ABSTRACT
Celestial space: the heavens in myth The sky has never been just the sky. It has also-always already-been the heavens, according to the vertical axis extending into the firmament that universally structures metaphysical thought.4 What for centuries symbolized the identification of the sky with divinity was the transcultural Cosmic Tree of Life (axis mundi), which mapped the spatial relationship between the underworld, Earth, and Heaven (Figs. I.1 and I.2). With its roots underground, its branches penetrated into the vault of the sky-the dwelling of the Olympians and their counterparts in other cultures, who governed the fates of the mortals below and communicated their implacable dictates via signs and messengers. Language itself, in tandem with iconography, confirms this paradigmatic conceptual triad: humankind, located in the paradoxriddled middle stratum (of perishable body encasing eternal soul), ‘looks up’ to the supernal realm of the divine and down upon subterranean Hades/Tarturus/ Hell. This symbolic geography, naturalized through the tree as an organic entity, has presided over modes of thought and cultural production for centuries, alternating with the ladder (scala naturae) as a means of vertical disposition and negotiation, verified in the Bible, depictions of Jacob’s ladder, the philosophy of Neo-Platonists, and Nikolai Gogol‘s idiosyncratic sense of the world (Fig. I.3). The hierarchical iconography and discourse of ascent/descent persists to this day. Mikhail Bakhtin, citing the metaphysical hierarchy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, conceived of this vertical temporality as “deep time,” wrenched free from linear temporal progression.5 Fyodor Dostoevsky, in his portrayal of the anti-Christ Nikolai Stavrogin in the novel Demons [Besy], similarly suspends time in the chapters titled “Night” [Noch’] to convey the primacy of spiritual hierarchy over narrative continuity.
