The Beautiful West Ame rica the Underworld in Afro - Eurasia n antiquity Compilation and commentary by Rowan Campbell Millar 2022 Public Domain Some typos and citation notes removed from some quotes Cover p hoto: 5,500 - year - old Egyptian map 1 Evan L ansing Smith has described the descent to the Underworld as “the single most important myth for Modernist authors”. 1 Jim Bailey writes: “In Greek tradition the Hesperides were islands far out across the Atlantic. In Welsh tradition the Atlantic Isles were known as Avalon of the Apples or Glas Innes. *** To Mesopotamians the land in mid - ocean was Kur”. 2 Bailey: “Tradition claimed that Peru was the land where one does not die. Compare this Amerindian tradition with the ident ical tradition of Ireland, of Mesopotamia, of Japan about the land in the middle of Ocean.” 3 Bailey: “It is significant that so many peoples put the abode of the dead beyond the ocean. I believe that they fashioned their heaven as they fashioned their gods, out of the materials of their ordinary working lives, and if the soul crossed the ocean to its ultimate destination in the Paradise Land, ‘going west,’ it was because sailing across the ocean was a major fact in the experience of the living. The sun worshippers naturally tended to see the soul as following the daily path of the sun from east to west, as they generally put the afterworld in the west.... As a symbol of this, the Valley of the Kings, where some of the pharaohs were buried, was in the desert on the west side of the Nile, and their bodies were carried westward across the river in the funeral barge. However, at an early period, when some voyaging was eastward across the Indian Ocean rather than westward across the Atlantic, the land of the dead was sometimes placed in the east, which can be seen as the resting place of the sun, where it is before it rises. In fact the sea peoples who exploited both the Pacific and the Atlantic routes referred to the America s as the land where the sun set and where the sun rose — and little time was wasted between the two! We find Ireland, China, Japan, Egy pt, and Mesopotamia agreeing that Paradise lay across a great ocean and that it was somehow associated with the possibility of eternal youth.” 4 Liangzhu and Teotihuacano c osmological Deities 2 Bailey: “Chronos, the Phoenician god, is described as livi ng in ‘the Isles of the Blest’ and living in ‘the Underworld’; the se are of course the same place — and Chronos being much the same as El we can quote Ezekial 24:2: ‘I am El, I sit in the seat of the gods, in the heart of the seas.’ All this is consistent wi th ... the tradition of America as being ‘the Paradise Land.’” 5 Western Zhou and Chavín situlas Bailey writes that “the Mesopotamian names Kur and Dilmun both stand for America, the latter not for Bahrain; that the Chinese Fu Sang was the Chinese name for America; that the Japanese Horaisan, the Eternal Land, the Abode of the Blessed, ten years’ sail ing east of Japan, is the Americas, not Formosa; to the Egyptians’ Tuat, the Field of Reeds, means the Americas; ... that the Hesperides and Tartarus were Greek names referring to the Americas, that Hi Brazil was the old pre - Columbian Portuguese name for t he Americas, Irish version Ui Breasail; that it was Armorica to the Bretons, Glan Innes or Avalon to the Welsh, Mag Mel or Tir na Og to the Irish, Vinland to the Scandinavians”. 6 3 Jade dragon - pendants : Western Zhou Dynasty and Meso a me rica 4 The upcoming book, “Pyramidomani a, a World of Pyramids”, by Ivan Petricevic, says that “ancient hieroglyphs from the Maya suggest the city of Teotihuacan was referred t o as ‘The Place of Reeds’.” 7 Bailey: “If we now notice that from the earliest times the Ame ricas are referred to as islands, Paradise Islands, one can infer that the speakers knew their entire geography to be able to enter upon that accurate description of them from a very early date indeed. It was in association with immortality and with Paradi se that the Americas were described worldwide, as well, of course, as being the place where the sun set and so the place of the dead.” 8 Bailey: “As we have seen, America was known to many nations of the Old World by a variety of names. Americ a was looked o n then — as now — as the Paradise Land: God’s own country. Perhaps the biggest single source of confusion lies in this term, the underworld, whic h originally meant the Americas — where the sun was at midnight ” 9 Tartaria and the sacred tablets says: “The ancient cultures believed that everything in the underworld is upside down, the dead walk there with the soles of their feet against ours. Growing downward was normal for trees.” 10 Falling down to the Underworld: Lambayeque, and Saint Julien at Tours William Fairfield Warren , the first president of Boston University , wrote of “the mo unt of the rulers of the dead — exactly opposite, beneath the earth”: “Of the latter mount, Lenormant correctly says that, in ancient Chaldæan thought, it is ‘située dans le s parties basses de la terre,’... he ... locates it in the West. In like manner the mountain of the gods — ‘le point culminant de la convexité de la surface de la terre’ — he places ... in the East or Northeast Origines de l’Histoire, Paris, 1882, tom. ii , 1, p. 134. See also Tiele, Histoire Comparée des Anciennes Religions, Paris, 1882, p. 177, where he speaks of the entrance to Hades as at the Southwest.” 11 Warren: “See Tiele, History of the Egyptian Religion (English edition, 1882), p. 68, ‘the reversed world’; and the still more forcible expression in his Histoire Comparée (Paris, 1882), p. 47, ‘le monde opposé au monde actuel.’ Comp. Book of the Dead (Birch’s version), where it is styled ‘the inverted precinct’; and Thompson’s Egyptian Doctrine of the Future State, wherein Hades is described as ‘the inverted hemisphere of darkness,’ and where it is said to be ‘evident that 5 the leading features of the Greek Hades were borrowed from Egypt.’” (The Mountain of the Gods may be wherever one dwells , especially the local temple or mountain , with the Underworld Mo untain being directly antipo dal. Or the M ountain of the World may be Chomolungma in the Nepalese Himalayas, i.e. Mount Everest , and the Mountain of the Underworld may be Aconcagua in the Argentine Andes These are the tallest mountains in their respective hemispheres , are relatively antipodal to each other, and both are near the e dge of their respective landmasses ) Artifacts f rom Nimrud and Tenochtitlan Warren: “Tiele, History of the Egyptian Religion, p. 67: ‘The heaven (at night) rests upon the earth, like a goose brooding over her egg.’ Chabas, Lieblein, and Lefèbure have each maintained that the ancient Egyptians were a cquainted with the spherical figure of the earth; while Maspero, despite his language in Les Contes Populaires de l’Egypte Ancienne , in a private letter of still more recent date admits the possibility that the Egyptians held to such a view as long 1 2 ago a s eighteen centuries before the Christian era.” 1 3 Warren: “At least one tribe of our American Indians at the time of their discovery had a myth of creation in which the earth was conceived of as a ball. H. H. Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States, v ol. iii, p. 536. That the same idea underlay the Hades - conception of the New Zealanders is plain from various indications.” 14 Warren: “The 6 universality of the ancient belief that disembodied souls must cross a body of water to reach their proper abode has attracted the attention of Mannhardt, and led him to remark, ‘Da auch die keltische, hellenische, iranische und indische Religion diese Vorstellung kennt, so ist es von vorn herein wahrscheinlich, dass dieselbe uber die Zeit d er Trennung hinausgeht.’ — Germa nische Mythen, Berlin, 1858, p. 364.” 1 5 The poet Lewis Morris wrote, in his Epic of Hades: The world of Life, The world of Death, are but opposing sides Of one great orb , and the Light shines on both. 16 William Fairfield Warren’s illustration 7 Warren: ... if in ancient Hindu thought “the gods in heaven are beheld by the inhabitants of hell as they move with their heads inverted,” if in Roman thought — Mundus, ut ad Scythiam Rhipaeasque arduus arces Consurgit premitur Libyae devexus in austros: Hic vertex nobis semper sublimis, at illum Sub pedibus Styx atra videt, Manesque profundi”; if in Greek cosmology the tall Pillar of Atlas is, as Euripides makes it, simply the u pright axis of earth and heaven — then the earth of the ancients is incontestably a SPHERE, and Hades its under - surface. The “flat disk” notion is itself a myth, and a myth without foundation. 17 F. B. Jevons writes: “There is, howev er, one entrance to the nether world which is fam iliar to many different peoples ; and it is known to many, because the facts which prove it to be a gate of the underworld are patent to all. Those facts are that the sun disappears below the surface of the e arth in the west, and em erges again from it in the east ; therefore in the night he must have travelled from west to east below the earth, i.e. through the realm of the dead. Among the natives of En counter Bay the sun is feminine : ‘every night she descends among the dead, who stand in double lines to greet her and let her pass.’ Amongst the Magyars it is day in Kalunga, the land of the dead, when it is night on earth, because the sun passes through it by night, as it is also believed to do by the people of M angaia, and was believed to do by the ancient Egyptians to the end. ‘The New Zealander who says “the sun has returned to Hades, ” simply means that it has set’ ; and it was an Aztec saying that the sun goes at evening to lighten the dead. ... In Australia th ey travel for that purpose to Nynamnat, the sunset; in Torres Strait, to kibuka, the western world ; in Polynesia, too, they go west; to the west, likewise, the spirits of the Iroquois, of the Fijians, and of the Brazilians ; in Virginia the cave Popogusso lies west, west the Gulchinam of the Chilians. Odysseus found the entrance to 1 8 Hades in the west. In Babylonia ‘the mountain of the west, where the sun set, was a pre - eminently funereal place,’ and ‘the entrance to Hades was near this mountain o f the west.’” 19 8 Art from Nimrud and Teotihuacán 9 Choga Zanbil and Tajín z iggurats whose stepped shap es likely represent the World and its sections 10 Warren writes that Hi ndu and Zoroastrian “ Indo - Aryan ” cosmologies include the W orld and the U nderworld. 20 He lists commonal ities of the Babylonian and Ind o - Ary an cosmologies: 1. Like the “Upper E - KUR” in that diagram, the Sumeru of the Indo - Aryans is a mons montium, a true “Weltberg.” 2. In both cosmological systems this Weltberg is at the same time par excellence the possession of the gods, a Götterberg. 3. In both this Götterberg is not only divinely vast and beautiful, but also, in shape, quadrangular. 4. In both the axis of the he avens and of the earth is perpendicular in position, and consequently the top of the quadrangular Götterberg is the true summit of the earth. 5. In both this crowning summit of the earth has an antipodal counterpart in a corresponding inverted Weltberg un derneath the earth. In Chaldea this peculiar conception seems to have been of pre - Semitic antiquity. One of the first of Western scholars to recognize the parallelism and something of its significance for Comparative Cosmology was Lenormant, who a generati on ago wrote as follows: “Dans les conceptions de la cosmologie 21 mythique des Indiens on oppose au Sou - Merou, ‘le bon Merou’ du nord, un Kou - Merou mauvais et funest, qui y fait exactement un pendant et en est l’antithèse. De même les Chaldéens opposaient à la divine et bienheureuse montagne de l’Orient (accadien ‘garsag - babbarra = assyrien š ad çit š am š i) une montagne funeste et ténébreuse (accadien ‘garsag - gigga = assyrien š ad erib š am š i), située dans les parties basses de la terre.” — Origines de l’Histoi re, tom, ii, 1, p. 134. 6. In the Babylonian cosmos the upper hemi - gæa has seven stages; in the Indo - Aryan it has seven varshas. 7. In the Babylonian system the lower or inverted hemi - gæa has seven stages; in the Indo - Aryan it has seven p ā t ā las. 8. We st of Babylonia is found the Hebrew conception of a quadrifurcate river of Paradise which flowed forth in opposite directions to water the four quarters of the pristine earth. East of Babylonia is found the Indo - Aryan conception of the Ga n ̄ g ā - stream which , descending from heaven to the top of Sumeru, there divides itself, according to the Vishnu Purana, into four world - rivers, and descending the several sides of the mountain from varsha to varsha, waters the whole earth. It is hardly possible to doubt that in both cases the conception was borrowed from the world - view of the people residing midway between the Hebrews on the one side and the Indo - Aryans on the other, or was at least common to the three. 9. In the Indo - Aryan, as in the Babylonian world - view, the seven divisions of the lower or inverted hemi - gæa 22 can be described (as they are in the Mah ā - Bh ā rata) as subterranean, and yet, at the same time, as capable of receiving light from the sun and moon. Our diagram clearly shows both the possibility and the entire naturalness of this. 10. In the Babylonian conception the upper ... planetary hemi - ouranoi were seven in number, and each of them, in receding order away from the Weltberg, was located at an increasing interval or distance; so i s it also in the Indo - Aryan cosmos. 11. According to the Babylonians, the under ... planetary hemi - ouranoi were also seven in number, and these, numbering from their center, were located at ever wider distances asunder; so is it also with the dv ī pas in t he Indo - Aryan cosmos. 11 12. In Babylonian thought each of the celestial spheres was assigned to the guardianship and government of a particular divine being; so was also eac h dv ī pa in Indo - Aryan thought. 13. In the Babylonian cosmos the lower hemi - ouranoi are, as a group, below the seven stages of the lower hemi - gæa; in like manner in the Indo - Aryan, the Narakas are, as a group, below the P ā t ā las. 23 *** 15. In the Indo - Aryan as in the Babylonian system the lowest hells are antipodal to the highest heave ns; hence the statement in the Vishnu Purana : “The gods in heaven are beheld by the inhabitants of hell as they move with their heads inverted.” In the Jain S ū tras also persons in hell are represented as moving about with their “heads downward.” Even in P lutarch the same ancient idea survives. 24 *** 17. In both systems a cross - section of the cosmos ... would show seven solid horizontal world - rings, one within another, and all of them inclosing their common center. Here, possibly, was the origin of the “world - rings of rock” separated by seven intervening seas in the common description of the Buddhist worl d - view. *** 18. In both systems the order of the seven planets is not that of the ... Greek teaching of Ptolemy, but is conformed to the older Babylonian view, according to which both sun and moon are nearer to the earth than the nearest of the remaining five. 19. Precisely as in Babylonian thought the sphere of the fixed stars is far above, beneath, and beyond the seven concentric planetary globes, so in the Indo - Aryan is found, far above, beneath, and beyond the earth and all the Deva - lokas, the all - inc luding shell of Brahma’s cosmic egg. 20. Finally, as in the Babylonian, so in the Indo - Aryan cosmos, there is present and visible to every eye that most wonderful of all monuments of prehistoric astronomic science, the starry world - girdle of the twelve - signed Zodiac, attesting in both peoples a clear recognition of the great circles and the poles of the ecliptically defined celestial sphere. 25 Warren: Again, if in the beginning the Indo - Aryan series consisted of seven concentric spheres, lik e the Babylonian, the second of them, Plaksha, would correspond to the Babylonian lunar sphere, the globe of the moon - god Sin. Like that it would be conceived of as perfectly transparent, and hence like the others invisible. The visible lunar disk would do ubtless be thought of, as it was in Babylonia, as the moon - god’s “Ship of Light,” the vehicle in which in sacred state he made his nightly journeys round and round upon his spacious earth - inclosing sphere, lighting at the same time the central world of men within. In Babylonian thought the only natural passages into or out of this earth - inclosing lunar sphere were one through a nor th - polar gate on the “Way of Anu ,” and one through a south - polar gate on the “Way of Ea.” Three items almost seem to imply that the original conception of Plaksha was in correspondence with this. First, while in the Vishnu Purana Vishnu is naturally represented as worshiped in all the dv ī pas below Brahman’s, he is said to be worshiped in Plaksha in the form or person of Soma, the moon. 26 12 13 Warre n compares Babylonian and Homeric cosmology, writing that “we do find, in both systems, (1) the geocentric feature, (2) the plural heavens feature, (3) the perpendicular world - axis, (4) the earth - encompassing Ocean - stream, and (5) the outre mer Hades, under yet not within the eart h. Taken together, the five correspondences are certainly striking evidence of a common origin of the two world - views.” 27 Warren writes of Babylonians and Egyptians: “Each people applied to its und er - earth — that far - off original of D ante’s pendent Purgato rio Mount — terms strikingly descriptive of the inverted pyramid of our diagram. Among the terms applied to the Egyptian Amenti are, ‘mountain,’ ‘pyramid,’ ‘hidden mountain,’ ‘inverted precinct.’ Nor should it be forgotten that, corresponding to the Semitic expression ‘heaven of heavens,’ Naville has found in a Litany of Ra the counterpart expression, ‘The Hades of Hades.’ 14 Furthermore, as in Mithraism, and in that survival of Babylonian lore which scholars call Sabeanism, so in the oldest Egyptian teaching, t he ‘Ladder of heaven,’ according to St. Clair, had just seven steps. Corresponding hereto, in the Book of the Dead, chapter 144, we read of ‘seven halls’ in the 28 underworld.” 29 Also, the Great Bitter Lake in Egypt which is saltwater had a similar title to that given by Mesopotamians to the sea that surrounds the World and divid es it from the Underworld, the Bitter River . Warren: “The Egyptian pictures of the nocturnal voyage of their sun - god, Ra, recall to the memory of every reader of the classics the cor responding Greek myth of the ‘cup,’ or coracle, in which Helios was represented as each night making the same semicircular passage on the surface of the Ocean - stream.” 30 Warren lists commonalities of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology , such as “the second heaven, that of Sakra (Indra). Third. In each the heaven of Yama is the third. Fourth. In the parent system the heaven of Brahma is the seventh and last, in the Buddhistic his are th e seventh and all the superadded.” 31 In the Mishkatu ‘l - Masbih, the Prophet Muhammad describes his travels through the cosmos: “Then I entered the seventh heaven, and, behold, I saw Abraham. And Gabriel said, ‘This is Abraham, your father; salute him.’ Whi ch I did, and he returned it 32 and said, ‘Welcome, goo d son and good Prophet.’” 33 The third Hindu heaven, Svarga, is guarded by Airavatha, who is also called “Arkasodara”, meaning “brother of the sun”. 34 Warren writes of Hinduism and Buddhism: “Finally, in each system the respective abodes of the gods and demons are antipodal”. 35 Buddhists represent their cosmology in mandalas. 36 Warren: “In the 15 foregoing chapters we have seen not a little evidence that in countries widely separated the earliest traceable t eachers held and taught what was essentially one and the same world - concept. This included appropriate local abodes for gods and demons, for living men and for dead. It grouped these several abodes into one all - inclusive geocentric, upright - axled, poly - ura nian cosmos. In the land in which we can study the system to the best advantage, it presents two earths adjusted base to base: the upper the abode of living men; the under, its inverted counterpart, the abode of the dead. To the seven planetary divinities it gives seven distinct concentric spheres, to Anu and Ea an eighth, outermost in position, all - including, the sidereal sphere.” 37 Amitayus Mandala and Codex Fejérváry - Mayer Warren says Earth was known to be a sphere by Borneo’s Bataks. 38 Astronomer Simon Newcomb writes : “N ot enough credit has been 39 given to the ancient astronomers. There is no time within the scope of history when it was not known that the earth is a 16 sphere, and that the direction down, at all points, is toward the same point at the earth’s center.” 40 Jim Bailey compares the estimates by Columbus and Eratosthenes of the circumference of the planet: “What is most interesting about this is that, in emulation of the Egyptians, the Greek Eratosthenes had made a far more accur ate measurement. *** And ... if Eratosthenes, seventeen centuries before Columbus, was so much better a geometer, why could not even earlier attempts to measure the earth have been as successful as Erastothenes’? Or perhaps even more so? The Greek Eratosth enes cross - checke d measurements in Egypt.” 41 Bailey: “The Greek - Sicilian geographer, Eratosthenes, is credited with having first measured the earth. He traveled to Egypt and took the distance of Alexandria from Syene, which lay on the north - south meridian. This distance is five thousand stadia. Working on the basis that the sun’s rays that strike the earth are parallel, Eratosthenes at the summer solstice took the difference in angle subtended by these rays at the two stations and from this calculated the c urvature of the sphere of the earth and thus the length of its circumference to be 252,000 stadia or 39,690 kilometers, a figure that is almost precisely correct.” 42 Bailey: Eratosthenes was reputed to be the first Greek of the Classical Age to measur e the circumference of the earth. He was head of the library of Alexandria (c. 250 B.C.). I think it is likely that he would have made use of the sun dials, obelisks or shadow clocks, the giant gnomons that the Egyptians had already set up to obtain the greatest possible accuracy in this important affair, as well as the scaphe, or traveling sun dial, Eratosthenes is described as using. *** For by the First Dynasty, c. 3100 B.C., the Egyptians had measured the circumference of the earth, knew the value of π and had established their own measures of the remen and cubit as functions of this circumf erence. 43 The following is quoted f rom https://bakcheion.wordpress.com/our - god/the - mystery - of - the - midnight - sun/: The evocative phrase Midnight Sun comes from Apuleius’ fictional account of initiation into the Isiac mysteries: I approached the confi nes o f death, and having trod on the threshold of Proserpine, I returned therefrom, being borne through all the elements. At midnight I saw the Sun shining with its brilliant light; and I approached the presence of the Gods beneath, and the Gods of heaven, and stood near, and worshi pped them. 44 17 Warren wr ote in his 1909 book, ( a Scholar Select book for vital information to understand civilization) The Earliest Cosmologies: “Nearly every eminent Egyptologist except Maspero holds that the ancient Egyptians were acquainted with the true figure of the earth, and that they had all the astronomical knowledge necessary to enable them to orient pyramids and temples to a hair’s breadth, and to harmonize the solar and lunar years. Brugsch, Chabas, Lieblein , and Lefébure are of this opinion. Lieblein, in fact, confidently maintains that the texts show that the ancient Egyptians already understood and believed the heliocentric theory of the universe.” 45 18 Georg Steindorff described ancient Egyptian texts : “Under the eart h is supposed to lie a counter - earth, which is made exactly like the earth and the heavens, and which is peopled by the dead.” Describing Egyp tian cosmology, Warren refers to “this conception of an underworld which is the perfect antipodal counterpart of our overworld”. 46 Gerald Massey said that “in the making of Amenti the one earth was divided into upper and lower, with a firmament or sky to each, and thus the earth was duplicated. 47 19 The God Bes at Philae, and the Aztec c odex Borbonicus Bailey: “The Egyptian word Tuat for the underworld is clearly the underside of the earth, not the center of the earth.” 48 Bailey: “It should be noted ... that Amenti lay to the remote west of Egypt, where the sun went at night. 49 *** Amenti is the Coptic for Hades.” 50 Bailey: “America was known to Egypt as Tuat”. 51