The science of discworld.., p.7
The Science of Discworld IV, page 7
To westerners, a turtle/elephant world is most commonly associated with Hinduism. Turtles are often confused with tortoises, as they generally are in American English. Philosopher John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690 mentions an ‘Indian who said the world was on an elephant which was on a tortoise’. In his 1927 Why I Am Not A Christian Bertrand Russell writes of ‘the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise’, adding, ‘When they said, “How about the tortoise?” the Indian said, “Suppose we change the subject.”’ The elephant-turtle story remains in common circulation, but it is a misrepresentation of Hindu beliefs, conflating two separate mythical beings: the world-turtle and the world-elephant. In fact, Hindu mythology features three distinct species of world-bearing creature: tortoise, elephant and snake, with the snake being arguably the most important.
These creatures occur in several guises. The commonest name for the world-tortoise is Kurma or Kumaraja. According to the Shatpatha Brahmana its upper shell is the heavens, its lower shell the Earth, and its body is the atmosphere. The Bhagavata Purana calls it Akupara – unbounded. In 1838 Leveson Vernon-Harcourt published The Doctrine of the Deluge, whose purpose is clearly indicated by its subtitle: vindicating the scriptural account from the doubts which have recently been cast upon it by geological speculations. In it, he wrote of a tortoise called Chukwa that supported Mount Meru. This mountain is sacred in both Hindu and Buddhist cosmology, the centre of the universe – physical, spiritual and metaphysical – where Brahma and the demigods reside. Vernon-Harcourt attributes the story to an astronomer who described it to Bishop Heber ‘in the Vidayala school in Benares’. Since the word ‘vidyayala’ (note slight difference in spelling) means ‘school’ in Sanskrit, it is hard to give the report much credit. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable includes the entry ‘Chukwa. The tortoise at the South Pole on which the Earth is said to rest’, but there is little evidence to support this statement. However, Chukwa appears in the Ramayana as the name of a world-elephant, also known as Maha-padma or -pudma. Most likely various mythological entities were being confused and their stories combined.
Some sources say that Chukwa is the first and oldest turtle, who swims in the primordial ocean of milk and supports the Earth. Some also say that the elephant Maha-Pudma is interposed. This story apparently occurs in the Puranas, dating from the Gupta period (320-500). Whether the Hindus believed this myth, other than in a ritual sense, is debatable. Hindu astronomers of the Gupta period knew the Earth was round, and they may even have known that the Earth goes round the Sun. Perhaps there were ‘priests’ and ‘scientists’ – human- and universe-centred thinkers – then too.
The ocean of milk appears in one of the most famous reliefs at one of the great world heritage sites, the Khmer temple complex of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. In one version of Hindu cosmology, the ocean of milk was one of seven seas, surrounding seven worlds in concentric rings. Horace Hayman Wilson’s 1840 translation of the Vishnu Purana relates that the creator god Hari (aka Vishnu and Krishna) instructed all the other gods to throw medicinal herbs into the sea of milk, and to churn the ocean to make amrit – the food of the gods. Assorted gods were told to use the mountain Mandara as a churning-stick, winding the serpent Vásuki round it like a rope. Hari himself, in the form of a tortoise, served as a pivot for the mountain as it was whirled around.
Around 1870 Ralph Griffith translated the Rámáyan of Válmíki into verse. Canto 45 of Book 1 relates that it didn’t go as well as had been hoped. When the gods and demons continued to churn the Ocean of Milk, a fundamental engineering blunder became apparent:
Mandar’s mountain, whirling round.
Pierced to the depths below the ground.
They implored Vishnu to help them ‘bear up Mandar’s threatening weight’. Obligingly, he came up with the perfect solution:
Then Vishnu, as their need was sore,
The semblance of a tortoise wore,
And in the bed of Ocean lay
The mountain on his back to stay.
Despite its neglect in Discworld cosmology, we must now introduce another species of world-bearing animal: the snake.
You’ll see why in a moment.
In many Hindu and Buddhist temples, the handrails of staircases are long stone snakes, which terminate at the lower end as a many-headed king cobra, each head having an extended hood. This creature is called a naga. The nagas of Angkor generally have seven heads in a symmetric arrangement: one in the centre, three either side. A Cambodian legend tells of the naga as a race of supernatural reptiles whose kingdom was somewhere in the Pacific Ocean; their seven heads correspond to seven distinct races, mythically associated with the seven colours of the rainbow.
The Mahabharata takes a fairly negative view of nagas, portraying them as treacherous and venomous creatures, the rightful prey of the eagle-king Garuda. But according to the Puranas the king of the nagas, Shesha (aka Sheshanag, Devanagari, Adishesha), was a creator deity. Brahma first saw him in the form of a devoted human ascetic, and was so impressed that he gave him the task of carrying the world on his head. Only then did Shesha take on the aspect of a snake, slithering down a hole in the Earth to reach the base of the world, so that instead of placing the planet on his head, he placed his head beneath the planet. As you would.
Why are we talking about world-bearing snakes, not exactly prominent in the Discworld canon?
World-bearing elephants are probably snakes that got lost in translation.
The Sanskrit word naga has several other meanings. One is ‘king cobra’. Another is ‘elephant’ – probably a reference to the animal’s snake-like trunk. Although world-bearing elephants appear in later Sanskrit literature, they are conspicuously absent from the early epics. Wilhelm von Humboldt has suggested that the myths of world elephants may have arisen from confusion between different meanings of ‘naga’, so that stories about the world-bearing serpent became corrupted into myths about world-bearing elephants. This is, in any case, an attractive idea for a culture that routinely used elephants for heavy lifting.
Classical Sanskrit writings include many references to the role of world elephants in Hindu cosmology. They guard and support the Earth at its four cardinal points, and the Earth shakes when they adjust their positions – an imaginative explanation for earthquakes. They variously occur as a set of four, eight, or sixteen. The Amarakosha, a dictionary in verse written by the scholar Amarasinha around AD 380, states that eight male and eight female elephants hold up the world. It names the males as Airavata, Anjana, Kumunda, Pundarika, Pushpa-danta, Sarva-bhauma, Supratika and Vamana. It is silent about the names of the females. The Ramayana lists just four male world elephants: Bhadra, Mahápadma, Saumanas and Virúpáksha.
It may or may not be significant that the name Mahápadma is mentioned in Harivamsa and Vishnu Purana as a supernatural snake. Like dragons in the mythology of other cultures, it guards a hoard of treasure. Brewer’s Dictionary describes a ‘popular rendition of a Hindu myth in which the tortoise Chukwa supports the elephant Maha-pudma, which in turn supports the world’. This variant spelling seems to come from a misprint in a 1921 edition of one of the stories of the Mahabharata by the Indian freedom fighter and poet Sri Aurobindo:
On the wondrous dais rose a throne,
And he its pedestal whose lotus hood
With ominous beauty crowns his horrible
Sleek folds, great Mahapudma; high displayed
He bears the throne of Death.
However, this creature is clearly a giant cobra – unless you think the lotus hood is the elephant’s ears.
Our main interest in these stories, in the present context, is comparative mythology. The creation myths of many ancient cultures contain very similar elements. It is tempting to explain these similarities in terms of cross-cultural contact. It is becoming increasingly clear that the ancient world, at various times and in various places, was more advanced than we have previously imagined, and there is good archaeological evidence for trade over much longer distances than used to be assumed. However, temptation should probably be resisted, even so, because other explanations are more plausible. One is cultural convergence driven by human psychology and common environments.
Images such as the Earth rising from a primal ocean seem to be the sort of thing that naturally occurs to intelligent but uninformed human beings who try to explain where their world came from using human-centred thinking. Seas rise and fall with the tides, rocks appear and disappear. Floods drown low mounds, and then reveal them again as the waters recede. We take inspiration from nature, make it larger than life, and use our own invention to explain what we can’t understand. Creation myths open up windows into the human psyche. Ubiquitous natural phenomena, such as seas, mountains, volcanoes and earthquakes, suggest similar supernatural explanations. All ancient cultures were greatly influenced by the animals and plants that existed in their vicinity. If you live in a land full of possums and jaguars, it is no surprise if you develop possum gods and jaguar gods.
In many ways the differences between mythologies in disparate cultures are their most significant features. They suggest that the similarities may often result from some kind of convergent evolution, in which the same general supernatural explanation turns up independently because it has a certain logic – often of the Discworld kind – that appeals to the human mind. Explaining thunder as the gods throwing things, for example.
It is also interesting to see how myths evolve, like Chinese whispers, when they are passed on by oral tradition. Snakes become elephants. When the myths were preserved in written form, they still underwent dramatic changes before the invention of printing made it easy to mass-produce books. Even today, many of us can remember the general outline of a joke, or a story, but not the names of the characters. In mathematical circles, there are some standard stories about famous mathematicians, and the stories never change, but the famous mathematicians often do; the important point is that they should be famous. After that, it doesn’t greatly matter who they were – the story is just as funny, whoever you choose. The turtle joke in the next section is an example.
The logic of mythology can also sometimes shed a little light on scientific issues, by reminding us of the principal reason for adopting the scientific method: the human tendency towards self-deception. We all too easily accept some kinds of evidence, or some types of argument, when they confirm what we want to believe; we tend to reject them if they conflict with our beliefs.
In 2012 a Gallup poll found that 46% of American adults agreed that ‘God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so’. It was agreed by 32% that ‘Human beings developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process’. And 15% believed that ‘Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process’. The scientific figures, based on a variety of evidence, place the first members of genus Homo at about 2.5 million years ago, and Homo sapiens – anatomically modern humans – at about 200,000 years ago, with archaic forms dating back perhaps twice as far.
We’ve mentioned Young Earth creationists in chapter 2. They argue that since Biblical scholarship dates the creation of humans to at most 10,000 years ago, and both the planet and humanity were created a few days apart, the Earth itself must also be less than 10,000 years old. As we saw, the scientific evidence that the planet is far older – homing in on about 4.5 billion years – is extensive, consistent, and comes from a variety of independent lines of thought, all supported by observations. If you insist on denying all of that, however, there is a straightforward way to do so: the scientific view rests on logical inference, not just direct personal experience.
It would seem strange, however, that a creator god should have gone to such extreme lengths, less than 10,000 years ago, to give his creation every appearance of being billions of years old, with humans existing for hundreds of thousands of years. It could be a test of faith, the universal get-out clause, but that’s a peculiar reason for deceiving your own creations.fn5
The turtle-and-elephant universe features early on in Stephen Hawking’s rampant bestseller A Brief History of Time. He tells us that a famous scientist, possibly Bertrand Russell,fn6 was giving a public lecture, explaining how the Earth goes round the Sun and the Sun shares the rotation of the Galaxy. When he asked for questions, a proverbial little old lady complained that his theories were nonsense: the world was flat and rode on the back of a giant tortoise. ‘What does the tortoise stand on?’ the lecturer enquired. ‘You’re very clever, young man,’ said the old lady, ‘but it’s turtles all the way down!’fn7
Before the Big Bang theory became the orthodoxy, cosmologists espoused the steady-state theory: the universe has always existed and is essentially static. Although they have now abandoned the steady-state theory, many people still find it more congenial than any theory with an origin. In particular, an origin seems to require a precursor, so it seems natural to ask ‘What happened before the Big Bang?’
Until recently most cosmologists would have answered that since time began with the Big Bang, there was no before: it’s like asking what lies north of the North Pole. In the last few years, however, many cosmologists have started to wonder if something more interesting might be going on, and whether there is a sensible series of events that led up to the Big Bang – in effect happening ‘before’ it in a causal sense, even if not a strictly temporal one. In Figments of Reality, Ian and Jack wrote:
Most people seem perfectly happy with ‘it’s always been like that’, finding no difficulty in conceiving of a universe that goes back for ever. Yet nearly everybody finds an infinite pile of turtles highly incongruous … So why are we so happy with an infinite pile of causality: today’s universe riding on the back of yesterday’s, which rides in turn on the day before’s? It’s universes all the way back.
Mathematical calculations show that an infinite pile of stationary turtles can support itself in a universe in which gravity is a constant force in a fixed direction (call this ‘down’). This rather improbable structure works because the force of gravity acting on each turtle is exactly balanced by the reaction force where it stands on the turtle below, so Newton’s third law of motion – action equals reaction – is obeyed. Similarly, there is no problem with causality in the infinite temporal pile of universes: each is caused by the previous one, so every universe has a cause. But psychologically, human beings are entirely happy with infinite piles of causality, yet find an infinite pile of turtles ridiculous.
We seem to accept or reject infinite piles of causality in a rather haphazard way, however. The philosopher David Hume rejected one example of what he called ‘infinite progression’ in his 1779 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. The context was a discussion of a creator God as an explanation of the material world. The obvious question ‘what created God?’ leads all too naturally to ‘creators all the way back’, a line of thinking that Hume wanted to close off. He says:
Have we not the same reason to trace that ideal world into another ideal world, or new intelligent principle? But if we stop, and go no further; why go so far? Why not stop at the material world? … after all, what satisfaction is there in that infinite progression? … If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end. It were better, therefore, never to look beyond the present material world. By supposing it to contain the principle of its order within itself, we really assert it to be God; and the sooner we arrive at that Divine Being, so much the better. When you go one step beyond the mundane system, you only excite an inquisitive humour which it is impossible ever to satisfy.
In short, if we identify God with the material universe, we need go no further, and that’s great because it stops us asking awkward questions. However, this does seem to imply that the universe created itself. And that seems to leave open exactly the line of thinking that Hume was trying to close (but Spinoza, two hundred years earlier, had already espoused that idea…).
Other scientific issues can be similarly swayed by human psychology. It is difficult to imagine Einstein’s curved space (though not impossible for a trained mathematician or physicist), because we foolishly ask ‘curved round what?’ The answer is that it’s not curved round anything – it’s just curved. Its natural metric – its mathematical measure of distance – is not flat. Space seems to bunch up or spread out compared to a naive model based on Euclid’s geometry. On the other hand, we are very happy with an infinite flat Euclidean plane or its three-dimensional analogue, space. It never occurs to us to ask ‘flat along what?’ But it’s an equally sensible (or equally senseless) question.
These cognitive biases probably stem from the model of space that our brains have evolved to contain, which seems to be Euclidean. This may perhaps be the simplest model that fits our experiences of the nearby world, extrapolated in the simplest way to avoid space having a boundary. Which would be appealing because we don’t see any boundary. Our minds are very parochial. Our model of causality presumably evolved to match sequences of events that are common in our immediate vicinity, the human-scale world.
When it comes to the crunch, looking at both the theory that time had a specific origin, a finite period into the past, and the theory that it did not, but has always been in existence, then both have inherent flaws. This suggests that we are not thinking about the right question. Our view of the universe may be just as parochial and unreasonable as the world-bearing animals of ancient cultures were. Future scientists may view both the Big Bang, and four elephants riding on a turtle, as conceptual errors of a very similar kind.
fn1 Like all really nice stories this tale, told by a ‘country parson’, may be false. Other versions say that Newton kept losing time from his research by letting the cat out. Selig Brodetsky’s Sir Isaac Newton and Louis Trenchard More’s Isaac Newton: a Biography both state that the great mathematician did not allow either a cat or a dog to enter his chamber. But in 1827 J.M.F. Wright, who lived in Newton’s former rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge, wrote that the door once had two holes – by then filled in – of the right size for a cat and a kitten.
