Center

Treating the centre as a direction is not a paradox but a distinct and widespread cosmological move: it converts a flat scheme of quarters into one with an axis. In Chinese cosmology the centre is the fifth direction of the five-phase system, holding the earth phase and the colour yellow, and it mediates among the other four; the emperor, the capital and the Middle Kingdom itself all occupy it, and the Hall of Light, the Mingtang, was a ritual building in which the ruler moved through the seasons around a central position.

In Mesoamerican cosmology the four quarters surround a centre marked by the world tree, coloured blue-green, and the same structure appears in the Maya and Aztec cosmograms. In Hindu Vastu the centre of a plot is the Brahmasthana, the place of Brahma, and is kept open and unbuilt, a rule that produces the courtyard at the heart of the traditional house.

What all these have in common is the axis mundi, the vertical line through the centre joining the underworld, the earth and the sky, imagined as a tree, a mountain, a pillar or a ladder: Yggdrasil in the Norse material, Mount Meru in Indian and Buddhist cosmology, the world tree in Mesoamerica, the pillar at the centre of the Saxon Irminsul, the tent pole and the smoke hole in a great many mobile dwellings. Mircea Eliade made this the centrepiece of his account of sacred space, arguing that founding a settlement or a temple repeats the ordering of the cosmos from a centre.

Eliade's comparative method has been sharply criticised since for flattening the differences between traditions and for assuming a universal religious structure, and the criticism is well taken. The recurrence of centred cosmograms is nonetheless real, and it is best explained without claiming that they all mean the same thing.