller and more luxuriant development of the parallels found and often remarked upon in the Baby- lonian thought of heavenly and earthly regions.2 In a paper in the Appendix to this volume
1 "From the most powerful nation of the ancient Semitic world, not from kindred India, came the system of terminology of the Zoroastrian months." — Louis H. Gray, "Origin of the Names of the Avesta Months," in American Journal of Semitic Language and Literature, 1904, p. 201.
2 "Grundlegend fiir das Verstandniss altbabyloniseher Himmels- und Weltkunde ist die Erkenntniss, dass jeder Begriff, jeder Untertheil in den verschiedensten Welttheilen wieder ein entsprechendes Spiegelbild haben muss. Luft-, Erd- und Wasserreich der unteren Welt — unsere Erde — haben ihre Gegenstiicke in den oberen, am Himmel, und innerhalb dieser finden sich wieder dieselben Untertheile, so dass wie im Maass und Gewicht die kleinen Theile immer die grossen wiederholen. Jeder Theil bildet wieder einen Mikrokosmos fiir sich." — Hugo Winckler, Altorien- talische Forschungen, Bd. iii, 1, S. 179. Winckler, however, like the Indo-Iranian scholars, has failed to see that the marked correspondences between the Upperworld and the Underworld are to be pictured in thought as resulting simply from the antipodal location of the upper and under halves of the cosmic whole.
THE INDO-IRANIAN UNIVERSE 93
I have noted twenty striking agreements be- tween the Indo-Iranian and the prehistoric Euphratean world-pictures. A stronger con- firmation of Hermann Oldenberg's conjecture that the Indo-Iranians prehistorically borrowed from the Babylonians, or Akkadians, seven deities, representing the sun, the moon, and the five remaining planets, could hardly be desired.1
As a not inappropriate close of the present chapter I will here give an illustration of the help which I venture to hope our new inter- pretation of the Babylonian world-view may yet afford in the interpretation of certain dark and difficult passages in Sanskrit and Avestan texts. In the Jaiminiya-Upanishad-Brahmana occurs a most puzzling statement touching the mutual local relations of Jambu-dvipa and Plaksha. Years ago it seemed to me utterly unintelligible. It reads: "The Navel of the Earth lies one span" — I am following Thibaut's translation — "one span to the north of Plaksha." Thibaut speaks of the strangeness and interest of the passage, but can give no explanation. No Indianist to my knowledge has ever at- tempted to give one. No interpreter accepting the prevailing view of the Indian cosmos can hope to find a rational meaning in the state- ment. Proceeding according to the "target- board" world-map, the farther one proceeds "to
i Die Religion des Veda, Berlin, 1894, pp. 192-195.
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the north of Plaksha" the farther one is from the Navel of the Earth, and indeed from the earth as a whole. But the moment one looks at our diagram of the Babylonian world the puzzling text is no longer puzzling. In The Cradle of the Human Race it was shown that in the ancient literatures the term "the Navel of the Earth" ordinarily signifies the northern terrestrial pole. This, however, in the pre- historic world-view, is at the level of the north pole of the second heaven, and therefore one interval, or span, to the north of the north pole of the first heaven, which latter belongs to Plaksha. The baffling statement is now as luminous as the heavens to which it takes us.
CHAPTER VIII
THE BUDDHISTIC UNIVERSE
Buddhism, as everybody knows, is a special outgrowth of antecedent Brahmanical thought and teaching among the Hindus. Naturally, therefore, its cosmology is but a modification of that of the Hindu teachers before and at the time of Gautama, the Buddha.1 Of its deviations from the parent system the following are the most worthy of notice: First, its extrav- agant multiplication of heavens beyond the sixth; second, its substitution of eight for seven as the standard number for the Narakas (hells) ; third, its transformation of the four equatorial varshas of the Puranic earth into fantastically shaped islands located at four respectively oppo- site points in the seventh or outer sea; fourth, its gradual ignoring of the four sacred World- rivers prominent in the earlier Hindu teaching and its resulting final loss of the cosmic water- system of the Puranas.
As to the first, the parent system in its
1 The Hindu cosmology which in Buddha's time was considered ortho- dox went into new and fantastic developments of its own; so that even in the Puranas, our chief sources of information, there are many confused and contradictory teachings. So great is this confusion that we cannot now identify with certainty any but the most fundamental features, and affirm that they beyond question had a place in the Hindu world-concept at a date as early as that of the rise of Buddhism.
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enumeration of the heavens was accustomed to stop with the seventh, that of Brahma, the highest of Hindu gods. In the books of the Buddhists, however, we now find in place of the one heaven of Brahma "sixteen of formed Brahmas and four of formless Brahmas," making with the original six below the Brahma-loka, twenty-six heavens in all. Moreover, of the countless world-units (sakwalas) in the countless aggregate which fills all space, every one has this precise series of six and twenty heavens.
The second of the enumerated points of divergence is noted by Professor Hopkins in his work on The Religions of India (p. 443), but neither he nor any other writer known to me has suggested what seems the most probable explanation of the disparity. The eighth hell (Avichi) is given such exceptional dimensions, and is placed at such an exceptional distance from the world-center, and is otherwise so differentiated from the nearer seven, that it seems spatially related to the others precisely as the eighth nether hemisphere is to the other seven in the Babylonian world-concept. It is not improbable, therefore, that the difference in the two enumerations results from the Buddhists including in their count an under- world which, as a sacred appanage of the perfect world of Brahma, seemed to the Brahmanists too holy to be here included.
As to the third point, I know of no non-
THE BUDDHISTIC UNIVERSE 97
Buddhistic Indian document in which anything is said of the four great islands, or "island- continents/' in the outermost of the seven concentric seas.1 In Buddhist cosmography, however, these are exceedingly important por- tions of the universe. One of them, Jambu- dvipa, is the home of the present human race. The one on the side of Meru opposite to us bears the name "Uttarakuru" ; which name shows that the island is merely a transformed and translocated varsha of the older system. The triangular shape of our own island sug- gests, if it does not show, that it is in like man- ner a transformed and translocated "Bharata" (India) ; to which has now been transferred the name (Jambu-dvipa) formerly applied to the total body made up of the seven varshas.
The fourth of the enumerated deviations is easier to explain than any of the others. The central teachings of the Buddha rendered it impossible for his followers to ascribe saving efficacy to baths in the heaven-descended Gunga (the Ganges) . Very early, therefore, in Buddhist circles the traditional belief in the sanctity of these divine waters must have been left behind. But with the passing of that belief must also have passed the traditionary belief in that elaborate water-system of the world in which,
*In one passage in the Mahabharata (Roy, vi, 10, p. 20) the four equatorial varshas are, it is true, called islands, but they are still left close "beside Meru." The passage is further interesting from the fact that it expressly equates Bharata and Jambu-dvipa.
98 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
according to the Puranas, all waters start from and return to the quadrifrontal headspring of the sacred Ganges, conceived of as high in the heavens. In the end, the indifference of the Buddhist peoples to burial in sacred rivers became so marked that Sir Monier-WilUams mentions it as one of the observed contrasts between Hindu and Buddhist communities.
But noteworthy as are the divergences of Buddhistic cosmology from the parent system, the features common to both are still more significant. The following are some of these points of agreement: First. In each system the axis of Great Meru is the axis of the world. Second. In each the north-polar top of this indescribably glorious world-mountain lifts itself to the level of the second heaven, that of Sakra (Indra). Third. In each the heaven of Yama is the third. Fourth. In the parent system the heaven of Brahma is the seventh and last, in the Buddhistic his are the seventh and all the superadded. Fifth. In each system are found the seven concentric seas, and the seven concentric lands. Sixth. In each the revolutions of the sun and moon about the earth are in a horizontal plane.1 Seventh. In each, every heaven and hell and intermediate
1 "It is not permitted to deviate the breadth of a hair from what the great Buddha, in his bana, has revealed; and especially not from his system that . . . the sun has its horizontal course over our heads."— Karetotte, High Priest of Ceylon, in Dr. Edward Upham's Buddhism in Ceylon, London, 1829, p. 85.
THE BUDDHISTIC UNIVERSE 99
region has a mythologic population appropriate to its biologic and other conditions, and in that population every individual is capable of reach- ing by processes of reincarnation any and every other place in the universe. Eighth. In the Buddhistic world-view the relation of the Patalas to the Narakas appears to be identical with that which we found in the Puranic teaching. Finally, in each system the respective abodes of the gods and demons are antipodal, the one being at the north-polar summit of Meru, the other at its south-polar counterpart.1
Other points of agreement and divergence will doubtless occur to professional Indianists. I could myself mention others; but I think of none as important as these. The two world- pictures have never been compared and con- trasted with adequate care. Many years ago I conversed and corresponded with Professor Max Mtiller, of Oxford, on the desirableness and the promise of such a comparative study, and at one time he hoped to see it undertaken by one of his gifted pupils. Unfortunately, to this date, the desideratum remains unsupplied. Indeed, I have never seen in any tongue a bare enumeration of the agreements and differences
1 "The Asuras or Daityas dwell under the foundations of Mount Meru, as far underneath the surface of the earth as their great enemy Indra is above it. In short, if he may be supposed to live at the zenith, they live at the nadir, and their battlefield is on the slopes of Meru." — Sir Monier-Williams, Buddhism in its Connexion with Brahmanism and Hinduism, London, 2d ed., 1890, p. 219.
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as extended as the utterly inadequate one above. May some master of Sanskrit and Pali soon give us the light and guidance needed!
As to graphic representations of the Buddhist universe, two perhaps are worthy of the reader's attention — chiefly, however, because of their unlikeness not only to each other, but also to the prehistoric world-picture of the ancient Babylonians. The one is found on the cover of BeaFs Catena of Buddhist Scriptures (Lon- don, 1871), the other in Giorgi's Alphabetum Tibetanum (Rome, 1762, p. 472) / The unlike- ness of the two is very striking. In the one, for example, the dvipas are represented as concentric circles, in the other as concentric squares. One cannot easily see how the one con- cept could ever have grown out of the other; on the other hand, however, it is perfectly easy to understand how both can well be variations of the one older prehistoric world-view, variations evolved in centuries of transmission.
In the Appendix to the present volume a paper, entitled "The Mandala Oblation/' pre- sents a description of the Buddhist universe in some of its more fantastic details. The con- trast between the baselessness of these details and the profound significance of the Oblation is one of the most striking things to be found in any of the ritual observances of mankind.
? This latter picture is reproduced in Waddell's Buddhism in Tibet r London, 1895, p. 79, and in Adolf Bastian's Ideate Welten, Berlin, 1893*
CHAPTER IX
RECOVERED TRACE OF TWO LOST SPHERES
If the Babylonian, or, better, the pre-Baby- lonian, world-view as here understood lies back of all our oldest mythologies, it is evident that the scholars of the future have before them many and most fascinating tasks. One of these relates to the earth's nearest neighbor- world, the moon.
All modern interpreters of ancient references
to the moon have gone upon the assumption
that by the words "the lunar sphere/' or "the
lunar world/ ' an ancient writer or singer always
meant the moon which we see waxing and
waning in the nocturnal sky. But if now, in
addition to our visible moon, there was in
ancient thought an invisible one, a lunar sphere
a thousand times vaster, inclosing in itself the
whole earth and all the clouds above and below
the earth, it becomes for the interpreter of
ancient literatures a most important problem
to determine in every instance to which of the
two lunar spheres his author in any particular
expression may be referring. And, inasmuch as
in this same all-antedating world-view the solar
sphere is immensely vaster than the sun that
rises in the east and sets in the west, a parallel
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102 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
necessity arises for discriminating between these two bodies whenever we find an ancient writer making reference to the movements or domains of a solar god.1
No student need be told that to make the proposed discriminations, and especially to demonstrate their correctness in every instance, is not likely to prove easy. The interpretation of myths, as competent judges know, is about the most difficult and baffling of all the duties that face the investigator of antiquity. Rarely can a large group of scholars agree even as to the nature of myths in general, or as to the principles to be considered as regulative in their interpretation. The published expositions of a single myth are often so discrepant and contradictory that one feels almost ready to unite with those who pronounce all scholarly effort in this field a simple waste of time and labor. Particularly difficult is the interpreta- tion of topographical and cosmographical myths. They reach us in forms and in mutual relations far removed from the primordial. As to possi- ble unities of such myths, it is natural to expect to find the most elaborate and complete mythological world-pictures where the mythical world-rulers and world-tenants are most numer-
1 A learned correspondent obligingly calls my attention to a passage in Plutarch, where in two consecutive sentences there is mention of the invisible earth-inclosing "lunar sphere," and of the visible earth-attending "moon." The passage is in the explanation of the sistrum, in Isis and Osiris, 63.
TRACE OF TWO LOST SPHERES 103
ous — that is, in systems and among peoples in which polytheism has found its completest expression. Facts justify this antecedent ex- pectation. But as all the greatest polytheisms of antiquity seem to have included ideas and cults originally local, the world-picture of each composite empire or people is at a very early time itself a composite one, a syncretistic product with indetectable variations in detail, and with indetectable blurrings in the mass. Then it is to be remembered that all the great polytheisms of the early ages were later and in some cases repeatedly subjected to the influence of profoundly pantheistic thought and teaching and, in this way, to further modifica- tion of details and to further blurring of the resulting total. That the product of such a process maintained through millenniums, as in the case of the Egyptians, should at last defy analysis as effectually as the dream of a hasheesh smoker, ought not to occasion surprise.
Despite these considerations, however, there is a possibility that our proposed discriminations between the lunar sphere and the visible moon, and between the solar sphere and the visible sun, may prove to be of service. In any case the students of early human thought should give them a fair trial. Even in the most con- fused and baffling of all fields, that of the Egyptian mythology, I should be glad to see the method of attempting such discriminations
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put on trial. I am encouraged by the outcome of my first experiment, an attempt to deal with the problem of the location of Tuat.
Among Egyptologists this problem is often characterized as peculiarly difficult.1 As the name of some region of the world, the word Tuat is found in the very oldest of Egyptian texts. As Budge correctly states, it is ordinarily translated "Underworld." Opposing this view, H. O. Lange says that Tuat was "a dark space above the stars." Renouf, on the contrary, expressly states that it was "below the earth." Steindorff says, "underneath the earth." Mas- pero, Budge, Mallet, and others assure us that in reality it was neither beneath the earth nor above it. It was an imaginary extramundane region, north of the earth and on the level of the Egyptian horizon, but no part either of heaven or of the earth. No wonder that many have frankly pronounced the question insoluble, and that Budge and Steindorff express thejbelief that the Egyptians of the historic period had them- selves lost the original meaning of the term.
In their descriptions of the region our highest living authorities are equally conflicting. Budge, of London, writes: "Through the valley of the Tuat runs a river, which is the counterpart of the Nile in Egypt and of the celestial Nile in
1 "E* ist sehr schwierig, sich eine richtige Vorstellung von der Duat zu machen." — H. O. Lange, in Chantepie de la Saussaye's Rdigionsge- schichte, Bd. i, S. 222.
TRACE OF TWO LOST SPHERES 105
heaven, and on each bank of this river lived a vast number of monstrous beasts, and devils, and fiends of every imaginable kind and size, and among them were large numbers of evil spirits which were hostile to any being that invaded the valley/ ' For such a region we would naturally look in one of the lowest of the hells.1 But if before beginning our search in that quarter we turn to Erman, of Berlin, we find this same Tuat described in these words: "A kingdom of light, the dwelling-place of the gods, who traveled with the happy dead, 'on those beautiful ways where the glorified travel/ " For such a region we would naturally look in one of the highest of the heavens. One eminent Hibbert lecturer, alluding to the Tuat water on which the sun-god voyages the twelve hours, calls it "the heavenly river," yet on the self- same page, and only fourteen lines further on, with no apparent consciousness of the incon- gruity, styles it "the infernal river." Reviewing all that has been written on this topic, the student is inclined to exclaim with Shakespeare,
"Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!"
Despite all the conflicting opinions, however, there are several important points on which nearly all recent investigators now seem to agree. They may be summed up under eight
1 Budge elsewhere calls it "the blackest hell." — The Egyptian Soudan, ii, 17.
106 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
heads, as follows: First. The nightly journey of the sun from the place of his setting to the place of his rising is neither above nor beneath the earth, yet lies in this elusive land of Tuat. Second. This twelve-hours, journey is conceived of as in every part horizontal. Third. It is furthermore semicircular. Fourth. The move- ment of a barque sailing a semicircular course over water represents the Egyptian idea of this solar journey. Fifth. The waterway passed over by the barque is pictured in thought as lying between two parallel mountain ranges which like semicircular walls hold the waters in their place. (See Fig. C, on page 59, above.) Sixth. During the voyage the sun-god has the Egyptian earth lying some distance away on his right hand, but beyond and distinct from the more southerly of the two mountain walls which bound the waterway over which he is sailing. Seventh. The sun-god does not enter the land of Tuat proper immediately on sinking below the horizon of Egypt, but only after making one hour's journey and passing through the nearer of the two parallel semicircular mountain ranges.1 In like manner the twelfth hour of the voyage is not in Tuat proper, but is spent in passing from Tuat proper to the eastern horizon of Egypt.2 Eighth. During the voyage
i Maspero gives the technical name of the opening in the mountain and translates it "the Slit." Elsewhere he calls it "the Mouth of the Cleft."
2 This passage from Tuat to Bakhau is represented as serpentine in a very peculiar sense. ''Twelve gods tow the boat, not over a river, or
TRACE OF TWO LOST SPHERES 107
in Tuat proper the sun-god has personal inter- course with both gods and demons.
Eureka! The Tuat problem is solved! The solution must already be clear to every careful reader. Turn to the diagram of the Babylonian or pre-Babylonian world-view. In it the noc- turnal path of the sun answers to every require- ment: 1. It is neither under the earth, nor yet above it. 2. It is in every part horizontal. 3. It is semicircular. 4. Movement on it is like that of a barque sailing a semicircular course over water. 5. The concentric solar and lunar spheres, or rather the portions from the west- point around northward to the east-point, give us the two parallel mountain ranges of the Egyptian picture. 6. As during the voyage Ra has the Egyptian, so Shamash has the Baby- lonian earth lying at some distance away on the right hand, but beyond and distinct from the more southerly of the two mountain walls which bound the waterway over which he is sailing. 7. Observing daily that the sun-god's da}^- journey was in a wholly different plane from that of the supposed night- journey, the Egyptians seem not unnaturally to have imag- ined that he required an hour after sinking below the western hills to get back into Tuat, and again an hour in the morning to make his
over a serpent or serpents, but completely through a serpent." — Budge, i, 257. See Lanzone, Dizionario, tav. vii. E. Amelineau agrees with Budge that the passage is through the serpent and not along his back. Revue de VHistoire des Religions, tome lii, pp. 26, 27.
108 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
way from beyond the lunar sphere to the eastern horizon of the dwellers upon the Nile. 8. Finally, Tuat being originally the space between the invisible lunar and solar spheres, and the nightly journey of the sun-god being in the equatorial or approximately equatorial plane which divides all the heavens from all the hells, the student should expect to find precisely what we do find, namely, that on the journey the solar god personally communicates as freely with gods as with demons, and with demons as with gods.1
Lost Tuat, or at least the best known part thereof, is certainly found. With it we recover, in the semicircular mountain ranges, the in- dubitable trace of two lost spheres. Would we see them as figured at one period upon the monuments, we have only to turn to the oft- reproduced cut given on page 211 of Brugsch's Religion und Mythologie der alten Aegypter.
1 The Egyptian pictures of the nocturnal voyage of their sun-god, Ra, recall to the memory of every reader of the classics the corresponding Greek myth of the "cup," or coracle, in which Helios was represented as each night making the same semicircular passage on the surface of the Ocean-stream. See Rapp, in Roscher's Lexzkon, i, 2, Sp. 2014. Very likely the sun-boat in this case was called a "cup" because those among whom the myth originated were familiar with the Kufa, or ordinary small river-boat of the Tigris and Euphrates, which was in the form cf a bowl. (See cut in Rawlinson's Herodotus, i, 260.) Referring to Bergk (Jahrb, fur Philologie, 1860, p. 389) and Kuhn (in his Zeitschrift, i, 536), Rapp correctly remarks: "Der Okeanos in welchem der Sonnen- becher dahinschwimmt, ist ursprunglich der Wolkenhimmel ; die Ein- schrankung seiner Fahrt auf die Nachtzeit nur die Folge des Anschlusses an die irdische Localisirung des Okeanos und der Einfugung dieses alten Mythus in die anderen, schon entwickelteren Vorstellungen."
CHAPTER X
POINTS AND PROBLEMS FOR FUTURE STUDY
In the foregoing chapters we have seen not a little evidence that in countries widely sep- arated the earliest traceable teachers held and taught what was essentially one and the same world-concept. This included appropriate local abodes for gods and demons, for living men and for dead. It grouped these several abodes into one all-inclusive geocentric, upright-axled, poly-uranian cosmos. In the land in which we can study the system to the best advantage, it presents two earths adjusted base to base: the upper the abode of living men; the under, its inverted counterpart, the abode of the dead. To the seven planetary divinities it gives seven distinct concentric spheres, to Ami and Ea an eighth, outermost in position, all-including, the sidereal sphere. When the upper half of the thus constituted universe is compared with the under, the symmetry of all the included parts and dimensions is seen to be as complete and admirable as it is striking.
Now, minds capable of originating, or even of handing down from generation to generation, a mental world-picture of such remarkable unity, complexity, and balance as this cannot
109
110 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
have failed to go farther — cannot have failed to inquire how the constituent parts of this stu- pendous system were related to each other in effecting, or in regulating, the orderly ongoings of the whole. The diurnal movements of the sun, moon, and stars would of necessity call out at least crude attempts at explanation. So also the rising mists and falling rain. So also the alternate growth and decay of the earth's verdure, the birth and death of human beings. If night and day are seen to be ever chasing each other, the parts of the universe alternately darkened and illuminated must be so adjusted in the observer's thought as at least to render possible such incessant alternations. If mists rise and rains fall, cloudland and the land rained upon must be set in some relation by every perceiver of the facts. No proof is needed for the statement that if any man's universe in- cludes distinct abodes for the living and the dead, it will also include some idea of the way in which the no longer living make their passage from the one abode to the other.
To a thoughtful person few things can be more impressive than the ways in which pre- historic men attempted to represent, and to render rationally coherent, the ongoings of the universe. These attempts reach us chiefly, of course, in the form of myths. In any form they are exceedingly precious; for they give us our only knowledge of the earliest efforts of our
PROBLEMS FOR FUTURE STUDY 111
race to construct what we moderns call a philosophy of nature.1 To call them mythical in no wise invalidates their claim to attentive study. The Nebular Hypothesis of Kant will become essentially a myth if, as an interesting and almost poetic speculation, it shall come to be handed down long generations after a more adequate view of the origin of the solar system has been discovered. Every such hypothesis for the explanation of a natural phenomenon is primarily an exercise of the imagination at the instigation of reason, and in the mythopceic stage of culture is sure to take on a mythologic form in its expression.2
1 "The assumptions of the Savant are hypotheses, those of the savage are called myths." — Frank B. Jevons, An Introduction to the History of Religion, p. 32. Wilhelm Bender, Die Entstehung der W eltanschauungen im griechischen Altertum, Stuttgart, 1899, p. 56.
2 Even as sober and severely scientific a writer as Professor E. B. Tylor emphasizes this relation between mythic form and scientific con- tent in nature-tales told among peoples of meager culture. In one place he says: "The savage names and stories of the stars and constellations may seem at first but childish and purposeless fancies; but it always happens, in the study of the lower races, that the more means we have of understanding their thoughts, the more sense and reason do we find in them. The aborigines of Australia say that Yurree and Wanjel, who are the stars we call Castor and Pollux, pursue Purra the Kangaroo (our Capella), and kill him at the beginning of the great heat, and the mirage is the smoke of the fire they roast him by. They say also that Marpean-Kurrk and Neilloan (Arcturus and Lyra) were the discoverers of the ant-pupas and the eggs of the loan-bird, and taught the aborigines to find them for food. Translated into the language of fact, these simple myths record the summer place of the stars in question, and the seasons of ant-pupas and loan-eggs, which seasons are marked by the stars who are called their discoverers." — Primitive Culture, i, 357. As the aborigines of Australia are commonly referred to as the very lowest specimens of our race, this evidence of their habitual recognition of individual stars by name, and this illustration of their ability to deter- mine the seasons by astronomic changes occurring in the progress of the
112 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
We call these prehistoric myths fanciful and hard to understand. So they are. But in the infancy of language every originator of a new thought had also to invent terms for its expression. How can we wonder if in multi- tudes of cases the terms seized upon were symbolic, pictographic, or even poetically sug- gestive merely? The time for matching mental concepts with polytechnically accurate and ade- quate expressions had not yet come. Can we say that it has yet come?
Again, we are told that these prehistoric myths are inconsistent with each other. They are. But our latest scientists rarely present us pictures of complex wholes without seeming equally inconsistent. Here are three elaborately colored drawings, representing obviously a hu- man body. They are from a new up-to-date atlas for students of human anatomy. One and the same face appears in each of the three pictures, but in all other parts they are utterly unlike. A child, or a Zulu, might imagine them to represent what men of three different races, or world-periods, believed to be the contents of the human frame. So thinking, he might well wonder at the utter lack of agreement. Very likely he would infer from the contrariety of the representations that all were alike worth-
year, are certainly very interesting. Too few ethnologists write as if they had discovered what Tylor says "always happens in the study of the lower races."
PROBLEMS FOR FUTURE STUDY 113
less. The deficiency would lie in the interpreter. In reality, there is no contrariety whatever in the three chromographs. The first represents the muscular, the second the vascular, and the third the nervous system of the human body. Precisely so, three myth-pictures of one and the same part or process of the universe may seem to us confused and inconsistent, when in reality all the confusion or inconsistency arises from our own failure to keep distinct such easily distinguishable world-concepts as the mechanical, the biological, and the personal. For example: In the mechanical, the axis of the universe may be pictured, as Plato pictures it, as "the Spindle of Necessity," the lifeless support of the whirling " whorls" of the heavens. In the biologic world-picture, however, the same world-axis is no longer lifeless, it is an ever-living oak-trunk, equipped with wings for self-rotation, the vital support of world-filling branches, the whole covered and adorned with "the starry peplos of Harmonia." Finally, in the picture in which the universe is considered mainly significant because a universe of persons, the oaken tree-trunk of the biologic world- view becomes the "columnar bridge" on which, as described in the vision of Er, the souls of the redeemed escape from our realms of sin and death, and gain the imperishable abode of the God of gods. All these conceptions of the axial line of the heavens and earth lay in Plato's
114 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
mind with as little of contrariety or mutual inconsistency as lie the three anatomical chromo- graphs in the mind of the teacher who drew them.
A lifetime could be spent in the one task of investigating the symbolic and poetic forms in which early peoples, and peoples of a later date, have expressed and reexpressed this fundamental idea of the world-axis. Though not a mythologist by calling, I many years ago printed a study in which the World-tree symbol of the universe was traced through twelve mythologies. The idea was found to be pre- Babylonian. The study further showed that sometimes, in place of the "Spindle of Neces- sity," we have a "lance," or an "arrow," or a "spear," on which the heavens revolve. In the Vedas, it is an "imperishable axle," on which without intermission celestial and terrestrial wheels are forever turning. Again, as in several mythologies, the columnar "bridge" is pictured as a "ladder," with seven, or eight, significant step-supports. In Burmese thought and imagery it is the "Umbrella Staff of Universe Sov- ereignty." The variety of the symbols is apparently without limit. In a work of amazing erudition, filling more than a thousand closely printed octavo pages, the late John O'Neill has claimed, and in the opinion of not a few has shown, that every known mythology is full of symbols and stories of this all-sustaining, all-
PROBLEMS FOR FUTURE STUDY 115
unifying universe-axis, and of the rotary world- movements centering about it.1
Another lifetime could be spent in investi- gating in ancient mythologies what we may call the vascular, or circulatory, system of the uni- verse. That all waters, celestial, terrestrial, and subterrestrial, belong to one system of flowing and reflowing streams is taught in every ancient mythology. That all these streams proceed from, and return to, one and the same celestial head-spring is asserted or implied in so many that the investigator may safely consider this idea to have constituted a feature of whatever world-view antedated the ancient cosmologies that have reached us. In a study on this subject, printed in the year 1885, evidences pointing to this peculiar feature were brought together from Vedic and Avestan sources — evidences so clear as to satisfy Professor Spiegel that both the Indian and Iranian Aryans prehistorically held and taught it. In the same paper clues were given going to show that the same idea was shared by the Northmen, by mediaeval Christian teachers, by the Finns, the Sabeans, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Baby- lonians, and even by the pre-Babylonian
1 The work is entitled The Night of the Gods : An Inquiry into Cosmic and Cosmogonic Mythology and Symbolism (London, vol. i, 1893 ; vol. ii, 1897). In the last two or three years of his life I received from this too early lost friend many letters, in one of which he was kind enough to say that but for my published researches the work above named would never have been written.
116 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
Akkado-Sumerians. In the Rig- Veda and in Homer, in the Puranas of India and the Suttas of China, the head-spring itself is a Fons Quadri- frons, that is to say, a Four-faced World-Fount, whose waters simultaneously pour forth east- wardly, westwardly, northwardly, southwardly, for the watering of the whole earth.1
But in any universe as complete and balanced as seems to have existed in the minds of pre- historic men, there must have been not only room and adjustments for the distribution of light and the circulation of the waters, but also recognized ways in which on proper occasions the tenanting intelligences could have inter- course with each other. Gods in widely sep- arated domiciles and jurisdictions must have had appropriate highways for their chariots when paying visits of ceremony one to another, or when summoned to attend one of those stated pan-uranian parliaments or consultation assemblies for which every polytheism provides. Moreover, gods and men being children of a common Sire, and the latter children dependent upon the former, no gulf between them must be impassable. We read of a fabled eagle bearing an Etana, or a Ganymede, from earth
1 "Von der Richtigkeit Ihrer Ansicht iiber das altindische und alte- ranische Wassersystem bin ich vollkommen uberzeugt." — F. Spiegel, in a letter to the author. In one of the apocryphal gospels the quad- rifrontal World-Fount is located in the fourth heaven, and its four streams are milk and honey, oil and wine. The same idea is expressed in the Slavonic Book of Enoch.
PROBLEMS FOR FUTURE STUD? 117
to heaven; but from instances so avowedly exceptional as these we get no light upon pro- visions conceived of as originally and per- manently included in the cosmic structure itself and thought of as expressly designed to facilitate intercourse between terranean and subterranean beings, or between the celestial and counter- celestial. What in the oldest cosmological thought were the permanent structural pro- visions of this kind, if such existed? The an- swering of this question must be left to the scholars of the future.1
My own studies on this point have not been extensive, but so far as they have gone they have resulted in a strong conviction that the main highway from heaven to heaven and from underworld to underworld was along the central axis-line of the total universe. Precisely there we should expect to find it. There alone could it stretch through the mundane immensities forever unaffected by the whirling spheres. There alone could it enter and pass through the throne-city of every world and directly link all to each and each to all. So conceived, its
1 A decidedly hopeful prospect of new progress in these studies is opened up by the establishment at Berlin of the new "Gesellschaft fur vergleichende Mythologie," and the starting of its "Mythologische Bibliotek" (Leip., 1907). Also by the recent issue of works more or less cosmological from the pens of Georg Siecke, H. Lessmann, G. Hiising, Bruno Baentsch, C. Fries, A. Dohring, Ditlef Nielsen, F. X. Kugler, F. K. Ginzel, and Johann Lepsius — all of whom give evidence of a whole- some dissatisfaction with the principles of interpretation long dominant in this field.
118 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
upper section, the "Path of the Devas," is identical with the pre-Babylonian "Way of Anu." To reach it from the abodes of living men, beings possessing weight must needs have a support for their ascending feet. Hence columnar bridges like the Chinvat of the Per- sians; heaven-ladders like the Egyptian; ter- raced mountains like those of the Euphratean peoples. On the other hand, beings at the top of the heavenly Way, having no weight, were not thought to need any such solid supports in making a descent. Hence, in Platonic. Neo-Platonic, Gnostic, and Sabean thought, souls, descending from the highest sphere for incarnation through human birth, have need of nothing more than obstructionless polar open- ings in the crystalline planetary spheres to enable them to pass the seven, and to reach the earth.
But while this axial highway from world to world was incomparably the most important in the universe, movements and paths on the surface of each of the spheres were, of course, conceivable. In mythologies built upon or including the idea of transmigration, one of these conceivable paths is particularly interest- ing since it provides a way by which a return from the land of the dead to the land of the living is possible, and this without retracing the path by which the ghost descended to the land of the dead. In Indian mythology, for example,
PROBLEMS FOR FUTURE STUDY 119
the descent, twelve days in duration/ is sup- posed to be along the surface of the earth, southward, and across the ocean, into the transoceanic underworld. It is conceivable that a return is supposed possible by a path up the interior surface of the earth-inclosing lunar sphere. If this thought underlay the confused and confusing Upanishad passages referred to below, there may easily have been connected with it the further idea that the perpetually reascending souls which again and ever again are "rained down" from the zenith of the earth-inclosing lunar sphere are thus doomed to successive rebirths because as yet imperfectly purified, and that only by passing the Hadean gate that gives access to the exterior surface of the first of the heavenly spheres, this lunar one, and by ascending a path upon its exterior, one can successfully reach the "door" that leads to the higher heavens.2
One other structural feature in this most ancient world-concept will surely challenge and receive the attention of future students of the prehistoric past. I allude to the Zodiac, the most precious if not the oldest scientific heir- loom of the human race.3 The axial world-
1 Leon Feer, Revue de VHistoire des Religions, xviii, 302.
2 Kaushttaki-Upanishad, i, 2-6 (Sacred Books of the East, vol. i, pp. 273-279). See also the reference to the "Path of the Devas" and the "Path of the Pitris" in the Khandogya-Upanishad, iv, 15, 5 (in same volume, p. 80, and note on pp. 82, 83).
3 Treating of the origin of the Zodiac in a recent article, Edward Walter Maunder, F.R.A.S., superintendent of the Solar Department, Royal
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pillar idea, associated in our minds with the name of Atlas, is no doubt of equal antiquity, possibly of greater; but it cannot compare in significance with the twelve-signed Zodiac. As soon as a man can mentally picture a circle he has the idea of a center; and as soon as the revolving sky suggests to his mind a sphere he has the idea of an axis. But to create the Zodiac required a far higher power of thought, and a vastly greater attainment in the knowledge of the stars and in mathematics. It is a perfect instrument for the measurement of astronomic ages. No modern has ever suggested a sub- stitute for it, or made any improvement in it. But had it as yet never been thought of, few persons now living in any one of our most civilized nations would be likely to invent it. How many would feel any need for such an asonian timepiece? How many, feeling the need, would be likely to hit upon this simple yet unimprovably perfect answer to the need? What learned and ingenious reader of this sentence believes that, if uninformed as to any previous effort in this line on the part of earlier
Observatory at Greenwich, expresses admiration of the "giant among men" who first recognized that the visible sun is daily moving among the invisible stars. He says: "This, perhaps, was the most difficult dis- covery which up to the present date has been made in astronomy. . . . It was the first great incursion of physical research into the invisible, the first great triumph of induction, the first time that appearances were put aside in favor of thought." — Littell's Living Age, vol. 227, p. 618. Writing of this triumph of mind, Newcomb says: "It may be considered the birth of astronomic science." — Popular Astronomy, p. 16.
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men, he himself would have been the first to chart out the ecliptical zone of the heavens, defining within it the lunar mansions and the solar stations, backgrounding all with a sex- agesimally divided and subdivided scale of twelve equal parts, on which the minutes of the progress of every planet, and the ages of the precession of the equinoxes, could be mea- sured each with equal ease and both with absolute accuracy? Of the prehistoric man or men who really invented this ingenious chronom- eter nothing is known. No branch of the human family has a tradition determining even the millennium of its first introduction. As yet the savants who have busied themselves with the problem have given us no trustworthy result. As early as 1754, Neubronner, in Ger- many, raised the question.1 Forty years later a distinguished French astronomer, Dupuis, working upon Egyptian data, convinced himself that the Zodiac was invented 15,000 years before his time. In 1872, however, an American astronomer, Professor John Brocklesby, assured us with great positiveness that "the Zodiac was constructed about 2,000 years ago." His exact date was 2,149 years before the time of his writing, which would give us the year 277 B.C. His argument was simply that, at the start, "the signs doubtless corresponded in position with their constellations," and that the
1 In his dissertation De Inventoribus Zodiaci.
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only time within the range of history when this occurred was between B.C. 200 and B.C. 300.1 Three years, however, after this settlement of the case, a learned professor at Leyden, Hol- land, employing Chinese data, announced that the Zodiac had been in use in China as early as B.C. 18716.2 Only one year after this an American scholar gave as his solution, "12,500 years ago."3 Within the next twelve months the English astronomer, Richard A Proctor, published a paper favoring B.C. 2170 as the desired date. Amid such disagreements, the prospect is not encouraging.4 One thing only seems growing more and more certain, and that is that if Brocklesby's fundamental proposition is correct, and if accordingly, at the start, "the signs corresponded in position with their re- spective constellations, we must go back of his date about 26,000 years; for, according to what is now known of Babylonian astronomy, the Zodiac was certainly in use many centuries before the correspondence of signs and con- stellations in the third pre-Christian century.5
1 Elements of Astronomy, New York, 1872.
aG. Schlegel, Uranographie Chinoise, La Haye, 1875.
» O. D. Miller, Har-Moad, latest ed., North Adams, Mass., 1892.
*The most recent estimates I have noticed are those of E. W. Maunder (op. cit., p. 619), and E. M. Plunket, Ancient Calendars and Constella- tions (London, 1903). According to the former, the Zodiac dates from circa 3000 B.C. ; according to the latter, from circa 6000 B.C. J. F. Hewitt, however, in his History and Chronology of the Myth-making Age, London, 1902, gives as the true date, B.C. 14200.
* Referring to the astronomical researches of Epping and Strassmaier, Sayce, Oppert, Mayer, Mahler, Jensen, Lehmann, and others, a writer just referred to (Plunket) remarks: "Whatever else remains uncertain
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Such oscillations in estimates of the date of the invention remind one of the aeonian oscillations reported by astronomers in the angle of the inclination of the Zodiac to the celestial equator. The former, however, lack the determinability, the moderate limits, and the indescribable stateliness of the astronomic movement.1
A final inquiry. Few readers can have reached the present page without having re- peatedly and earnestly asked themselves, Where was originated this unique, this widespread, almost ecumenical, pre-Babylonian conception of the universe? In what land can our "hairy arboreal ancestors" — as the current anthropol- ogy calls them — have so far lifted their thoughts from the gathering of nuts and edible roots for daily food as to feel an intellectual interest in the far-off astral world, and because of this
and open to discussion, some facts are clearly established. We now know that the inhabitants of Babylonia, in a remote age (certainly as early as the fourth millennium B.C.), were acquainted with the twelve divisions of the Zodiac, and that these divisions were imagined under figures closely resembling in almost every instance those now depicted on our celestial globes." Similarly M. A. Quentin, in the Revue de VHistoire des Religions (Mars-avril, 1895, pp. 169ff .), places the invention "more than 4000 B.C." The contributions of Professors Hommel and Winckler in the Babylonian field are very important. In the Greek field no work is perhaps more authoritative at this date than Professor Franz Boll's Sphaera. A worthy geographical counterpart is E. Hugo Berger's Geschichte der vrissenschaftlichen Erdkunde der Gricchen, 2 Aufl., Leipzig, 1903.
According to Lagrange this angle was at its maximum (29° 30') B.C. 29400. It then decreased to a minimum (21° 20') B.C. 14400; then increased to a new maximum (23° 53') in B.C. 2000. Its next minimum (22° 54') will be A.D. 6600; its next maximum (25° 21') in A.D. 19300. Many and great are the advantages of the astronomer over the ar- chaeologist ; he can not only unveil the past, but also foretell the future
124 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
interest proceeded to distinguish the planets from the stars that never wander, and — most remarkable of all — to invent that Zodiacal chronometer whose months are double millen- niums and whose year is more than 25,000 of our years? One of the most eminent of living astronomers, Maunder, of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, following the same line of evi- dence as Proctor, and before him Schwartz, reaches the conclusion they reached, to wit, that the terrestrial standpoint of the astronomers who framed our constellations and mapped the Zodiac cannot have been in Babylonia, or in Egypt, or in Arabia, or in India. He further says that "probably" we are warranted in excluding from our search Greece, Italy, and Spain.1 If not in any of these seats of ancient culture, where can that primeval standpoint have been? I believe the true answer to this question is now attainable.
The region I am about to suggest is equidis- tant from India, Babylonia, and Egypt. From each of these, however, it widely differs. It is
* E. Walter Maunder, in Littdl's Living Age, vol. 227, pp. 614ff. The present writer was in the midst of an interesting correspondence with Mr. Proctor at the time of his sudden and widely lamented death. That the constellations associated by him with the Flood-tradition were outlined and named at the time and place supposed by him, and by Maunder, is far from incredible; but both the interest in astral worlds, and the proficiency in stellar studies manifested in the conception and construction of such a "Star-story of the Deluge," require for their rational explanation a liberal allowance of antecedent time and a place more signally adapted than Cappadocia, or any other part of Asia Minor, to "draw men's thoughts to heaven."
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more favorable for astronomic observation and for astronomic experiment than any one of the three. Indeed, no other land was so fitted to become the birthplace of the science. It is a region in which the movements of the heavenly bodies can be watched through unusually pro- tracted periods, without interruption, and under cosmical conditions more favorable than any that our modern astronomers have known. Especially does its center offer an astronomic viewpoint superior in several respects to any to be found on the banks of the Euphrates or in the basin of the Mediterranean. Men there domiciled would need no careful measurements or logarithmic calculations to determine solstice or equinox — each would be as visibly fixed and dated as are with us the noon and the sunset. At that center there is but one sunrise and one sunset in the whole long year. Strange as this arrangement would seem to us were we trans- located to that latitude, our wonder would be increased on finding that by a short march of less than five miles we could reach a new camping ground distinguished from the first by having annually two sunrises and two sunsets. Nor would our wonder fail to grow on finding that with every farther march the same distance southward we would find camping grounds having an additional annual sunrise and sunset until, after more than three and a half hundred such marches, we reached a charmed circle be-
126 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
yond which, however far we journeyed, we could find but three hundred and sixty-five such annual apparitions and vanishings of the orb of day.
Now, it is on, and within, the charmed circle inclosing these ever increasing and decreasing dawns and nightfalls that the starry realms can be studied as nowhere else. On it, an observer whose zenith is 47° from the pole of the ecliptic soon finds his observatory obligingly wheeled into a position where zenith and pole are absolutely coincident. This pleasing transpor- tation poleward or the reverse completes itself every twelve hours, and by no mechanism of the observatory, or effort of the observer. The parallaxes and sky-tiltings obtainable in these ever-recurring circuits can nowhere else be had. Then, farther within the circle, a heavenly body can be watched and studied months at a time. Star-paths which we at present can trace but a night, and through but a minute fraction of an unknown arc, can there be followed through their completed circuits, and this without one hour of interruption. There the problem of the identity or non-identity of the morning and evening star has never risen. There no com- mentator on ancient poets has ever had excuse for getting confused over the eastern and western palaces of the sun. There all stars along the celestial equator can be correlated to corresponding points on the terrestrial horizon of the observer, or at his pleasure tilted to a
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different plane. There the sphericity of the earth, and the inclination of its axis, would be easily discoverable.1 So also the dependence of the moon upon the sun for her illumination. So also the rationale of an eclipse. There more naturally than anywhere else could men come to think of the azure sky as an ever-moving, earth-encircling Ocean-stream, on whose level waters the sun and moon and stars were sailing.2 There, and nowhere else, the observer is at the top of an earth that never rolls over, and under a zenith that never passes to its setting.3 That country's center is the Arctic Pole, its bound- aries the Arctic Circle. Years ago I called it the one natural astronomic observatory of the whole earth, and the more I have studied the astronomic attainments and world-views of pre- historic men, the more certain it has seemed to me that here, in this upright-axled country, was originated this upright-axled cosmology of the oldest culture-peoples. The progress of a like conviction in the wide
1 The changing aspects of the heavens during a simple walk in a straight line from any point a few miles distant from the pole to a point equidis- tant beyond the pole would suggest the true figure of the earth, and would well-nigh furnish an ocxilar demonstration of the ancient doctrine that the celestial sphere was centered about a fixed terrestrial one. Even the slow movement of the celestial pole around the unchanging pole of the ecliptic, and the consequent precession of the equinoxes (both known to the Babylonians), could have been first discovered in the Arctic regions far more easily, one would think , than in Babylonia.
2 See Berger, Mythische Ko.wnographie der Griechen, 1904, p. 2.
3 For this reason it is the only place where the heaven-ladders and columnar bridges of all mythologies can permanently and uninterruptedly connect our earth with the heavens above it. See The Cradle of the Human Race, pp. 144, 145, and passim.
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world of scholarship may be slow, but it is remarkably steady.1 Already in the eighteenth century Jean Sylvain Bailly, an astronomer of first rank, reached the well-reasoned conclusion that the genesis of his science was in the highest North. Buffon, a genius of the same genera- tion, demonstrated that in the slow cooling of the earth in early ages the first portions of its surface to become habitable by men must have been at the poles. Two or three generations later biology independently reached the con- viction that the dominant floral and faunal forms of the whole earth had their origin in the Paleo-Arctic zone.2 About the same time ethnologists began to suggest or to assert th€ Arctic origin of the human family.3 Even authors from whom such a doctrine was by no means looked for found reason for professing their belief that the human species originated in the polar world.4 Comparative philology has
1 See my paper on "The Cradle of the Human Race — Recent Litera- ture," in the Methodist Review, New York, December, 1908.
2Kriz, Mittheilungen der Wiener anthropologischen Gesellschaft, N. F. xvii, 1, 1898. Eminent pioneers in this scientific advance were Asa Gray, Oswald Heer, A. Penck, Otto Kuntze, and Joseph Le Conte. See James Orton, Comparative Zoology, p. 384. Also, G. Hilton Scribner, Where Did Life Begin? New York, 2d ed., 1903.
3 Quatref ages, The Human Species, New York, 1879, p. 178. Moritz Wagner, Ursprung und Heimat des Urmenschen, Basel, 1889. M. Le Marquis G. de Saporta, "How the Earth was Peopled," in The Popular Science Monthly, New York, 1884, translated from the Revue des Deux Mondes.
4 Giulio Lazzarini, Etnica Razionale, Pavia, 1890. In June, 1884, and again in December, 1891, in the pages of LaNuova Scienza, Rome, the editor, Dr. Enrico Caporali, supported this view of the cradleland of the race.
PROBLEMS FOR FUTURE STUDY 129
increasingly turned its eyes in the same direc- tion for light upon its problems.1 Comparative mythology, through Indian investigators in the East,2 and Keltic in the West,3 and Teutonic in the center,4 is more and more pointing with converging fingers toward a Proto- Aryan home- land within the Arctic Circle.5 Anthropology, in the person of some of its most authoritative representatives, is to-day teaching, with a positiveness of conviction hitherto unequaled, that the real cradleland of the whole human family, and the center of its original dispersion, "must be sought in 'Arktogaa/ a north-polar country which no foot of man shall ever again tread, a land covered with everlasting ice, or submerged beneath the billows of the ocean."8 Even the biblical theologians have come to see that the Eden story of Genesis, when rightly
1 E. R. Burton, Etyma Latina, London, 1890.
2 Bal Gungadhar Tilak, The Arctic Home in the Vedas, Bombay, 1903, 8vo, pp. xxiv, 504. This author is a native Sanskrit scholar who long resisted the view to which, as here shown, his maturer studies have led him.
» Principal John Rhys, Professor of Celtic in the University of Oxford, Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom (Hibbert Lectures), London, 1888. "In any case, the mythological indications to which your attention has been called, point, if I am not mistaken, to some spot within the Arctic Circle" (p. 636).
* Ernst Krause, Tuiskoland : Derarischen Stamme und Goiter Urheimat, Glogau, 1891, 8vo, pp. over 600. Noticed by Rudolph Virchow in Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie, Heft 3, 1891. Two years later Dr. Krause published a supplementary volume: Die Trojaburgen Nordeuropas, Glogau, 8vo, pp. xxxii, 300. His Allgemeine Weltanschauung in ihrer historischen Entwicklung (Stuttgart, 1889) I have not seen.
* J. D. Ludwig Wilser, Herkunft und Urgeschichte der Arier, 1899. "Wilser, Menschwerdung, Stuttgart, 1907, pp. 11, 13, 15, 72, 107ff.
Also the authors quoted by him in his Tierwelt und Erdalter (1908), and in his treatise, Die Urheimat des Menschengeschlechtcs, Heidelberg, 1905.
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interpreted, is the story of a Polar Paradise, the headspring of whose four rivers is in the upper heavens.1 At no distant day, compara- tive cosmology, youngest of all these lines of scientific research, is certain to bring in her slowly and carefully gathered testimony; and we may rest assured that this testimony will be found to be in full accord with that of her tributary sciences.
1 Hermann Gunkel, Genesis Ubersetst und erkldrt, Gottingen, 1901, p. 33. T. K. Cheyne, Traditions and Beliefs of Ancient Israel, London, 1907, pp. 84, 455. Gunkel expressly equates "der Gottesgarten," "der Gottes- berg," "Eden," and "der Nordpol des Himmels." See also Alfred Jeremias, Das alte Testament im Lichte des alten Orients, 2 Aufl., S. 188-202, for approximations to this view.
Since the foregoing was put in type Wilser, in an article entitled "Der Nordische Scbopfungsherd," printed in the Zeitschrift fur den Ausbau der Entwieklungslehre, Heft V, 1909, has given an instructive summary of the entire literature of this anthropological doctrine, in- cluding even my article in the Methodist Review for November, 1908.
APPENDIX
PAGE
I. The Mandala Oblation 133
Paper read before a private club of clergymen, March 4, 1897.
II. Homer's Abode op the Dead 157
Printed in The Boston University Year Book. vol. x (1883).
III. Homer's Abode op the Living 178
Printed in The Boston University Year Book, vol. xii.
IV. The Gates op Sunrise in the Oldest Mythologies. . 192
Printed in The Babylonian and Oriental Record, London, vol. xii (1889).
V. The Homeland op the Gandharvas 197
Prepared for Annual Meeting, American Oriental So- ciety, 1906.
VI. The World Tree op the Teutons 200
Printed in The Monist, Chicago, January, 1907. VII. Problems Still Unsolved in Indo- Aryan Cosmology. 205 Printed in The Journal of the American Oriental So- ciety, 1905.
VIII. Index op Authors 217
IX. Index op Subjects 221
131
SECTION I— THE MANDALA OBLATION
Every day in the year, in every Lamaist temple in Tibet, there is offered up by the officiating priest a notable oblation. Few, even among students of religion, have ever heard of it. I know of but two writers who give evidence of acquaintance with the details of the rite, and neither of these shows any adequate appre- ciation of its significance. To my mind the offering is the most interesting, and in some respects the most impressive, anywhere found in the whole history of human worship. It consists of thirty-eight little thumb- and-finger pinches of rice-grains on a tray. Why this simple offering should have such exceptional impressive- ness and significance can never be understood without some understanding of Lamaism; and Lamaism can never be understood without a careful study of the earlier Indian Buddhism, of which it is a corrupt but more highly organized form. To this earlier system, then — to its view of the world and of human life — I must first invite your attent on.
In the poem entitled The Daisy, Tennyson recounts some travels of his in Italy, and in so doing chances to recall his impressions of the Milan Cathedral. Imme- diately his own verse takes on a new elevation and he cries out:
"O Milan, O the chanting quires, The giant windows ' blazon 'd fires, The height, the space, the gloom, the glory!"
That last line is apt to haunt me whenever I turn my thoughts in the direction they are now about to
133
134 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
take. With a good degree of continuity I have studied Brahmanic and Buddhistic teachings for more than twenty-five years, yet even now it often seems as if I were only mastering the alphabet of a strange new language. I even thought of writing for this very occasion a paper with this title: "Why I am resolved to abandon my studies of Buddhism." More than once I have suspended them, but the issue of the next new text-translation, or treatise thereon, has usually re- awakened my zeal. Still, as often as I return to the contemplation of the Buddhist conception of the world and of life I feel afresh,
"O the height, the space, the gloom, the glory!"
To get some impression of the altitude and spacious- ness of this world-view I know of no better way than to start with the familiar world-view of the ancient Greeks, and thence to proceed to that described in the sacred books of the Buddhists.
Omitting, then, all debated questions, we may remind ourselves that the world of Homer and Hesiod con- sisted, first, of an earth for the abode of men living and dead; second, above this a starry heaven inhabited by the gods; and third, below the earth at an equal dis- tance with the sky a Tartaros full of murky darkness, the abode of Titans and other dethroned enemies of the gods. Beyond this overarching heaven and underarch- ing Tartaros naught existed or was imagined to exist. This one world-shell included the abodes of all beings and all beings themselves. No conception of the uni- verse could well be clearer or more complete.
What, now, of its dimensions? How far was it sup- posed to be from highest heaven to lowest hell?
We cannot tell in furlongs or in miles. Homer,
THE MANDALA OBLATION 135
however, tells us that Tartaros was as far below the earth as the heaven was above it, and Hesiod confirms this when he tells us that an anvil dropped from heaven would fall nine days before reaching the earth, and that if dropped from the earth it would likewise require nine days to reach the bottom of murky Tartaros. Such a measurement, however, would seem to be a little poetic and to have something of the exaggeration of poetry, for when the Father of Gods and men hurled Hephaistos over the battlements of heaven he alighted on Lemnos, according to his own testimony in the Iliad, at the close of one day's fall. Moreover, we must not forget that in the Odyssey we find the giants planning to scale the heights of heaven by simply piling Pelion upon Ossa and Ossa upon Olympos, so making the distance only the height of those three mountains. Indeed, Atlas was tall enough to stand upon the earth and support the heaven upon his upstretched hands. With these cosmological thought-measures of the Greeks in mind, let us now turn to the cosmos of the Buddhists, not forgetting that it was inherited in large part from the yet older Hindu teaching. The description I am about to give is based upon those of Spence-Hardy, Beal, and the more recent Oriental scholars.
First, let us take the Homeric world-shell and see what enlargement it may need to enable it to accom- modate the Buddhist thought of the world's contents. In its center, laterally considered, we must locate the stupendous mountain Meru, or Su-meru, which means ' 'Beautiful Meru." This is the upright axis of the earth conceived of as an enormous foursquare mountain. Around it revolve the sun and moon in horizontal orbits. It is glorious beyond description, being like burnished gold on one side, silver on another, sapphire
136 THE EARLIEST COSMOLOGIES
on another, ruby on another. From base to summit it is 1,680,000 miles. Its support underneath is the still larger Trikuta rock, whose three supporting peaks are each 40,000 miles in height. This tripod-like pedes- tal rests upon the Gal Polova, or World-stratum of Gold, which rocklike serves as a bottom to all the oceans. In vertical thickness this is 3,200,000 miles. Next underneath this is a Jala Polova, or World-stratum of Waters, 4,800,000 miles in thickness, and below this a World-stratum of Air, the Va Polova, and this is 9,600,- 000 miles in thickness. Below this, our world, or, as the Buddhist would say, our sakwala, does not extend.
One of the greatest of recent achievements of science is the liquefaction of atmospheric air. A few weeks after its first accomplishment the emperor and empress of Germany visited a laboratory of the university in Berlin to witness the performance of the wonder by a famous professor from Munich. At the close of the successful experiment the enthusiastic emperor, with his own hand, decorated the professor with an imperial order. Our next problem will be the solidifying of this liquefied air. Of this Science has not yet begun to dream. These Orientals, however, began to dream of it long ago. If the German Kaiser could visit this bottom stratum of the Buddhist world he would find that though it is a stratum of air, it is one perfectly solid and harder than a diamond.
Returning now from the bottom of things and ascend- ing through the Air-stratum 9,600,000 miles, and through the Water-stratum 4,800,000 miles, and through the Gold-stratum 3,200,000 miles, and through the Earth- stratum 1,200,000 miles, we arrive at last at the level of Jambu-dvipa, and the three other island-continents which constitute the abode of men and of the beings
THE MANDALA OBLATION 137
with which men are most familiar. We have measured the depth of our world-shell — nearly 19,000,000 miles; it remains to explore its height.
But before we scale the heavens we must ascend on terra firma a stupendous series of terraces, seven in number, quadrangular in form,1 and inclosing in their center Mount Meru, the axial line of our heavens and earth. These seven terraces dam in and hold in place seven intervening seas, also concentric, of course, with the square continents which separate and shore them. Now, as Jambu-dvlpa, our own particular abode, lies in the Great Sea, the outermost of all, a step in thought from our own island-continent to the nearest of the seven concentric square continents would be a step across the inner portion of the outermost sea up to the higher level of the seventh of the continents. Another thence to the sixth continent would take one across the seventh sea and up to the level of the sixth continent, and so on, until on crossing the first or innermost sea one would plant his feet on the lofty level of the visible base of Mount Meru. I say "lofty level" because the height of the seventh continent above the outermost sea is more than 6,000 miles, that of the sixth above the seventh more than 12,000, that of the fifth above the sixth more than 24,000, and so on each time in redoubled numbers, until the last or inmost step alone lifts us more than 400,000 miles toward the heavenly regions, although properly speaking we are still on terra firma. We are now at the level of Ilavrita, the divinely beautiful country surrounding the visible base of Mount Meru. Far above us are the heavens to which we now turn our attention.
The first, or lowest, is called the heaven of the Maha-
1 See picture on p. 79 of Waddell's Buddhism of Tibet (London, 1895).
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Rajahs, that is, the heaven of the Four Great Kings. Ancient Hindu cosmography places at the four corners of this divinely beautiful country, Ilavrita, four stu- pendous mountains, each 100,000 miles in height. These constitute what are called the four buttresses of the far loftier Meru, which stands in their center, and towers to an almost immeasurable distance above them. Now, the heaven which at the height of 400,000 miles over- arches Ilavrita and all the concentric quadrangular oceans and continents below is the heaven of the Four Great Kings. Each of these kings is sovereign over the quarter of the world in which his mountain is located, and each has subjects much resembling demigods. One of these mighty monarchs is white, another imperial purple, another imperial yellow, another imperial red. A part of their duty is to drive back any demon armies that may strive to reach the heavens of the gods by scaling Mount Meru. The normal lifetime of beings born into this lowest heaven — and man or beast, or god, or ghost, is liable to be born into it — is 9,000,000 years.
The second heaven is that of the Three and Thirty Gods, or, as it is often called from the name of its king, the heaven of Sakra. This overarches the heaven of the Four Great Kings. It must be at least 400,000 miles higher up, for it is on a level with the summit of Mount Meru. Right on that summit is the palace and the capital city of King Sakra. Of course, his dominions extend laterally far beyond this capital to almost unimag- inable distances. The most moderate statement is 600,000 miles. The lifetime of anyone born into this heaven is 36,000,000 years. It almost gives one a brain paralysis to remember that in his various previous births before his last, Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, was born into this heaven no less than twenty times.
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Accordingly, he spent in this one abode no less than 720,000,000 years. It is the heaven into which his mother was born on her decease seven days after she had given him birth. One can but feel an interest in learn- ing what kind of a place it is. Here is a brief account from one of the Shasters summarized by Beal in his Catena of Buddhist Scriptures :
The central city is 100,000 miles in circuit. The towering gates are fifteen miles in height and there are one thousand of these gates. Each gate has five hundred blue-clad celestial watchmen fully armed. In its center is a kind of inner city called the Golden City of King Sakra. Here he has a pavilion 10,000 miles in circuit. Its floor is of pure gold inlaid with every kind of costly gem. This inner city has five hundred gates, and on each of its four sides are one hundred towers; in each tower one thousand and seven hundred chambers; in each chamber seven devis, and each devi is attended by seven handmaidens. All these devis are consorts of King Sakra, with whom he has intercourse in different forms and personations according to his pleasure. The total region of this heaven, like others, is surrounded by a sevenfold wall, a sevenfold ornamental railing, a sevenfold row of tinkling curtains, and beyond these are seven rows of Talas trees. All these encircle one another, and are of every color of the rainbow, being composed of every imaginable precious substance. So the description runs on and on.
This King Sakra is himself one of the most interest- ing of all imaginable gods. He has for a trumpet a remarkable conch-shell one hundred and twenty cubits in length, and when he has finished blowing a merry blast upon it, it continues to sound on and on four months before its wind is exhausted. Moreover, his
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throne is a kind of moral thermopile, so that every now and then when some saint down in the human world is achieving some extraordinary merit — one so great that he is in danger of becoming more powerful than any god — this marble throne suddenly begins to grow hot, and Sakra is prompted to descend in haste to the world of men and look into the case. Usually he disguises himself as a man and tests the saint, and as the stories have been written by the saints, he is usually represented as overwhelmed with amazement at the wisdom and transcendent powers of the man he came to test. One could easily fill an hour with read- ings from his adventures of this kind as told in the Jatakamala and other sacred books. Of course we must not, for we have yet higher heavens to climb. Our earthly minutes and hours are not like those found in these heavenly places.
The third heaven is inhabited by beings called Yamas, and their king is Suyama. This is at an immense dis- tance above the heaven of Sakra. As its inhabitants are far above all possible incursions from the demon armies they are called "Strife-less." They determine the time of day by the opening and shutting of the flowers. Their peaceful lifetime extends through the liberal allowance of 144,000,000 of our years.
The fourth heaven, far above this, is that of the Tushitas, or the Satisfied Ones. Their king is San- tushita. This seems to be regarded as specially holy, as it is the last home of Budhisattvas, or future Buddhas — one by one — before their final birth as men. Maitreya, the fifth and last of our present world-cycle, is now in this heaven biding his time. We may have long to wait for him, for the life allowance here is 576,000,000 years.
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Of the fifth heaven the sacred books have little to say. Its inhabitants are called "The Gods who Delight in Fashioning." With them life runs on to 2,304,000,000 years.
To indicate the progressive disappearance of the sensual in the heavenly beings as one ascends, the people are taught that in the first heaven the occupants propagate the species in the same way as human beings, in the second it is done by a mere clasping in the arms, in the third by a mere touch of hands, in the fourth by colloquy, or an interchange of speech, and in the fifth by a mere exchange of glances. Beyond this abode propagation is supposed to cease.1
The sixth is the heaven of King Mara, and he rules over millions of subjects, also called Maras. This King Mara, like Sakra, has great interest in men. He tests them so often and so mercilessly that he is often called the Buddhist Satan. If time would permit I should like to read the description of his temptation of Gautama when he was sitting under the Bo-tree. The elephant which Mara rode on that occasion was one hundred and fifty leagues in height. In many passages he is called "the Wicked One/' but this cannot be taken in our strict monotheistic sense. He is a god ruling over gods, and their happy lives fill out 9,216,000,000 years. The garments of any one of these weigh only the one hundred and twenty-eighth part of a single ounce. It is the last heaven in which clothing of any kind is needed.
How many more heavens above these six rise from height to height unpicturable? Twenty.
It is manifestly impossible to proceed with such de-
1 Pallas and Koppen, quoted in Menzel's Vorchristliche Unsterblichkeits- lehre, i, 277.
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tail as hitherto. We must group the whole twenty-six, as the Buddhist teachers themselves do. The first six are the heavens of sensuous gods — divinities — capable, like the Olympians, of marriage and propagation, yet so self-luminous with divine energies that none of these heavens have need of the light of a sun or of a moon, any more than did that celestial city described in the Apocalypse. On being born into any one of them a person takes the color of the celestial flower on which one's eyes may chance first to fall.
The twenty yet higher heavens are collectively styled the Brahma-loka, or heavens of Brahma. If a stone as big as a pagoda were dropped from the lowest of these it would fall 18,383 years before it could reach the earth, so we are assured in one of the Shasters. Poor Hesiod's anvil and its nine days' fall are as naught.
The seventh, eighth, and ninth heavens take us be- yond all trace of sense high into the spirit realm. No being can ever reach any one of them until sublimated by long practice of meditation and mystic vision up to the ecstatic experience known as the first Dhyana, or spiritual trance. Over the third of this group, namely, the ninth in the total order, presides as sovereign Great Brahma, the supreme god of ancient Brahmanism.
The tenth, eleventh, and twelfth constitute another group of three attainable only by beings who have attained the powers and virtues of the second trance.
In like manner the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth are a yet higher group attainable only by those who have attained the powers and virtues of adepts in the third trance.
Next follows a group of seven, the sixteenth to the twenty-second inclusive; and these are attainable only by beings who have attained the transcendent powers
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and virtues of adepts in the fourth and highest trance- condition. It is well that these so-called heavens of form extend no higher, for as we ascend through them the inhabitants are found to increase in stature in a geometrical progression, so that here in the twenty- second they are in height 160,000 of our miles.
Combining now all four of these groups of heavens reached by beings sublimated to the trance stages, we have what the Buddhist scriptures call the heavens of form, Rupa-loka. They are sixteen in number. Beyond and above this higher group, comes last of all, most ineffable of all, the four Arupa-loka, or heavens of form- less entities. These are the twenty-third, the twenty- fourth, twenty-fifth, and twenty-sixth. The altitude of these no archangelic surveyor can ever measure, for they rise into a realm as impalpable as that of subject- less, objectless thought. The tenants of the twenty-sixth are called "beings who abide in neither consciousness nor unconsciousness."
Here, then, culminates the spheroidal sakwala in which we dwell. No opium-dream described by De Quincey ever grew to such unimaginable proportions or so moved us to exclaim,
"O the height, the space, the gloom, the glory I"
As yet, however, I have hardly more than made a beginning in Buddhist cosmology. I have simply taken you from the bottom of our enlarged Homeric world- shell to its summit. Had I time to make a horizontal journey from one side of this fairy world to the other and around the four sides of beautiful Meru, we should find spaces and groupings and distances quite as be- wildering. We should find geometric continents, and satellite continents, and lakes and seas, all filled with
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fantastic yet remarkably coherent creations, and all described with the greatest apparent accuracy of detail. We should find the seventh concentric sea common salt sea-water, but the sixth is pure fresh water, the fifth comparable only to spirits of wine, the fourth to sugar- cane juice, the third to butter, the second to fragrant curds, the highest and innermost, the first, to a milklike liquid of absolute whiteness, yielding to the gods an elixir of life. And the depth of this innermost and highest of the seven concentric quadrilateral seas, like its breadth, is 840,000 miles. Here we might see waves 400 miles in height, others 600, each variety with its own proper nautical name. Nor would these produce any sense of disproportion. In such vast expanses they would be the veriest ripplings of a summer sea. Take the outermost ocean, the one in which we live. The four island-continents therein are the outermost land, but beyond this last barrier of land the waste of waters extends out and out and out to the uttermost wall of the world, a distance of 2,798,000 miles. At that far-off outer shore we should find a circular wall of iron or of living metallic rock, like iron, 1,640,000 miles in height, one half above the water and one half below. The circumference of this circular wall, this solid equa- torial girdle of the world, is no less than 36,103,500 miles.
Crossing such a world we should very likely be for- tunate enough to see in one of these oceans a Timinda, a fish 2,000 miles in length,