The Science of Discworld IV Judgement Da - By Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart Page 0,23

to keep out malevolent supernatural beings. Each of the mountains was the home of one aspect of a grandfather deity, Mayan name unknown or uncertain, referred to by anthropologists as God N. The gods’ homes could be reached through caves, but these created gaps in the protective perimeter so that evil could enter.

The Earth was next made ready for growing corn. So the children and grandchildren of the creator grandparents, now living on the Earth, set up the Sun and the yearly cycle of the seasons and synchronised them with the movements of the Moon and Venus. There were two children, Hun Hunahpu and Vucub Hunahpu. The first married Bone Woman – the book does not say how she came into being (just as Genesis tells us that Cain’s wife ‘dwelt in the land of Nod’, but is silent about the creation of both Nod and the wife). When Bone Woman died, Hun Hunahpu and Vucub Hunahpu went to the underworld, suffering defeat at the hands of the two lords of death. Blood Woman, the daughter of an underworld being, was made pregnant by spittle from Hun Hunahpu’s dead head, and gave birth to Hunahpu and Xbalanque, the hero twins. Much of the tale deals with the twins’ eventual defeat of the lords of death, which required assistance from their grandparents. Xmucane made a mixture of corn and ground bone into dough, from which the creator grandparents formed the first people. Job done, the hero twins became the Sun and the full Moon.

God N is often shown wearing a net bag on his head. One of his manifestations was as a possum; another was as a turtle. An inscribed stone at Copán bears his name ‘yellow turtle’, in the form of his image together with phonetic signs for ak – meaning turtle. In his turtle aspect, God N represented the Earth, because the creation of the Earth, rising from the primordial sea, was like a turtle coming to the surface of a pool. God N also manifested himself as the four bacabs, whom the sixteenth-century Bishop of Yucatán Diego de Landa described as ‘four brothers whom [the creator] god placed, when he created the world, at the four points of it, holding up the sky so that it should not fall’.

Benford’s distinction is very visible here. The Mayan view, like that of many ancient cultures, was human-centred. They tried to understand the universe in terms of their own everyday experiences. Their stories rationalised nature, by portraying it in human terms – only bigger. But within that framework, they did their best to tackle the big questions of life, the universe, and everything.

To westerners, a turtle/elephant world is most commonly associated with Hinduism. Turtles are often confused with tortoises, as they generally are in American English. Philosopher John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690 mentions an ‘Indian who said the world was on an elephant which was on a tortoise’. In his 1927 Why I Am Not A Christian Bertrand Russell writes of ‘the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise’, adding, ‘When they said, “How about the tortoise?” the Indian said, “Suppose we change the subject.”’ The elephant-turtle story remains in common circulation, but it is a misrepresentation of Hindu beliefs, conflating two separate mythical beings: the world-turtle and the world-elephant. In fact, Hindu mythology features three distinct species of world-bearing creature: tortoise, elephant and snake, with the snake being arguably the most important.

These creatures occur in several guises. The commonest name for the world-tortoise is Kurma or Kumaraja. According to the Shatpatha Brahmana its upper shell is the heavens, its lower shell the Earth, and its body is the atmosphere. The Bhagavata Purana calls it Akupara – unbounded. In 1838 Leveson Vernon-Harcourt published The Doctrine of the Deluge, whose purpose is clearly indicated by its subtitle: vindicating the scriptural account from the doubts which have recently been cast upon it by geological speculations. In it, he wrote of a tortoise called Chukwa that supported Mount Meru. This mountain is sacred in both Hindu and Buddhist cosmology, the centre of the universe – physical, spiritual and metaphysical – where Brahma and the demigods reside. Vernon-Harcourt attributes the story to an astronomer who described it to Bishop Heber ‘in the Vidayala school in Benares’. Since the word ‘vidyayala’ (note slight difference in spelling) means ‘school’ in Sanskrit, it is hard to give the report much credit. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and