Mythological Data @ Google.com . Interesting Theology of Cosmos .

1. in the company of Dante, with some notes for twenty-first-
century travellers.
By Ratnagarbha. This essay first appeared in Urthona
Issue 9.
Dante’s great epic poem The Divine Comedydescribes the
poet’s journey through hell, purgatory and finally his ascent
to paradise. The Divine Comedy explores with great
metaphysical clarity and sublime poetry the medieval
model of the universe. By Dante’s time, this model,
drawing on various Classical sources, had become an
elaborate web of symbolic connections between man, the
natural world, the planets, the stars and the orders of
angels. There is so much detail here that it is easy to get
lost, so for convenience I have divided Dante’s cosmos into
five levels – The Five Storied Palace.

2. To begin I will attempt simply to evoke a picture of the
traditional universe in its broad outlines. Next I will survey
each storey of Dante’s palace, and at each level take note of
the surprising degree of common ground that exists with
Buddhist cosmology. There will also be a few fascinating
glances at the Middle-Eastern Sufi view of the same
territory. These illuminating asides come from the works of
Henry Corbin, the great French scholar of Islamic culture
who writes with great insight about the symbolic worlds of
the Sufi mystical philosophers. Finally, I will attempt to
sum up, with some suggestions about how we might make
use of this material in our own lives.

3. From this vantage point we will
survey the overall scheme of the traditional world view,
and observe those features which are, in broad outline, the
common inheritance of mankind. This is not, of course, a
journey to the North Pole reached by arctic explorers,
rather it is a journey towards the Cosmic North, towards the
Pole Star – the spindle of the universe. Henry Corbin
speaks of this journey to the Pole as the Quest for the
mystical Orient, the Orient which, paradoxically, is not to
be found by travelling east: “This mystic Orient, the Orient-
origin, is the heavenly pole, the point of orientation of the
spiritual ascent. Acting as a magnet to draw
beings…towards the palaces ablaze with immaterial matter.
1
Let us take flight towards this Cosmic North, up into dark
blue evening sky. As we ascend higher and higher the air
becomes darker.
Looking down we see nets of sparkling lights from the
cities of the north, then just the occasional gleam from a
homestead deep in the forest, and finally just darkness,
complete and total darkness. But our flight continues until,
very dimly, we make out a hint of green radiance, a strange
greenish glow which begins to get brighter.
The dim green becomes a diffuse emerald light, glowing in
front of us, as if a green sun were about to rise. This green
radiance grows stronger and brighter, it fills more and more

4. of our field of vision, until we feel as though we were being
bathed in gentle green light. Rippling veils of diaphanous
light are all around us, they seem to descend from the
heavens like vast cosmic mantles. Eventually, as our eyes
begin to accustom to this marvellous display, we recognise
that we are within the centre of the aurora borealis, the
‘black light’ of the Sufi masters which illuminates (in
Corbin’s words) “the divine night of superbeing”. By this
light all the wonders of the spiritual universe are to be
revealed. As our eyes adjust to its otherworldly radiance we
begin to make out behind the aurora, as if behind a veil, the
form of an enormous mountain. Many jewels and other
precious substances seem to be lodged in the rocks of this
peak; they flash and glint in the pulsing emerald light,
inviting us to begin the ascent of the cosmic mountain; a
mountain which could equally well be a tree as tall as the
universe, or a spindle of light which extends from earth to
the Pole Star.
Many strange beings dwell on the mountain: Elves and
Orcs are there as well as Nereids, nymphs and satyrs. There
are palaces carved of jewels and gardens of light filled with
wonders, but we must not stay long in this paradise for we
have come to survey the view from the top of the mountain.
From this awesome height we see that the world is a great
disc of water surrounding the mountain. Looking out across
the disc we see all the lands of men, and all the oceans,
which link up into a great ring of water that surrounds the
entire disc. Perhaps the ocean is surrounded by a ring of
mountains, or perhaps it just curves back upon itself and is
lost to sight. Beyond the great ocean there is vacant

5. darkness, or so it appears at first; but as we strain our eyes
we see that space beyond our world is not dark and empty,
in fact it is filled with light, filled with innumerable points
of light, merging into one another at the limit of vision.
Somehow we sense that these glints are the light from other
universes, unimaginably distant – millions upon millions of
other worlds, each with their own seas and mountains,
spread out like a net of jewels across the depths of space
and time.
But by looking upwards we find an even more awe
inspiring vista. For above the great mountain, and
encircling it, we see a series of bright spheres, one inside
the other like Each higher sphere is brighter
and richer in colour than the one below. They merge into an
unbroken sea of radiance, too dazzling for the eye to take
in. There is sound too, our ears are bathed by a subtle drone
of scintillating harmonies, as if all the instruments ever
invented were playing at once, yet all in harmony. Dimly
we sense that as one ascends, the sound also becomes more
and more sweetly overpowering.
This, then, is the universe of our ancestors, the universe of
Dante and Plato, the universe expounded by the Buddha in
the Pali scriptures and embellished with baroque splendour
in the Mahayana sutras. We will now go on to look at the
traditional cosmos in more detail, with the great Dante
Alighieri as our guide.

6. Perhaps the best place to begin is with our own world of
earth and sky and human habitation – Middle Earth. This
medieval term, now well known through Tolkien’s works,
is a good designation for the ground floor of the great
palace. It is situated, as might be expected, midway
between heaven and hell. Those who are more familiar with
Buddhist scriptures than Dante will recognise Middle Earth
as Jambudvipa, the Rose-Apple island, home of the human
race. The ancient Indian Buddhists saw our earth as one of
four islands which float in a great disc of water. The disc
was definitely flat, with various hells to be found below it,
and the four islands arranged around a central ring of
golden mountains (more of these later). The disc was
supported, not by a mythical beast, but by two crossed
vajras (invincible thunderbolts made of diamond),
representing

7. Dante’s universe was in some ways more sophisticated. He
saw the earth as a globe and situated his hells in the middle
of it. This view he derived from the
who made some precise deductions about the nature of the
nearby physical universe. Some of the ancient pre-Socratic
philosophers even went so far as to postulate that there
were many universes, but this strand of thought was
unfortunately lost to later Western tradition. For Dante the
earth is a unique point at the centre of the universe,
infinitesimally small compared to the vastness of the stellar
bodies and the spheres they inhabit, but definitely at the
centre. Buddhism has always taught that there are billions
upon billions of other inhabited world systems; so in this
respect, at least, the ancient Buddhist view is actually
closer to our own than the mediaeval model. In any case the
flat earth has its advantages, for it suggests that our three
dimensions are not the only ones. There are other
dimensions which can be experienced in ‘imaginal’ space
as ‘above’ and ‘below’ our world. The evocative term
‘imaginal’ was used by Henry Corbin to designate the inner
world of the soul. In Arabic this is the alam al-
mithal (or mundus imaginalis in Latin) the universe of the
mind. In order to experience this imaginal space we must
surely begin by opening ourselves up to the possibility of
there being other modes of being, as it were ‘out there’. For
those dimensions, though in a sense ‘inner’, are not just
subjective fantasies; they exist with their own special mode
of presence and can be experienced by anyone who makes
the effort to retrace the journey laid out by the visionary
philosophers of the past.

8. All of our experience, after all, is mediated through the
mind, and all modes of experience, whether dream, fantasy,
or vision have (like our day to day world) an objective pole
and a subjective pole – a ‘self’ and a ‘world’. The
objectivity of the dream or vision, must therefore be
acknowledged and explored, if we are to understand its
meaning. As Corbin says of the cosmos of Sohravardi, the
12th Century Iranian mystical philosopher:
This innerness must in no way be confused with anything
that our modern terms subjectivism or nominalism may be
supposed to refer to…this view, generally speaking, leaves
no alternative but to take the suprasensory universe as
consisting of abstract concepts. On the contrary, the
universe which in Sohravardi’s neo-Zorastian Platonism is
called the mundus imaginalis or the ‘heavenly Earth of
Hurqalya’ is a concrete spiritual universe.2
Journey into hell
Dante’s journey into imaginal space begins with a spiritual
crisis. He finds himself at the midpoint of his life in the
middle of a dark wood; he is lost, uncertain of the way
forward:
Halfway along the road we have to go,
I found myself obscured in a great forest,
Bewildered, and I knew I had lost the way.
It is hard to say just what the forest was like,
How wild and rough it was, how overpowering;
Even to remember it makes me afraid.
So bitter it was, death is hardly more so;
Yet there was good there, and to make it clear

9. I will speak of other things that I perceived.
Inferno Canto 1. Lines 1 – 9.3
Virgil explains that Dante cannot escape the
forest by ascending the shining mountain that he desires; he
must go right down into the bowels of the earth, down even
to the lowest circle of hell. From there they will be able to
escape to Mount Purgatory, on the other side of the globe.
Entering upon a deep and thorny crevasse the pair find
themselves at the gateway to hell, above which these words
are chiselled:
Through me you go into the city of weeping;
Through me you go into eternal pain;
Through me you go among the lost people
Before me there was nothing that was created
Except eternal things; I am eternal:
Abandon hope, all you who enter here.
Inferno Canto 3. Lines 1- 9.
Dante follows Virgil though a series of nine descending
circles. At each level there are found different kinds of
sinners with appropriate tortures being meted out to them.
For example, near the bottom of hell we find a circular
ravine full of boiling pitch where the swindlers (those who
got rich by dishonest means) are boiled without respite.
Elsewhere in the dark circles we find burning sands, rains
of fire and all manner of other tortures, most of them
savagely appropriate to the crime committed in the world.

10. The Buddhist hells are similarly arranged in various levels.
Generally there are said to be eight hot and eight cold hells,
of increasing intensity, where again the degree of pain fits
the seriousness of the deeds committed. However, being a
Buddhist hell, it is the mental state in which a particular act
was done that is considered to be primary. There can be no
rigid allocation of particular punishments for particular
crimes as in Dante’s hell. The common principle is that for
Dante and the ancient Buddhists hell existed; it was
something to be feared as much or more than suffering in
this life. We can think here of the great Zen master Hakuin,
who in his early life was so afraid of the flames of hell that
he chanted a mantra constantly and with great intensity to
give him protection. Nowadays we might think that such a
person was suffering from paranoid delusions, but in fact it
was Hakuin’s problem with hell that propelled him with
meteoric force onto the spiritual path.

11. The Otherworld
So much for hell. Next, the third storey of the palace, above
hell and Middle Earth. This storey is somewhat ambiguous
in its positioning – it can be found above, or below or
sometimes hidden within Middle Earth. The Celtic peoples
were particularly familiar with this realm – the term
‘Otherworld’ is a rendering of the Irish Sídhe or the
Welsh Annwyn. The Celts regarded these places as the
source of all power and magic within this world – heroes
went there to find their faery brides and do battle with
elvish warriors. The main focus of the Otherworld is
generally the cosmic mountain, but its influence is felt
everywhere by those who are receptive. On certain nights
of the year the door to this hidden realm was open,
especially at sacred places such as ancient burial mounds.
Certain places in Middle Earth do indeed seem to be more
strongly connected with the Otherworld than others.

12. Mountains are often gateways to it, some more so than
others.
For Dante the Otherworld appears primarily as the Earthly
Paradise which is situated at the top of Mount Purgatory.
His cosmic mountain stands in the middle of the Pacific, on
the exact opposite side of the globe to Jerusalem. In
contrast to the Celtic Otherworld it is principally a place of
moral improvement, where repentant sinners ascend
through various levels, gradually purifying themselves by
undergoing punishments scarcely less severe than those of
hell. However, they are bathed by the clear light of the
southern skies and ministered to by magnificent angels –
some of them with green wings! For Dante, the most
important event that occurs here is his meeting with
Beatrice. Beatrice is his beloved female guide, embodiment
of sublime beauty and divine wisdom. She is found by
Dante, surrounded by Nymphs, in the most refined earthly
sphere, the paradisal garden on top of the cosmic mountain.
Turning now to the Buddhist Otherworld we meet a very
strange structure. You may remember that Middle Earth is
one of four islands floating in a great sea. The other three
islands are inhabited by all kinds of strange beings peculiar
to Indian mythology, but the strangest feature is that in the
centre of the ocean, with the four islands surrounding it, we
find a great ring of circular mountains made of pure gold.
Inside this ring is another ring, twice as high, and so on –
seven rings of mountains in all. In the very centre, within
the seven rings there is Mount Meru, the cosmic mountain.
Here live the lower gods, those of the realm of desire, who

13. correspond roughly to the inhabitants of mount Olympus in
the Greek pantheon.
I have not seen a definitive explanation of the symbolism of
these seven rings, probably there is no such explanation
available, so some sympathetic guesswork is required.
Kloetzli in his book Buddhist Cosmology suggests that one
could take the seven rings of mountains to be associated
with the courses of the seven heavenly bodies known to the
ancient world.
That is the sun, the moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, Neptune
and Mars. In the classical world view, best known from
Plato’s description in his Timeus, these bodies were
attached to crystal spheres, which rotated about the earth in
different but mutually resonant motions (thus giving rise to
the famous music of the spheres).
So it does not seem too far fetched to see these rings of
mountains as having a position somewhat analogous to the
crystal spheres. The gods and goddesses of ancient India
circled in their chariots around the central pole of mount
Meru, and were associated with the heavenly bodies just
like the classical Pantheon; so the rings of mountains do
seem like an image of the heavens translated onto a mythic
terrestrial plane.

14. Thus the cosmos becomes a landscape to be explored with
the inner eye, and the lights of heaven “those intricate
traceries in the sky, the loveliest and most perfect of
material things (Timeus)” are reflected on the imaginal
earth in mountains of the loveliest and most perfect
element.
In both Eastern and Western cosmology the planets are said
to influence the earth through the laws of astrology. Dante
follows here the general mediaeval scheme in assigning to
each of the planetary spheres a governing intelligence
(Mars for aggression, Venus for Love, and so forth) which
influences nature and the natural part of man – his soul
remains the concern of the almighty:
The soul of every animal and plant
Is drawn from its compounded potency
By the beam and movement of the sacred lights.
But your life breathes without intermediary
The highest goodness, and makes it in love
With him, so that it then desires him.
Paradiso Canto 7, lines 139 – 145
Even if we do not believe the laws of astrology,
contemplating the rhythm of those ‘sacred lights’ in their
slow majestic dance through the heavens is a marvellous
practise. They can draw us into feeling that we are part of a
subtle web of connections that exists between earth and
heaven.

15. Now at last it is time to ascend even higher, into the pure
abodes. The 4th storey is that of the angelic realms, above
the planetary heavens, where luminous beings dwell who
are neither male nor female, in a realm of bliss and light we
can hardly imagine. In some traditions this realm is reached
by a bridge from the top of the cosmic mountain.
Sohravardi, our mystical Sufi/Platonist speaks of “The
mountain of dawns from whose summit the Chinvat Bridge
springs forth to span the passage to the beyond.”. Here we
meet the who will lead us to
his abode which is “self illuminated within and adorned on
the outside with stars”.
Perhaps it is best to say very little about these glorious
realms. Even Dante finds words beginning to fail him as he
ascends above Mount Purgatory through crystal spheres of
increasing subtlety and luminosity, and thence to the 8th
sphere of the fixed stars. Beyond this there is the primum
mobile, the 9th and final sphere, the very apex of the
phenomenal universe, where time and space have their
origin. In the brilliance of this realm Dante’s guide Beatrice
becomes almost too beautiful for him to look at. She warns
Dante at one point that if she were to smile he would be
unable to bear it:
If I smiled you would become as was Semele
When she was turned to ashes.

16. For if my beauty which lights up the more
As you have seen, the higher we ascend
Upon the stairs of the eternal palace,
If it were not tempered, it would so shine
That at its brilliance your mortal power
Would be a branch split by lightning.
Paradiso Canto 21, lines 4 – 12, adapted.
Later, however, Dante’s guide “Raises his mind to
Paradise” and he is able to “Look straight at the light which
came from my sweet guide. Which as she smiled blazed
from her holy eyes.” Just as for Dante the highest heaven is
a sphere of pure light beyond the stars, so in the Buddhist
cosmos we leap into the realms of pure form by ascending
100,000 yoganas above mount Meru.
and
Brahmas are powerful beings who are permeated with
certain blissful positive emotions.
These are the (divine abodes) of
universal love, compassion, sympathetic joy and
equanimity.

17. We have such heavens as ‘Immeasurable Splendour’,
‘Immeasurable Beauty’, ‘the Well Seeing’, ‘the Effortless’
and many others. As one ascends through these heavens
one is able to take in ever more expansive vistas of the
universe; from the higher realms one surveys 1000 million
worlds, while the very highest, those corresponding to the
4th absorption, give a view that is said to be without
measure. I have the impression that it makes most sense to
think of these higher realms being shared between more
and more world systems, so that the highest realms, as it
were, encompass a whole galaxy.
We have now ascended to the pinnacle of the universe. We
have gained a vantage from where we can look deep into
the fiery mists of time and space, and see millions upon
millions of worlds floating like motes of dust in the cosmic
void. From this vantage we may begin to wonder what
connects all of this together? How is it to be understood, if

18. at all? To the ancients the answer was simple: the scheme
of the universe was dependent on some kind of ultimate
reality, from which the many levels of the cosmos
ultimately derived their existence.
Buddhist teachers tended to frame this ultimate reality in
terms of mind and inner experience. One ascended to an
ultimate level of consciousness, Nirvana, which was not to
be found anywhere within the symbolic universe. In this
state, the manifold phenomena of existence, both inner and
outer, were seen as being all dependant on each other; not
ultimately separate, and lacking any fixed, unique essence.
Some later traditions, particularly
school, asserted that while this mind sees all as
insubstantial, its nature can be hinted at by being spoken of
as eternal, substantial and blissful.
This brings the Buddhist view just a little closer to Dante’s,
for whom, of course the ultimate reality is God, the ‘still
centre’ of the universe. Rather than resolving everything
into a non-dual flux of phenomena, the mediaeval world
view stressed the principle of hierarchy. The universe
descended in a series of emanations from God’s ‘supreme
light’, the levels of existence becoming progressively
darker and more prison like, the further they were from
their source. Dante, as we have seen, ascends through these
levels, and at last arrives at the supreme paradise, sphere of

19. the ultimate good, which lies beyond the primum mobile.
He stretches his imaginal powers to convey some of the
wonders of this realm and it is worth following him there.
Strengthened by gazing upon Beatrice’s smile, and by her
adroit resolution of his (justified?) doctrinal doubts, Dante
is at last able to bear the ‘simple light’ of the divine abode.
This is what he sees:
And I saw light in the form of a stream
Of resplendent brilliance, in between two banks
Painted with all the marvels of the spring.
From this river there issued live sparks
Which everywhere settled themselves in the flowers
Like rubies which have been set in gold.
Then, as if the scents had made them intoxicated,
They sank once more into the marvellous swirl;
And as one entered it, another flew out.
Paradiso Canto 30, lines 61 – 69.
Beatrice now urges Dante to satiate the “deep desire that
burns and urges him” and drink from the water to know of
its true nature. He does so and a greater vision is revealed:
the stream of light becomes a circle of brilliance which
resolves into a vision of the courts of heaven as a rose – a
rose of pure beings who are the greatest of the saints of the
church (interestingly the angels are on a lower level than
this final vision). This rose is a series of ascending tiers of
increasing luminosity which ‘give off a scent of praise’ to
the sun at their centre. We have here a mandala like figure
of luminous beings rapt in devotion to the eternal light at
their centre. Surely a Buddhist’s vision of Nirvana, though

20. metaphysically quite different, should be no less luminous
and inspiring than the paradise revealed by Beatrice’s
divine smile.
Having sketched (I hope with sufficient vividness) a picture
of the symbolic cosmos, it is time to draw some
conclusions. How might these wonderful vistas of light and
colour be made relevant to our spiritual lives? The first
point I wish to make is simply that it is easier to make
spiritual progress if we can let go of (or at least loosen) our
materialistic views of the universe.
We many have some faith in the Three Jewels (the Buddha,
his teaching and his community) but if we believe that we
are surrounded by blind, inert matter our ideals will be
compromised.

21. For example: if the earth is simply a lump of various kinds
of rock and molten lava with a skin of organic activity on
the surface, then it will not shake and tremble when the
Buddha gains enlightenment. When reading of His great
victory over birth and death we will be forced to say to
ourselves “Ah Ha! That is a metaphor for an inner
realisation.” But this is exactly what it is not. The earth
itself shook and trembled, that is the effect of
enlightenment! To call this an image, a poetic device, will
not do. It leaves enlightenment in the realm of subjective
experience, and our own spiritual lives blighted by an
unnatural dislocation; a dislocation between our inner
ideals and the world we move about in.
So we are left with a dilemma. On the one hand the
symbolic reality of the dharma is thwarted and reduced in
potency by being constrained to inhabit a nebulous
subjective sphere. We need a world where even the rocks
can be changed by metta (loving kindness). But on the
other hand the scientific world view works. For nearly
every physical phenomena there is an explanation that
makes sense, to deny this is to deny our own rational
faculty. We cannot, for example, return to the innocence of
not knowing that Venus the planet is a globe shrouded in
sulphurous gas, and not at all a fit dwelling place for a
goddess.
The solution I propose to this dilemma is a simple one.
Firstly, we take the symbolic universe as the primary
reality, in so far as it supports the dharma. In particular we
need to feel that we live in the middle of a vast cosmic

22. hierarchy. We need to have a sense that this is the very
stuff of life, otherwise life itself is ultimately purposeless.
Secondly, we take the scientific universe as one level of
that vast hierarchy; a subset, valid in its own terms and very
useful for bringing us more material comfort, but only a
subset. It may loom large in our minds because of the way
we have been moulded by our culture but in reality it is a
tiny chink of what is there.
Thus the earth which is a globe floating in space comes to
be contained within a symbolic reality that we can
approach by contemplating those ancient images which we
have been exploring. An example may help to clarify
matters. Proclus, the Neo-Platonist, writes of the
Heliotrope, a flower that follows the course of the sun. To
Proclus this flower is worshipping the sun, offering prayer
to the sun:
What other reason can we give for the fact that the
Heliotrope follows in its movement the movement of the
sun…? For, in truth, each thing prays according to the
rank it occupies in nature, and sings the praise of the
leader of the divine series to which it belongs, a spiritual or
rational or physical or sensuous praise; for the Heliotrope
moves to the extent that it is free to move, and in its
rotation, if we could hear the sound of the air buffeted by
its movement, we should be aware that it is a hymn to its
king, such as it is within the power of a plant to sing.4
For the botanist, of course, the plant’s behaviour is
explained as an evolutionary adaptation, probably just the
result of a mechanism for catching more light on its leaves.

23. Let us be honest, do we in our heart of hearts believe that
Proclus is right? More likely we tend towards the view that
the botanist has the truth about the physical world, whereas
Proclus is speaking a poetic truth. In other words we think
that the flower does not really worship the sun but we may
project an imaginative device upon it for our own benefit.
Suppose instead we were to embrace a view of the sensual
world where nature acts in concordance with spiritual
realities; so that a flower is an embodiment of a particular
‘flowerness’ which extends right up through the angelic
realms to the lotuses of Pure Lands (the Buddhist vision of
paradise). Natural flowers and the lotuses of Buddha realms
are not completely separate but both are part of a chain of
‘flowerness’. The botanist’s flower subsides to being a
small subset of the sensual world, a chink within a chink.
And we are free to see the poppy, for example, not merely
as a symbol for Amitabha (the red Buddha of infinite light),
but as an emissary of Amitabha in the sensual world. To
say ‘symbol for’ suggests that we are projecting an image
from our minds onto a neutral world. To say ’emissary of’
suggests that to see Amitabha in a red flower is to vibrate
with the flower’s true nature. This way of looking at things
suggests that ultimately rocks, flowers, ourselves, and the
Buddha are Mind with a capital M. But until we reach that
level of experience let us overcome the dreary view that we
alone are psychically alive and the universe ‘out there’
dead. Let both be charged with life. Let the element of fire
below be connected to sun which is the fire of the gods of
the natural world, let this sun be connected to the fire of
angelic intelligence, and let the fire of angelic intelligence
be connected to the sun of Transcendental Wisdom.5 May

24. the Buddhas be to us like the Angel of Initiation Sroasha
and reveal these wonders as we are ready.