The cosmos,
in mythology, is very different from the way astronomer-author
Carl Sagan writes about it. Yet, it proves to be the more abstract
and perplexing of the two interpretations. What is the cosmos?
Let us go on to address this question..
The cosmos
is the entire universe, always beyond the naked eye of the human
being. It encompasses the underworld to the heavens, and in
it, all creation is held. Yet the cosmos extends in time long
before creation, and after it. In many mythologies, the world
is popularly created out of a void, emptiness, or the nothingness
of the cosmos. It is in this context in which we see the cosmos
taking on the role of an entity whose magnitude and complexity
is way beyond imagination. Yet, the men who wrote about the
gods and the skies, sought to understand the world beyond themselves,
and wrote of these great worlds.
After the
world was created, the cosmos now held the world in all its
intricate detail, and with all its different realms and levels.
The most prominent example of this is in Norse Mythology, with
Yggdrasil, the World Tree.
Yggdrasil
is the centre of the world for the Norse. It is comprised of
nine different realms, each housing different creatures. Humans
lived in one of these realms. These nine realms resided on three
different levels in the tree, with the top three in the branches
of the tree, and the next three being below the three. The last
three were below the ground, around the giant tree's roots.
Not only the Norse had a world tree as such. The people of Kalimantan
in Indonesia, and the Aztecs too had the world mapped with the
central feature being a large tree.
Apart from
the Norse, the Japanese had a rather unique structural plan
of the cosmos. They believed there are six skies above the mortal
plane, and six more realms below it. The Chinese believed in
a much larger world, with the Jade Emperor upon his throne in
heaven, in a separate and distinct place from the mortal world.
Greek mythology also talked of a different architecture, with
the cosmos being in the shape of a dome, where the rounded top
was the sky, whilst the flat bottom was the ground.
Apart from
having physical three dimensions, the cosmos also possessed
the fourth dimension: time. Apart from telling of the cyclic
nature of creation and destruction in some myths, the cosmos
also served to link the worlds which operated on different chronological
planes. In Indian mythology, one thousand days on the mortal
plane translated to a single day in the heavens.
The cosmos
were not built without their blueprints and maps. To conceptualize
the cosmos required tools of their own. These tools were the
cardinal and spatial directions, which dictated the underlying
architectural basis on which the cosmos was built upon.
Tibetan
mythology illustrates the adoption of the system, which was
comprised of four cardinal directions on any plane. China had
an extra cardinal point, which was the middle of the four points,
which was simply called 'middle'. This incidentally suggests
why China is called 'Middle Country' in the Chinese language:
they thought their country sat in the middle of the cosmos.
Most ancient civilizations stopped at five spatial directions,
but went on further to divide it into six directions, each at
right angles to each other, in space.
Back to
Carl Sagan's cosmos, the world as we know today has completely
debunked previous myths on the construct of the world. To start
with, the world is round, and it is situated within the solar
system of nine planets. Interestingly enough, the sun is a part
of what we know as the cosmos today, although most civilizations
thought it to having been an embodiment of the creative force
of the cosmos.
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The
Making of Mankind >>
