ORIGIN OF CREATION STORIES A GLOBAL WORLD OF COMMON SYMBOLS Author´s Introduction
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THE MILKY WAY TELLING IN ANCIENT TEXTS

References to the very fine website of Anne Wright

http://www.constellationsofwords.com/stars/milky_way.html

Excerpt:
"There is a high track, seen when the sky is clear, called the Milky Way, and known for its brightness. This way the gods pass to the palaces and halls of the mighty Thunderer [Zeus/Jupiter]. To right and left are the houses of the greater gods, doors open and crowded. The lesser gods live elsewhere. Here the powerful and distinguished have made their home. This is the place, if I were to be bold, I would not be afraid to call high heavens Palatine." [Ovid, Met, Bk I:151-176]".

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MILKY WAY MYTHS

THE MILKY WAY AS THE PATH TO THE OTHERWORLD:
A COMPARISON OF PRE-COLUMBIAN NEW WORLD CULTURES
Edwin L. Barnhart
Revised September 2003
(First written in the Fall of 1994)
(Please do not cite without permission from author)

INTRODUCTION
The recently defined discipline of Archaeoastronomy has drawn attention to how Pre-Columbian New World peoples viewed the night sky. Countless studies now exist on the importance of sky watching to Native American life. Like their European counterparts, early man in the New World had many myths about the planets, the stars and the universe. Indigenous built structures from Chile to Alaska have been demonstrated to be observatories and models of the universe in miniature. The application of archaeoastronomy to the studies of New World cultures has greatly aided in the understanding of the customs of those groups. Cross-cultural comparison using archaeoastronomy has proven more difficult and few attempts in the literature exist. The 1990 National Geographic article entitled "America's Ancient Skywatchers", by John Carlson, is one notable exception. The article compares the cosmologies of four New World cultures, the Inca, Maya, Aztec and Navajo, and demonstrates that each believe in a three planed universe; the earth plus an upper and under world. This paper is a comparison of the role of the largest of all sky phenomena, the Milky Way, as seen from the perspectives of eleven New World cultures. The following culture groups will be discussed; Inca, Tukano, Maya, Aztec, Apache, Pawnee, Cheyenne, Sioux, Shoshone, Seneca and Kwakiutl (Figure 1).

This group of cultures was picked for a number of reasons. First, the group is meant to be a representative sample of the three New World areas, North, Central and South. Second, there are many ethnographies of New World cultures but few breach the topic of sky watching. Fewer still speak of the Milky Way. Many cultures are now vanished from the earth or changed to such a degree as to retain little of their Pre-Columbian customs. For those people, early ethnographies are the only source left which records their customs and beliefs. Thus, the cultures included in this study were also chosen due to the quality of ethnographic information regarding them. There are countless other culture groups that should be included here but cannot due to lack of surviving information. Unfortunately, information concerning the Milky Way cannot be found for every New World culture. This should not be construed as a lack of beliefs regarding the Milky Way. The examples given in this paper are simply the beliefs that have made their way into the written record.

Each group discussed has their own myths regarding the creation and character of the Milky Way. They involve local animals and geography. The Milky Way is spoken of in terms of metaphors that have special meaning to each individual culture. However, if one looks beyond the metaphors, to the meaning and function of the Milky Way in those same cultures, continuity emerges. Each of the cultures discussed here regard the Milky Way as the Path to the otherworld, traveled by spirits, deities and shamans in trance. The following compilation of ethnographic information will demonstrate the existence of this belief in eleven cultures, starting with the Inca and moving northward. Moche, Navajo and Eastern Greenland Eskimos will be tangentially discussed. Finally, a possible explanation for the continuity will be offered.

  
Figure 1. Cultures discussed in this paper 2

INCA
At the time of contact, the Inca controlled the largest territory in the history of the New World. The Inca Empire spanned the Andes, from Chile into Ecuador. To the Inca, the Milky Way was, and still is, referred to as a river flowing through the sky. Its source is said to be terrestrial, the run off of the Vilcanota River, which runs southeast/northwest through the heart Peru. The Vilcanota and the Milky Way are said to be mirror images of one another and for this reason the primary orientation of the Milky Way is said to be running southeast/northwest (Urton 1981:38). During the twilight periods of the solstices the Milky Way forms a cross in the sky. This cross touches the four points on the horizon in which the sun rises and sets during the equinoxes. Further, it divides the stars into four separate directional quarters. Though a case for the cross being formed by the ecliptic and the Milky Way can be made, Urton provides abundant and convincing evidence that it is indeed formed solely by the Milky Way (Urton 1981:54-65). The Milky Way is also said to be home to a number of animals in the form of what Urton terms "dark star constellations" (Figure 2). The dark patches in the Milky Way have names like the Llama, the Toad and the Snake. Like the celestial river they float in, these animals have terrestrial origin. Further, some equate them with the deities Viracocha (the Inca creation deity) designated as the patrons of animals (Urton 1981:169-191)

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Figure 2. Inca Milky Way constellations (Urton 1981)

The souls of the deceased were said to go to the Hurin Pacha or "upperworld". Even while a person was still alive, the soul visited the Hurin Pacha during sleep. Dreams were believed to be views into the upperworld as seen through the eyes of the soul (De la Vega 1990:84-86). As discussed above, the Milky Way connects heaven and earth.

In the Inca creation myth, Viracocha himself follows the primary axis of the Milky Way (southeast to northwest) on his journey from earth to the upperworld after creation had been completed. If the huacas whom the Inca ask for prosperous life abide in the upperworld, then the Milky Way must be the channel through which they communicate and the shrines the portals.

Just after the June solstice the Inca himself presided over the most grave and serious ceremony of the year. It was called Intip Raimi, "the Solemn Feast of the Sun". Absolutely every noble from all over the Inca Empire was required to come to Cuzco for this ceremony and all people, nobles and commoners alike, were encouraged to participate (De la Vega 1966:356). The ceremony is a "centering of the universe" around the Inca in the temple of the Sun at Cuzco. The timing of the Intip Raimi in the ritual calendar coordinates with the time Urton reports the Milky Way to align with the Vilcanota River. It was this time, when heaven and earth come together, and the sun rose and set in the Milky Way, that the people came together with their king to pay homage to the sun.

The king was the center of the Inca world and Cuzco was the center of the kingdom. As the Milky Way did to the night sky, the Inca partitioned the realm into four sections. As the Milky Way lends order to the universe, so does the Inca king to the empire. Indeed, the cross created by the Milky Way at zenith was probably one of the Inca symbols of office. De la Vega described an inner shrine in the palace at Cuzco, a place where only those of royal blood could enter. The room was called a huaca and housed an heirloom handed down from king to king. It was a large cross of fine marble. De la Vega strongly asserts that this was not a Christian cross and that the Inca did not worship it but rather revered it as an ancestor or huaca (De la Vega 1966:73). If this cross was not a European influence than it is likely the Milky Way cross. The Inca kings considered it a symbol of their ancestors and by doing so drew a parallel between the Milky Way's function in the sky and the King's function on earth. The function of the Milky Way is to partition space and connect heaven and earth. The purest divine blood on earth coursing through the veins of the Inca made him most able to perform these tasks and the above discussion suggests that he did just that.

TUKANO
The Tukano are a small group who live in the equatorial rain forests of the Columbian Northwest Amazon. For the Tukano, the Milky Way is foam flowing up from Ahipikondia churned by celestial wind currents. It is sometimes referred to as a giant wind skein flowing across the night sky. A deity named Viho Mahse resides in the Milky Way. Viho is the term for the hallucinogenic powder ingested by the payes (the Tukano term for shaman) to induce vision. When a person becomes ill they are said to be under attack from the spirit world. To cure their patients, payes enlist the help of beings called Viho Mahsa who also dwell in the Milky Way. Rivers and hills are common spots for creating portals from which to make contact with the supernatural world. Tukano informants state plainly and clearly that the Milky Way connects the three worlds. Those three worlds are; the lower world (Ahipikondia), the Earth and the upper world, home of the spirits and Viho Mahse (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1967:43-47).

The Malocas, or longhouses, of the Tukano are built to be miniature models of the universe. They are always built with their main axis pointing east/west, the direction of rivers and the Sun's passage across the sky. Three pairs of large forked posts and their respective beams separate the interior space of the Maloca. The sections are joined together from above by a single beam. This central beam is said to symbolize the Milky Way, which connects the three worlds and lies on the east-west axis. Interestingly, the word for the beam is gumu. The words gumu and kumu come from the same origin and mean "axis". Kumu is the title used to describe the most powerful shaman in the tribe. Gumu can also refer to a bridge created from a single trunk. Again, we see leader symbolizing the connection between Earth and the Otherworld, the Milky Way.
As a final example from South America, look at these two paintings from the sides of pottery vessels originating from the Moche culture (Figures 3 and 4). The Moche occupied the Peruvian coast starting at 200BC. The Moche were absorbed by the Chimu Empire around 750AD and then by the Inca before European contact. The men in the scene may be identified as shaman and the arc above them is a rainbow or the Milky Way.

Figure 3. Moche vessel painting featuring the Milky Way (Hocquenghen 1987)

Figure 4. Moche vessel featuring the Milky Way (Hocquenghen 1987) 5

MAYA
The Maya have occupied Guatemala, Belize, and parts of Mexico, Honduras and El Salvador for almost 3000 years. For the Maya, both ancient and modern, the Milky Way plays a central role in a re-enactment of creation that is cyclically displayed in the night sky. Primarily, it is associated with the World Tree that reaches from Earth into the heavens. The great false Sun, Seven-Macaw, sat in this tree in the third creation. On the dates August 13 and February 5, dates especially associated with creation, the night sky goes through a cycle from dusk to dawn that recounts the story of the transition from the third creation into the present one. During those evenings, when the Milky Way runs along a North-South Axis it is the World Tree. A constellation identified as the great bird, Seven-Macaw, is positioned falling out of the top of the Tree in north. As it tilts towards the horizon, the Milky Way becomes the Crocodile Tree. When it reaches the east-west axis it switches into the canoe carrying the Maize God to the Place of creation (Freidel et al. 1993:93-99).


Figure 5. Pakal's sarcophogus lid, tree only (Brundage 1981)

While oriented on the north-south direction, the Milky Way also forms a cross with the elliptical path of the Sun. It is called the K'an Cross and correlates to a well-known symbol in Classic Maya iconography and writing (Freidel et al. 1993:94). Crosses are especially visible at the ruins of Palenque. Palenque's Cross Group was named for its abundance of the symbols. The cross is also displayed on Palenque's most recognizable scene, the sarcophagus lid on the tomb of Pakal. Brundage (1981) published a drawing of the lid omitting Pakal and leaving only the cross (Figure 5). The book Maya Cosmos suggests that this image shows Pakal falling down the Milky Way to the same path once taken by the Maize God and his brother towards Xibalba. One enters the road in the south, at the base of the tree when it is helping to form the cross in the sky (Freidel et al. 1993:351). The Maya Milky Way is the path to the Otherworld.

The cross in the sky formed by the Milky Way and the ecliptic stretches out in all four directions. The place where they meet is the center of the universe. From the creation myth, the Popol Vuh, we know that the three hearthstones were set at this center. The first act was the setting of the stones, followed by the raising of the sky and the establishment of the four corners and sides. The Milky Way and the ecliptic form the four partitions and a triangular constellation identified by Dennis Tedlock forms the three hearthstones (1985:261). The responsible deities left the story of creation in the sky for all Maya to see and remember.

AZTEC
The Aztec creation myth begins when the Fourth Sun ended and the sky fell from its great height, covering the earth with its ruins. The celestial waters flooded the earth. Texcatlipoca and QuetzalcoatI heaved the sky back up into place. The two gods then transformed themselves into World Trees to provide more stable support. During the setting of the sky a path was worn through the wilderness of the stars that was to become known as the Milky Way (Brundage 1982; 243). The path is said to have been created on the first day of the first year (Brundage 1982; 146). In another version of the same story, Texcatlipoca and QuetzalcoatI transform into two intertwined dragons that coil around the earth to reshape it for the fifth world (Brundage 1982; 147). The outermost band of the famous Aztec Calendar Stone shows exactly that. A double headed dragon or serpent, wrapped around the Aztec universe, with the heads of two gods emerging from their mouths, as QuetzalcoatI and Texcatlipoca do in the creation myth (Figure 6). The connection of this image to the Milky Way is clear.

Figure 6. Aztec Calendar Stone

The Milky Way contemporary Aztec times, aside from its role in creation, was conceptualized as a road across the sky and was presided over by two divinities, the male Citallatonac, Starshine, and the female Citlalinicue, Star Skirt. Citlalinicue was the Great Mother of the stars and was especially associated with the Milky Way. Her messenger was the hawk (Brundage 1979; 34).

APACHE - NAVAJO
In 1907 Edward S. Curtis published the first volume of a twenty-volume set of works entitled The North American Indian, a collection of photographs and descriptions of the indians of the United States and Alaska. Theodore Roosevelt, who had high praise for the book and its author, wrote the foreword of this first volume. The subject was the Apache and Navajo Indians of the Arizona, New Mexico area. Curtis strongly believed that the two tribes were one in prehistoric time due to similarities in languages and mythologies (Curtis 1907;4). In a section headed "Mortuary Customs" he briefly recorded the Apache beliefs concerning the Milky Way.

Yolkai Nalin is the name of the most feared and venerated deities in Apache mythology. She is the goddess of Death and the afterlife. She controls all souls that pass on to the future world. The road to this afterworld is supposed to cross her shoulders and is symbolized by the Milky Way, a trail made by departing spirits (Curtis 1907; 34). The souls of the dead follow the path for four days and finally arrive in a land of peace and plenty, where there is no disease or death (Curtis 1907; 134).

PAWNEE
The Pawnee villages, before the tribe's relocation to Oklahoma, were located in present day Nebraska. To the average Pawnee individual the Milky Way was spoken of as "Buffalo Dust". The name came from a story of race between a horse and a buffalo in which an enormous cloud of dust is kicked up. To the priests, however, the Milky Way was "the Pathway of Departed Spirits". A Pawnee constellation located next to the Milky Way depicts two men carrying a third in a stretcher, a sick or dead man being taken along the road. The Northstar, probably Polaris, was said to greet the dead and act as gatekeeper to the path. The South Star presided over the spirit world and stood at the end of the path. The Southstar was also said to be the deity of tornados because their violent winds were akin to the winds that carried the dead along the path (Von Del Chamberlain 1982:113). Pawnee priests conducted bundle rituals in which they contacted deities and ancestors (Murie 1981:12). The Milky Way was the channel between worlds and the bundle was a terrestrial portal to the channel.

CHEYENNE
In Volume Six of The North American Indian by Curtis, the Cheyenne are discussed. His information comes from the group living on the Tongue River Reservation in Montana. The southern group lived in Oklahoma at the time. Briefly, again under the heading of "Mortuary Customs", while discussing the soul after death, the following statement was 8
recorded; "The future world was the usual material, ideal world, reached by the Milky Way. Suicides and murderers went in a opposite direction to that taken by others." (Curtis 1911; 158). Though brief, the statement clearly supports the hypothesis of this paper.

SIOUX
The Sioux are a large culture that is further subdivided into multiple smaller tribes. The Oglala and the Lakota Sioux will be the groups discussed below. Both tribes are found in the upper mid-west United States. The information on the Oglala presented here comes from William K. Power's book Qqlala Religion (1975). The testimony comes from people of the Pine Ridge Reservation in southwestern South Dakota. Power reports that the Oglala believed that souls traveled along the Wanagi Tacanku or "Ghost Road", the Milky Way. They go until they meet an old woman who judges the soul's life on earth and sends it on to the other world or back to earth to be a shade (Power 1975; 93). The light in the Milky Way is the campfires of ghosts on the road (Power 1975; 53).

The Sioux, Life and Customs of a Warrior Society by Royal B. Hassrick, discusses the Lakota Sioux conception of death and the afterlife in some detail. At death, it was believed that the spirit or nagi left the body to travel the "spirit trail" or Milky Way to the "land of Many Lodges". Like the Oglala, during the journey the Lakota spirit must pass by an old woman. She would examine each one for the proper tattoo marks which must appear on the wrist, forehead or chin. If they were marked correctly they were allowed passage into the "land of many lodges" where all one's ancestors pitched their tipis and buffalo roamed in unending abundance (Hassrick 1964; 297).

The Lakota rituals involving proper burial lasted over a year. At the end of the process, the shaman assisting the family opens the spirit bundle outside the door of the lodge, under the night sky, so that the spirit might be properly released to make its journey to the spirit road, the Milky Way (Hassrick 1964; 264).

SHOSHONE
The Shoshone are another large culture group divided into separate tribes. Their territory ranged from California to Utah and from Oregon to Arizona. The information below comes from tribes occupying the heartland of the Shoshone territory, Nevada and eastern California.

The generation before the extensive scholarship of Franz Boas and his colleagues, James Mooney did a study of the Ghost Dance Tradition of the Plains Indians in an attempt to explain the behavior that lead up to the "Sioux outbreak of 1890". John Wesley Powell founded the Bureau of American Ethnology in Washington D.C. in 1885 and appointed Mooney ethnologist, a career he kept with until his death in 1921. He did exhaustive studies of the rituals of the Cherokee, Kiowa, Arapaho, Sioux, Comanche and Shoshone. The Paiute tribe he identifies as part of the great Shoshonean stock and describes their territory as covering most of Nevada, together with adjacent parts of southwestern Utah, northwestern Arizona and southeast California. At one point, Mooney described a song sung often in the Ghost Dance of the Paiute involving the Milky Way and wrote in passing, "In the mythology of the Paiute, as of many other tribes, the Milky Way is the road to the dead, the spirit world" (Mooney 1896:290). His casual reference to man tribes believing this makes it appear as if he felt that that piece of information was well known, though he makes no reference to the Milky Way in regard to any other tribe in particular.

Curtis published his fifteenth volume in 1921, its sole subject the Shoshone. The tribes in the Paiute area he refers to as the Plateau Shoshone. In their tradition, the spirits of the dead are said to rise straight through the air to the Milky Way and travel southward to the end of the trail, where they find a lake with a conical rock in the middle. Down through the hole in the apex of the rock they pass. At the bottom they emerge, living bodies, in Pugwainumu - muguwa - bitighan ("Place where spirit goes in"). Some say that below the Milky Way is another earth like this one of ours, but with more abundant grass and flowers. Tales from those who have died and returned say that one cannot see anything there. One hears the voices of people like the humming of "unnumbered flies" (Curtis 1921; 82).

Near the end of the origin myth recorded by Curtis the Numu-naa, People Father, and the Numu-biya, People Mother leave the earth headed southward. Mother didn't want to leave her children but Father consoled her saying that when their human children grew and multiplied there would be death and the spirits would then come to live with them again. They walked to the ocean, the clouds rose up like a great door in the sky and they climbed up a ladder to pass through it. They now reside there. When anybody dies, their spirit goes up along Kasipo, the Milky Way, to this place. People's Father places the soul in a box and after a time it becomes a living person. The land they live on has white soil and there is no sickness (Curtis 1921; 134).

SENECA
The Seneca are an Iroquois tribe. In the 1790's the Iroquois Nation tribes were split up into various reservations. One of the Seneca chiefs of the time was a man named Cornplanter. He was one of the chiefs of the Iroquois Nations in support of peace with the white man and had a large role in negotiations that ended the Indian resistance. Cornplanter and his branch of the Seneca established themselves around the Allegheny River, in a few little towns on both sides of the Pennsylvania border. They made treaties with the U.S. government for the land and in 1792 there were over 350 Seneca living in the area, a large portion of the believed 1800 total Seneca survivors of the day (Wallace 1972; 168).

The start of a new life on the reservation was difficult on Cornplanter's tribe of rag tag Seneca collected from the aftermath of the war against the whites. Mass depression and alcoholism were major problems. In the spring of 1799 a man from the tribe named Handsome Lake began having a series of visions that were to change all that and give the Seneca a new focus. From 1799 to 1801, he taught the Seneca of Cornplanter's reservation through his visions, condemning whiskey and the evil ways of his people. A Quaker named Henry Simmons was living among and recorded Handsome Lake's accounts of his visions. On the night of August 7th, 1799, Handsome Lake was ill and lay half dead in his bed. During this period he had his second vision, a vision that would become the core of the new Seneca religion's theology. During the trance Handsome Lake had the vision of the "sky journey". Led by a guide who carried a bow and arrow and was dressed in sky-blue clothes, he traversed heaven and hell and was told the moral plan of the cosmos. The following is a section out of Simmons record of the words of Handsome Lake concerning this vision:

"Suddenly as they looked, a road [the Milky Way] slowly descended from the south sky and came to where they were standing. Now there upon he saw the...tracks of the human race going in one direction [the individual stars] were all different sizes from small to great. This road, which they soon were treading themselves, was the path by which human souls ascended into the afterworld. On it could be observed, in various situations, many different types of people striving heavenward, and from its vantage point a vast panorama of the human scene could be observed." (Wallace1972; 243).
Simmons goes on to add to this description of the path that judges stood at the fork in the Milky Way. The good people went on the narrow path to the lands of the creator. His informants referred to the Milky Way as "the Great Sky Road" (Wallace 1972; 245).

As a final note, a comment from one of the many stories collected by Wallace (1972). The path to the village of the dead is a wobbly tree-trunk bridge guarded by a dog that sometimes pushes souls over the edge toward the raging river below (1972; 101). Again, masked in the individual mythology of the Seneca the image of the Milky Way comes through.

KWAKIUTL
In 1885 Franz Boas lived with the Kwakiutl for two years. The group he stayed with lived in Fort Rupert, just northeast of Vancouver Island on the west coast of Canada. During that time, he taught George Hunt, a half-blooded indian, and trained him as an anthropologist. Together, the two men produced volumes of monographs on the Kwakiutl. In 1975 Irving Goldman wrote a synthesis of these works, created for the purpose of investigating the nature of Kwakiutl religion. It is from Goldman's synthesis that much of the following information is collected.

There were 13 separate tribes in the Kwakiutl language group at the time of Boas' study. He included the entire group into a larger category he classified "Northwest Coast Culture". As mentioned earlier, his time was spent primarily with the Kwakiutl living in Fort Rupert, deeded to them through treaty. For the purposes of this paper, the most important ceremony that Boas witnessed and recorded was the Winter Ceremony. The Milky Way plays a central role in the Winter Ceremony. Its connection is described below.

The Winter Ceremony takes place within a lodge especially constructed for the purposes of ritual. It is a reenactment of a myth played out by chiefs and warriors of the tribe. The main role in the ceremony is "Man Eater", a deity located at the headwaters of the rivers at the north end of the world. The highest-ranking chief has the honor of impersonating this powerful and feared deity. A warrior is tied to a great pole that extends up through the center of the lodge. It is the role and identity of this pole that allows us insight into the Kwakiutl conception of the Milky Way. A smooth mast of cedar some 40 feet tall, it projects through the roof of the lodge. It is said to be the channel for spirits arriving from the otherworld (Goldman 1975; 195). It is also referred to as a bridge to the sky. Named the Cannibal Pole, it's the great symbol of death and resurrection (Goldman 1975; 93). The Cannibal Pole is the Man Eater's own tree that connects him with the sky.

The entire set of animals associated with Man Eater is elaborately carved into its sides (Goldman 1975; 110). The animal image carved into the top of the pole, the Eagle is also associated with the Milky Way. The Eagie rests upon the Grizzly, "the guardian of the doorway". In tribal ranking systems, the Eagle is associated with the highest ranked chief and more generally with shamanism (Goldman 1975; 111). The lodge and pole are further said to be connected to the life of the lineage chief. The lodge is torn down at the death of one chief and rebuilt in stages over a period of four years. The four years correspond to the rite of elevation of the heir (Goldman 1975;65). Again, as we see with many cultures in this study, connections between the lineage chief and the Milky Way are drawn.

A final image comes from East Greenland Eskimos entitled, "The way to the afterworld" (Figure 7). The ethnography from which this drawing comes never speaks of the Milky Way. However, considering the evidence given thus far in this paper, the drawing speaks for itself.

CONCLUSION
The preceding collection of myths and testimonies demonstrates clearly that the identification of the Milky Way as the path to the otherworld was a Pan-New World concept, established long before European contact. The question then becomes, why such continuity in the beliefs about the Milky Way but not regarding the other elements of the sky? Beliefs regarding the Sun, the Moon, the planets and the stars vary widely across the New World. What makes the Milky Way different? The explanation offered here is that the Milky Way, as the path to the otherworld, is central to the ancient tradition of shamanism. Eliade's landmark research of the 1960's convinced most scholars that shamanism is a tradition shared by all new world cultures. Shamanism entered the New World through the Bering Strait land bridge with the first peoples to cross over from Asia. Thus, Eliade places the origins of the shamanic complex in Asia. Over millennia, people who entered the New World spread out and settled into geographical niches and developed their own ethnicities. Shamanism was there from the beginning and was such a core element of people's lives that it survived the processes of cultural evolution. The power of shamanism is the ability to contact the Otherworld and they do so via a path between the worlds. This paper has attempted to prove that cultures across the New World identified that path with the Milky Way.

What kind of conclusions does this continuity lead to? The process by which a linguist constructs theoretical models provides an appropriate analogy. A linguist starts with a group of mutually unintelligible languages a finds common ancestry between them. It is done by keying on core words in vocabulary known to change little over time. Proto-languages are reconstructed in this way. This paper suggests that this singular explanation of the Milky Way is analogous to the core words in vocabulary that related groups of modern languages share. Along with the tradition of shamanism, the identification of the Milky Way as the path to the otherworld is further evidence for the theory of a proto-New World culture, with common roots in Asia.

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Morrow, New York.
Tedlock, Dennis
1985 Popol Vu. a translation. Simon and Schuster, New York.
Urton, Gary
1981 At the Crossroads of the Earth and the Sky - An Andean Cosmology.
University of Texas Press, Austin.
Von Del Chamberlain
1982 When Stars Came Down to Earth - Cosmology ofthe Skiri Pawnee
Indians of North America, Ed. Thomas C. Blackburn. Ballena Press,
Los Altos.
1982 The Skiri Pawnee Earth Lodge as an Observatory. Archaeoastronomv
in the New World, Ed. Anthony F. Aveni. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Wallace, Anthony F.C.
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1984 Living the Sky - The Cosmos of the American Indian. University of Oklahoma
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Thanks to Edwin L. Barnhart for so kindly sharing this brilliant article!

 

Ancient tellings and analysis of the Cosmos and the Galaxy

The Stone and the Tree

IN GREEK MYTH, the basic frame of the world is described in the famous Vision of Er in the 10th  Book of the Republic. In it we find Er the Armenian, who was resurrected from the funeral pyre just before it was kindled, and who describes his travel through the other world (10.615ff.). He and the group of souls bound for re­birth whom he accompanies travel through the other world. They come to "a straight shaft of light, like a pillar, stretching from above throughout heaven and earth-and there, at the middle of the light, they saw stretching from heaven the extremities of its chains; for this light binds the heavens, holding together all the revolving firmament like the undergirths of a ship of war. And from the extremities stretched the Spindle of Necessity, by means of which all the circles revolve."

Cornford adds in a note: "It is disputed whether the bond holding the Universe together is simply the straight axial shaft or a circular band of light, suggested by the Milky Way [n1 Cf. O. Gruppe, Griechische Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte (1905), p. 1036, n.1: "probably the Milky Way."], girdling the heaven of fixed stars." [n2 Plato's Republic (Cornford trans.), p. 353.] Eisler understood it as the zodiac, strange to say [n3 Eisler, Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt (1910), pp. 97ff.]. Since those "undergirths" of the trireme did not go around the ship horizontally, but were meant to secure the mast (the

"tree" of the ship) which points upwards, we stand, on principle, for the Galaxy, which, however, had to be "replaced" by invisible colures in later times [n4 Cf. also the discussion in J. L. E. Dreyer, A History of Astronomy from Thales to Kepler (1953), pp. 56ff. Concerning the "chains," which he translates "ligatures," Dreyer states: "The ligatures (desmoi) of the heavens are the solstitial and equinoctial colures intersecting in the poles, which points therefore may be called their extremities (akra)."]. But Er also talks of the adventures of the souls between incarnations, and in this context we might rely on the Milky Way. Surely the "model" is far from clear, even, on Cornford's concession, obviously intentionally so. And indeed, a few paragraphs later, there comes the complete planetarium with its "whorls," the "Spindle of Necessity" held by the goddess, by which sit the Fates as they unwind the threads of men's lives. The souls can listen to the Song of Lachesis, if they are still in the "meadow," but the chains and shaft or band are no longer in the picture. Plato refuses to be a correct geometrician of the Other World, just as he would not be sensible about the hydraulics of it. But previously in the Phaedo, Socrates had been ironic about the "truths" of science, and insisted that the truths of myth are of another order, and rebellious to ordinary consistency. It is here as if Plato had juxtaposed a number of revered mythical traditions (including the planetary harmony) without pretending to fit them into a proper order. And so his image of the "framework" of the cosmos is left inconclusive. But somehow the axis and the band and the chains stand together, and this, one concludes, was the original idea. The rotation of the polar axis must not be disjointed from the great circles which shift along with it in heaven. The framework is thought of as all one with the axis. This leads back to a Pythagorean authority whom Plato was supposed to have followed (Timon even viciously said: plagiarized) and whom Socrates often quotes with unfeigned respect. It is Philolaos, surely a creative astronomer of high rank, from whom there are only a few surviving fragments, and the authenticity of these has been rashly challenged by many modern philologists [n5 G. de Santillana and W. Pitts, "Philolaos in Limbo," ISIS 42 (1951), pp. 112-20; also in Reflections on Men and Ideas (1968), pp. 190-201.]. In fragment 12 of Philolaos, there is a brief definition of the cosmos, very much in the spirit of Plato's "dodecahedron" quoted in chapter XII.

"In the sphere there are five elements, those inside the sphere, fire, and water and earth and air, and what is the hull of the sphere, the fifth." [n6 See H. Diets, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (1951), vol. I, pp. 412f.]. Notwithstanding Philolaos' graceless Doric, the statement is perfectly clear. The "hull," (olkas) was the common name for freighters, built for bulk cargo, broad in the beam. It is really more adequate than Plato's slim trireme; and it is closer in shape to what both men meant apparently: the dodecahedron, the "hull," i.e., the sphere, the actual containing frame. It is clear from Plato that the "fifth" is the sphere that he calls ether which contains the four earthly elements but is wholly removed from them. Aristotle was to change it to the crystalline heavenly "matter" that he needed for his system, but it remained for him a "fifth essence." There has thus been twice repeated the original "hull," the frame that has been sought. What happened, and was noted in chapter VII, was that the etymology of Sampo was discovered to be in the Sanskrit skambha.

The abstract idea of a simple earth axis, so natural today, was by no means so logical to the ancients, who always thought of the whole machinery of heaven moving around the earth, stable at the center. One line always implied many others in a structure. So, apparently one must accept the idea of the world frame a an implex (as used here and later this word involves the necessary attributes that are associated with a concept: e.g., the center and circumference of a circle, the parallels and meridians implied by a sphere), of which Grotte and Sampo were the rude models with their ponderous moving parts.

Like the axle of the mill, the tree, the skambha, also represents the world axis. This instinctively suggests a straight, upright post, but the world axis is a simplification of the real concept. There is the invisible axis, of course, which is crowned by the North Nail, but this image needs to be enriched by two more dimensions. The term world axis is an abbreviation of language comparable to the visual abbreviation achieved by projecting the reaches of the Sky onto a flat star map.

It is best not to think of the axis in straight analytical terms, one line at a time, but to consider it, and the frame to which it is connected, as one whole. This involves the use of multivalent terms and the recognition of a convergent involution of unusual meanings.

As radius automatically calls circle to mind, so axis must invoke the two determining great circles on the surface of the sphere, the equinoctial and solstitial colures. Pictured this way, the axis resembles a complete armillary sphere. It stands for the system of coordinates of the sphere and represents the frame of a world-age. Actually the frame defines a world-age. Because the polar axis and the colures form an indivisible whole, the entire frame is thrown out of kilter if one part is moved. When that happens, a new Pole star with appropriate colures of its own must replace the obsolete apparatus.

Thus the Sanskrit skambha, the world pillar, ancestor of the Finnish Sampo, is shown to be an integral element in the scheme of things. The hymn 10.7 of the Atharva Veda is dedicated to the skambha, and Whitney, its translator and commentator [n7 Harvard Oriental Series, vol. 8, p. 590.] sounds puzzled in his footnote to 10.7.2: "Skambha, lit. 'prop, support, pillar,' strangely used in this hymn as frame of the universe or held personified as its soul" Here are two verses of it:

12. In whom earth, atmosphere, in whom sky is set, where fire, moon, sun, wind stand fixed, that Skambha tell. . .

35. The Skambha sustains both heaven-and-earth here; the skambha sustains the wide atmosphere, the skambha sustains the six wide directions; into the skambha entered this whole existence.

The good old Sampo sounds less pretentious, but it does have its three "roots," "one in heaven, one in the earth, one in the water-eddy." [n8 K. Krohn, Kalevalastudien 4. Sampo (1927), p. 13.] To make a drawing of a pillarlike tree (let alone a mill), with its roots distributed in the manner indicated, would be quite a task. Notably it takes the "enormous bull of Pohja"—obviously a cosmic bull—to plow up these strange roots: the Finnish heroes by themselves had not been able to uproot the Sampo.

In the case of Yggdrasil, the World Ash, Rydberg tried his hardest to localize the three roots, to imagine and to draw them.

Since he looked with Steadfast determination into the interior of our globe, the result was not overly convincing. One of the roots is said to belong to the Asa in heaven, and beneath it is the most sacred fountain of Urd. The second is to be found in the quarters of the frost-giants "where Ginnungagap formerly was," and where the well of Mimir now is. The third root belongs to Niflheim, the realm of the dead, and under this root is Hvergelmer" the Whirlpool (Gylf. 15) [n9 We are aware that either Grotte "should" have three roots, or that Yggdrasil should be uprooted, and that the Finns do not tell how the maelstroem came into being. All of which can be explained; we wish, however, to avoid dragging more and more material into the case. Several ages of the world have passed away, and they do not perish all in the same manner; e.g., the Finns know of the destruction of Sampo and of the felling of the huge Oak.].

This precludes any terrestrial diagram. It looks as though the "axis," implicating the equinoctial and solstitial colures, runs through the "three worlds" which are, to state it roughly and most inaccurately, the following:

(a) the 'sky north of the Tropic of Cancer, i.e., the sky proper, domain of the gods

(b) the "inhabited world" of the zodiac between the tropics, the domain of the "living"

(c) the II sky south from the Tropic of Capricorn, alias: the Sweet-Water Ocean, the realm of the dead 

The demarcation plane between solid earth and sea is represented by the celestial equator; hence half of the zodiac is under "water," the southern ecliptic, bordered by the equinoctial points. There are more refined subdivisions, to be sure, "zones" or "belts" or "climates" dividing the sphere from north to south and, most important, the "sky" as well as the waters of the south have a share in the "inhabited world" allotted to them [n10 To clear up the exact range of the three worlds, it would be necessary to work out the whole history of the Babylonian "Ways of Anu, Enlil, and Ea" (cf. pp. 431f.), and how these "Ways" were adapted, changed, and defined anew by the many heirs of ancient oriental astronomy. And then we would not yet be wise to the precise whereabouts of Air, Saltwater, and other ambiguous items.].

This summary is an almost frivolous simplification, but for the time being it may be sufficient.

Meanwhile, it is necessary to explain again what this "earth" is that modern interpreters like to take for a pancake. The mythical earth is, in fact, a plane, but this plane is not our "earth" at all, neither our globe, nor a presupposed homocentrical earth. "Earth" is the implied plane through the four points of the year, marked by the equinoxes and solstices, in other words the ecliptic. And this is why this earth is very frequently said to be quadrangular. The four "corners," that is, the zodiacal constellations rising heliacally at both the equinoxes and solstices, parts of the "frame" skambha, are the points which determine an "earth." Every world-age has its own "earth." It is for this very reason that "ends of the world" are said to take place. A new "earth" arises, when another set of zodiacal constellations brought in by the Precession determines the year points.

Once the reader has made the adjustment needed to think of the frame instead of the "pillar" he will understand easily many queer scenes which would be strictly against nature—ideas about planets performing feats at places which are out of their range, as both the poles are. He will understand why a force planning to uproot (or to chop down) a tree, or to unhinge a mill, or merely pull out a plug, or a pin, does not have to go "up"—or "down"—all the way to the pole to do it. The force causes the same effect when it pulls out the nearest available part of the "frame" within the inhabited world.

Here are some examples of the manipulation of the frame, beginning with a most insignificant survival. Actually this is a useful approach, because the less meaningful the example, the more astonishing is the fact of its surviving. Turkmen tribes of southern Turkestan tell about a copper pillar marking the "navel of the earth," and they state that "only the nine-year-old hero Kara Par is able to lift and to extract" it [n11 Radloff, quoted by W. E. Roescher, Der Omphalosgedanke (1918), pp. 1f.]. As goes without saying, nobody comments on the strange idea that someone should be eager to "extract the navel of the earth." When Young Arthur does it with Excalibur, the events have already been fitted into a more familiar frame and they provoke no questions.

In its grandiose style, the Mahabharata presents a similar prodigy as follows:

It was Vishvamitra who in anger created a second world and numerous stars beginning with Sravana . . . He can burn the three worlds by his splendour, can, by stamping (his foot), cause the earth to quake. He can "sever the great Meru from the Earth" and hurl it to any distance, He can go round the 10 points of the Earth in a moment [n12 Mbh. 1.71, Roy trans., vol. 1, p. 171.].

Vishvamitra is one of the seven stars of the Big Dipper, this at least has been found out. But each planet is represented by a star of the Wain, and vice versa, so this case does not look particularly helpful [n13 The notion of "numerous [newly appointed] stars beginning with Sravana" should enlighten us. Sravana, "the Lame," is, in the generally accepted order, the twenty-first lunar mansion, alpha beta gamma Aquilae, also called by the name Ashvatta, which stands for a sacred fig tree but which means literally "below which the horses stand" (Scherer, Gestirnnamen, p. 158), and which invites comparison with Old Norse Yggdrasil, meaning "the tree below which Odin's horse grazes" (Reuter, Germanische Himmelskunde, p. 236). Actually, the solstitial colure ran through alpha beta gamma Aquilae around 300 B.C., and long after the time when it used to pass through one or the other of the stars of the Big Dipper; the equinoctial colure, however, comes down very near eta Ursae Majoris. Considering that eta maintains the most cordial relations with Mars in occidental astrology, Vishvamitra might be eta, and might represent Mars, and that would go well with the violent character of this Rishi. But even if we accept this for a working hypothesis, there remains the riddle of the "second world," i.e., "second" with respect to which "first" world? Although we have a hunch, we are not going to try to solve it here and now. Two pieces of information should be mentioned, however: (1) Mbh. 14-44 (Roy trans., vol. 12, p. 83) states: "The constellations [= lunar mansions, nakshatras] have Sravana for their first"; (2) Sengupta (in Burgess' trans. of Surya Siddhanta, p.xxxiv) claims that "the time of the present redaction of the Mahabbarata" was called "Sravanadi kala, i.e., the time when the winter solstitial colure passed through the nakshatra Sravana."].

A cosmic event of the first order can be easily overlooked when it hides modestly in a fairy tale. The following, taken from the Indian "Ocean of Stories," tells of Shiva: "When he drove his trident into the heart of Andhaka, the king of the Asuras, athough he was only one, the dart which that monarch had infixed into the heart of the three worlds was, strange to say, extracted." [n14 N. M. Penzer, The Ocean of Story (1924), vol. 1, p. 3.].

A plot can also shrink to unrecognizable insignificance when it comes disguised as history, but this next story at least has been pinned down to the proper historical character, and even has been checked by a serious military historian like Arrianus, who tells us the following:

Alexander, then, reached Gordium, and was seized with an ardent desire to ascend to the acropolis, where was the palace of Gordius and his son Midas, and to look at Gordius' wagon and the knot of that chariot's yoke. There was a widespread tradition about this chariot around the countryside; Gordius, they said, was a poor man of the Phrygians of old, who tilled a scanty parcel of earth and had but two yoke of oxen: with one he ploughed, with the other he drove his wagon. Once, as he was ploughing, an eagle settled on the yoke and stayed, perched there, till it was time to loose the oxen; Gordius was astonished at the portent, and went off to consult the Telmissian prophets, who were skilled in the interpretation of prodigies, inheriting—women and children too—the prophetic gift. Approaching a Telmissian village, he met a girl drawing water and told her the story of the eagle: she, being also of the prophetic line, bade him return to the spot and sacrifice to Zeus the King. So then Gordius begged her to come along with him and assist in the sacrifice; and at the spot duly sacrificed as she directed, married the girl, and had a son called Midas.

Midas was already a grown man, handsome and noble, when the Phrygians were in trouble with civil war; they received an oracle that a chariot would bring them a king and he would stop the war. True enough, while they were discussing this, there arrived Midas, with his parents, and drove, chariot and all, into the assembly. The Phrygians, interpreting the oracle, decided that he was the man whom the gods had told them would come in a chariot; they there­upon made him king, and he put an end to the civil war. The chariot of his father he set up in the acropolis as a thank-offering to Zeus the king for sending the eagle.

Over and above this there was a story about the wagon, that anyone who should untie the knot of the yoke should be lord of Asia. This knot was of cornel bark, and you could see neither beginning nor end of it. Alexander, unable to find how to untie the knot, and not brooking to leave it tied, lest this might cause some disturbance in the vulgar, smote it with his sword, cut the knot, and exclaimed, "I have loosed it! "-so at least say some, but Aristobulus puts it that he took out the pole pin, a dowel driven right through the pole, holding the knot together, and so removed the yoke from the pole. I do not attempt to be precise how Alexander actually dealt with this knot. Anyway, he and his suite left the wagon with the impression

that the oracle about the loosed knot had been duly fulfilled. It is certain that there were that night thunderings and lightenings, which indicated this; so Alexander in thanksgiving offered sacrifice next day to whatever gods had sent the signs and certified the undoing of the knot [n15 Anabasis of Alexander 2.3.1-8 (Robson trans., LCL).].

Without going now into the relevant comparative material it should be stressed that in those cases where "kings" are sitting in a wagon (Greek hamaxa), i.e., a four-wheeled truck, it is most of the time Charles' Wain.

Alexander was a true myth builder, or rather, a true myth attracting magnet. He had a gift for attracting to his fabulous personality the manifold tradition that, once, had been coined for Gilgamesh.

But the time is not yet ripe either for Alexander or for Gilgamesh, nor for further statements about deities or heroes who could pull out pins, plugs and pillars. The next concern is with the decisive features of the mythical landscape and their possible localization, or their fixation in time. It is essential to know where and when the first whirlpool came into being once Grotte, Amlodhi's Mill, had been destroyed. This is, however, a misleading expression because our terminology is still much too imprecise. It would be better to say the first exit from, or entrance to, the whirlpool. It appears advisable to recapitulate the bits of information that have been gathered on the whirlpool as a whole:

The maelstrom, result of a broken mill, a chopped down tree, and the like, "goes through the whole globe," according to the Finns. So does Tartaros, according to Socrates. To repeat it in Guthrie's words: "The earth in this myth of Socrates is spherical, and Tartaros, the bottomless pit, is represented in this mythical geography by a chasm which pierces the sphere right through from side to side." [n16 Orpheus and Greek Religion (1952), p. 168.].

It is source and mouth of all waters.

It is the way, or one among others, to the realm of the dead.

Medieval geographers call it "Umbilicus Maris," Navel of the Sea, or "Euripus."

Antiochus the astrologer calls Eridanus proper, or some abstract topos not far from Sirius, "zalos," i.e., whirlpool.

M. W. Makemson looks for the Polynesian whirlpool, said to be "at the end of the sky," "at the edge of the Galaxy," in Sagittarius.

A Dyak hero, climbing a tree in "Whirlpool-Island," lands himself in the Pleiades.

But generally, one looks for "it" in the more or less northwest/north-northwest direction, a direction where, equally vaguely, Kronos-Saturn is supposed to sleep in his golden cave notwithstanding the blunt statements (by Homer) that Kronos was hurled down into deepest Tartaros.

And from those "infernal" quarters, particularly from the (Ogygian) Stygian landscape, "one"—who else but the souls?—sees the celestial South Pole, invisible to us.

The reader might agree that this summary shows clearly the insufficiency of the general terminology accepted by the majority. The verbal confusion provokes sympathy for Numenius (see above, p. 188), and the Third Vatican Mythographer who took the rivers for planets, their planetary orbs respectively. We think that the whirlpool stands for the "ecliptical world" marked by the whirling planets, embracing everything which circles obliquely with respect to the polar axis and the equator-oblique by 23 ½ degrees, more or less, each planet having its own obliquity with respect to the others and to the sun's path, that is, the ecliptic proper. It has been mentioned earlier (p. 206, n. 5) that in the axis of the Roman circus was a Euripus, and altars of the three outer planets (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars), and the three inner planets (Venus, Mercury, Moon) on both sides of the pyramid of the sun, and that there were not more than seven circuits because the "planets are seven only."

The ecliptic as a whirl is only one aspect of the famous "implex." It must be kept in mind that being the seat of all planetary powers, it represented, so to speak, the "Establishment" itself. There is no better symbol of the thinking of those planet-struck Mesopotamian civilizations than the arrogant plan of the royal cities themselves, as it has been patiently reconstructed by generations of Orientalists and archaeologists.

Nineveh proclaimed itself as the seat of stable order and power by its seven-times crenellated circle of walls, colored with the seven planetary colors, and so thick that chariots could run along the top. The planetary symbolism spread to India, as was seen in chapter VIII, and culminated in that prodigious cosmological diagram that is the temple of Barabudur in Java [n17 P. Mus, Barabudur (1935).]. It is still evident in the innumerable stupas which dot the Indian countryside, whose superimposed crowns stand for the planetary heavens. And here we have the Establishment seen as a Way Up and Beyond, as Numenius would have seen immediately, the succession of spheres of transition for the soul, a. quiet. promise of transcendence which marks the Gnostic and Hinduistic scheme. The skeleton map will always lack one or the other dimension. The Whirl is then a way up or a way down? Heraclitus would say, both ways are one and the same. You cannot put into a scheme everything at once.

This general conception of the whirlpool as the "ecliptical world" does not, of course, help to understand any single detail. Starting from the idea of the whirlpool as a way to the other world, one must look at the situation through the eyes of a sou1 meaning to go there. It has to move from the interior outwards, to "ascend" from the geocentric earth through the planetary spheres "up" to the fixed sphere, that is, right through the whole whirlpool, the ecliptical world. But in order to leave the ecliptical frame, there must be a station for changing trains at the equator. One would expect this station to be at the crossroads of ecliptical and equatorial coordinates at the equinoxes. But evidently, this was not the arrangement. A far older route was followed. It is true that it sometimes looks as though the transfer point were at the equinoxes. The astrological tradition that followed Teukros [n18 F. Boll, Sphaera (1903), pp. 19,28,47,246-51. Antiochus does not mention any of these star groups.], for example provided a rich offering of celestial locations for Hades, the Acherusian lake, Charon the ferryman, etc., all of them under the chapter Libra. But this is a trap and one can only hope that many hapless souls have not been deceived. For these astrological texts mean the sign Libra, not the constellation.

All "change stations" are found invariably in two regions: one in the South between Scorpius and Sagittarius, the other in the North between Gemini and Taurus; and this is valid through time and space, from Babylon to Nicaragua [n19 The notion is not even foreign to the cheering adventures of Sun, the Chinese Monkey (Wou Tch'eng Ngen, French trans. by Louis Avenal [1957]). One day, two "harponneurs des morts" get hold of him, claiming that he has arrived at the term of his destiny, and is ripe for the underworld. He escapes, of course. The translator remarks (vol. 1, p. iii) that it is the constellation Nan Teou, the Southern Dipper, that decides everybody's death, and the orders are executed by these "harponneurs des morts." The Southern Dipper consists of the stars mu lambda phi sigma tau zeta Sagittarii (cf. G. Schlegel, L'Uranographie Chinoise [1875], pp. 172ff.; L. de Saussure, Les Origines de l'Astronomie Chinoise [1930], pp. 452f.).].

Why was it ever done in the first place? Because of the Galaxy, which has its crossroads with the ecliptic between Sagittarius and Scorpius in the South, and between Gemini and Taurus in the North.

CHAPTER XVIII

The Galaxy

MEN's SPIRITS were thought to dwell in the Milky Way between incarnations. This conception has been handed down as an Orphic and Pythagorean tradition [n1 See F. Boll, Aus der Offenbarung Johannes (1914), pp. 32, 72 (the first accepted authority has been Herakleides of Pontos); W. Gundel, RE s.v. Galaxias; A. Bouche-Leclerq, L'Astrologie Grecque (1899), pp. 22f.; F. Cumont, After Life in Roman Paganism (1959), pp. 94. 104. 152f.] fitting into the frame of the migration of the soul. Macrobius, who has provided the broadest report on the matter, has it that souls ascend by way of Capricorn, and then in order to be reborn, descend again through the "Gate of Cancer." [n2 Commentary on the Dream of Scipio 1.12.1-8.]. Macrobius talks of signs; the constellations rising at the solstices in his time (and still in ours) were Gemini and Sagittarius: the "Gate of Cancer" means Gemini. In fact, he states explicitly (l.12.5) that this "Gate" is "where the Zodiac and the Milky Way intersect." Far away, the Mangaians of old (Austral Islands, Polynesia), who kept the precessional clock running instead of switching over to "signs," claim that only at the evening of the solstitial days can spirits enter heaven, the inhabitants of the northern parts of the island at one solstice, the dwellers in the south at the other [n3 W. W. Gill, Myths and Songs from the South Pacific (1876), pp. 1566ff., 185ff.]. This information, giving precisely fixed dates, is more valuable than general statements to the effect that the Polynesians regarded the Milky Way as "the road of souls as they pass to the spirit world." [n4 E. Best, The Astronomical Knowledge of the Maori (1955), p. 45.]. In Polynesian myth, too, souls are not permitted to stay unless they have reached a stage of unstained perfection, which is not likely to occur frequently. Polynesian souls have to return into bodies again, sooner or later [n5 Since so many earlier and recent "reporters at large" fail to inform us of traditions concerning reincarnation, we may mention that according to the Marquesans "all the souls of the dead, after having lived in one or the other place (i.e., Paradise or Hades) for a very long time, returned to animate other bodies" (R. W. Williamson, Religious and Cosmic Beliefs of Central Polynesia [1924], vol. I, p. 208), which recalls the wording of the case as we know it from book X of Plato's Republic.].

Two instances of relevant American Indian notions are worth mentioning without discussion. The important thing is that the tradition is there, more or less intact. Among the Sumo in Honduras and Nicaragua their "Mother Scorpion. . . is regarded as dwelling at the end of the Milky Way, where she receives the souls of the dead, and from her, represented as a mother with many breasts, at which children take suck, come the souls of the new­born." [n6 H. B. Alexander, Latin American Mythology (1916), p. 185.]. Whereas the Pawnee and Cherokee say [n7 S. Hagar, "Cherokee Star-Lore," in Festscbrift Boas (1906), p. 363; H. B. Alexander, North American Mythology, p. 117.]: "the souls of the dead are received by a star at the northern end of the Milky Way, where it bifurcates, and he directs the warriors upon the dim and difficult arm, women and those who die of old age upon the brighter and easier path. The souls then journey southwards. At the end of the celestial pathway they are received by the Spirit Star, and there they make their home." One can quietly add "for a while," or change it to "there they make their camping place." Hagar takes the "Spirit Star" to be Antares (alpha Scorpii).

Whether or not it is precisely alpha, because the star marks the southern "end" of the Galaxy, the southern crossroads with the ecliptic, it is at any rate a star of Sagittarius. or Scorpius [8 This is no slip of the tongue; the zodiacal Sagittarius of Mesopotanian boundary stones had, indeed, the tail of a Scorpion: but we just must not be drowned in the abyss of details of comparative constellation lore, and least of all in those connected with Sagittarius, two-faced as he is, half royal, half dog.]. That fits "Mother Scorpion" of Nicaragua and the "Old goddess  with the scorpion tail" of the Maya as it also fits the Scorpion-goddess Selket-Serqet of ancient Egypt and the Ishara tam.tim of the Babylonians. Ishara of the sea, goddess of the constellation Scorpius, was also called "Lady of the Rivers" (compare appendix #30).

Considering the fact that the crossroads of ecliptic and Galaxy are crisis-resistant, that is, not concerned with the Precession, the reader may want to know why the Mangaians thought they could go to heaven only on the two solstitial days. Because, in order to "change trains" comfortably, the constellations that serve as "gates" to the Mi1ky Way must "stand" upon the "earth," meaning that they must rise heliacally either at the equinoxes or at the solstices. The Galaxy is a very broad highway, but even so there must have been some bitter millennia when neither gate was directly available any longer, the one hanging in midair, the other having turned into a submarine entrance.

Sagittarius and Gemini still mark the solstices in the closing years of the Age of Pisces. Next comes Aquarius. The ancients, no doubt, would have considered the troubles of these our times, like over­ population, the "working iniquity in secret," as an inevitable prelude to a new tilting, a new world-age.

But the coming of Pisces was long looked forward to, heralded as a blessed age. It was introduced by the thrice-repeated Great Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in Pisces in the year 6 B.C., the star of Bethlehem. Virgil announced the return of the Golden Age under the rule of Saturn, in his famous Fourth Eclogue: "Now the Virgin retbrns, the reign of Saturn returns, now a new generation descends from heaven on high. Only do thou, pure Lucina, smile on the birth If the child, under whom the iron brood shall first cease, and a golden race spring up throughout the world!"

Although promoted to the rank of a "Christian honoris causa" on account of this poem, Virgil was no "prophet," nor was he the only one who expected the return of Kronos-Saturn [n9 See, for example, A. A. Barb, "St. Zacharias the Prophet and Martyr," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 11 (1948), pp. 54f., and "Der Heilige und die Schlangen," MAGW 82 (1953), p. 20.]. "lam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna." What does it mean? Where has Virgo been, supposedly, so that one expected the constellation "back"?

Aratus, in his renowned astronomical poem (95-136), told how Themis-Virgo, who had lived among humans peacefully, retired at the end of the Golden Age to the "hills," no longer mingling with the silver crowd that had started to populate the earth, and that she took up her heavenly abode near Bootes, when the Bronze Age began [n10 Cf. Al-Biruni, dealing with the Indian ages of the world, and quoting the above passages from Aratus with a scholion (Alberuni's India, trans. E. C. Sachau [1964], vol. 1, pp. 383-85).]. And there is Virgil announcing Virgo's return. This makes it easy to guess time and "place" of the Golden Age. One need only turn back the clock for one quarter "hour" of the Precession (about 6,000 years from Virgil), to find Virgo standing firmly at the summer solstitial corner of the abstract plane "earth." "Returning," that is moving on, Virgo would indicate the autumnal equinox at the time when Pisces took over the celestial government of the vernal equinox, at the new crossroads.

Once the Precession had been discovered, the Milky Way took on a new and decisive significance. For it was not only the most spectacular band of heaven, it was also a reference point from which the Precession could be imagined to have taken its start. This would have been when the vernal equinoctial sun left its position in Gemini in the Milky Way. When it was realized the sun had been there once, the idea occurred that the Milky Way might mark the abandoned track of the sun-a burnt-out area, as it were, a scar in heaven. Decisive notions have to be styled more carefully, however: so let us say that the Milky Way was a reference "point" from which the Precession could be termed to have taken its start, and that the idea which occurred was not that the Milky Way might mark the abandoned track of the sun, but that the Milky Way was an image of an abandoned track, a formula that offered rich possibilities for "telling" complicated celestial changes.

With this image and some additional galactic lore, it is now possible to concentrate on the formula by which the Milky Way became the way of the spirits of the dead, a road abandoned by the living. The abandoned path is probably the original form of the notions insistently built around a projected Time Zero. If the Precession was seen as the great clock of the Universe, the sun, as it shifted at the equinox, remained the measure of all measures, the "golden cord," as Socrates says in Plato's Theaetetus (153C). In fact, apart from the harmonic intervals, the sun was the only absolute measure provided by nature. The sun must be understood to be conducting the planetary fugues at any given moment as Plato also showed in the Timaeus. Thus, when the sun at his counting station moved on toward the Milky Way, the planets, too, were termed to hunt and run this way.

This does not make very sound geometrical sense, but it shows how an image can dominate men's minds and take on a life of its own. Yet, the technical character of these images should not be forgotten, and it is to prevent this that the verbs "to term" and "to spell out" are used so often instead of the customary expression "to believe."

To the American Plains Indians, the Milky Way was the dusty track along which the Buffalo and the Horse once ran a race across the sky [11 J. Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, 19th ARBAE 1897-98 (1900), p.443.]. For the Fiote of the African Loango Coast the race was run by Sun and Moon [n12 E. Pechuel-Loesche, Volkskunde van Loango (1907), p. 135.]. The East African Turu took it for the "cattle track" of the brother of the creator [n13 S. Lagercrantz, "The Milky Way in Africa," Ethnos (1952), p. 68.], which is very close to the Greek legend of Herakles moving the herd of Gerion [n14 See W. Gundel, RE s.v. Galaxias.]. The convergence of so many animal tracks along this heavenly way is, once again, not a pointless conjunction of fancies. The Irawak of Guyana call the Galaxy "the Tapir's way."

This is confirmed in a tale of the Chiriguano and some groups of the Tupi-Guarani of South America. According to Lehman-Nitsche, these people speak of the Galaxy as "the way of the true father of the Tapir," a Tapir -deity which is itself invisible [n15 O. Zerries, "Sternbilder als Ausdruck jagerischer Geiteshaltung in Sudamerika," Paideuma 5 (1951), pp.220f.]. Now, if this hidden deity turns out to be Quetzalcouatl himself, ruler of the Golden Age town Tollan, no other than "Tixli cumatz," the tapir-serpent dwelling in the "middle of the sea's belly," as the Maya tribes of Yucatan describe him [n16 E. Seler, Gesammelte Abbandlungen (1961), vol. 4, p. 56], the allusions begin to focus. Finally, the actual scheme is found in that Cuna tradition described earlier: the Tapir chopped down the "Saltwater Tree," at the roots of which is God's whirlpool, and when the tree fell, saltwater gushed out to form the oceans of the world.

Should the Tapir still seem to lack the appropriate dignity, some Asiatic testimonies should be added. The Persian Bundahishn calls the Galaxy the "Path of Kay-us," after the grandfather and co­regent of Kai Khusrau, the Iranian Hamlet [n17 Bdh. V B 22, B. T. Anklesaria, Zand-Akasih. Iranian or Greater Bundahishn (1956), pp. 69, 71.]. Among the Altaic populations the Yakuts call the Milky Way the "tracks of God," and they say that, while creating the world, God wandered over the sky; more general in use seems to have been the term "Ski-tracks of God's son," whereas the Voguls spelled it out "Ski-tracks of the forest-man." And here the human tracks fade out, although the snowshoes remain. For the Tungus the Galaxy is "Snowshoe-tracks of the Bear." But whether the figure is the son of God, the forest-man, or the Bear, he hunted a stag along the Milky Way, tore it up and scattered its limbs in the sky right and left of the white path, and so Orion and Ursa Major were separated [n18 U. Holmberg, Die religiosen Vorstellungen der altaischen Volker (1938), pp. 201f.]. The "Foot of the Stag" reminded Holmberg immediately of the "Bull's Thigh" of ancient Egypt—Ursa Major.

With his penetrating insight he might easily have gone on to recognize, in that potent thigh, the isolated "one-leg" of Texcatlipoca, Ursa Major again, in Mexico-the day-sign "Crocodile" (Cipactli) had bitten it off-the great Hunrakan (= 1 leg) of the Maya Quiche [n19 Going further south, he would have found there again the lining up of Ursa and Orion and the violent tearing up of celestial figures. Says W. E. Roth ("An Inquiry into the Animism and Folk-lore of the Guiana Indians," 30th ARBAE 1908-09 [1915], p. 262; cf. Zerries, pp. 220f.) of the Indians of Guiana: "All the legends relating to the constellations Taurus and Orion have something in common in the detail of an amputated arm or leg." And that goes for parts of Indonesia too. But then, Ursa Major is the thigh of a Bull, and the zodiacal Taurus is so badly amputated, there is barely a half of him left. More peculiar still, in later Egyptian times it occurs, if rarely, that Ursa is made a ram's thigh (see G. A. Wainwright, "A Pair of Constellations," in Studies Presented to F. L. Griffith [1932], p. 373); and on the round zodiac of Dendera

(Roman period) we find a ram sitting on that celestial leg representing Ursa, and it even looks back, as befits the traditional zodiacal Aries. We must leave it at that.].

There is an insistent association here, right below the surface, which is still revealed by the old Dutch name for the Galaxy, "Brunelstraat." Brunei, Bruns, Bruin (the Brown) is the familiar name of the bear in the romance of Renard the Fox, and is as ancient as anything that can be traced [n20 The notion of the Milky Way as "Brunelstraat" seems to be present in ancient India: the Atharva Veda 18.2.31 mentions a certain path or road called rikshaka. Riksha is the bear in both senses, i.e., the animal and Ursa Major (see H. Grassmann, Worterbuch zum Rig-Veda [1915] s.v. Riksha). Whitney (in his translation of AV, p.840 ) suggested rikshaka as a road "infested by bears (?).” A. Weber, however, proposed to identify rikshaka with the Milky Way ("Miszellen aus dem indogermanischen Familienleben," in Festgruss Roth [1893], p. 131). Since the whole hymn AV 18.2 contains "Funeral Verses," and deals with the voyage of the soul, that context too would be fitting. (That the souls have to first cross a river "rich with horses" is another matter.)]. It is a strange lot of characters that were made responsible for the Milky Way: gods and animals leaving the path that had been used at "creation" time [n21 The shortest abbreviation: the Inca called Gemini "creation time" (Hagar, in 14th International Amerikanisten-Kongress [1904], p. 599f.). But the very same notion is alluded to, when Castor and Pollux (alpha beta Geminorum) are made responsible for the first fire sticks, by the Aztecs (Sahagún) and, strange to say, by the Tasmanians. (See below, chapter XXIII, "Gilgamesh and Prometheus.")]. But where did they go, the ones mentioned, and the many whom we have left out of consideration? It depends, so to speak, from where they took off. This is often hard to determine, but the subject of "tumbling down" will be dealt with next.

As for Virgo, who had left the "earth" at the end of the Golden Age, her whereabouts in the Silver Age could have been described as being "in mid-air." Many iniquitous characters were banished to this topos; either they were thrown down, or they were sent up—Lilith dwelt there for a while, and King David [n22 See J. A. Eisenmenger, Entdecktes Judenthem (1711), vol. I, p. 165; vol. 2, pp.417ff.], also Adonis [n23 "Es ton eera," see F. K. Movers, Die Phonizier (1967), vol. I, p. 205.], even the Tower of Babel itself, and first of all the Wild Hunter (appendix #20).

This assembly of figures "in mid-air" helps to give meaning to an otherwise pointless tale, a veritable fossil found in Westphalian folklore: "The Giants called to Hackelberg [= Odin as the Wild Hunter] for help. He raised a storm and removed a mill into the Milky Way, which after this is called the Mill Way." [n24 J. Grimm, TM, pp. 1587f.]. There are other fossils, too, the wildest perhaps being that of the Cherokee who called the Galaxy "Where the dog ran." A very unusual dog it must have been, being in the habit of stealing meal from a corn mill owned by "people in the South" and running with it to the North; the dog dropped meal as he ran and that is the Milky Way [n25 Mooney, pp. 253, 443.]. It is difficult here to recognize Isis scattering ears of wheat in her flight from Typhon [n26 See R. H. Allen, Star Names (1963), p. 481; W. T. Olcott, Star Lore of All Ages (1911), p. 393.]. And yet, the preference of the very many mythical dogs, foxes, coyotes—and even of the "way-opening" Fenek in West Sudan—for meal and all sorts of grain—more correctly "the eight kinds of grain" –a trait which is hardly learned by eavesdropping on Mother Nature, could have warned the experts to beware of these doggish characters. They are not to be taken at their pseudo-zoological face value.

Thus, everybody and everything has left the course, Wild Hunter, dog and mill—at least its upper half, since through the hole in the lower millstone the whirlpool is seething up and down.

The Whirlpool

DANTE KEPT to the tradition of the whirlpool as a significant end for great figures, even if here it comes ordained by Providence. Ulysses has sailed in his "mad venture" beyond the limits of the world, and once he has crossed the ocean he sees a mountain looming far away, "hazy with the distance, and so high I had never seen any." It is the Mount of Purgatory, forbidden to mortals.

"We rejoiced, and soon it turned to tears, for from the new land a whirl was born, which smote our ship from the side. Three times it caused it to revolve with all the waters, on the fourth to lift its stern on high, and the prow to go down, as Someone willed, until the sea had closed over us." The "many thoughted" Ulysses is on his way to immortality, even if it has to be Hell.

The engulfing whirlpool belongs to the stock-in-trade of ancient fable. It appears in the Odyssey as Charybdis in the straits of Messina-and again, in other cultures, in the Indian Ocean and in the Pacific. It is. found there too, curiously enough, with the overhanging fig tree to whose boughs the hero can cling as the ship goes down, whether it be Satyavrata in India, or Kae in Tonga. Like Sindbad's magnetic mountain, it goes on in mariners' yarns through the centuries. But the persistence of detail rules out free invention. Such stories have belonged to the cosmographical literature since antiquity.

Medieval writers, and after them Athanasius Kircher, located the gurges mirabilis, the wondrous eddy, somewhere off the coast of Norway, or of Great Britain. It was the Maelstrom, plus probably a memory of Pentland Firth [n1 See for Ireland, W. Stokes, "The Prose Tales in the Rennes Dindsenchas," RC 16 (1895), no. 145: "A great whirlpool there is between Ireland and Scotland on the North. It is the meeting of many seas [from NSEW]-it resembles an open caldron which casts the draught down [and] up, and its roaring is heard like far­ off thunder. . ."]. It was generally in the direction north-northwest, just as Saturn's island, Ogygia, had been vaguely placed "beyond" the British Isles by the Greeks.

On further search this juxtaposition seems to be the result of the usual confusion between uranography and geography. There is frequently a "gap" in the northwest ("Nine-Yin" for the Chinese) of the heavens and inasmuch as the skeleton map of earth was derived from that of the sky, the gap was pinned down here as the Maelstrom, or Ogygia. Both notions are far from obvious, as are the localizations, and it is even more remarkable that they should be frequently joined.

For the Norse (see chapter VI) the whirlpool came into being from the unhinging of the Grotte Mill: the Maelstrom comes of the hole in the sunken millstone. This comes from Snorri. The older verses by Snaebjorn which described Hamlet's Mill stated that the nine maids of the island mill who in past ages ground Amlodhi's meal now drive a "host-cruel skerry-quern." That this skerry-quern means the whirlpool, and not simply the northern ocean, is backed up through some more lines which Gollancz ascribes to Snaebjorn; not that they were of crystal clarity, but again mill and whirlpool are connected:

The island-mill pours out the blood of the flood goddess's sisters [i.e., the waves of the sea], so that [it] bursts from the feller of the land: whirlpool begins strong [n21. Gollancz, Hamlet in Iceland (1898), pp. xvii.].

No localization is indicated here, whereas the Finns point to directions which are less vague than they sound. Their statement that the Sampo has three roots-one in heaven, one in the earth, the third in the water eddy-has a definite meaning, as will be shown.

But then also, Vainamoinen driving with his copper boat into the "maw of the Maelstrom" is said to sail to "the depths of the sea," to the "lowest bowels of the earth," to the "lowest regions of the heavens." Earth and heaven-a significant contraposition. As concerns the whereabouts of the whirlpool, one reads:

Before the gates of Pohjola,

Below the threshold of color-covered Pohjola,

There the pines roll with their roots,

The pines fall crown first into the gullet of the whirlpool.

[n3 M. Haavio, Vainamoinen, Eternal Sage (1952), pp. 191-98.]

Then in Teutonic tradition, one finds in Adam of Bremen (11th century) :

Certain Frisian noblemen made a voyage past Norway up to the farthest limits of the Arctic Ocean, got into a darkness which the eyes can scarcely penetrate, were exposed to a maelstroem which threatened to drag them down to Chaos, but finally came quite unexpectedly out of darkness and cold to an island which, surrounded as by a wall of high rocks, contains subterranean caverns, wherein giants lie concealed. At the entrances of the underground dwellings lay a great number of tubs and vessels of gold and other metals which "to mortals seem rare and valuable." As much as the adventurers could carry of these treasures they took with them and hastened to their ships. But the giants, represented by great dogs, rushed after them. One of the Frisians was overtaken and torn into pieces before the eyes of the others. The others succeeded, thanks to our Lord and Saint Willehad, in getting safely on board their ships. [n4 V. Rydberg, Teutonic Mythology (1907), p. 320.]

The Latin text (Rydberg, p. 422) uses the classical familiar name of Euripus. The Euripus, which has already come up in the Phaedo, was really a channel between Euboea and the mainland, in which the conflict of tides reverses the current as much as seven times a day, with ensuing dangerous eddies-actually a case of standing waves rather than a true whirl [n5 We meet the name again at a rather unexpected place, in the Roman circus or hippodrome, as we know from J. Laurentius Lydus (De Mensibus 1.12.), who states that the center of the circus was called Euripos; that in the middle of the stadium was a pyramid, belonging to the Sun; that by the Sun's pyramid were three altars, of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and below the pyramid, altars of Venus, Mercury and the Moon, and that there were not more than seven circuits (kykloi) around the pyramid, because the planets were only seven. (See also F. M. Cornford's chapter on the origin of the Olympic games in J. Harrison's Themis (1962), 228; G. Higgins' Anacalypsis (1927), vol. 2, pp. 377ff.) This brings to mind (although not called Euripus, obviously, but "the god's place of skulls") the Central American Ball Court which had a round hole in its center, termed by Tezozomoc "the enigmatic significance of the ball court," and from this hole a lake spread out before Uitzilo­pochtli was born. See W. Krickeberg, "Der mittelamerikanische Ballspielplatz und seine religiose Symbolik," Paideuma 3 (1948). pp. 135ff., 155, 162.].

And here the unstable Euripus of the Ocean, which flows back to the beginnings of its mysterious source, dragged with irresistible force the unhappy sailors, thinking by now only of death, towards Chaos. This is said to be the maw of the abyss, that unknown depth in which, it is understood, the ebb and flow of the whole sea is absorbed and then thrown up again, which is the cause of the tide.

This is reflection of what had been a popular idea of antiquity. But here comes a version of the same story in North America [n6 J. Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee (1900), p. 340.]. It concerns the canoe adventure of two Cherokees at the mouth of Suck Creek. One of them was seized by a fish, and never seen again. The other was taken round and round to the very lowest center of the whirlpool, when another circle caught him and bore him outward. He told afterwards that when he reached the narrowest circle of the maelstroem the water seemed to open below and he could look down as through the roof beam of a house, and there on the bottom of the river he had seen a great company, who looked up and beckoned to him to join them, but as they put up their hands to seize him the swift current caught him and took him out of their reach.

It is almost as if the Cherokees have retained the better memory, when they talk of foreign regions, inhabited by "a great company"—which might equally well be the dead, or giants with their dogs—there, where in "the narrowest circle of the maelstroem the water seemed to open below." It will be interesting to see whether or not this impression is justifiable [n7 See illustrations (p.60) showing Mount Meru in the shape or an hourglass.].

Snorri, who has preserved the Song of Grotte for us, does not actually name the whirlpool in it, but there is only one at hand, namely the “Hvergelmer" in Hel’s abode of the dead, from and to which all waters find their way." [n8 Grimnisma126; cf. Snorri, Gylf. 15.]. Says Rydberg:

It appears that the mythology conceived Hvergelmer as a vast reservoir, the mother fountain of all the waters of the world. In the front rank are mentioned a number of subterranean rivers which rise in Hvergelmer, and seek their courses thence in various directions. But the waters of earth and heaven also come from this immense fountain, and after completing their circuits they return thither.

The myth about Hvergelmer and its subterranean connection with the ocean gave our ancestors the explanation of ebb and flood tide. High up in the northern channels the bottom of the ocean opened itself in a hollow tunnel, which led down to the "kettle-roarer," "the one roaring in his basin" (hverr=kettle; galm=Anglo-Saxon gealm= a roaring). When the waters of the ocean poured through this tunnel down into the Hades-well there was ebb-tide, when it returned water from its superabundance then was flood-tide.

Between the death-kingdom and the ocean there was, therefore, one connecting link, perhaps several. Most of the people who drowned did not remain with Ran, Aegir's wife, Ran, received them hospitably, according to the Icelandic sagas of the middle ages. She had a hall in the bottom of the sea, where they were welcomed and offered . . . seat and bed. Her realm was only an ante-chamber to the realms of death.

[n9 Rydberg, pp. 414, 421f. Cf. the notions about the nun Saint Gertrude, patron of travelers, particularly on sea voyages, who acted also as patron saint of inns "and finally it was claimed that she was the hostess of a public house, where the souls spent the first night after death" (M. Hako; Das Wiesel in der europaischen Volksuberlieferung, FFC 167 [1956], p. 119).].

There are several features of the Phaedo here, but they will turn up again in Gilgamesh. This is not to deny that Hvergelmer, and other whirlpools, explain the tides, as indicated previously. (Perhaps it will be possible to find out what tides "mean" on the celestial level.) But it is clear that the Maelstrom as the cause of the tides does not account for the surrounding features, not even for the few mentioned by Rydberg—for instance, the wife of the Sea-god Aegir who receives kindly the souls of drowned seafarers in her antechamber at the bottom of the sea—nor the circumstance that the Frisian adventurers, sucked into the Maelstrom, suddenly find themselves on a bright island filled with gold, where giants lie concealed in the mountain caves.

This island begins to look very much like Ogygia I, where Kronos/Saturn sleeps in a golden mountain cave, whereas the reception hall of Ran—her husband Aegir was famous for his beer brewing, and his hall it was, where Loke offended all his fellow gods as reported in the Lokasenna—would suggest rather Ogygia II, the island of Calypso, sister of Prometheus, called Omphalos Thalasses, the Navel of the Sea. Calypso as the daughter of Atlas, "who knew the depths of the whole sea." She, Calypso, has been authoritatively compared [n10 See chapter XXII, ."The Adventure and the Quest."] to the divine barmaid Siduri, who dwells by the deep sea and will be found later on in the tale of Gilgamesh.

Mythology, meaning proper poetic fable, has been of great assistance but it can help no further. The golden island of Kronos, the tree-girt island of Calypso, remain unlocatable, notwithstanding the efforts of Homeric scholars. Through careful analysis of navigational data, one of them (Berard) has placed Calypso in the island of Perejil near Gibraltar, another (Bradfield) in Malta, others even off Africa. Presumably it should not be too far from Sicily, since Ulysses reaches it riding on the mast of his ship, right after having escaped from Charybdis in the strait of Messina, in the setting that Homer describes so plausibly. It appears throughout time in many places [n11 The last learned attempt to locate it—by H. H. and A. Wolf, Der Weg des Odysseus (1968)—proves as illusionistic as the previous ones.]. Some data in Homer look like exact geography, as Circe's Island with its temple of Feronia, or the Land of the Laistrygones, which should be the bay of Bonifacio. But most elements from past myth, like Charybdis or the Planktai, are illusionistic. They throw the whole geography into a cocked hat, as do the Argonauts themselves.

Without trying to fathom Ogygia, or Ogygos, the adjective "Ogygian"—which has been used as a label for the Waters of Styx—has also assumed the connotation of "antediluvian." As for Hvergelmer, "roaring kettle," it is the "navel of the waters" but it is certainly "way down," as is the strange "Bierstube" of Aegir.

And when it is found, as it soon will be, that Utnapishtim (the builder of the Ark, who can be reached only by the road leading through the bar of the divine Siduri and hence also, one would say, through the inn of beer-brewing Aegir) lives forever at the "confluence of the rivers," this might have charmed Socrates with his idea of confluences, but it will not make things much clearer.

Yet there are some footholds to climb back from the abyss. It is known (chapter XII) that Socrates and the poets really referred to heaven "seen from the other side."

It has been shown that the way through the "navel of the waters" was taken by Vainamoinen, and we shall see (chapter XIX) that the same goes for Kronos-Phaethon, and other powerful personalities as well, who reached the Land of Sleep where time has ceased. One can anticipate that the meaning will be ultimately astronomical. Hence, backing out of fable, one can turn again for assistance to the Royal Science.

That there is a whirlpool in the sky is well known; it is most probably the essential one, and it is precisely placed. It is a group of stars so named (zalos) at the foot of Orion, close to Rigel (beta Orionis, Rigel being the Arabic word for "foot"), the degree of which was called "death," according to Hermes Trismegistos [n12 Vocatur mors. W. Gundel, Neue Astrologische Texte des Hermes Trismegistos (1936), pp. 196f., 216f.], whereas the Maori claim outright that Rigel marked the way to Hades (Castor indicating the primordial homeland). Antiochus the astrologer enumerates the whirl among the stars rising with Taurus. Franz Boll takes sharp exception to the adequacy of his description, but he concludes that the zalos must, indeed, be Eridanus "which flows from the foot of Orion." [n13 Sphaera (1903), pp. 57,164-67.]. Now Eridanus, the watery grave of Phaethon—Athanasius Kircher's star map of the southern hemisphere still shows Phaethon's mortal frame lying in the stream­was seen as a starry river leading to the other world. The initial frame stands, this time traced in the sky. And here comes a crucial confirmation. That mysterious place, pi narati, literally the "mouth of the rivers," meaning, however, the "confluence" of the rivers, was traditionally identified by the Babylonians with Eridu.

But the archaeological site of Eridu is nowhere near the confluence of the Two Rivers of Mesopotamia. It is between the Tigris and Euphrates, which flow separately into the Red Sea, and placed rather high up. The proposed explanation, that it was the expanding of alluvial land which removed Eridu from the joint "mouth" of the rivers, did not contribute much to an understanding of the mythical topos of pi narati, and some perplexed philologist supposed in despair that those same archaic people who had built up such impressive waterworks had never known which way the waters flow and had believed, instead, that the two rivers had their source in the Persian Gulf.

This particular predicament was solved by W. F. Albright, who exchanged "mouth" and "source" [n14 "The Mouth of the Rivers," AJSL 35 (1919), pp. 161-95.]; he left us stranded "high and dry"—a very typical mythical situation, by the way in the Armenian mountains around the "source." And though he stressed, rightly, that Eridu-pi narati could not mean geography, he banished it straightaway into the interior of the planet.

The "source" is as unrevealing as the "mouth" has been, and as every geographical localization is condemned to be Eridu, Sumerian mulNUNki is Canopus, alpha Carinae, the bright star near the South Pole, as has been established irrefragably by B. L. van der Waerden [n15 "The Thirty-six Stars," JNES 8 (1949), p. 14. "The bright southern star Canopus was Ea's town Eridu (NUNki dE-a)."], a distinguished contemporary historian of astronomy. That one or another part of Argo was meant had been calculated previously [n16 See P. F. Gassmann, Planetarium Babylonicum (1950), 306.]. And that, finally, made sense of the imposing configuration of myths around Canopus on the one hand, and of the preponderance of the "confluence of the rivers" on the other hand. This unique topos will be dealt with later.

One point still remains a problem. The way of the dead to the other world had been thought to be the Milky Way, and that since the oldest days of high civilization. This image was still alive with the Pythagoreans. When and how did Eridanus come in?

A reasonable supposition is that this was connected with the observed shifting of the equinoctial colure17 due to the Precession. But the analysis of this intricate problem of rivers will come in the chapter on the Galaxy [n17 The equinoctial colure is the great circle which passes through the celestial poles and the equinoctial points: the solstitial colure runs through both the celestial and ecliptic poles and through the solstitial points. Macrobius has it, strange to say, that "they are not believed to extend to the South Pole," whence kolouros, meaning "dock-tailed," "which are so called because they do not make complete circles" (Comm. Somn. Scip. 1.15.14). The translator, W. H. Stahl (p. 151), refers, among others, to Geminus 5.49-50. Geminus, however (5-49, Manitius, pp. 60­61), does not claim such obvious nonsense; he states the following: "Kolouroi they are called, because certain of their parts are not visible (dia to mere tina auton atheoreta ginesthai). Whereas the other circles become visible in their whole extension with the revolution of the cosmos, certain parts of the Colures remain invisible, 'docked' by the antarctical circle below the horizon."].

One thing meanwhile stands firm: the real, the original, way from the whirlpool lies in heaven. With this finding, one may plunge again into the bewildering jungle of "earthly" myths concerning the Waters from the Deep.

The Waters from the Deep

THERE IS A TRADITION from Borneo of a "Whirlpool island" with a tree that allows a man to climb up into heaven and bring back useful seeds from the "land of the Pleiades." [n1 A. Maass, "Sternkunde und Sterndeuterei im Malaiischen Archipel" (1924), in Tijdschrift lndische Taal-, Land, en Volkenkunde 64, p. 388.]. The Polynesians have not made up their mind, apparently, concerning the exact localization of their whirlpool which serves in most cases as entrance to the abode of the dead; it is supposed to be found "at the end of the sky," and "at the edge of the Milky Way." [n2 M. W. Makemson (The Morning Star Rises: An Account of Polynesian Astronomy [1941], no. 160) suggests Sagittarius. For Samoa, see A. Kraemer, Die Samoa-Inseln (1902), vol. I, p. 369. For Mangaia, see P. Bue, Mangaian Society (1934), p. 198; and R. W. Williamson, Religious and Cosmic Beliefs of Central Polynesia (1924), vol. 2, p. 251.].

On this side of the Atlantic the Cuna Indians also knew the basic scheme [n3 C. E. Keeler, Secrets of the Cuna Earthmother (1960), pp. 67ff., 78f.], although they, too, failed to give the accepted localization: "God's very own whirlpool" (tiolele piria) was right beneath the Palluwalla tree, "Saltwater-Tree," and when the Sun-God, or the Tapir, a slightly disguised Quetzalcouatl, chopped down the tree, saltwater gushed forth to form the oceans of the world.

There are three elements here, which combine into a curious tangle: (a) the whirlpool represents, or is, the connection of the world of the living with the world of the dead; (b) a tree grows close to it, frequently a life-giving or -saving tree; (c) the whirl came into being because a tree was chopped down or uprooted, or a mill's axle unhinged, and the like. This basic scheme works into many variants and features in many parts of the world, and it provides a very real paradox or conundrum: it is as if the particular waters hidden below tree, pillar, or mill's axle waited only for the moment when someone should remove that plug-tree, pillar, or mill's axle-to play tricks.

This is no newfangled notion. Alfred Jeremias remarks casually, "The opening of the navel brings the deluge. When David wanted to remove the navel stone in Jerusalem, a flood was going to start [see below, p. 220]. In Hierapolis in Syria the altar of Xisuthros [= Utnapishtim] was shown in the cave where the flood dried up." [n4 HAOG, p. 156, n. 7 ("wo die Flut versiegte").].

The pattern reveals itself in the Indonesian Rama epic [n5 W. Stutterheim, Rama-Legenden und Rama-Reliefs in Indonesien (1925), p. 54.]. When Rama is building the huge dike to Lanka (Ceylon) the helpful monkeys throw mountain after mountain into the sea, but all of them vanish promptly. Enraged, Rama is going to shoot his magic arrow into the unobliging sea, when there arises a lady from the waters who warns him that right here was a hole in the ocean leading to the underworld, and who informs him that the water in that hole was called Water of Life.

Rama would seem to have won out with his threat since the dike was built. But the same story comes back in Greece when Herakles crosses the sea in order to steal the cattle of Geryon. Okeanos, represented here as a god, works up the waters into a tumult which are the waters of the original flood; Herakles threatens with his drawn bow, and calm is re-established.

Neither whirlpool nor confluence are mentioned in these cases, but they clearly extend to them. This gives great importance to the Catlo'ltq story from the American Northwest that is paradigmatic. (see chapter XXII) of the maiden who shoots her arrow into the

"navel of the waters which was a vast Whirlpool" thus winning fire. Some very fundamental idea must be lurking behind the story, and a pretty old one, since it was said of Ishtar that it is "she who stirs up the apsu before Ea." [n6 "Descent of Ishtar to the Nether World," obv. l. 27, ANAT, p. 107; see also W. F. Albright, "The Mouth of the Rivers," AJSL 35 (1919), p. 184.].

A strange pastime for the heavenly queen, but it seems to have been a rather celestial sport. The eighth Yasht of the Avesta [n7 Yasht 8.6 and 8.37 (H. Lommel, Die Yashts des Awesta [1927]).], dedicated to Sirius-Tishtriya, says of this star: "We worship the splendid, brilliant Tishtriya, which soars rapidly to Lake Vurukasha, like the arrow quick-as-lightning, which Urxsa the archer, the best archer among the Aryans, shot from Mount Aryioxsutha to Mount Huvanvant." [n8 See for the feat of this unpronounceable archer (Rkhsha) the report given by Al-Biruni, who spells him simply Arish (The Chronology of Ancient Nations, trans. E. Sachau [1879], p. 205). The background of the tale: Afrasiyab had promised to restore to Minocihr a part of Eranshar (which had been conquered by him) as long and as broad as an arrow shot. Arish shot the arrow on the 13th day of the month Tir-Mah, after having announced: "I know that when I shoot with this bow and arrow I shall fall to pieces and my life will be gone." Accordingly, when he shot, he "fell asunder into pieces. By order of God the wind bore the arrow away from the mountain of Ruyan and brought it to the utmost frontier of Khurasan between Farghana and Tabaristan; there it hit the trunk of a nut-tree that was so large that there had never been a tree like it in the world. The distance between the place where the arrow was shot and that where it fell was 1,000 Farsakh." (See also S. H. Taqizadeh, Old Iranian Calendars [1938], p. 44,) Tir or Ira is the name for Mercury (see T. Hyde, Veterum Persarum et Parthorum Religionis historia [1760], p. 24: "Tir, i.e., Sagitta. . ., quo etiam nomine appellatur Mercurius Planeta propter velociorem motum"), but it is also, along with Tishtriya, the name for Sirius (see A. Scherer, Gestirnnamen bei den indogermanischen Volker [1953], pp. 113f.), and the 13th day of every month is dedicated to Sirius-Tishriya (see Lommel, p. 5). We must leave it at that: Sirius-the-arrow has made more mythical "noise" than any other star, and also its connection with the ominous number 13 appears to be no Iranian monopoly.]. And what does Sirius do to this sea? It causes "Lake Vurukasha to surge up, to flood asunder, to spread out; at all shores surges Lake Vurukasha, the whole center surges up" (Yt. 8.31; see also 5.4). Whereas Pliny [n9 9.58. cf. Aristotle, Historia Animalium 8.15.599B-600.] wants to assure us that "the whole sea is conscious of the rise of that star, as is most clearly seen in the Dardanelles, for sea-weed and fishes float on the surface, and everything is turned up from the bottom."

He also remarks that at the rising of the Dog-Star the wine in the cellars begins to stir up and that the still waters move (2.107)—and the Avesta offers as explanation (Yt. 8.41) that it is Tishtriya, indeed, "by whom count the waters, the still and the flowing ones, those in springs and in rivers, those in channels and in ponds." [n10 Trans. E. Herzfeld, Zoroaster and His World (1947), p. 587.].

This is, however, no Iranian invention: the ritual text of the Babylonian New Year addresses Sirius as "mul.KAK.SI.DI. who measures the depth of the Sea." mul is the prefix announcing the star, KAK.SI.DI means "arrow," and it is this particular arrow which is behind most of the bewildering tales of archery. The bow from which it is sent on its way is a constellation, built from stars of Argo and Canis Major, which is common to the spheres of Mesopotamia, Egypt and China [n11 There is strong circumstantial evidence of this bow and arrow in Mexico also: the bow of the Chichimeca, the Dog-people.]. And since the name Ishtar is shared by both Venus and Sirius, one may guess who "stirs up the apsu before Ea."

And here is what the "fire" accomplished, according to a Finnish rune of origin [n12 K. Krohn, Magische Ursprungsrunen der Finnen (1924), pp. 115ff. See also F. Ohrt, The Spark in tbe Water (1926), pp. 3f.], after it had been "cradled. . . over there on the navel of the sky, on the peak of the famous mountain," when it rushed straightaway through seven or nine skies and fell into the sea: "The spark. . . rolled. . . to the bottom of Lake Aloe, roaring it rushed to the bottom of the sea, down into the narrow depression (?). This Lake Aloe then, thrice in the summernight, rose foaming to the height of its firs, driven in fury beyond its banks. Thereupon again Lake Aloe thrice in the summernight dried up its waters to the bottom, its perch on the rocks, its pope [small fishes] on the skerries."

A violent spark this seems to have been; yet—is it not also said of the old Sage: "Vainamoinen in the mouth of the whirlpool boils like fire in water" [n13 M. Haavio, Vainamoinen, Eternal Sage (1952), p. 196.]? Which goes to show that mythical "fire" means more than meets the eye.

Actually, the enigmatical events in "Lake Aloe" cannot be severed from those occurring in lake Vurukasha and the coming into being of the "three outlets," the first of which had the name Hausravahf/Kai Khusrau (see chapter XIII, "Of Time and the Rivers," p. 201).

Before we move on to many motifs which will be shown as related to the same "eddy-field" or whirl, it is appropriate to quote in full a version of the fire and water story from the Indians of Guyana. This not only provides charming variations, but presents that rarest of deities, a creator power neither conceited nor touchy nor jealous nor quarrelsome nor eager to slap down unfortunates with "inborn sin," but a god aware that his powers are not really unlimited. He behaves modestly, sensibly and thoughtfully and is rewarded with heartfelt cooperation from his creatures, at least from all except for the usual lone exception.

The Ackawois of British Guiana say that in the beginning of the world the great spirit Makonaima [or Makunaima; he is a twin-hero; the other is called Pia] created birds and beasts and set his son Sigu to rule over them. Moreover, he caused to spring from the earth a great and very wonderful tree, which bore a different kind of fruit on each of its branches, while round its trunk bananas, plantains, cassava, maize, and corn of all kinds grew in profusion; yams, too, clustered round its roots; and in short all the plants now cultivated on earth flourished in the greatest abundance on or about or under that marvelous tree.

In order to diffuse the benefits of the tree all over the world, Sigu resolved to cut it down and plant slips and seeds of it everywhere, and this he did with the help of all the beasts and birds, all except the brown monkey, who, being both lazy and mischievous, refused to assist in the great work of transplantation. So to keep him out of mischief Sigu set the animal to fetch water from the stream in a basket of open-work, calculating that the task would occupy his misdirected energies for some time to come.

In the meantime, proceeding with the labour of felling the miraculous tree, he discovered that the stump was hollow and full of water in which the fry of every sort of fresh-water fish was swimming about. The benevolent Sigu determined to stock all the rivers and lakes on earth with the fry on so liberal a scale that every sort of fish should swarm in every water.

But this generous intention was unexpectedly frustrated. For the water in the cavity, being connected with the great reservoir somewhere in the bowels of the earth, began to overflow; and to arrest the rising flood Sigu covered the stump with a closely woven basket. This had the desired effect. But unfortunately the brown monkey, tired of his fruitless task, stealthily returned, and his curiosity being aroused by the sight of the basket turned upside down, he imagined that it must conceal something good to eat. So he cautiously lifted it and peeped beneath, and out poured the flood, sweeping the monkey himself away and inundating the whole land. Gathering the rest of the animals together Sigu led them to the highest points of the country, where grew some tall coconut-palms. Up the tallest trees he caused the birds and climbing animals to ascend; and as for the animals that could not climb and were not amphibious, he shut them in a cave with a very narrow entrance, and having sealed up the mouth of it with wax he gave the animals inside a long thorn with which to pierce the wax and so ascertain when the water had subsided. After taking these measures for the preservation of the more helpless species, he and the rest of the creatures climbed up the palm-tree and ensconced themselves among the branches.

During the darkness and storm which followed, they all suffered intensely from cold and hunger; the rest bore their sufferings with stoical fortitude, but the red howling monkey uttered his anguish in such horrible yells that his throat swelled and has remained distended ever since; that, too, is the reason why to this day he has a sort of bony drum in his throat.

Meanwhile Sigu from time to time let fall seeds of the palm into the water to judge of its depth by the splash. As the water sank, the interval between the dropping of the seed and the splash in the water grew longer; and at last, instead of a splash the listening Sigu heard the dull thud of the seeds striking the soft earth. Then he knew that the flood had subsided, and he and the animals prepared to descend. But the trumpeter-bird was in such a hurry to get down that he flopped straight into an ant's nest, and the hungry insects fastened on his legs and gnawed them to the bone. That is why the trumpeter­bird has still such spindle shanks. The other creatures profited by this awful example and came down the tree cautiously and safely.

Sigu now rubbed two pieces of wood together to make fire, but just as he produced the first spark, he happened to look away, and the bush-turkey, mistaking the spark for a fire-fly, gobbled it up and flew off. The spark burned the greedy bird's gullet, and that is why turkeys have red wattles on their throats to this day 

The alligator was standing by at the time, doing no harm to anybody; but as he was for some reason an unpopular character, all the other animals accused him of having stolen and swallowed the spark. In order to recover the spark from the jaws of the alligator Sigu tore out the animal's tongue, and that is why alligators have no tongue to speak of down to this very day [n14 W. H. Brett, The Indian Tribes of Guiana (1868), pp. 37-84; Sir Everard F. im Thurn, Among the Indians of Guiana (1883), pp. 379-81 (quoted in J. G. Frazer, Folklore in the Old Testament [1918], vol. I, p. 265). The italics are ours.]

There are many more stories over the world of a plug whose removal causes the flood: with the Agaria, an iron smith tribe of Central India, it is the breaking of a nail of iron whch causes their Golden Age town of Lohripur to be flooded [n15 V. Elwin, The Agaria (1942), pp. 96ff.]. According to the Mongolians, the Pole star is "a pillar from the firm standing of which depends the correct revolving of the world, or a stone which closes an opening: if the stone is pulled out, water pours out of the opening to submerge the earth." [n16 G. M. Potanin, quoted by W. Ludtke, "Die Verehrung Tschingis-Chans bei den Ordos-Mongolen," ARW 25 (1927), p. 115.]. In the Babylonian myth of Utnapishtim," Nergal [the God of the Underworld] tears out the posts; forth comes Ninurta and causes the dikes to follow" (GE 11.101 f.). But the new thing to be faced is the appearance of the Ark in the flood, Noah's or another's.

The first ark was built by Utnapishtim in the Sumerian myth; one learns in different ways that it was a cube-a modest one, measuring 60 x 60 x 60 fathoms, which represents the unit in the sexagesimal system where 60 is written as 1. In another version, there is no ark, just a cubic stone, upon which rests a pillar which reaches from earth to heaven. The stone, cubic or not, is lying under a cedar, or an oak, ready to let loose a flood, without obvious reasons.

Confusing as it is, this seems to provide the new theme. In Jewish legends, it is told that "since the ark disappeared there was a stone in its place. . . which was called foundation stone." It was called foundation stone "because from it the world was founded [or started]." And it is said to lie above the Waters that are below the Holy of Holies.

This might look like a dream sequence, but it is buttressed by a very substantial tradition, taken up by the Jews but to be found also in Finno-Ugrian tradition [n17 L. Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews (1954), vol. 4, p. 96; cf. also vol. 1, p. 12; vol. 5, p. 14. We are indebted to Irvin N. Asher for the quotation, as well as for the ones from Jastrow that follow. Cf. V. J. Mansikka, "Der blaue Stein," FUF 11 (1911), p. 2.]. The Jewish story then goes on:

When David was digging the foundations of the Temple, a shard was found at a depth of 1500 cubits. David was about to lift it when the shard exclaimed: "Thou canst not do it." "Why not?" asked David. "Because I rest upon the abyss." "Since when?" "Since the hour in which the voice of God was heard to utter the words from Sinai, 'I am the Lord, your God,' causing the world to quake and sink into the Abyss. I lie here to cover up the Abyss."

Nevertheless David lifted the shard, and the waters of the Abyss rose and threatened to flood the earth. Ahithophel was standing by and he thought to himself: "Now David shall meet with his death and I shall be king." Just then David said: "Whoever knows how to stem the tide of waters and fails to do it, will one day throttle himself."

Thereupon Ahithophel had the name of God inscribed upon the shard, and the shard thrown into the Abyss. The waters at once commenced to subside, but they sank to so great a depth that David feared the earth might lose her moisture, and he began to sing the fifteen "Songs of Ascents," to bring the waters up again.

The foundation stone here has become a shard and its name in tradition is Eben Shetiyyah, which is derived from a verb of many meanings [18 The verb is shatan; the meanings are given in Jastrow's dictionary.]: "to be settled, satisfied; to drink; to fix the warp, to lay the foundations of," among which "to fix the warp" is the most revealing, and a reminder of the continuing importance of "frames." Within that "frame" there is a surging up and down of the waters below (as in the Phaedo myth) which suggests catastrophes unrecorded by history but indicated only by the highly colored terminology of cosmologists. Had they only known of a Cardan suspension, the world might have been conceived as more stable.

Hildegard Lewy's researches [n19 "Origin and Significance of the Magen Dawid," Archiv Orientalni 18 (1950), Pt. 3, pp. 344ff.] on Eben Shetiyyah brought up a passage in the Annals of Assur-nasir-apli in which the new temple of Ninurta at Kalhu is described as founded at the depth of 120 layers of bricks down "to the level of the waters," or, down to the water table.

This comes back to the waters of the deep in their natural setting. But what people saw in them is something else again. If David and the Assyrian king dug down to subsoil water, so did the builders of the Ka'aba in Mecca. In the interior of that most holy of all shrines there is a well, across the opening of which had been placed, in pre-Islamic times, the statue of the god Hubal. Al-Biruni says that in the early Islamic period this was a real well, where pilgrims could quench their thirst at least at the time of the Arab pilgrimage. The statue of Hubal had been meant to stop the waters from rising. According to the legends, the same belief had once been current in Jerusalem. Hence the holy shard. But Mecca tells more. Hildegard Lewy points out that, in pre-Islamic days, the god Hubal was Saturn, and that the Holy Stone of the Ka'aba had the same role, for it was a cube, and hence originally Saturn.

Kepler's polyhedron inscribed in the sphere of Saturn is only the last witness of an age-old tradition.

The humble little shard was brought in by pious legend to try to say that what counted was the power of the Holy Name. But the real thing was the cube: either as Utnapishtim's ark or, in other versions, as a stone upon which rests a pillar which reaches from earth to heaven. Even Christ is compared to "a cube-shaped mountain, upon which a tower is erected." [n20 In the ninth simile of the "Pastor of Hermas," according to F. Kampers (Vom Werdegange der abendlandischen Kaisermystik [1924], p. 53).]. Hocart writes that "the Sinhalese frequently placed inside their topes a square stone representing Meru. If they placed in the center of a tope a stone representing the center of the world it must have been that they took the tope to represent the world" [n21 Kingship, p. 179 (quoted by P. Mus, Barabudur [1935], p. 108, n. 1).]—which goes without saying. But it is said otherwise that this stone, the foundation stone, lies under a great tree, and that from under the stone "a wave rose up to the sky."

This sounds like a late mixture, with no reasons given; the way to unscramble the original motifs is to take them separately.

But first, some stock-taking is in order at this point. There are a number of figures to bring together. The brown monkey, father of mischief in Sigu's idyllic creation, is familiar under many disguises. He is the Serpent of Eden, the lone dissenter. He is Loke who persuaded the mistletoe not to weep over Balder's death, thus breaking the unanimity of creatures. Sigu himself, benevolent king of the Golden Age, is an unmistakably Saturnian figure, who dwelt among his creatures, and so is lahwe, at least when he still "walked with Adam in the garden." A ruler who "means well" is a Saturnian character. No one but Saturn dwelt among men. Says an Orphic fragment: "Orpheus reminds us that Saturn dwelt openly on earth and among men." [n22 Orphicorum Fragmenta (1963), frg. 139, p. 186, from Lactantius.]. Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1.36.1) writes: "Thus before the reign of Zeus, Kronos ruled on this very earth" to which Maximilian Mayer crisply annotates: "We find no mention anywhere of such an earthly sojourn on the part of Zeus." [n23 M. Mayer, in Roscher s.v. Kronos, pp. 1458f.]. In a similar way, Sandman Holmberg states with respect to Ptah, the Egyptian Saturn: "The idea of Ptah as an earthly king returns again and again in Egyptian texts," and also points to "the remarkable fact that Ptah is the only one of the Egyptian gods who is represented with a straight royal beard, instead of with a bent beard." [n24 M. Sandman Holmberg, The God Ptah (1946), pp. 83, 85.].

The Saturnalia, from Rome to Mexico, commemorated just this aspect of Saturn's rule, with their general amnesties, masters serving slaves, etc., even if Saturn was not always directly mentioned. When this festival was due in China, so to speak "sub delta Geminorum"—more correctly, delta and the Gemini stars 61 and 56 of Flamsteed— "there was a banquet in which all hierarchic distinctions were set aside. . . The Sovereign invited his subjects through the 'Song of Stags.'" [n25 G. Schlegel, L'Uranographie Chinoise (1875), p. 424.].

The cube was Saturn's figure, as Kepler showed in his Mysterium Cosmographicum; this is the reason for the insistence on cubic stones and cubic arks. Everywhere, the power who warns "Noah"

and urges him to build his ark is Saturn, as Jehovah, as Enki, as Tane, etc. Sigu's basket stopper was obviously an inadequate version of the cube seen through the fantasy of basket-weaving natives. This leads to the conclusion that Noah's ark originally had a definite role in bringing the flood to an end. A interesting and unexpected conclusion for Bible experts.

One of the great motifs of myth is the wondrous tree so often described as reaching up to heaven. There are many of them—the Ash Yggdrasil in the Edda, the world-darkening oak of the Kalevala, Pherecydes' world-oak draped with the starry mantle, and the Tree of Life in Eden. That tree is often cut down too. The other motif is the foundation stone, which sometimes becomes a cubic ark.

These motifs must first be traced through. After reading the beautiful story of Sigu's wonder tree, in whose stump are all the kinds of fish to populate the world, it needs patience to cope with the cubic stone which is found in the middle of the sea, under which dwells a mystic character whose guises vary from a miraculous fish, even a whale, to a "green fire," the "king of all fires," the "central fire," to the Devil himself. The chief source for him are Russian [n26 V. J. Mansikka, Uber Russische Zauberformeln (1909), pp. 184-87, 189, 192.] and Finnish magic formulae, and these "superstition" ("left-overs") are Stone Age fragments of flinty hardness embedded in the softer structure of historic overlay. Magic material withstands change, just because of its resistance to the erosion of common sense. As far as these magic formulae go, they became embedded in a Christian context as the particular populations underwent conversion, but they remain as witnesses for a very different understanding of the cosmos. For example, Finnish runes on the origin of water state that "all rivers come from the Jordan, into which all rivers flow," that "water has its origin in the eddy of the holy river it is the bathing water of Jesus, the tears of God." [n27 Krohn, Ursprungsrunen, pp. l06f.]. On the other hand, Scandinavian formulae stress the point that Christ "stopped up the Jordan" or "the Sea of Noah" (Mansikka, pp. 244f., 297, n. I) which, in its turn, fits into the Pastor of Hermas, where Christ is compared to a "cube-shaped mountain" (see above, p. 221).

From this it is not strange that the Cross becomes the "new tree," marking new crossroads. One need not go as far as Russia for that. In the famous frescoes of Fiero della Francesca in Arezzo there is "the discovery of the True Cross." It begins with the death of Adam, lying at the foot of the tree. The wood from the tree will later provide the material for the Cross. Later still, St. Helena, mother of Constan­tine, sees it in a dream and causes the wood to be dug up to become the holiest of relics. Fiero illustrated nothing that was not in good medieval tradition. This is, one might say, sensitive ground.

 

Of Time and the Rivers

SOCRATES' INIMITABLE HABIT of discussing serious things while telling an improbable story makes it very much worth while to take a closer look at his strange system of rivers.

It appears again in Virgil, almost as a set piece. The Aeneid is noble court poetry, and was not intended to say much about the fate of souls; one cannot expect from it the grave explicit Pythagorean indications of Cicero's Dream of Scipio. But while retaining conventional imagery and the official literary grand style which befitted a glorification of the Roman Empire, it repays attention to its hints, for Virgil was not only a subtle but a very learned poet, Thus, while Aeneas' ingress into Hades begins with a clangorous overture of dark woods, specters, somber caves and awesome nocturnal rites, which betoken a real descent into Erebus below the earth, he soon finds himself in a much vaguer landscape. Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram . . . "On they went dimly, beneath the lonely night amid the gloom, through the empty halls of Dis and his unsubstantial realm, even as under the grudging light of an Inconstant moon lies a path in the forest."

The beauty of the lines disguises the fact that the voyage really is not through subterranean caverns crowded with the countless dead, but through great stretches of emptiness suggesting night space, and once the party has crossed the rivers and passed the gates of Elysium thanks to the magic of the Golden Bough, they are in a serene land "whence, in the world above, the full flood of Eridanus rolls amid the forest." Now Eridanus is and was in heaven—surely not, in this context, on the Lombard plain. And here also "an ampler aether clothes the meads with roseate light, and they know their own sun, and stars of their own." There is no mention here of the "pallid plains of asphodel" of Homeric convention. Those hovering souls, "peoples and tribes unnumbered," are clearly on the "true earth in heaven," for it is also stated that many of them await the time of being born or reborn on earth in true Pythagorean fashion. And there is more than an Orphic hint in the words of father Anchises: "Fiery is the vigour and divine the source of those life-seeds, so far as harmful bodies clog them not. . ." But when they have lived, and died, "it must needs be that many a taint, long linked in growth, should in wondrous use become deeply ingrained. Therefore, they are schooled with penalties, for some the stain of guilt is washed away under swirling floods or burned out in fire. Each of us suffers his own spirit." Some remain in the beyond and become pure soul; some, after a thousand years (this comes from Plato) are washed in Lethe and then sent to life and new trials.

This is exactly Socrates' belief. The words "above" and "below" are carefully equivocal, here as there, to respect popular atavistic beliefs or state religion, but this is Plato's other world. 

When Dante took up Virgil's wisdom, his strong Christian preconceptions compelled him to locate the world of ultimate punishment "physically below." But his Purgatory is again above, under the open sky, and there is no question but that most, if not quite all, of Virgil's world is a Purgatory and definitely "up above" too. Socrates' strange descriptions have remained alive.

But Virgil offers even more than this. In the Georgics (1.242f.) it is said: "One pole is ever high above us, while the other, beneath our feet, is seen of black Styx and the shades infernal" ( sub pedibus Styx atra videt Manesque profundi).

What can it mean, except that Styx flows in sight of the other pole? The circle which began with Hesiod is now closed. [n1 The symmetry of both polar Zones is clearly in the poet's mind. "Five Zones comprise the heavens; whereof one is ever glowing with the flashing sun, ever scorched by his flames. Round this, at the world's ends, two stretch darkling to right and left, set fast in ice and black storms. Between them and the middle zone, two by grace of the Gods have been vouchsafed to feeble mortals; and a path is cut between the two [the ecliptic], wherein the slanting array of the Signs may turn" (Georgics 1,233-38).].

Great poets seem to understand each other, and to use information usually withheld from the public; Dante carries on where the Aeneid left off. As the wanderers, Dante and the shade of Virgil as his guide, make their way through the upper reaches of Hell (Inferno VII. 102) they come across a little river which bubbles out of the rock. "Its water was dark more than grey-blue"; it is Styx. and as they go along it they come to the black Stygian marsh, here are immersed the souls of those who hated "life in the gentle light of the sun" and spent it in gloom and spite. Then they have to confront the walls of the fiery city of Dis, the ramparts of Inner Hell, guarded by legions of devils, by the Furies with the dreadful Gor­gon herself. It takes the intervention of a Heavenly Messenger to spring the barred gates with the touch of his wand (a variant of Aeneas' Golden Bough) to admit the wanderers into the City of Perdition. As they proceed along the inner circle, there is a river of boiling red water, which eventually will turn into a waterfall plunging toward the bottom of the abyss (baratro = Tartaros). At this point Virgil remarks (xlv.8S): "Of all that I have shown you since we came through the gate that is closed to none, there is nothing you have seen as notable as this stream, whose vapor screens us from the rain of fire." Those are weighty words after all that they have gone through; then comes the explanation, a rather far­ fetched one: "In the midst of the sea," Virgil begins, "there lies a ruined country which is called Crete, under whose kin. [i.e., Saturn] the world was without vice." There, at the heart of Mount Ida where Zeus was born of Rhea, there is a vast cavern in which sits a great statue.

Dante is going back there to an ancient tradition to be found in Pliny, that an earthquake broke open a cavern in the mountain, where a huge statue was found, of which not much was said, except that it   was 46 cubits high; but Dante supplies the description from a famous vision of Daniel, when the prophet was asked by King Nebuchadnezzar to tell him what he had seen in a frightening dream that he could not remember. Daniel asked God to reveal to him the dream:

"Thou, O king, sawest, and beheld a great image. This great image, whose size was immense, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible. This image's head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of bronze. His legs of iron, his feet part of iron, and part of clay. 

Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces. . . and the stone that brake the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth."

At this point Dante takes leave of Daniel, and with that insouciance which marks him even when speaking of Holy Prophets, whom he treats as his equals, he dismisses the royal shenanigans in Babylon. His instinct tells him that the vision must really deal with older and loftier subjects, with the cosmos itself. Hence he proceeds to complete the vision on his own. The four metals stand for the four ages of man, and each of them except the gold symbol of the Age of Innocence) is rent by a weeping crack from whence issue the rivers which carry the sins of mankind to the Nether World. They are Acheron, Styx and Phlegethon. We have noted that he describes the original flow of Styx as dark gray-blue, or steel-blue (perso), just as written in Hesiod and Socrates that he had never read. It may have come to him by way of Servius or Macrobius, no matter; what is remarkable is the strictness with which he preserves the dimly understood tradition of the lapis lazuli landscape of Styx, which will be seen to extend all over the world. As far as Phlegethon goes, the course of the stream follows quite exactly what Socrates had to say about Pyriphlegethon, the "flaming river." We have seen in the Phaidon a low-placed fiery region traversed by a stream of lava, which even sends off real fire to the surface of the earth.

Whereas some interpreters thought it flowed through the interior of our earth, others transferred Pyriphlegethon, as well as the other rivers, into the human soul [n2 Cf. Macrobius. Commentary on the Dream of Scipio 1.10.11 (Stahl trans., p. 128): "Similarly, they thought that Phlegethon was merely the fires of our wraths and passions, that Acheron was the  chagrin we experienced over having said or done something, . . . that Cocyros was anything that moved us to lamentation or tears, and that Styx was anything that plunged human minds into the abyss of mutual hatred."], but there is little doubt that it was originally, as Dieterich has claimed [n3 A. Dieterich, Nekyia (1893). p.27.], a stream of fiery light in heaven, as Eridanus was. In any case, the flaming torrent, as the Aeneid calls it, goes down in spirals carefully traced in Dante's topography, until it cascades down with the other rivers to the icy lake of Cocytus, "where there is no more descent," for it is the center, the Tartaros where Lucifer himself is frozen in the ice. (Dante has been respectful of the Christian tradition which makes the universe, so to speak, diabolocentric.) But why does he say that the fiery river is so particularly "notable"?

G. Rabuse [n4 Der kosmische Aufbau der Ienseitsreiche Dantes (1958), pp. 58-66 , 88-95] has solved this puzzle in a careful analytical study of Dante's three worlds. First, he has found by way of a little-known manuscript of late antiquity, the so-called "Third Vatican Mythographer," that the circular territory occupied by the Red River in Hell was meant "by certain writers" to be the exact counterpart of the circle of Mars in the skies "because they make the heavens to begin in the Nether World" (3.6.4) [n5 See Scriptores Rerum Mythicarum Latini, ed. G. H. Bode (1968 1st ed. 1934) vol. 1, p. 176 : Eundem Phlegethontem nonnulli, qui a caelo infernum incipere autumant, Martis circulum dicunt sicut et Campos Elysios . . . circulum Jovis esse contendunt.]. So Numenius was not wrong after all. The rivers are planetary. Dante subscribed to the doctrine and worked it out with a wealth of parallel features. Mars to him was important because, centrally placed in the planetary system, he held the greatest force for good or evil in action. As the central note in the scale, he can also become the harmonizing force. Both Hermetic tradition and Dante himself are very explicit about it. Is he the planetary Power that stands for Apollo? That requires future investigation.

In the sky of Mars in his Paradise Dante placed the sign of the Cross ("I come to bring not peace but a sword"), a symbol of reckless valor and utter sacrifice, exemplified by his own ancestor the Crusader with whom he passionately identified. In the circle of Mars in Hell he placed, albeit reluctantly, most of the great characters he really admired, from Farinata, Emperor Frederick I , his Chancellor Pier della Vigna, to Brunetto, Capaneus and many proud conquerors. In truth, even Ulysses belongs in it, clothed in the "ancient flame," the symbol of his "ire" more than of his deceit. Virtues appear down there with the sign minus; they stand as fiery refusal, "blind greed and mad anger" which punish themselves: but their possessors are nonetheless, on the whole, noble, as, in the Nihongi, Brave-Swift-Impetuous-Male, the force of action par excellence. The meek may inherit the earth, but of the Kingdom of Heaven it has been written: violenti rapiunt illud. Christ stands in Dante as the Heliand, the conquering hero, the judge of the living and the dead: rex tremendae majestatis.

However that may be, the equivalence of above and below, of the rivers with the planets, remains established. By artifice Dante brings in at this point the figure of the Colossus of Crete, built out of archaic mythical material. By identifying the rivers with the world-ages, he emphasizes the identity of the rivers with Time: not here the Time that brings into being, but that of passing away—the Time that takes along with it the "sinful dirt," the load of errors of life as it is lived.

Men's minds in the 13th century were still very much alive to the archaic structure. But over and above this, by way of the Circle of Mars, an unexpected insight appears. Through the solemn Christian architecture of the poem, through the subtle logical organization, beyond the "veil of strange verses" and the intention they cloaked, there is a glimpse of what the author cared for more than he would say, of the man Alighieri's own existential choice. Poets cannot guard their own truth. Ulysses setting out toward the southwest in a last desperate attempt foreordained to failure by the order of things, trying to reach the "world denied to mortals," swallowed by the whirlpool in sight of his goal, that is the symbol.

It is revealed not by the poet's conscious thinking, but by the power of the lines themselves, so utterly remote, like light coming from a "quasi­stellar object." To be sure, the Greek stayed lost in Hell for his ruthless resourcefulness in life as much as for his impiety: he was branded by Virgil as "dire and fierce"; the sentence was accepted. But he was the one who had willed to the last, even against God, to conquer experience and knowledge. His Luciferian loftiness remains in our memory more than the supreme harmony of the choirs of heaven.

To pursue this hazardous inquiry the first source is Homer, "the teacher of Hellas." The voyage of Odysseus to Hades is the first such expedition in Greek literature. It is undertaken by the weary hero to consult the shade of Teiresias about his future. The advice he eventually gets is startlingly outside the frame of his adventures and of the Odyssey itself (10.508ff.). It will be necessary to come back to this strange prophecy. But as far as the voyage itself goes, Circe gives the hero these sailing instructions:

"Set your mast, hoist your sail, and sit tight: the North Wind will take you along. When you have crossed over the ocean, you will see a low shore, and the groves of Persephoneia, tall poplars and fruit-wasting willows; there beach your ship beside deep-eddying Okeanos, and go on yourself to the dank house of Hades.

There into Acheron, the river of pain, two streams flow, Pyriphlegethon blazing with fire, and Cocytos resounding with lamentation, which is a branch of the hateful water of Styx: a rock is there, by which the two roaring streams unite. Draw near to this, brave man, and be careful to do what I bid you. Dig a pit about one cubit's length along and across, and pour into it a drink-offering for all souls. . ."

Many centuries later, a remarkable commentary on this passage was made by Krates of Pergamon, a mathematician and mythographer of the Alexandrian period. It has been preserved by Strabo [n6 1.1.7. Referring to Odyssey 1l.639-12.3. See H. J. Mette, Sphairophoiia (1936), pp. 75, 250.]: Odysseus coming from Circe's island, sailing to Hades and coming back, "must have used the part of the Ocean which goes from the hibernal tropic [of Capricorn] to the South Pole, and Circe helped with sending the North Wind."

This is puzzling geography, but astronomically it makes sense, and Krates seems to have had good reasons of his own to make the South Pole the objective.

The next information comes from Hesiod in his Theogony (775-­814), and very obscure it is. After having heard of the "echoing halls" of Hades and Persephone, he says:

"And there dwells the goddess loathed by the deathless gods, terrible Styx, eldest daughter of backflowing Ocean. She lives apart from the gods in her glorious house vaulted over with great rocks and propped up to heaven all around with silver pillars. Rarely does the daughter of Thaumas, swift-footed Iris, come to her with a message over the sea's wide back.

"But when strife and quarrel arise among the deathless gods, and when anyone of them who live in the house of Olympus lies, then Zeus sends Iris to bring in a golden jug the great oath of the gods from far away, the famous cold water which trickles down from a high and beetling rock.

"Far under the wide-pathed earth a branch of Oceanus flows through the dark night out of the holy stream, and a tenth part of his water is allotted to her. With nine silver-swirling streams he winds about the earth and the sea's wide back, .and then falls into the main; but the tenth flows out from a rock, a sore trouble to the gods. For whoever of the deathless gods that hold the peaks of snowy Olympus pours a libation of her water and is forsworn, lies breathless until a full year is completed, and never comes near to taste ambrosia and nectar, but lies spiritless and voiceless on a strewn bed: and a heavy trance [coma] covers him.

"But when he has spent a long year in his sickness, another penance and a harder follows after the first. For nine years he is cut off from the eternal gods and never joins their councils or their feasts, nine full years. But in the tenth year he comes again to join the assemblies of the deathless gods who live in the house of Olympus. Such an oath, then, did the gods appoint the eternal and primeval water of Styx to be: and it spouts through a rugged place.

"And there, all in their order, are the sources and limits of the dark earth and misty Tartarus and the unfruitful sea [pontos] and starry heaven, loathsome and dank, which even the gods abhor. And there are shining gates and an immoveable threshold of bronze having unending roots and it is grown of itself. And beyond, away from all the gods, are the Titans, beyond gloomy Chaos."

This is Hesiod's version of the "Foundations of the Abyss." Its very details make confusion worse confounded, as befits the subject. The difficult word ogygion, translated often with "primeval," seems to designate things vaguely beyond time and place; one might say, the hidden treasure at the end of the rainbow. It was also the name for the resting place of Kronos, where he awaited the time of his return. But the paradoxical piling up of sources, limits, "unending roots" of earth, sea, heaven, and Tartaros too, remove any thought of a location at the earth's core, such as the cryptic words were popularly felt to convey. This "deeper than the deep" must have been "beyond the other side of the earth," and for reasons of symmetry, opposite to our pole. The shining gates and the immovable threshold of bronze are said elsewhere in the text to be the gates of Night and Day. Two centuries later, Parmenides, taking up Hesiod's allegorical language, speaks again of those gates of Night and Day [n7 G. de Santillana, Prologue to Parmenides, U. of Cincinnati, Semple Lecture, 1964. Reprinted in Reflections on Man and Ideas (1968), p. 82.]. But his image becomes clearer, as befits his invincibly geometrical imagination. The gates are "high up in the aether," leading to the abode of the Goddess of Truth and Necessity, and in his case too they must be at the Pole for explicit reasons of symmetry. We once tentatively suggested the North Pole, but many concurrent clues would indicate now the other one, the unknown, the Utterly Inaccessible. Hesiod says that Styx is a branch of Okeanos in heaven, "under the wide-pathed earth"; its dreaded goddess lives in a house "propped up to heaven all around with silver pillars," the water drips from a high rock. It can be reached by Iris coming with her rainbow "from snowy Olympus in the north." This ogygion region, that the gods abhor, has to be both under and beyond the earth; this should mean something like "on the other side of heaven." Homer never spoke of "above" and "below" in the strict sense. He simply made Odysseus land on a flat shore far away.

But what of the dreadful Styx which seems to be the core of the mystery? A river of death, even to gods, who can at least expect to come out of their coma at the appointed time.

It is inimical to all matter: it cracks glass, metal, stone, any container. Only a horse's hoof is proof against it, says the legend [n8 Pausanias 8.184-6; ed. J. G. Frazer, Pausanias' Description of Greece 4, pp. 248-56; also O. Waser, Roscher 4, cols. 1574, 1576. Pausanias leaves it open whether or not Alexander was killed by means of Stygian water, as was fabled.]. It adds that to men that water is inescapably lethal—except for one day of the year, which no one knows, when it becomes a water of immortality. This leads finally to the tragic ambiguity which gives drama to the tale of Gilgamesh and Alexander.

It is clear by now that the rivers are understood to be Time—­the time of heaven. But images have their own logic. Where are the sources? The Colossus of Crete is Dante's own invention. Before him, there were many other accounts of the cracks from which flow the world-ages. Kai Khusrau, the Iranian Amlethus, was persecuted by a murderous uncle, established a Golden Age and then moved off in melancholy into the Great Beyond. The bad uncle, Afrasiyab, in his desperate efforts to seize the holy legitimacy, the "Glory" (Hvarna), had turned himself into a creature of the deep waters and plunged into the mystic Lake Vurukasha, diving after the "Glory." Three times he dove, but every time;: "this glory escaped, this glory went away": and at every try, it escaped through an outlet which led to a river to the Beyond. The name of the first outlet was Hausravah, the original Avestan name of Kai Khusrau. This should make the epoch and design tolerably plain.

An equally ancient story of three outlets comes from Hawaii. It appears in Judge Fornander's invaluable Account compiled a century ago, when the tradition was still alive. The "living waters" belong to Kane, the world-creating Demiurge or craftsman god. These waters are to be found in an invisible divine country, Pali-uli (= blue mountain), where Kane, Ku, and Lono created the first man, Kumu honua ("earth-rooted") or alternatively, the living waters are on the "flying island of Kane" (the Greek Hephaistos lived also on a floating island). Fornander describes the spring of this "living water" as beautifully transparent and clear. Its banks are splendid. It had three outlets: one for Kane, one for Ku, one for Lono; and through these outlets the fish entered the pond.

If the fish of this pond were thrown on the ground or on the fire, they did not die; and if a man had been killed and was afterwards sprinkled over with this water he did soon come to life again [n9 A. Fornander, An Account of the Polynesian Race, Its Origin and Migrations (1878), vol. I, pp. 72f. cf. Fornander Collection of Hawaiian Antiquities and Folk-Lore, Mem. BPB Mus. 6 (1920), pp. 77f.]

An extraordinary theme has been set, that of the "revived fish" which will later show itself as central in Mid-Eastern myth, from Gilgamesh to Glaukos to Alexander himself. And then there are again the three outlets. These may help individualize the notion of Kane's "spring of life," which might otherwise sound as commonplace to folklorists as the Fountain of Youth. But something really startling can be found in good sound Pythagorean tradition. Plutarch in his essay "Why oracles no longer give answer" tells us (422E) that Petron, a Pythagorean of the early Italian school, a contemporary and friend to the great doctor Alcmaeon (c. 550 B.C.) theorized that there must be many worlds—183 of them. More about these 183 worlds was reported by Kleombrotos, one of the persons taking part in the conversation about the obsolescence of oracles, who had received his information from a mysterious "man" who used to meet human beings only once every year near the Persian Gulf, spending "the other days of his life in association with roving nymphs and demigods" (421A). According to Kleombrotos, he placed these worlds on an equilateral triangle, sixty to each side, and one extra at each corner. No further reason is given, but they were so ordered that one always touched another in a circle, like those who dance in a ring. The plain within the triangle is . . . the foundation and common altar to all these worlds, which is called the Plain of Truth, in which lie the designs, moulds, ideas, and invariable examples of all things which were, or ever shall be; and about there is Eternity, whence flowed Time, as from a river, into the worlds. Moreover, that the souls of men, if they have lived well in this world, do see these ideas once in ten thousand years; and that the most holy mystical ceremonies which are performed here are not more than a dream of this sacred vision [n10 Plutarch, De defectu oraculorum, ch. 22, 422BC.].

What is this? A mythical prefiguration of Plato's metaphysics? And why this triangular "Plain of Truth," which turns out again to be a lake of Living Water?

Pythagoreans did not care to explain. Nor did Plutarch [n11 Proclus (comm. on Plato's Timaeus 138B, ed. Diehl, BT, vol. 1, p. 454) claimed this to be a "barbarous opinion" (doxe barbarike). He shows no particular interest in the triangular plain of truth, alias our "lake" with its outlets, but he has more to say about the 180 "subordinate" and the 3 "leading" worlds (hegemonas) at the angles, and how to interpret them. To which Festugiere, in his (highly welcome and marvelous) translation of Proclus' commentary, remarks (vol. 2, p. 336, n. I): "On notera que Proclus donne a la fois moins et plus que Plutarque. A-t-il lu ces elucubrations pythagoriciennes elles-memes?"]. But here is at least one original way of linking Eternity with the flow of Time. When it came to geometric fantasy, no one could outbid the Pythagoreans.

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