Axis Mundi

The cosmic pillar, the center of the world, the structural figure by which sacred space is oriented. Eliade assembles the pattern across cultures: the Achilpa sacred pole, the Germanic Irminsul, the Vedic skambha, the Kwakiutl cedar trunk, the Babylonian ziggurat, Mount Meru, the temple at Jerusalem, the World Tree of the Siberian shaman. Each instance performs the same structural function. A sacred place is a break in the homogeneity of space; the break is symbolized by an opening through which passage between cosmic regions becomes possible; the axis — pillar, ladder, mountain, tree — connects and supports heaven, earth, and the underworld (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957).

“Where the break-through from plane to plane has been effected by a hierophany, there too an opening has been made, either upward or downward. The three cosmic levels — earth, heaven, underworld — have been put in communication” (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957). The axis is always at the center because the habitable world extends around it. The multiplicity of centers raises no difficulty for religious thought: “it is not a matter of geometrical space, but of an existential and sacred space… capable of an infinite number of communications with the transcendent” (ibid.).

The shaman alone transforms the axis from cosmological ideogram into personal itinerary. “What for the rest of the community remains a cosmological ideogram, for the shamans (and the heroes, etc.) becomes a mystical itinerary” (Shamanism, 1951). The tribe imagines the pillar; the shaman climbs it. This distinction is structurally equivalent to the Jungian distinction between the collective archetype and the individuation path that makes it personal.

For Seba, the axis mundi is the archaic substrate of the mandalic centering Jung found in his patients’ dreams and of the alchemical quaternitas — the psyche generates the figure because the figure is the structure of orientation itself.

Relationships

• hierophany
• shamanic-ecstasy
• imago
• cosmogonic-paradigm

Primary sources

• eliade-sacred-and-profane (Eliade 1957)
• eliade-shamanism (Eliade 1951)