Part 1 – Mapping Paradise

A four-part series of reflections

A question of seeing

Can we perceive reality as it is – independently of memory, language, culture, imagination, history and our own inward disposition? 

These four reflections follow this question through maps of Paradise, medieval legends, timeless realities in changing forms and, finally, a garden – all seeking to discover how we might perceive the world more truthfully. 

Throughout October and November, a new reflection will offer a different way of looking at this question.

The four reflections:

PART 1: Mapping Paradise (below)
PART 2: Medieval Legends (Coming soon)
PART 3: Timeless Realities (Coming soon)
PART 4: A Garden (Coming soon)

Giovanni Leardo, Mapa Mondi; Figura Mondi, Venice, 1442. Verona, Biblioteca Civica, MS 3119, unfoliated. (Image reproduced from Alessandro Scafi, Maps of Paradise, Fig. 15.)

Mapping Paradise

Seeing the world through maps of Paradise

“One day in 1442, the Venetian cartographer Giovanni Leardo signed and dated a map he had just completed… It depicted the whole of the habitable world as it was known in the mid-fifteenth century… Highly detailed, showing mountain ranges, islands, rivers, and lakes, as well as towns and cities… it also included an exceptionally beautiful city, clearly labelled in red ink, paradixo teresto… How could a careful cartographer include on a map of the world something as intangible as the Garden of Eden?” (Scafi 32 - 34). 

What is surprising is that Leardo was not the only cartographer who mapped this Earthly Paradise. For much of history, we find Eden depicted on the maps of the world.

Alessandro Scafi, in his beautiful book Maps of Paradise, traces the cartography of Eden from late antiquity and early Christianity through the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the present day. He shows us how, unlike most modern maps, medieval mappae mundi presented something beyond physical geography: they intertwined theology and biblical events with literature and history. They represented a sacred geography shaped by ideas and beliefs, illustrating not just where the world's places were, but also what the world meant.

Paradise on the Map

How did Earthly Paradise come to be mapped? Philosophers and theologians believed that Eden was real but had long disagreed about its nature: was it a spiritual reality or an actual physical place on earth? This question was not merely philosophical. The language of the Bible gave Earthly Paradise both a spatial and a temporal dimension. The Hebrew expression miq-qedem, associated with Eden, could be understood in two ways: spatially, as meaning “from the east,” or temporally, as meaning “from the beginning” (41). Eden therefore belonged both to a place and a time (41).

But how could Eden belong to human history, and yet also be a spiritual reality beyond time and space? (163)

This posed a dilemma for medieval cartographers. If philosophers in the Platonic tradition were correct in claiming that Eden was allegorical and therefore could not be found on earth, Eden should be left off the map. However, if Augustine was right to insist that, since Adam and Eve were real people, they must have inhabited an earthly place, Eden should be included. But then where to place it?

In order to place Eden within sacred history and physical geography, they drew on genealogies to express Eden in time, beginning with Adam and Eve at the top of their maps, and descending towards Christ at the bottom. Medieval cartographers, including Leardo, also situated Eden in space by orienting their maps to the east rather than to the north, as on modern maps. Eden therefore appeared at the top, while Jerusalem – the centre of salvation history – occupied the middle (82).

As geographical knowledge and theological interpretation changed, so too did the location of Eden on the maps. Leardo placed Eden close to India. This placement echoed Bede’s association of Havilah – a land described in Genesis as rich in gold and watered by one of Eden’s rivers – with a region of India (44). Pliny the Elder similarly described India as rich in gold, which helped to support this association (44). Other maps placed Eden on the equator or in the polar zone (84), while some showed it nowhere at all (84).

When Paradise Left the World Map

Earthly Paradise, however, was not to remain on the map forever. With the rise of navigational charts in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it gradually disappeared from maps of the world (86). The old connection between history and geography, which had given medieval cartography so much of its meaning, began to dissolve.

By the sixteenth century, Eden was generally believed to no longer belong to the present world (100). Yet it did not disappear entirely from cartography. Biblical and secular history continued to be represented on regional maps and historical atlases – although these new forms treated places and historical periods separately, rather than combining them in one all-embracing mappa mundi (118).

What Is a Map Actually Mapping?

Today, we may be tempted to dismiss medieval cartographers as naïve and their maps as bizarre. How could they confuse reality with fantasy? But modern mapmakers are not neutral either: they also select, arrange and omit aspects of reality, depending on the purpose of the map. A street map, for example, has simply made one kind of truth – measurable physical location – its principal concern. Modern maps are often objectively accurate for a limited purpose.

What kind of truth, then, did a mappa mundi show?

To a medieval cartographer, a map did more than reproduce physical territory – it expressed the truth about the world as a meaningful whole. The geography may have been factually wrong, but the map’s deeper intuition – that human existence cannot be adequately mapped without memory of the past, an understanding of the present, and hope for the future – may remain true. It allowed one to view “the entire space-time continuum of history from beginning to end” (55).

In contrast, a modern map may be geographically exact while saying nothing about what it means to inhabit the world. 

Conclusion

What, then, do these medieval maps suggest about our original question: Can we perceive reality as it is – independently of memory, language, culture, imagination, history and our own inward disposition? 

We do not know. But what these maps show is that, for centuries, human beings have encountered reality through maps, stories, symbols and inherited ways of understanding. These forms were all shaped by time, place, history and experience. 

This does not mean that people create their own reality. The world exists independently of any map or story. What a map does is represent one way of seeing and understanding the world, without claiming to know the whole truth of it.

While our interpretations do not produce reality, they nevertheless give shape to the way in which reality becomes intelligible to us.

Works Cited

Scafi, Alessandro. Maps of Paradise. University of Chicago Press, 2013.

A Note to Readers

Comments on these reflections and essays are always welcome. I enjoy reading them very much, and as always, I will reply personally via WhatsApp or email rather than in the comments section.