God as a Turtle
I was reading an interesting article by Gerald R. Baron recently about the origin of the laws of nature. In it he relates an anecdote in the life of the psychologist William James. After a lecture he had given, a woman presented him with her cosmological viewpoint, that we live on a crust of earth, which is on the back of a giant turtle, which stands on the back of a larger turtle, which stands on another, and so on ad infinitum: “it’s turtles all the way down”. The major flaw in this argument is that it suggests infinite regress, a concept which is considered to be implausible, philosophically speaking.
We can all agree that this woman has got things wrong, but it’s possible that she was on to something but merely confused. She has probably seen a piece of artwork with a giant turtle in it in this cosmological context, and got the idea from there. She may even have been familiar with a Babylonian cosmological myth, in which the Earth is flat and is held up by elephants standing on a giant sea-turtle. I would argue that, provided we are talking symbolically, this myth is an accurate description of the universe, and closer to the truth than the anonymous lady’s version. She seems to have confused turtles with elephants, which are the true intermediaries between God and the lower realms. In reality there is only one turtle, and many elephants.
How do we understand this myth? (I have discussed it in more detail in this earlier article, so I will be brief here.) It describes various levels of a hierarchical universe. The flat Earth should not be interpreted as meaning that the ancients did not understand that the planet is (approximately) spherical, rather that the Earth symbolises the material universe, the lowest level of reality. This material level is held up by elephants, which I interpret as supported or sustained by elephants. This would be a level of gods and goddesses, or cosmic principles (archetypes). Even if the reason for the symbolism is not obvious, elephants do seem to represent the creative level of the gods. This is most obvious in Hinduism.
The myth further says that the elephants are “standing on a giant sea-turtle”. The gods and goddesses could only be generated by, thus supported by the ultimate source, namely God, however you understand that term. Why is the turtle an appropriate symbol of the Divine? In many spiritual traditions there is an ultimate Ground of Being, conceived of as a self-contained emptiness or nothingness, complete in itself. Yet in another aspect, this emptiness is also the One, the creative source behind all that is. There are thus two aspects of the Divine, the first we might call introverted, and the second extroverted. What a perfect symbol for this is the turtle, which is equally capable of and comfortable with withdrawing its head inside its shell, or leaving it outside looking outwards into the world.
The turtle is thus a perfect symbol of God, the ultimate infinite reality. There is only one turtle, and it stands on nothing; it is the point beyond which no further regress is possible or necessary.
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