Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Cosmology and World-Structure gathers forty two doctrines describing how the universe began, how it is arranged, and whether it runs once or cycles, drawn from nearly every tradition the atlas records.

Cosmogony supplies the origin accounts: making from nothing, ordering out of a cosmic ocean or primordial waters, a world egg splitting into sky and earth, a theogony of gods descending from primal powers, or humankind shaped bluntly as labor for the gods, as the Atrahasis Epic states of Mesopotamia. Anthropogony narrows the same question to human origins, clay, plant descent or divine emergence recurring across unrelated peoples.

A structural cluster locates the world once it exists: an axis mundi or world tree or world mountain at its centre, seven heavens or nested celestial spheres above, a primum mobile and empyrean beyond the fixed stars in the medieval Christian scheme, and Norse, Jain and Hindu traditions each supplying their own architecture, nine worlds bound by Yggdrasil, the loka-purusha, and the triple world of Trailokya. Buddhist cosmology answers with the six realms of rebirth and the Theravada's thirty one planes, and Mandaean and Manichaean dualism split the cosmos into worlds of light and darkness locked in conflict.

Time recurs as cyclical rather than linear for many of these: pralaya's periodic dissolution in the Puranas, Jain avasarpini and utsarpini turning without end, Norse Ragnarok and its Fimbulwinter, and eternal return as the pattern Eliade named across them. As above so below and the music of the spheres state a Hermetic and Pythagorean correspondence between cosmic order and a living cosmos, while creation care, ecotheology and the Gaia hypothesis read that same order as ground for modern environmental duty.