Fig. 46.Fig. 46.—The Map of Andrea Bianco.
One of the most remarkable monuments of the geography of the last centuries of the middle ages is the map in Hereford Cathedral, by Richard of Haldingham, not only on account of its numerous legends, but because of its large dimensions, being several square yards in area.
On the upper part of this map is represented the Last Judgment; Jesus Christ, with raised arms, holding in His hands a scroll with these words,Ecce testimonium meum. At His side two angels carry in their hands the instruments of His passion. On the right hand stands an angel with a trumpet to his mouth, out of which come these words,Levez si vendres vous par. An angel brings forward a bishop by the hand, behind whom is a king, followed by other personages; the angel introduces them by a door formed of two columns, which seems to serve as an entrance to an edifice.
The Virgin is kneeling at the feet, of her Son. Behind her is another woman kneeling, who holds a crown, which she seems ready to place on the head of the Mother of Christ, and by the side of the woman is a kneeling angel, who appears to be supporting the maternal intercessor. The Virgin uncovers her breast and pronounces the words of a scroll which is held by an angel kneeling in front of her,Vei i b' fiz mon piz de deuiz lauele chare preistes—Eles mame lettes dont leit de Virgin qui estes—Syes merci de tous si com nos mesmes deistes.—R ... em ... ont servi kaut sauveresse me feistes.
To the left another angel, also with a trumpet to his mouth, gives out the following words, which are written on a scroll,Leves si alles all fu de enfer estable. A gate, drawn like that of the entrance, represents probably the passage by which thosemust go out who are condemned to eternal pains. In fact the devil is seen dragging after him a crowd of men, who are tied by a cord which he holds in his hand.
Fig. 47.Fig. 47.—From the Map in Hereford Cathedral.
Fig. 48.Fig. 48.—From the Map in Hereford Cathedral.
The map itself commences at its upper part, that is, the east, by the terrestrial paradise. It is a circle, in the centre of which is represented the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve are there in company with the serpent that beguiled them. The four legendary rivers come out of the base of the tree, and they are seen below crossing the map. Outside Eden the flight of the first couple, and the angel that drove them away, are represented. At this extreme eastern portion is the region of giants with the heads ofbeasts. There, too, is seen the first human habitation, or town, built by Enoch. Below appears the Tower of Babel. Near this are two men seated on a hill close to the river Jaxartes; one of them is eating a human leg and the other an arm, which the legend explains thus:—"Here live the Essedons, whose custom it is to sing at the funerals of their parents; they tear the corpses with their teeth, and prepare their food with these fragments of flesh, mixed with that of animals. In their opinion it is more honourable to the dead to be enclosed in the bodies of their relations than in those of worms."
Below are seen dragons and pigmies, always to the east of Asia, and a little further away in the midst of a strange country,the King of the Cyclops.
This extraordinary geography shows us in India the "Mantichore, who has a triple range of teeth, the face of a man, blue eyes, the red colour of blood, the body of a lion, and the tail of a scorpion; its voice is a whistle."
On the north of the Ganges is represented a man with one leg, shading his head with his foot, which is explained by the following legend:—"In India dwell the Monocles, who have only one leg, but who nevertheless move with surprising velocity; when they wish to protect themselves from the heat of the sun they make a shadow with the sole of their foot, which is very large."
The Blemmys have their mouth and eyes in their chest;others have their mouths and eyes on their shoulders. The Parvini are Ethiopians that have four eyes.
To the east of Syene is a man seated who is covering his head with his lip, "people who with their prominent lip shade their faces from the sun."
Above is drawn a little sun, with the wordsol. Then comes an animal of human form, having the feet of a horse and the head and beak of a bird; he rests on a stick, and the legend tells us it is a satyr; the fauns, half men and half horses; the cynocephales—men with the head of a dog; and the cyanthropes—dogs with the heads of men. The sphinx has the wings of a bird, the tail of a serpent, the head of a woman. It is placed in the midst of the Cordilleras, which are joined to a great chain of mountains. Here lastly is seen themonoceros, a terrible animal; but here is the marvel: "When one shows to thismonocerosa young girl, who, when the animal approaches, uncovers her breast, the monster, forgetting his ferocity, lays his head there, and when he is asleep may be taken defenceless."
Near to the lake Meotides is a man clothed in Oriental style, with a hat that terminates in a point, and holding by the bridle a horse whose harness is a human skin, and which is explained thus by the Latin legend: "Here live the griffins, very wicked men, for among other crimes they proceed so far as to make clothes for themselves and their horses out of the skins of their enemies."
More to the south is a large bird, the ostrich; according to the legend, "the ostrich has the head of a goose, the body of a crane, the feet of a calf; it eats iron."
Not far from the Riphean Mountains two men with long tunics and round bonnets are represented in the attitude of fighting; one brandishes a sword, the other a kind of club, and the legend tells us, "The customs of the people of the interior of Scythia are somewhat wild; they inhabit caves; they drink the blood of the slain by sucking their wounds; they pride themselves on the number of people they have slain—not to have slain any one in combat is reckoned disgraceful."
Near the river that empties itself into the Caspian Sea it is written: "This river comes from the infernal regions; it enters the sea after having descended from mountains covered with wood, and it is there, they say, that the mouth of hell opens."
To the south of this river, and to the north of Hyrcania, is represented a monster having the body of a man, the head, tail, and feet of a bull: this is the Minotaur. Further on are the mountains of Armenia, and the ark of Noah on one of its plateaux. Here, too, is seen a large tiger, and we read: "The tiger, when he sees that he has been deprived of his young, pursues the ravisher precipitately; but the latter, hastening away on his swift horse, throws a mirror to him and is safe."
Elsewhere appears Lot's wife changed into a pillar of salt; the lynx who can see through a stone wall; the river Lethe; so called because all who drink of it forget everything.
Numerous other details might be mentioned, but enough has been said to show the curious nature and exceeding interest of this map, in which matters of observation and imagination are strangely mixed. Another very curious geographical document of that epoch is the map of the world of theGrandes Chroniques de Saint-Denis. This belongs to the fourteenth century. The capitals here too are represented by edifices. The Mediterranean is a vertical canal, which goes from the Columns of Hercules to Jerusalem. The Caspian Sea communicates with it to the north, and the Red Sea to the south-east, by the Nile. It preserves the same position for Paradise and for the land of Gog and Magog that we have seen before. The geography of Europe is very defective. Britannia and Anglia figure as two separate islands, being represented off the west coast of Spain, with Allemania and Germania, also two distinct countries, to the north. The ocean is represented as round the whole, and the various points of the compass are represented by different kinds of winds on the outside.
Fig. 49.Fig. 49.—Cosmography of St. Denis.
This was the general style of the maps of the world at that period, as we may perceive from the various illustrations we have been able to give, and it curiously initiates us into the mediæval ideas. Sometimes they are surrounded by laughable figures of the winds with inflated cheeks, sometimes there are drawn light children of Eolus seated on leathern bottles, rotating the liquid within; at other times, saints, angels, Adam and Eve, or other people, adorn the circumference of the map. Within are shown a profusion of animals, trees, populations, monuments, tents, draperies, and monarchsseated on their thrones—an idea which was useful, no doubt, and which gave the reader some knowledge of the local riches, the ethnography, the local forms of government and of architecture in the various countries represented; but the drawings were for the most part childish, and more fantastic than real. The language, too, in which they were written was as mixed as the drawings; no regularity was preserved in the orthography of a name, which on the same map may be written in ten different ways, being expressed in barbarous Latin, Roman, or Old French, Catalan, Italian, Castilian, or Portuguese!
During the same epoch other forms of maps in less detail and of smaller size show the characters that we have seen in the maps of earlier centuries.
Marco Polo, the traveller, at the end of the fourteenth century, has preserved in his writings all the ancient traditions, and united them in a singular manner with the results of his own observations. He had not seen Paradise, but he had seen the ark of Noah resting on the top of Ararat. His map of the world, preserved in the library at Stockholm, is oval, and represents two continents.
In that which we inhabit, the only seas indicated are the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Asia appears at the east, Europe to the north, and Africa to the south. The other continent to the south of the equator, which is not marked, is Antichthonia.
In a map of the world engraved on a medal of the fifteenth century during the reign of Charles V. there is still a reminiscence of the ideas of the concealed earth and Meropides, as described by Theopompus. We see the winds as cherubim; Europe more accurately represented than usual; but Africa still unknown, and a second continent, called Brumæ, instead of Antichthonia, with imaginary details upon it.
Fig. 50.Fig. 50.—The Map of Marco Polo.
If such were the ideas entertained amongst the most enlightened nations, what may we expect among those who were less advanced? It would take us too long to describeall that more Eastern nations have done upon this point since the commencement of our present era, but we may give an example or two from the Arabians.
Fig. 51.Fig. 51.—Map on a Medal of Charles V.
In the ancient Arabian chronicle of Tabari is a system founded on the earth being the solid foundation of all things; we read: "The prophet says, the all-powerful and inimitable Deity has created the mountain of Kaf round about the earth; it has been called the foundation pile of the earth, as it is said in the Koran, 'The mountains are the piles.' This world is in the midst of the mountain of Kaf, just as the finger is in the midst of the ring. This mountain is emerald, and blue in colour; no man can go to it, because he would have to pass four months in darkness to do so. There is inthat mountain neither sun, nor moon, nor stars; it is so blue that the azure colour you see in the heavens comes from the brilliancy of the mountain of Kaf, which is reflected in the sky. If this were not so the sky would not be blue. All the mountains that you see are supported by Kaf; if it did not exist, all the earth would be in a continual tremble, and not a creature could live upon its surface. The heavens rest upon it like a tent."
Another Arabian author, Benakaty, writing in 1317, says: "Know that the earth has the form of a globe suspended in the centre of the heavens. It is divided by the two great circles of the meridian and equator, which cut each other at light angles, into four equal parts, namely, those of the north-west, north-east, south-west, and south-east. The inhabited portion of the earth is situated in the southern hemisphere, of which one half is inhabited."
Ibn-Wardy, who lived in the same century, adopted the idea of the ocean surrounding all the earth, and said we knew neither its depth nor its extent.
This ocean was also acknowledged by the author of the Kaf mountain; he says it lies between the earth and that mountain, and calls it Bahr-al-Mohith.
The end of the fifteenth century saw the dawn of a new era in knowledge and science. The discoveries of Columbus changed entirely the aspect of matters, the imagination was excited to fresh enterprises, and the hardihood of theadventurers through good or bad success was such as want of liberty could not destroy.
Nevertheless, as we have seen, Columbus imagined the earth to have the shape of a pear. Not that he obtained this idea from his own observations, but rather retained it as a relic of past traditions. It is probable that it really dates from the seventh century. We may read in several cosmographical manuscripts of that epoch, that the earth has the form of a cone or a top, its surface rising from south to north. These ideas were considerably spread by the compilations of John of Beauvais in 1479, from whom probably Columbus derived his notion.
Although Columbus is generally and rightly known as the discoverer of the New World, a very curious suit was brought by Pinzon against his heirs in 1514. Pinzon pretended that the discovery was due to him alone, as Columbus had only followed his advice in making it. Pinzon told the admiral himself that the required route was intimated by an inspiration, or revelation. The truth was that this "revelation" was due to a flock of parrots, flying in the evening towards the south-west, which Pinzon concluded must be going in the direction of an invisible coast to pass the night in the bushes. Certainly the consequences of Columbus resisting the advice of Pinzon would have been most remarkable; for had he continued to sail due west he would have been caught by the Gulf Stream and carried to Florida,or possibly to Virginia, and in this case the United States would have received a Spanish and Catholic population, instead of an English and Protestant one.
The discoveries of those days were often commemorated by the formation of heraldic devices for the authors of them, and we have in this way some curious coats of arms on record. That, for instance, of Sebastian Cano was a globe, with the legend,Primus circumdedisti me. The arms given to Columbus in 1493 consisted of the first map of America, with a range of islands in a gulf. Charles V. gave to Diego of Ordaz the figure of the Peak of Orizaba as his arms, to commemorate his having ascended it; and to the historian Oviedo, who passed thirty-four years without interruption (1513-47) in tropical America, the four beautiful stars of the Southern Cross.
We have arrived at the close of our history of the attempts that preceded the actual discovery of the form and constitution of the globe; since these were established our further progress has been in matters of detail. There now remains briefly to notice the attempts at discovering the size of the earth on the supposition, and afterwards certainty, of its being a globe.
The earliest attempt at this was made by Eratosthenes, 246 years before our era, and it was founded on the following reasoning. The sun illuminates the bottom of pits at Syene at the summer solstice; on the same day, instead of beingvertical over the heads of the inhabitants of Alexandria, it is 7¼ degrees from the zenith. Seven-and-a-quarter degrees is the fiftieth part of an entire circumference; and the distance between the two towns is five thousand stadia; hence the circumference of the earth is fifty times this distance, or 250 thousand stadia.
A century before our era Posidonius arrived at an analogous result by remarking that the star Canopus touched the horizon at Rhodes when it was 7 degrees 12 minutes above that of Alexandria.
These measurements, which, though rough, were ingenious, were, followed in the eighth century by similar ones by the Arabian Caliph, Almamoun, who did not greatly modify them.
The first men who actually went round the world were the crew of the ship under Magellan, who started to the west in 1520; he was slain by the Philippine islanders in 1521, but his ship, under his lieutenant, Sebastian Cano, returned by the east in 1522. The first attempt at the actual measurement of a part of the earth's surface along the meridian was made by Fernel in 1528. His process was a singular, but simple one, namely, by counting the number of the turns made by the wheels of his carriage between Paris and Amiens. He made the number 57,020, and accurate measurements of the distance many years after showed he had not made an error of more than four turns.
The astronomer Picard attempted it again under Louis XIV. by triangulation.
The French astronomers have always been forward in this inquiry, and to them we owe the systematic attempts to arrive at a truer knowledge of the length of an arc of the meridian which were made in 1735-45 in Lapland and in Peru; and later under Mechain and Delambre, by order of the National Assembly, for the basis of the metrical system.
Observations of this kind have also been made by the English, as at Lough Foyle in Ireland, and in India.
The review which has here been made of the various ideas on what now seems so simple a matter cannot but impress us with the vast contrast there is between the wild attempts of the earlier philosophers and our modern affirmations. What progress has been made in the last two thousand years! And all of this is due to hard work. The true revelation of nature is that which we form ourselves, by our persevering efforts. We now know that the earth is approximately spherical, but flattened by about 1/300 at the poles, is three-quarters covered with water, and enveloped everywhere by a light atmospheric mantle. The distance from the centre of the earth to its surface is 3,956 miles, its area is 197 million square miles, its volume is 256,000 millions of cubic miles, its weight is six thousand trillion tons. So, thanks to the bold measurements of its inhabitants, we know as much about it as we are likely to know for a long time to come.
The legends that were for so many ages prevalent in Europe had their foundation in the attempt to make the accounts of Scripture and the ideas and dogmas of the Fathers of the Church fit into the few and insignificant facts that were known with respect to the earth, and the system of which it forms a part, and the far more numerous imaginations that were entertained about it.
We are therefore led on to examine some of these legends, that we may appreciate how far a knowledge of astronomy will effect the eradication of errors and fantasies which, under the aspect of truth, have so long enslaved the people. No doubt the authors of the legendary stories knew well enough their allegorical nature; but those who received them supposed that they gave true indications of the nature of the earth and world, and therefore accepted them as facts.
Some indeed considered that the whole physical constitution of the world was a scaffold or a model, and that there was a realtheological universe hidden beneath this semblance. No one omitted from his system the spiritual heaven in which the angels and just men might spend their existence; but in addition to this there were places whose reality was believed in, but whose locality is more difficult to settle, and which therefore were moved from one place to another by various writers, viz., the infernal regions, purgatory, and the terrestrial paradise.
We will here recount some of those legends, which wielded sufficient sway over men's minds as to gain their belief in the veritable existence of the places described, and in this way to influence their astronomical and cosmographical ideas.
And for the first we will descend to the infernal regions with Plutarch and Thespesius.
This Thespesius relates his adventures in the other world. Having fallen head-first from an elevated place, he found himself unwounded, but was contused in such a way as to be insensible. He was supposed to be dead, but, after three days, as they were about to bury him, he came to life again. In a few days he recovered his former powers of mind and body; but made a marvellous change for the better in his life.
He said that at the moment that he lost consciousness he found himself like a sailor at the bottom of the sea; but afterwards, having recovered himself a little, he was able to breathe perfectly, and seeing only with the eyes of his soul,he looked round on all that was about him. He saw no longer the accustomed sights, but stars of prodigious magnitude, separated from each other by immense distances. They were of dazzling brightness and splendid colour. His soul, carried like a vessel on the luminous ocean, sailed along freely and smoothly, and moved everywhere with rapidity. Passing over in silence a large number of the sights that met his eye, he stated that the souls of the dead, taking the form of bubbles of fire, rise through the air, which opens a passage above them; at last the bubbles, breaking without noise, let out the souls in a human form and of a smaller size, and moving in different ways. Some, rising with astonishing lightness, mounted in a straight line; others, running round like a whipping-top, went up and down by turns with a confused and irregular motion, making small advance by long and painful efforts. Among this number he saw one of his parents, whom he recognised with difficulty, as she had died in his infancy; but she approached him, and said, "Good day, Thespesius." Surprised to hear himself called by this name, he told her that he was called Arideus, and not Thespesius. "That was once your name," she replied, "but in future you will bear that of Thespesius, for you are not dead, only the intelligent part of your soul has come here by the particular will of the gods; your other faculties are still united to your body, which keeps them like an anchor. The proof I will give you is that the soulsof the dead do not cast any shadow, and they cannot move their eyes."
Further on, in traversing a luminous region, he heard, as he was passing, the shrill voice of a female speaking in verse, who presided over the time Thespesius should die. His genius told him that it was the voice of the Sibyl, who, turning on the orbit of the moon, foretold the future. Thespesius would willingly have heard more, but, driven off by a rapid whirlwind, he could make out but little of her predictions. In another place he remarked several parallel lakes, one filled with melted and boiling gold, another with lead colder than ice, and a third with very rough iron. They were kept by genii, who, armed with tongs like those used in forges, plunged into these lakes, and then withdrew by turns, the souls of those whom avarice or an insatiable cupidity had led into crime; after they had been plunged into the lake of gold, where the fire made them red and transparent, they were thrown into the lake of lead. Then, frozen by the cold, and made as hard as hail, they were put into the lake of iron, where they became horribly black. Broken and bruised on account of their hardness, they changed their form, and passed once more into the lake of gold, and suffered in these changes inexpressible pain.
In another place he saw the souls of those who had to return to life and be violently forced to take the form of all sorts of animals. Among the number he saw the soul ofNero, which had already suffered many torments, and was bound with red-hot chains of iron. The workmen were seizing him to give him the form of a viper, under which he was destined to live, after having devoured the womb that bore him.
The locality of these infernal regions was never exactly determined. The ancients were divided upon the point. In the poems of Homer the infernal regions appear under two different forms: thus, in theIliad, it is a vast subterranean cavity; while in theOdyssey, it is a distant and mysterious country at the extremity of the earth, beyond the ocean, in the neighbourhood of the Cimmerians.
The description which Homer gives of the infernal region proves that in his time the Greeks imagined it to be a copy of the terrestrial world, but one which had a special character. According to the philosophers it was equally remote from all parts of the earth. Thus Cicero, in order to show that it was of no consequence where one died, said, wherever we die there is just as long a journey to be made to reach the "infernal regions."
The poets fixed upon certain localities as the entrance to this dismal empire: such was the river Lethe, on the borders of the Scythians; the cavern Acherusia in Epirus, the mouth of Pluto, in Laodicœa, the cave of Zenarus near Lacedæmon.
In the map of the world in thePolychroniconof Ranulphus Uygden, now in the British Museum, it is stated: "The Island of Sicily was once a part of Italy. There is MountEtna, containing the infernal regions and purgatory, and it has Scylla and Charybdis, two whirlpools."
Ulysses was said to reach the place of the dead by crossing the ocean to the Cimmerian land, Æneas to have entered it by the Lake of Avernus. Xenophon says that Hercules went there by the peninsula of Arechusiade.
Much of this, no doubt, depends on the exaggeration and misinterpretation of the accounts of voyagers; as when the Phœnicians related that, after passing the Columns of Hercules, to seek tin in Thule and amber in the Baltic, they came, at the extremity of the world, to the Fortunate Isles, the abode of eternal spring, and further on to the Hyperborean regions, where a perpetual night enveloped the country—the imagination of the people developed from this the Elysian fields, as the places of delight in the lower regions, having their own sun, moon, and stars, and Tartarus, a place of shades and desolation.
In every case, however, both among pagans and Christians, the locality was somewhere in the centre of the earth. The poets and philosophers of Greece and Rome made very detailed and circumstantial maps of the subterranean regions. They enumerated its rivers, its lakes, and woods, and mountains, and the places where the Furies perpetually tormented the wicked souls who were condemned to eternal punishment. These ideas passed naturally into the creeds of Christians through the sect of the Essenes, of whom Josephus writes asfollows:—"They thought that the souls of the just go beyond the ocean to a place of repose and delight, where they were troubled by no inconvenience, no change of seasons. Those of the wicked, on the contrary, were relegated to places exposed to all the inclemencies of the weather, and suffered eternal torments. The Essenes," adds the same author, "have similar ideas about these torments to those of the Greeks about Tartarus and the kingdom of Pluto. The greater part of the Gnostic sects, on the contrary, considered the lower regions as simply a place of purgatory, where the soul is purified by fire."
Amongst all the writings of Christian ages in which matters such as we are now passing in review are described, there is one that stands out beyond all others as a masterpiece, and that is the magnificent poem of Dante, hisDivine Comedy, wherein he described the infernal regions as they presented themselves to his lively and fertile imagination. We have in it a picture of mediæval ideas, painted for us in indelible lines, before the remembrance of them was lost in the past. The poem is at once a tomb and a cradle—the tomb of a world that was passing, the cradle of the world that was to come: a portico between two temples, that of the past and that of the future. In it are deposited the traditions, the ideas, the sciences of the past, as the Egyptians deposited their kings and symbolic gods in the sepulchres of Thebes and Memphis. The future brings into it its aspirations andits germs enveloped in the swaddling clothes of a rising language and a splendid poetry—a mysterious infant that is nourished by the two teats of sacred tradition and profane fiction, Moses and St. Paul, Homer and Virgil.
The theology of Dante, strictly orthodox, was that of St. Thomas and the other doctors of the Church. Natural philosophy, properly so called, was not yet in existence. In astronomy, Ptolemy reigned supreme, and in the explanation of celestial phenomena no one dreamt or dared to dream of departing in any way from the traditionally sacred system.
In those days astronomy was indissolubly linked with a complete series of philosophical and theological ideas, and included the physics of the world, the science of life in every being, of their organisation, and the causes on which depended the aptitudes, inclinations, and even in part the actions, of men, the destinies of individuals, and the events of history. In this theological, astronomical, and terrestrial universe everything emanated from God; He had created everything, and the creation embraced two orders of beings, the immaterial and the corporeal.
The pure spirits composed the nine choirs of the celestial hierarchy. Like so many circles, they were ranged round a fixed point, the Eternal Being, in an order determined by their relative perfection. First the seraphim, then the cherubim, and afterwards the simple angels. Those of the first circle received immediately from the central point the light andthe virtue which they communicated to those of the second; and so on from circle to circle, like mirrors which reflect, with an ever-lessening light, the brilliancy of a single luminous point. The nine choirs, supported by Love, turned without ceasing round their centre in larger and larger circles according to their distance; and it was by their means that the motion and the divine inflatus was communicated to the material creation.
This latter had in the upper part of it the empyreal, or heaven of pure light. Below that, was thePrimum mobile, the greatest body in the heavens, as Dante calls it, because it surrounds all the rest of the circle, and bounds the material world. Then came the heaven of the fixed stars; then, continuing to descend, the heavens of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the sun, Venus, Mercury, the moon, and lastly, the earth, whose solid and compact nucleus is surrounded by the spheres of water, air, and fire.
As the choirs of angels turn about a fixed point, so the nine material circles turn also about another fixed point, and are moved by the pure spirits.
Let us now descend to the geography of the interior of the earth. Within the earth is a large cone, whose layers are the frightful abodes of the condemned, and which ends in the centre, where the divine Justice keeps bound up to his chest in ice the prince of the rebellious angels, the emperor of the kingdom of woe. Such are the infernal regions whichDante describes according to ideas generally admitted in the middle ages.
The form of the infernal regions was that of a funnel or reversed cone. All its circles were concentric, and continually diminished; the principal ones were nine in number. Virgil also admitted nine divisions—three times three, a number sacredpar excellence. The seventh, eighth, and ninth circles were divided into several regions; and the space between the entrance to the infernal regions and the river Acheron, where the resting-place of the damned really commenced, was divided into two parts. Dante, guided by Virgil, traversed all these circles.
It was in 1300 that the poet, "in the midst of the course of life," at the age of thirty-five, passed in spirit through the three regions of the dead. Lost in a lonely, wild, and dismal forest, he reached the base of a hill, which he attempted to climb. But three animals, a panther, a lion, and a thin and famished wolf, prevented his passage; so, returning again where the sun was powerless, into the shades of the depths of the valley, there met him a shadow of the dead. This human form, whom a long silence had deprived of speech, was Virgil, who was sent to guide and succour him by a celestial dame, Beatrice, the object of his love, who was at the same time a real and a mystically ideal being.
Virgil and Dante arrived at the gate of the infernal regions; they read the terrible inscription placed over thegate; they entered and found first those unhappy souls who had lived without virtue and without vice. They reached the banks of Acheron and saw Charon, who carried over the souls in his bark to the other side; and Dante was surprised by a profound sleep. He woke beyond the river, and he descended into the Limbo which is the first circle of the infernal regions. He found there the souls of those who had died without baptism, or who had been indifferent to religion.
They descended next to the second circle, where Minos, the judge of those below, is enthroned. Here the luxurious are punished. The poet here met with Francesca of Rimini and Paul, her friend. He completely recovered the use of his senses, and passed through the third circle, where the gourmands are punished. In the fourth he found Plutus, who guards it. Here are tormented the prodigal and the avaricious. In the fifth are punished those who yield to anger. Dante and Virgil there saw a bark approaching, conducted by Phlegias; they entered it, crossed a river, and arrived thus at the base of the red-hot iron walls of the infernal town of Dite. The demons that guarded the gates refused them admittance, but an angel opened them, and the two travellers there saw the heretics that were enclosed in tombs surrounded by flames.
Fig. 52.Fig. 52.—Dante's Infernal Regions.
The travellers then visited the circles of violence, fraud, and usury, when they came to a river of blood guarded by a troop of centaurs; suddenly they saw coming to themGeryon, who represents fraud, and this beast took them behind him to carry them across the rest of the infernal space.
The eighth circle was divided into ten valleys, comprising: the flatterers; the simoniacal; the astrologers; the sorcerers; the false judges; the hypocrites who walked about clothed with heavy leaden garments; the thieves, eternally stung by venomous serpents; the heresiarchs; the charlatans, and the forgers.
At last the poets descended into the ninth circle, divided into four regions, where are punished four kinds of traitors. Here is recounted the admirable episode of Count Ugolin. In the last region, called the region of Judas,Luciferis enchained. There is the centre of the earth, and Dante, hearing the noise of a little brook, reascended to the other hemisphere, on the surface of which he found, surrounded by the Southern Ocean, the mountain of Purgatory.
Such was the famousInfernoof Dante.
Not only was the geography of the infernal regions attempted in the middle ages, but even their size. Dexelius calculated that the number of the damned was a hundred millions, and that their abode need not measure more than one German mile in every direction. Cyrano of Bergerac amusingly said that it was the damned that kept turning the earth, by hanging on the ceiling like bats, and trying to get away.
In 1757 an English clergyman, Dr. Swinden, published a book entitled,Researches on the Nature of the Fire of Hell and the Place where it is situated. He places it in the sun. According to him the Christians of the first century had placed it beneath the earth on account of a false interpretation of the descent of Jesus into hell after his crucifixion, and by false ideas of cosmography. He attempted to show, 1st, that the terrestrial globe is too small to contain even the angels that fell from heaven after their battle; 2nd, that the fire of hell is real, and that the closed globe of earth could not support it a sufficiently long period; 3rd, that the sun alone presents itself as the necessary place, being a well-sustained fire, and directly opposite in situation to heaven, since the empyreal is round the outside of the universe, and the sun in the centre. What a change to the present ideas, even of doctors of divinity, in a hundred years!
So far, then, for mediæval ideas on the position and character of hell. Next as to purgatory.
The voyage to purgatory that has met with most success is certainly the celebrated Irish legend of St. Patrick, which for several centuries was admitted as authentic, and the account of which was composed certainly a century before the poem of Dante.
This purgatory, the entrance to which is drawn in more than one illuminated manuscript, is situated in Ireland, onone of the islands of Lough Derg, County Donegal, where there are still two chapels and a shrine, at which annual ceremonies are performed. A knight, called Owen, resolved to visit it for penance; and the chronicle gives us an account of his adventures.
First he had his obsequial rites performed, as if he had been dead, and then he advanced boldly into the deep ravine; he marched on courageously, and entered into the semi-shadows; he marched on, and even this funereal twilight abandoned him, and "when he had gone for a long time in this obscurity, there appeared to him a little light as it were from a glimmer of day." He arrived at a house, built with much care, an imposing mansion of grief and hope, a marvellous edifice, but similar nevertheless to a monkish cloister, where there was no more light than there is in this world in winter at vesper-time.
The knight was in dreadful suspense. Suddenly he heard a terrible noise, as if the universe was in a riot; for it seemed certainly to him as if every kind of beast and every man in the world were together, and each gave utterance to their own cry, at one time and with one voice, so that they could not make a more frightful noise.
Then commenced his trials, and discourse with the infernal beings; the demons yelled with delight or with fury round him. "Miserable wretch," said some, "you are come here to suffer." "Fly," said others, "for you have notbehaved well in the time that is passed: if you will take our advice, and will go back again to the world, we will take it as a great favour and courtesy."
Plate XII.Plate XII.—The Legend of Owen.
Owen was thrown on the dark shadowy earth, where the demons creep like hideous serpents. A mysterious wind, which he scarcely heard, passed over the mud, and it seemed to the knight as if he had been pierced by a spear-head. After a while the demons lifted him up; they took him straight off to the east, where the sun rises, as if they were going to the place where the universe ends. "Now, after they had journeyed for a long time here and there over divers countries, they brought him to an open field, very long and very full of griefs and chastisements; he could not see the end of the field, it was so long; there were men and women of various ages, who lay down all naked on the ground with their bellies downwards, who had hot nails driven into their hands and feet; and there was a fiery dragon, who sat upon them and drove his teeth into their flesh, and seemed as if he would eat them; hence they suffered great agony, and bit the earth in spite of its hardness, and from time to time they cried most piteously 'Mercy, mercy;' but there was no one there who had pity or mercy, for the devils ran among them and over them, and beat them most cruelly."
The devils brought the knight towards a house of punishment, so broad and long that one could not see the end.This house is the house of baths, like those of the infernal regions, and the souls that are bathed in ignominy are there heaped in large vats. "Now so it was, that each of these vats was filled with some kind of metal, hot and boiling, and there they plunged and bathed many people of various ages, some of whom were plunged in over their heads, others up to the eyebrows, others up to the eyes, and others up to the mouth. Now all in truth of these people cried out with a loud voice and wept most piteously."
Scarcely had the knight passed this terrible place, and left behind in his mysterious voyage that column of fire which rose like a lighthouse in the shades, and which shone so sadly betwixt hope and eternal despair, than a vast and magnificent spectacle displayed itself in the subterranean space.
This luminous and odorescent region, where one might see so many archbishops, bishops, and monks of every order, was the terrestrial paradise; man does not stay there always; they told the knight that he could not taste too long its rapid delights; it is a place of transition between purgatory and the abodes of heaven, just as the dark places which he had traversed were made by the Creator between the world and the infernal regions.
"In spite of our joys," said the souls, "we shall pass away from here." Then they took him to a mountain, and told him to look, and asked of him what colour theheavens seemed to be there where he was standing, and he replied it was the colour of burning gold, such as is in the furnace; and then they said to him, "That which you see is the entrance to heaven and the gate of paradise."
The attempts at identification of hell and purgatory have not been so numerous, perhaps because the subjects were not very attractive, except as the spite of men might think of them in reference to other people; but when we come to the terrestrial paradise, quite a crowd of attempts by every kind of writer to fix its position in any and every part of the globe is met with on every side.
In the seventeenth century, under Louis XIV., Daniel Huet, Bishop of Avranches, gave great attention to the question, and collected every opinion that had been expressed upon it, with a view to arriving at some definite conclusion for himself. He was astonished at the number of writings and the diversity of the opinions they expressed.
"Nothing," he says, "could show me better how little is really known about the situation of the terrestrial paradise than the differences in the opinions of those who have occupied themselves about the question. Some have placed it in the third heaven, some in the fourth, in the heaven of the moon, in the moon itself, on a mountain near the lunar heaven, in the middle region of the air, out of the earth,upon the earth, beneath the earth, in a place that is hidden and separated from man. It has been placed under the North Pole, in Tartary, or in the place now occupied by the Caspian Sea. Others placed it in the extreme south, in the land of fire. Others in the Levant, or on the borders of the Ganges, or in the Island of Ceylon, making the name India to be derived from Eden, the land where the paradise was situated. It has been placed in China, or in an inaccessible place beyond the Black Sea; by others in America, in Africa, beneath the equator, in the East, &c. &c."
Notwithstanding this formidable array, the good bishop was bold enough to make his choice between them all. His opinion was that the dwelling-place of the first man was situated between the Tigris and Euphrates, above the place where they separate before falling into the Persian Gulf; and, founding this opinion on very extensive reading, he declared that of all his predecessors, Calvin had come nearest to the truth.
Among the other authors of greater or less celebrity that have occupied themselves in this question, we may instance the following:—
Raban Maur (ninth century) believed that the terrestrial paradise was at the eastern extremity of the earth. He described the tree of life, and added that there was neither heat nor cold in that garden; that immense rivers of water nourished all the forest; and that the paradise wassurrounded by a wall of fire, and its four rivers watered the earth.
James of Vitry supposed Pison to come out of the terrestrial paradise. He describes also the garden of Eden; and, like all the cosmographers of the middle ages, he placed it in the most easterly portion of the world in an inaccessible place, and surrounded by a wall of fire, which rose up to heaven.
Dati placed also the terrestrial paradise in Asia, like the cosmographers that preceded him, and made the Nile come from the east. Stenchus, the librarian of St. Siége, who lived in the sixteenth century, devoted several years to the problem, but discovered nothing. The celebrated orientalist and missionary Bochart wrote a treatise on this subject in 1650. Thévenot published also in the seventeenth century a map representing the country of the Lybians, and adds that "several great doctors place the terrestrial paradise there."
An Armenian writer who translated and borrowed from St. Epiphanius (eighth century) produced aMemorial on the Four Rivers of the Terrestrial Paradise. He supposes they rise in the unknown land of the Amazons, whence also arise the Danube and the Hellespont, and they deliver their waters into that great sea that is the source of all seas, and which surrounds the four quarters of the globe. He afterwards says, following up the same theory, that the rivers ofparadise surround the world and enter again into the sea, which is the universal ocean."
Gervais and Robert of St. Marien d'Auxerre taught that the terrestrial paradise was on the eastern border of thesquarewhich formed the world. Alain de Lille, who lived in the thirteenth century, maintained in hisAnticlaudianusthat the earth is circular, and the garden of Eden is in the east of Asia. Joinville, the friend of St. Louis, gives us a curious notion of his geographical ideas, since, with regard to paradise, he assures us that the four great rivers of the south come out of it, as do the spices. "Here," he says, referring to the Nile, "it is advisable to speak of the river which passes by the countries of Egypt, and comes from the terrestrial paradise. Where this river enters Egypt there are people very expert and experienced, as thieves are here, at stealing from the river, who in the evening throw their nets on the streams and rivers, and in the morning they often find and carry off the spices which are sold here in Europe as coming from Egypt at a good rate, and by weight, such as cinnamon, ginger, rhubarb, cloves, lignum, aloes, and several other good things, and they say that these good things comefrom the terrestrial paradise, and that the wind blows them off the trees that are growing there." And he says that near the end of the world are the peoples of Gog and Magog, who will come at the end of the world with Antichrist.
We find, however, more than descriptions—we have representations of the terrestrial paradise by cartographers of the middle ages, some of which we have seen in speaking of their general ideas of geography, and we will now introduce others.