Northrop Frye and the Axis Mundi

There is no doubt in my mind that Northrop Frye is a vast resource when it comes scholarly work on The Bible. However some times I feel that I am reading above and beyond my level of comprehension. For example Frye takes the notion of intertexualtiy to the next level with his seemingly endless conections of The Bible and other texts. Regardless of complexity he is quite interesting, definatley not lacking in the arena of literary intellect.

One thing I found inter woven in the text is the Axis Mundi. Not only in the beginning of the book in the introduction and the first chapter but later on in Frye's chapter "First Variation: The Mountain." To be honest I knew about the Axis Mundi in a sort of innate way prior to reading Frye, and only after reading portions of Frye did I have a name for the "Axis Mundi." Interestingly enough looking into the Axis Mundi I found that the Axis Mundi is sometimes considered to be, "a natural and universal psychological perception." Perhaps that explains this feeling of knowing the Axis Mundi before I "Knew of" the Axis Mundi. However I wonder if the conception of the Axis Mundi is so fundamental in the understanding of the self in relation to the world as portrayed in underlying ways by literature that we are never given an opportunity to conceive of any other form of relational existence. Regardless of the scientific evidence and the presence of the actual the Axis Mundi seems to be some what of a rational human manifestation.

This idea of the Axis Mundi also prompted me to open a book from my "personal archive" entitled You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination by Katherine Harmon. The book touches on notions of personal geographies as a transcendence of the physical into the realm of the imagination, and the innate ability for humans to create within the mind; nations and borders without a prior knowledge of the like. Like the coded nature of words in Frye there is a coded visual language of the map. I feel this is interesting because the notions of the Axis Mundi proposed in Frye in relation to the literary is then manifest in visual form in the mind. What I really find interesting as I observed my mental image of Frye's Axis Mundi and other theoretical maps is that humanity lay in the center of things. We have this notion in of Ascension and Descension with God on top in what most would view as the position of power. While this may be true people have continued to place humanity in the middle, or the center of things. Now the top may be the power position, but being in the center of things has all sorts of implications of power and importance.

This is little excerpt from Leonardo Da Vinci:

"Man is called by the ancients a world in miniature and certainly this name is well applied, for just as man is composed of earth, water, air and fire, so is the body of the earth. If man has in him bones which are the support and armor of the flesh, the world has rocks which are the support of the earth; if man has in himself the sea of blood, in which the lungs rise and fall in breathing, so the body of the earth has its oceanic sea which also rises and falls every six hours for the world to breathe. If from the said sea of blood spring veins which go on ramifying through out the human body, similarly the oceanic sea fills the body of the earth with infinite veins of water."


Yggdrasil from Norse Mythology (not "actual" axis mundi)