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When Jules Verne wrote Journey to the Center of the Earth, he was thinking in terms of a hollow planet. There's another sense in which we can think about the center of the earth, though -- a more spiritual one.

We can approach this in two dimensions. Horizontally, the center of the world can be called the omphalos, from the Greek word for "navel." The Greeks had a myth that Zeus loosed two eagles from the opposite ends of the earth which, flying at equal speed, crossed each other's paths at Delphi, thereby proving it to be the precise middle of existence. A stone sculpture there -- the original of which may now be in the museum at Delphi, or that may be a later replica -- served as a sacred object to mark the spot.

I should note in passing that this idea can also be executed on a smaller scale than the whole world. The Roman Forum contained the Umbilicus Urbis or "navel of the city," the reference point for measuring all distances to Rome; Charing Cross has served the same function for London since the nineteenth century. That's a very pragmatic purpose, but not incompatible with a spiritual dimension: the Umbilicus Urbis may also have been the above-ground portion of a subterranean site called the Mundus or "world," which was a gateway to the underworld.

Which brings us to the (sort of) vertical dimension. Axis mundi as a term was coined for astronomical purposes, but it's been extended as a catch-all for describing a widespread religious concept, which is the connection point between different spiritual realms.

An axis mundi can take any form, but a few are noteworthy for cropping up all around the globe. One of the most common is the world tree, whose roots extend into the underworld and whose branches reach into the heavens. The exact type of tree, of course, depends on the local environment: the Norse Yggdrasil, one of the most well-known examples, is usually said to be an ash (though some theorists hold out for yew), while the Maya saw theirs as a ceiba, and in northern Asia it might be a birch or a larch. Depending on how flexible you want to be with the concept, you might see as a world tree anything that connects to at least one other realm, like the oak at Dodona whose roots supposedly touched Tartarus, without a corresponding link upward.

Mountains are the other big motif. Olympus, Kailash, Qaf, and Meru are all singular and stand-out examples, but anywhere there are impressive mountains, people have tended to think of them as bridges between different spiritual realms. They more obviously connect to the heavens than the underworld, but especially if there are caves, their linkage can extend in both directions.

Approach it broadly enough, though, and an axis mundi can be basically anything vertical enough to suggest that it transcends our mortal plane. The folktale of Jack and the Beanstalk? It may not be sacred, but that beanstalk certainly carried Jack to a different realm. The Tower of Babel? God imposed linguistic differences to stop humans from building it up to the sky. Even smoke can be an ephemeral axis mundi: ancient Mesoamericans, burning the bark paper soaked with blood from their voluntary offerings, are said to have seen the smoke as forging a temporary connection to the heavens above and the deities who dwelt there.

These two concepts, omphalos and axis mundi, are not wholly separate. While the latter term can apply to anything that connects the realms, like a pillar of smoke, a really orthodox axis mundi -- the axis mundi, the fundamental point where many worlds meet -- is often conceived of as standing at the center of the universe, i.e. at the omphalos. (In a spiritual sense, if not a geographical one.) It's the nail joining them together, the pivot point around which everything turns.

And it does occasionally crop up in fiction. In Stephen King's Dark Tower series, the eponymous tower toward which Roland quests is a canonical axis mundi, linking many realities together. That actually makes the conclusion of his quest a difficult narrative challenge . . . because how do you depict the literal center of the cosmos in a way that's going to live up to its significance? (Without going into spoilers, I'll say that King provides two answers to that question. Many readers find both of them unsatisfying, but to my mind, they are just about the only way you can answer it. Neither one, of course, is a conventional denouement.)

Even without journeying to the fundamental center of creation, however, I think there's unused room for this concept in fantasy. Plenty of stories send their characters between planes of existence via some kind of gateway or portal: an arch, a ring of standing stones, or something else in that vein. I want more beanstalks! Maybe not literally a humble crop plant on steroids, but more vertical transitions, where you feel the effort of the characters climbing up or down to reach a heavenly realm, the underworld, or an alternate reality -- one that, by the climbing, is implied to exist in a certain spatial relationship with ordinary reality. Make them go on a long journey to reach that point of connection, or undergo more effort than a bit of chanting to create a structure imbued with the capacity to carry them across those boundaries.

Ironically, this is a place where science fiction sometimes winds up preserving more of a folkloric feeling than its sibling genre does. Space elevators are absolutely an axis mundi rendered in literal, mundane terms -- complete with placement at the center of the world, since the lower end of the cable would need to be near the equator for the physics to work. Mind you, a space elevator doesn't extend into the underworld (. . . not unless somebody writes that story; please do!), but as we saw above, sometimes the concept is applied to one-sided connections. It's close enough for me!



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/bzQCUD)

In these days of climate change, the notion of coastal areas going underwater is a familiar fear. But it's not a new one; we have stories of drowned lands going back for thousands of years.

The famous example, of course, is Atlantis. Which Plato wrote about for allegorical purposes, not literal ones: he was making a point about society, building up Atlantis as a negative foil to the perfections of Athens. That hasn't stopped later writers from taking the idea and running with it, though, with interest particularly surging after Europeans learned of the New World. That's one of many locations since identified with Atlantis, with considerable effort expended on identifying a real-world inspiration for Plato's story (Thera leads the pack) . . . alongside wild theories that build up the sunken land as a place of advanced technology and magic. The supposed "lost continents" of Lemuria and Mu -- which may be the same thing, or may be synonymous with Atlantis -- are later inventions, discredited by the development of geological science.

We don't have to lose whole continents to the ocean, though. The shorelines of northern Europe are dotted with legends of regions sunk below the waves: the city of Ys on the coast of Brittany, Lyonesse in Cornwall, Cantre'r Gwaelod in Wales' Cardigan Bay. Natural features can contribute to these legends; the beaches of Cardigan Bay have ridges, termed sarnau, which run out into the ocean and have been taken for causeways, and environmental conditions at Ynyslas have preserved the stumps of submerged trees, which emerge at times of low tide. The so-called Yonaguni Monument in Japan and Bimini Road in the Bahamas are eerily regular-looking stone formations that theorists have mistaken for human construction, again raising the specter of a forgotten society drowned by the sea.

Many of the examples I'm most familiar with come from Europe, but this isn't solely a European phenomenon. I suspect you can get stories of this kind anywhere there's a coastline, especially if the offshore terrain is shallow enough for land to have genuinely been submerged by rising sea levels. Tamil and Sanskrit literature going back two thousand years has stories about places lost to the ocean, which is part of why some modern Tamil writers seized on the idea of Lemuria (supposedly positioned to the south of India). It doesn't even have to be salt water! A late eighteenth-century Russian text has the city of Kitezh sinking into Lake Svetloyar: a rather pyrrhic miracle delivered by God when the inhabitants prayed to be saved from a Mongol invasion.

Some drowned lands are entirely factual. Doggerland is the name given to the region of the North Sea that used to connect the British Isles to mainland Europe, before rising sea levels at the end of the last glaciation inundated the area. Archaeological investigation of the terrain is difficult, but artifacts and human bones have been dredged up from the depths. If we go into another Ice Age, Doggerland could re-emerge from the sea -- and if it had been flooded in a later era, what's down there could include monumental temples and other such dramatic features. We're robbed of such exciting discoveries by the fact that it was inhabited only by nomadic hunter-gatherers . . . which, of course, need not limit a fictional example!

Doggerland was submerged over the course of thousands of years, but most stories of this kind involve a sudden inundation. That may not be unrealistic: after an extended period in which the Mediterranean basin was mostly or entirely cut off from the Atlantic Ocean, the Zanclean flood broke through what is now the Strait of Gibraltar and refilled the basin over the course of anything from two years to as little as a few months. Water levels may have risen as fast as ten meters a day! Of course, the region before then would have been hellishly hot and arid rather than the pleasant home of a happy civilization, but it's still dramatic to imagine.

Then there are the phantom islands. I have these on the brain right now because the upcoming duology I'm writing with Alyc Helms as M.A. Carrick, the Sea Beyond, makes extensive use of these, but they've fascinated me for far longer than we've been working on the series.

"Phantom island" is the general term used for islands that turn out not to be real. Some of these, like Atlantis, are entirely mythical, existing only in stories whose tellers may not ever have meant them to be more than metaphor. Others, however, are a consequence of the intense difficulties of maritime travel. Mirages and fog banks can make sailors believe they've spotted land where there is none . . . or they see an actual, factual place, but they don't realize where they are.

To understand how that can happen, you have to think about navigation in the past. We've had methods of calculating latitude for a long time, but they were often imprecise, and a error of even one degree can mean your position is off by nearly seventy miles/a hundred kilometers. Meanwhile, as I've mentioned before, longitude was a profoundly intractable problem until about two hundred and fifty years ago, with seafarers unable to make more than educated guesses as to their east-west position -- guesses that could be off by hundreds and hundreds of miles.

The result is that even if you saw a real piece of land, did you know where it was? You would chart it to the best of your ability, but somebody else later sailing through (what they thought was) the same patch of sea might spot nothing at all. Or they'd find land they thought looked like what you'd described, except it was in another location. Well-identified masses could be mistaken for new ones if ships wrongly calculated their current position, especially since accurate coastal charts were also difficult to make when your movements were at the mercy of wind and current.

Phantom islands therefore moved all over the map, vanishing and reappearing, or having their names reattached to new places as we became sure of those latter. Some of them persisted into the twentieth century, when we finally amassed enough technology (like satellites) to know for certain what is and is not out there in the ocean. There are still a few cases where people wonder if an island appeared and then sank again, though we know now that the conditions which can make that happen are fairly rare -- and usually involve volcanic eruptions.

The sea still feels like a place of mystery, though, where all kinds of wonders might lie just over the horizon. And depending on how much we succeed or fail at controlling global temperatures and the encroachments of the sea, we may genuinely wind up with sunken cities to form a new generation of cautionary tales . . .



(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/kKc80k)