John Milton, Paradise Lost
Eden in Paradise Lost
The planted garden whose abundance becomes the setting for human intimacy and concealed danger.
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Cosmologies describe the order of a world and the places within it. Here, accounts of creation and the afterlife sit alongside named realms in particular texts. Read each world through the source that gives it form.
109 entries · A–Z
John Milton, Paradise Lost
The planted garden whose abundance becomes the setting for human intimacy and concealed danger.
Blessed destinations in Greek and Roman poetry
Discover Elysium and the Islands of the Blessed in Homer, Hesiod, Pindar and Virgil, tracing changing ideas of privilege, virtue and life after death.
The Mabinogion, Guest’s 1877 edition
The familiar kingdom emptied by thunder and mist in Manawyddan’s tale.
Egyptian funerary religion
Nine gods arranged as a creation family, with variant lists.
Dante, Purgatory and Paradise
The companion stream that restores the memory of good.
Welsh folklore, Wirt Sikes
Circles in the grass remembered as dance grounds with a perilous boundary.
Goethe’s Faust, Part One
The crowded Gothic room from which the scholar seeks escape.
Egyptian funerary religion
Abundant afterlife fields where agriculture continues without its earthly hazards.
Welsh folklore, Wirt Sikes
A wood whose central tree shelters the Dancing Place of the Goblin.
A place-name and language of judgment in Jewish and Christian texts
Trace Gehenna and Gehinnom from the Valley of Hinnom to Jewish and Christian accounts of judgment, with primary texts and distinctions between interpretations.
William Blake, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion; retained monochrome facsimile
A fourfold city built by Los in London from pity, affection and forgiveness.
The Mabinogion, Guest’s 1877 edition
The mound where the promise of injury or wonder introduces Rhiannon’s arrival.
Welsh folklore, Wirt Sikes
Vanishing fairy islands off the Welsh coast, associated with enchanted inhabitants.
The Mabinogion, Guest’s 1877 edition
The island hall where the survivors of Branwen’s catastrophe spend eighty years outside remembered grief.
The realm of the dead in Greek literature and its Roman reception
Explore Hades as the Greek realm of the dead through Homer, funerary practice and Plato, with a separate look at Virgil’s Roman underworld.
Blessed states and celestial realms across selected traditions
Understand Heaven through Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Zoroastrian and Bahá’í accounts, with clear distinctions between paradise and liberation.
Punishment, purification and separation in selected traditions
Explore Hell through Christian debate, Jewish Gehinnom, Islamic Jahannam, Buddhist suffering realms and Zoroastrian accounts without treating them as identical.
John Milton, Paradise Lost
The burning realm whose confinement continues inside the rebel who leaves it.
Japanese legends, Davis retelling
The heavenly setting of divine mourning and missions in Davis’s early legends.
Celtic fairy traditions
Irish royal landscape surrounded by stories of Sidhe processions.
Hollow-earth narrative, Willis George Emerson
The inhabited world inside the earth described in Olaf Jansen's voyage narrative as presented by Willis George Emerson.
Judgment, punishment and mercy in Islamic teaching
Understand Jahannam through Qur’anic warnings, hadith, intercession and Muslim debates about judgment, divine mercy and the duration of punishment.
Paradise in Islamic scripture and interpretation
Discover Jannah in Islamic teaching: gardens, divine pleasure, gates, companionship and the sources behind descriptions of paradise.
Dante, Inferno
The final frozen division, where the souls are entirely enclosed and Lucifer occupies the centre.