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Clay tablet from the city of Sippar (circa 700 -- 500 BCE).
Probably the earliest mappa mundi or "world map" in existence.
Babylon is marked in
the centre. An inscription describes the ring as marratu or 'bitter
river'.

Mar 05, 2008
The Circular Ocean: a Round Up

It is probably fair to say that the cosmological systems described
by traditional societies around the world contain more features
that do not make sense from a modern perspective than ones that do.

Contemporary members of indigenous societies will dwell on the
phenomena of sunrise and the cycle of the moon and point out the
Milky Way and a few notable constellations, but these statements
are far outweighed by the excessive interest shown in a bevy of
anomalous features. Worldwide motifs such as the stony or metallic
composition of the sky, four stanchions supporting the sky, a hole
at the pole, a navel of the earth, a dragon below the surface of
the earth whose contortions cause earthquakes, a tree, mountain or
pillar at the centre of the earth, a giant thunderbird at the top
of this column, or the superposition of nine heavens like a stack
of pancakes pose so many challenges to specialists, from
anthropologists to archaeologists and from philologists to art
historians.

The sanity of the thousands of such testimonies is not in any
doubt, possibly even overshadowing the intelligence displayed in
modern western views on the cosmos. As exactly the same puzzling
traits populate the most ancient descriptions and depictions of the
"world" in abundance, a more plausible solution is that these
remarkably consistent reports preserve memories of forms and
fixtures that were once really observed in the heavens.
The theme of an ocean following the circular perimeter of the earth
is widespread, and in quite a few cases, the enclosing body of
water is itself envisioned as a "ring" or river. The Egyptians had
such a concept, portraying the god Osiris in his "watery" aspect as
the personification of the circular ocean: "... you are hale and
great in your name of `Sea'; behold, you are great and round in
<your name of> `Ocean'; behold, you are circular and round as the
circle which surrounds the H-.zw-nbwt ...", says a spell in the
Pyramid Texts.

The Greek historian Herodotus bemoaned his compatriots for
"foolishly" perpetuating the myth of the circular ocean, in the
face of current knowledge: "And I laugh to see how many have ere
now drawn maps of the world, not one of them showing the matter
reasonably; for they draw the world as round as if fashioned by
compasses, encircled by the river of Ocean, and Asia and Europe of
a like bigness." But the concept remained popular for millennia
afterwards, in countries far outside the sphere of Greek influence.
As an example, the people of Benin contended until recently that
"the water surrounds the earth around its entire convex surface".
And the Pueblo people of New Mexico "believe the earth to be
circular and surrounded on all sides by the ocean."

As with many other instances of "erratic" features of traditional
cosmography, scholars have tried to explain the theme of the
circular ocean as springing from more or less obvious and
spontaneous observations of nature. For example, the Dutch
orientalist Anton Wensinck clarified: "The primitive eye starts
from what it observes: the seashore presents the unlimited sight of
the ocean; this means that the ends of the earth are surrounded by
the ocean." And John Pairman Brown, a modern savant, offers: "Since
the bottom of the sky-vault is obviously a perfect circle, so must
be the plane of earth and water that it encloses."

Yet, for all the confidence expressed in such sentiments, the
circularity of the horizon may on a closer inspection perhaps seem
less "obvious" than these writers suggest. Although the impression
of roundness may certainly present itself to people familiar with
other geographic environments than mountainous ones, they might as
well imagine the expanse of land or sea they see to extend
indefinitely in all directions, especially in cultural contexts
that have not yet embraced a spherical model of the cosmos.

And why would forest-dwellers such as the Warao or the
Shipibo-Conibo, who have never toyed with the idea of a spherical
earth, envision a round horizon? The apparent rotundity of the
horizon may at best have served ancient societies as a confirmation
of their cosmological beliefs, while early guesses about the
distribution of water will have influenced the notion of a flowing
world ocean.

A strong indication that something else is going on is the
ingrained tendency of ancient cosmographers to equate the round
ocean with the coiled body of a serpent, tail in mouth, that is
technically known as an ouroboros. From Latin America to equatorial
Africa and from Oceania to the Judaic tradition, the entity
surrounding the earth is perceived as a dazzlingly bright
"feathered" serpent coil of an aquatic composition.

Preliminary findings suggest that the theme of the circular ocean
as well as the ouroboros' link with the circular ocean are roughly
restricted to the equatorial zones of the earth for the time frame
between 5,000 and 3,000 BCE. This suggests that, in these areas,
the plasma ring responsible for the related body of mythology
appeared close enough to the horizon to suggest its physical
identity with the known oceans bordering the land.

In addition, other traditions imply or enunciate that the "earth"
of the mythical age was a region in the sky rather than the earth
known as such today. In the mythology of the Iroquois, of New York
State, for example, "the earth was the thought of the Indian Ruler
of a great island which floats in space." The modern earth was only
"formed" at a later point in the process of creation. Such
considerations help to establish that the prototype of ideas such
as the "round ocean" could really be in interplanetary space rather
than on earth in the strict sense.
Close cooperation with physicists modeling plasma instabilities in

laboratory conditions has led to the conclusion that the ouroboros
of world mythology corresponds in virtually all its details to a
so-called diocotron instability. Research has revealed that the
ouroboros is intimately associated with the "world axis" or axis
mundi.

This suggests that the round ocean, along with the full list of
anomalies given above, finds its ultimate explanation in a
configuration of high-energy density plasma structures formed in
and above the earth's ionosphere at a time of increased auroral
activity, most likely in the late Palaeolithic or early Neolithic
period. Far from an amusing figment of imagination, the circular
ocean appears to belong to a largely forgotten but nonetheless
genuine "sky world" revealed when electromagnetic forces dominated
the physics of the near-earth environment.

Contributed by Rens Van der Sluijs
www.mythopedia.info