Friends of the Serpent

Sunday Morning Transport is making all of its January stories free to read, and that includes my latest piece: "The Final Voyage of the Ouranos"!

If you're getting Mary Celeste vibes off it, you're not wrong; the genesis of this story was entirely me going "oooh, I want to do something kinda like that." (It is not, however, a retelling of that specific incident.) The setting of my previous SMT story, "The Poison Gardener", struck me as the ideal place for such a narrative, and the editor, Fran Wilde, snapped it right up!

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)