Early maps, space and the post-colonial Western mind

In my recent attention to matters Old and English, I haven’t been focussing on hagiographies to the exclusion of all else – though my piecemeal calendar-driven re-read of Bede has certainly lent itself well to that purpose. But I recently came across an Old English map. A map of the world, in fact, dated to a couple of decades before the Great Schism and perhaps as many as four decades before the Norman Conquest. This is a digitised image of that map here:

Anglo-Saxon Mappa Mundi, ca. 1030

Several things strike me immediately about this map. The first is that the Old English placed the Eastern Mediterranean at the centre of the map. As is still more clearly evident in a Psalter map from the late 1200s, the centre of the world was held to be the city of Jerusalem. (For the benefit of the wags – not literally, of course: Bede, as did all mediæval minds, held the world to be a globe.) The second is that, because ‘east’ is ‘up’ on the map, the British Isles are all the way down at the lower left-hand corner.

Psalter map, ca. 1290. Note the iconographic depiction of Christ at the top.

This map orientation may look odd to us moderns, but it makes sense. Jerusalem was the site of the Temple, and Golgotha – just outside Jerusalem – the site of Our Lord’s Passion. It makes sense that a mediæval European mind which places God at the centre of the cosmos would adopt an Incarnational logic that places the life and place of Christ at the centre of her understanding. Additionally, it fully makes sense that a mediæval European would regard ‘east’ as ‘up’ or ‘forward’. Think about the way Orthodox and historic Roman Catholic churches are built – which direction is the altar in, and which way do the people face the iconostasis? How do we set up our prayer corners? We pray to the east because that is the direction that Scripture indicates the Second Coming will happen, and also because that is where the Holy Fathers direct us to pray. That is also where the sun rises. And this is also according to Classical logic and mindset. The name Yemen – from the Arabic al-Yaman اليمن and the Hebrew Teyman תימן from whence also comes the name Benjamin – refers, as Dr Paul Tarazi informed our Hebrew class – to both the right hand, and to the cardinal direction south. Hence, Yemen is ‘the South’, and Benjamin is bin-yamin, the ‘son of the right hand’! Which way do you have to be facing for the south to be on your right hand? Our very word ‘orientation’ itself derives from the Latin root for ‘east’: to the Classical mind, when you are orienting yourself you are literally ‘finding east’. For a culture like that of the Old English that was transforming itself in the Church, steeping itself in the wisdom of the Holy Fathers, a map orientation that relegates your homeland to the lower left corner of the world map was not only perfectly acceptable but sensible.

Gough Map, ca. 1300

It’s noteworthy that, as the Psalter map (and the contemporary Gough map) makes clear, this ‘east-up’ map orientation survived the upheavals of the Great Schism which severed Rome from Jerusalem (and Constantinople, Alexandria and Antioch). However, it did not survive the age of conquest. As mapping became a more technically-intricate process to meet the needs of navigation and maritime trade, the portolan chart replaced the classical mappa mundi. The first portolan charts were drawn in the mid-13^th century in the same Italian city-states that were busy laying the mercantilist foundations for capitalism: Genoa, Venice, Florence, Pisa. Starting ca. 1375, these portolan charts directed the user, not east or towards Jerusalem, but instead north – because they were designed to be used with a compass that pointed to magnetic north.

Portolan chart of Europe by Grazioso Benincasa, 1470

This might sound like just a harmless technological innovation, meant to better aid sea travel. But ‘north-up’ maps were also a mark of egocentricity. The focus had shifted away from God, away from the Creator of the fabric of space which the map was meant to serve – away from the east, in other words (at least from the perspective of the European). Instead the entire fabric of space and its understanding was fitted to suit the cartographer, the navigator, or whoever was reading the map. This is a very similar æsthetic and philosophical development to the rest of sæcular Renaissance art – painting, sculpture, architecture – that was crafted to honour not God but rather some wealthy mortal patron. The map serves the technological works of human hands, and thus the [European] human subject himself. No longer is Jerusalem, or Christ, to be found on this map. Instead the portolan chart is just bare fact, with no universal referent. North is the direction of orientation because that is where the iron points. The portolan chart is pure ideology, and that ideology is nominalism.

Del Chierico map of the British Isles, 15^th century.

The error of the overcorrecting ‘south-up’ proponents of nowadays is that they mistake this nominalism for Eurocentrism or white supremacy or some later ideological formation. And even here, they are very close – but not close enough – to being right. Of course this nominalist turn (literally!) in cartography was ultimately linked to the ideologies of conquest of man and nature that characterised the age. By the 1400s Florentine cartographers like Francesco del Chierico had introduced ‘north-up’ oriented portolan charts and less cumbersome maps to England and France, where they were used by both navigators and land-based generals to wage the last stages of the Hundred Years’ War. The use of these early ‘north-up’ maps was undoubtedly linked to the early growth stages of nationalism in both countries – but not in as neatly-packaged and idealistic a way as the ‘south-up’ maptivists would like to make it.

The ill-uses of religion in the service of nationalism happening around this time, under the revolution in military technology of which cartography as a discipline was a significant part, are probably worth not passing over in silence. The irony, for example, of that Thespian-immortalised slogan ‘For God, Harry and Saint George,’ invoking a Palestinian saint in an English national cause, was born at this time – and even then, that Palestinian saint was invoked last, after the English king! To minds as sensitive as Shakespeare’s to the Classical ordering of reality, this slight inversion of human and divine agencies would have been significant: it essentially creates an equation of the earthly sovereign and realm with the sovereignty of God which to the mediæval mind would have bordered on hubristic. And the English were not alone: just think of the rather sordid ideological purposes the French put that poor delusional young country girl before the English put her to the stake. Of course her canonisation by the Latins in the age of World War and nationalism at its highest fever pitch is not accidental either – let alone blameless.

Still, it seems fairly hard to deny that the egocentrism of this cartographical convention had some relation to later nominalist developments. If space has been reoriented to the comfort, convenience and mastery of the cartographer or navigator or general rather than to Christ, of course it becomes far easier to rationalise conquest within that same spatial fabric.

But what is interesting to me is this: as long as the Old English had been under the tutelage of the Church, they were – in a very real sense – crucifying their egos on a collective basis, in a way that should be instructive for us. In accepting a God who had taken on a human Incarnation in Palestine, they had accepted that they did not occupy an exalted or central place in the world. This is a very far cry from later centuries, when intoxicated with their own imperial pride the British people placed themselves not only on the top of the map but also in the very centre, with the longitudinal prime meridian running through Greenwich Village on every standard map of the world. When the imperial centre of gravity shifted to Washington, certain map projections placed the North American continent instead in the top-central position.

I am not, of course, advocating for the maptivist ‘south-up’ position or for a retro-mediæval ‘east-up’ position; at this point, even that inversion would be something like vanity, and in any event it wouldn’t solve the underlying problem. We live in an age where, in the wake of imperial hubris, a kind of spiritual egotism has been allowed to fester and deepen and darken. For multiple generations now, we, particularly white, Americans of all political stripes have been taught – whether by indulgent parents, by school administrators and college deans, by the legal system, or by films, books, talk radio, cable news, presidential candidates or the omnipresent corporate advertisement – that we are the centre of the universe and that the universe owes us. We are taught we are owed comfort, security, high living standards, the starring rôle. This is culturally every bit as much ingrained in us as the idea that ‘north is up’ on a map. But of course, reality refuses to oblige, and that same egotism that we are taught embitters us. It leads us to stubborn denials of our past. It leads us to an empty and morbid fascination with preserving, as if in formaldehyde, the physical material outer remnants of ‘Western civilisation’. It leads us in some cases, as seen from recent news, to inward darkness and outbursts of homicidal violence.

Those of us who go to church are also taught to put Christ at the centre of our lives, but the vast majority of us have no conception of how to do this. Unlike the Old English, our removal from the cultural context of the Incarnation has convinced us that Christ is merely an abstract reflection of us: a liberal-individualist, white, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic. Speaking from personal experience, this is an incredibly tough and painful intellectual habit to break. The most useful way to do this, still (and this is not something I remotely pretend to be good at), is to find the least of our brothers and sisters near us, and look to them to point us to Christ. That’s probably a surer way than relying on any map to tell us, even subconsciously, where the centre of the world is.

Such reflections may sound harsh, but they are necessary for those of us who are not anti-Western at heart. Indeed, if we love the West we need to seek its return to a more humble and less œcologically- and sociologically-taxing way of life. And the contours of the Old English worldview – still flavoured by a Teutonic heathen heroism, yes, but also shaped by Benedictine monasticism and an openness to Greco-Syrian, North African, Ægyptian and Palestinian spiritual influences – point a possible way out.