Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth

by Alessandro Scafi

Throughout history, humans have searched for paradise. When early Christians adopted the Hebrew Bible, and with it the story of Genesis, the Garden of Eden became an idyllic habitat for all mankind. Medieval Christians believed this paradise was a place on earth, different from this world and yet part of it, situated in real geography and indicated on maps. From the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, the mapping of paradise validated the authority of holy scripture and supported Christian faith. But from the early nineteenth century onwards, the question of the exact location of paradise was left not to theologians but to the layman. And at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there is still no end to the stream of theories on the location of the former Garden of Eden.

Mapping Paradise is a history of the cartography of paradise that journeys from the beginning of Christianity to the present day. Instead of dismissing the medieval belief in a paradise on earth as a picturesque legend and the cartography of paradise as an example of the period’s many superstitions, Alessandro Scafi explores the intellectual conditions that made the medieval mapping of paradise possible. The challenge for mapmakers, Scafi argues, was to make visible a place that was geographically inaccessible and yet real, remote in time and yet still the scene of an essential episode of the history of salvation. Mapping Paradise also accounts for the transformations, in both theological doctrine and cartographical practice, that brought about the decline of the belief in a terrestrial paradise and the emergence of the new historical and regional mapping of the Garden of Eden that began at the time of the Reformation and still continues today.

The first book to show how paradise has been expressed in cartographic form throughout two millennia, Mapping Paradise reveals how the most deeply reflective thoughts about the ultimate destiny of all human life have been molded and remolded, generation by generation.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

400 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2006

Reviews

[Charles Dee Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Medieval cartographers had no difficulty locating the Garden of Eden on their world maps. Their Mappa Mundi were both chronological and geographical documents. Since history began in the Garden, its location was top and center on their maps. Since the Bible placed the Garden in the East, this rotated the cardinal points 90 degrees from the orientation we’ve come to expect. A move down the map was a journey to the West and a trip through history. Biblical events clustered near the top. Jerusalem, the sight of Christ’s resurrection -- the central event of world history—took center position. Further west were the civilizations of Greece and Rome followed by the rise of Europe. At the bottom of the map were the Pillars of Hercules, marking the westernmost point of the known world where the Mediterranean Sea entered the Atlantic Ocean.

Problems arose when Medieval travelers and the earliest Portuguese explores failed to find any evidence of the Biblical Paradise on their travels. The area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers remained the favored location, but that left two of the four rivers mentioned in Genesis unaccounted for. Theologians went to work to solve that problem, the best solution to my mind being that the deluge in the time of Noah altered the geography to such an extent that the location was not longer recognizable. At least one map placed the Garden in a sidebar outside the geographical image, suggesting that it existed in a different dimension.

In the Renaissance, cartographers established scientific criteria for mapmaking, and turned the earth to its now accepted polar orientation. Although the oceans still hosted sea monsters, the Biblical history of Medieval mapmaking no longer had a place in this new scientific world. Scafi’s book presents this history in an accessible and heavily illustrated volume, that discusses both cartography and the concept of Paradise across ancient civilizations. He even includes a contemporary approach to locating the Garden of Eden. Maps distributed by Jehovah Witnesses continue to place Paradise somewhere between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

[Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the early days of mapmaking, there was always a place for Eden . . .