Mapping Worlds

One of the challenges of thinking about reality is that it defies easy mapping. Yes, satellites encircle the earth and provide excellent surveillance. However, the neat little circles the satellites follow have as much a prescriptive function as a descriptive one. That is to say that the orderliness of the world they convey says more about their orderly nature than the world's. The modern sky map is hardly the only representation. Humans have been mapping reality since they were humans. Turns out, the versions vary. Earth is flat or round. One world or many. Some go literal, others figurative. Some people think the best representation of reality is an unfolding lotus. 

So welcome to our jaunt through many mapped worlds. 

If one thinks hard, people long ago would have made maps out of all sorts of things. Hide, bone, stone. But it's the stone ones that have lasted to today.

Stone painting, Turkey, 6,500 BCE. Map ofHasan Dağı twin-peaks volcano located ~130 km northeast of Çatalhöyük, and a birds-eye view of a town plan

But not all ancient maps were small in scope.

Map of Europe, date controversy, but potentially 100,000s of years old

Large and small, we have mapped the world around us. The mayhem arrives when we start to realize that there may be more than one world around us. There are material worlds, emotional worlds, spiritual worlds... each a subtle but ever present reality asking to be mapped.

The Vortex of Enviable Romance, by artist-philosopher Tim Holmes

 So lets start with the way back.

Petroglyph of the spirit world, North American Southwest, origin unknown

Shamans, holy people, and philosophers have been trying map out the spirit world and its various layers. Not entirely unlike the satellites, circles have a certain appeal. Inscribed within each other, the central geographical reality is clear: the spiritual world has layers. As rendered above, our spiritual cartographer makes this point clearly, but it would be relatively hard to use this as a navigation tool.

Thankfully, some are more instructive. The above is a map of the Umbra as rendered by a Garou mystic. While I'm not used to maps with strange grabby bits, the Garou are clearly competent when it comes to navigating the spiritual aspects of reality. So I take their mapping relatively seriously (although their maps may be predicated on certain intuitions not widely held beyond their community).

The Garou are also fond of what one might call conceptual or mythic cartography. Above we have a Garou representation of reality, mapped over the Metaphysical Trinity: dynamism, stasis, and entropy. In this version, three Celestines (the Triat) are depicted in an apocalyptic rendering: the turtle (the Wyld) is begin beset by the spider (the Weaver) and the serpent (the Wyrm). For those who might call this conceptual art and not mapping, consider:

Some of the oldest world maps include turtles as a core metaphysic. The idea that the world rides on the back of a shelled reptile can be found in more cultures than one might expect. As such, turtles figure prominently into early mapping of the world and its relation to space beyond. I once met a Dreamspeaker who carried around a pet turtle with a map carved onto his back. This man managed to navigate the Umbra with the best of them. But the turtle is not the only option.

A careful look at the Garou apocalyptic map also shows a tree motif at the intersection of the spider's web (the branches) and the turtle's shell (the roots). In the ancient world, if a culture wasn't on the back of a turtle, it was probably on a tree. World trees are common axis mundis (places where the cosmos has an axis, or where the heavens meet the earth). Sometimes the trees are used to structure the world and its outer planes. Other times they are more conceptual.

The Hermetic Qabalah articulates the various aspects of... go ask someone who knows more. Maybe it's ascending deification, maybe it's descending actualization. Maybe it's a tool for illuminating sephirothic names, or maybe it's a tool for mystifying them. Suffice it to say, some maps are better at getting you lost than found. But sometimes lost is where you want to be.

Which is where we are right now. Let's pick up a more material thread.

Modern maps of outer worlds are based on physical observation of celestial, yes, but definitively embodied and enspaced entities. Folks call them planets. One of the ways to get out into the ether is to strap a bunch of explosions together and blow yourself into the great beyond. The many manned and unmanned expeditions are mapped above, showing the diversity of space exploration that has happened over the last 50 years. According to Technocratic doctrine, space simply is all there is. Most modern mages can't help but agree that planets is not a bad way of thinking about the great beyond.

Which leads to geographical syncretisms like above. Here we have notions of planetary bodies with an Umbral sensitivity supervening. Lots of mages I know use the following map to account for what happens above, beyond, and beside the more immediate patterned world. It's not a bad place to start, but it's terra-centric, as models go.

Moving beyond the terrasphere involves collecting lots, lots more data. There are over 500 billion galaxies, which makes the number of planets in the observable univse something on the order of 10 to the 24th, or, for those of you who like it written out, around 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

And we've been charting those bodies for a long, long time. As with terrestrial cartography, some accounts are more sober, like above.

While others are more fantastic.

The modern scientific representation of celestial bodies has grown in complexity and scope. But they really are still a bunch of dots and lines.

At this stage, a summary is in order. We've reviewed both modern and ancient mappings of both the material and spiritual world, but focused on the Earth and the universe beyond. One might think that we're basically done with the idea of mapping space. But we aren't. The trouble with mapping space is that space, as an idea, is a bunch of shit. 

One rendering of nonspacial quantum generativity

Here's the bitch about space: it doesn't really exist. Maps say more about the terrain than the terrain actually does about itself. There's a reason 15 different maps can get you around in the Umbra, and there's a reason every culture has a different map. Because space is a relational quality produced by actor-networks (both human and nonhuman agents) interacting. Space is nothing more than the non-essential agreement about the Tellurian's data. As such, any conversation about maps must also engender a conversation about data.

Turns out VAs can get behind trees, too, so long as they are fractal trees

Because mapping data is mapping the world. As before, some universal data maps are more sober.

And others are more dramatic.

Map of the internet

But the efforts of Virtual Adepts in articulating how data is arrayed starts to recognize some common elements. Notice how we find ourselves falling back on dots, lines, and trees? Even those of us who pride ourselves on transcending common notions of spacial arrangement still use the tools of ancient cryptographers to make some kind of sense of what the hell is going on here.

So is the universe really made up of dots, lines, and trees?

Or are the commonalities across these cosmological representations a reflection of the humanness behind the authors? Is any commonality simply the human reflecting the universe?

Or are humans merely reflecting the nature of the universe?

Fuck it. I don't know. Maybe the best map really is the Unfolding Lotus.