(31) For the site of the cross on Calvary, as the point where stood "the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil" in Eden, at the centre of the
earth, see various Eastern travellers cited in Tobler; but especially
the travels of Bishop Arculf in the Holy Land, in Wright's Early Travels
in Palestine, p. 8; also Travels of Saewulf, ibid, p. 38; also Sir John
Mandeville, ibid., pp. 166, 167. For Roger, see his La Terre Saincte,
Paris, 1664, pp. 89-217, etc.; see also Quaresmio, Terrae Sanctae
Elucidatio, 1639, for similar view; and, for one narrative in which the
idea was developed into an amazing mass of pious myths, see Pilgrimage
of the Russian Abbot Daniel, edited by Sir C. W. Wilson, London, 1885,
p. 14. (The passage deserves to be quoted as an example of myth-making;
it is as follows: "At the time of our Lord's crucifixion, when he gave
up the ghost on the cross, the veil of the temple was rent, and the rock
above Adam's skull opened, and the blood and water which flowed from
Christ's side ran down through the fissure upon the skull, thus washing
away the sins of men.")
Nor was this the only misconception which forced its way from our sacred writings into medieval map-making: two others were almost as marked. First of these was the vague terror inspired by Gog and Magog. Few passages in the Old Testament are more sublime than the denunciation of these great enemies by Ezekiel; and the well-known statement in the Apocalypse fastened the Hebrew feeling regarding them with a new meaning into the mind of the early Church: hence it was that the medieval map-makers took great pains to delineate these monsters and their habitations on the maps. For centuries no map was considered orthodox which did not show them.
The second conception was derived from the mention in our sacred books of the "four winds." Hence came a vivid belief in their real existence, and their delineation on the maps, generally as colossal heads with distended cheeks, blowing vigorously toward Jerusalem.
After these conceptions had mainly disappeared we find here and there evidences of the difficulty men found in giving up the scriptural idea of direct personal interference by agents of Heaven in the ordinary phenomena of Nature: thus, in a noted map of the sixteenth century representing the earth as a sphere, there is at each pole a crank, with an angel laboriously turning the earth by means of it; and, in another map, the hand of the Almighty, thrust forth from the clouds, holds the earth suspended by a rope and spins it with his thumb and fingers. Even as late as the middle of the seventeenth century Heylin, the most authoritative English geographer of the time, shows a like tendency to mix science and theology. He warps each to help the other, as follows: "Water, making but one globe with the earth, is yet higher than it. This appears, first, because it is a body not so heavy; secondly, it is observed by sailors that their ships move faster to the shore than from it, whereof no reason can be given but the height of the water above the land; thirdly, to such as stand on the shore the sea seems to swell into the form of a round hill till it puts a bound upon our sight. Now that the sea, hovering thus over and above the earth, doth not overwhelm it, can be ascribed only to his Providence who 'hath made the waters to stand on an heap that they turn not again to cover the earth.'"(32)
(32) For Gog and Magog, see Ezekiel xxxviii and xxxix, and Rev. xx,
8; and for the general subject, Toy, Judaism and Christianity, Boston,
1891, pp. 373, 374. For maps showing these two great terrors, and for
geographical discussion regarding them, see Lelewel, Geog. du Moyen
Age, Bruxelles, 1850, Atlas; also Ruge, Gesch. des Zeitalters der
Entdeckungen, Berlin, 1881, pp. 78, 79; also Peschel's Abhandlungen,
pp.28-35, and Gesch. der Erdkunde, p. 210. For representations on maps
of the "Four Winds," see Charton, Voyageurs, tome ii, p. 11; also Ruge,
as above, pp. 324, 325; also for a curious mixture of the scriptural
winds issuing from the bags of Aeolus, see a map of the twelfth century
in Leon Gautier, La Chevalerie, p. 153; and for maps showing additional
winds, see various editions of Ptolemy. For a map with angels turning
the earth by means of cranks at the poles, see Grynaeus, Novus Orbis,
Basileae, 1537. For the globe kept spinning by the Almighty, see J.
Hondius's map, 1589; and for Heylin, his first folio, 1652, p. 27.
III. THE INHABITANTS OF THE EARTH.
Even while the doctrine of the sphericity of the earth was undecided, another question had been suggested which theologians finally came to consider of far greater importance. The doctrine of the sphericity of the earth naturally led to thought regarding its inhabitants, and another ancient germ was warmed into life—the idea of antipodes: of human beings on the earth's opposite sides.
In the Greek and Roman world this idea had found supporters and opponents, Cicero and Pliny being among the former, and Epicurus, Lucretius, and Plutarch among the latter. Thus the problem came into the early Church unsolved.
Among the first churchmen to take it up was, in the East, St. Gregory Nazianzen, who showed that to sail beyond Gibraltar was impossible; and, in the West, Lactantius, who asked: "Is there any one so senseless as to believe that there are men whose footsteps are higher than their heads?... that the crops and trees grow downward?... that the rains and snow and hail fall upward toward the earth?... I am at a loss what to say of those who, when they have once erred, steadily persevere in their folly and defend one vain thing by another."