World Turtle
People all over the world share a piece of myth and folklore that is so incredibly inviting for the imagination that it has inspired a slew of fantastical and speculative mirror images within modern media and philosophy. I am, of course, referring to the World Turtle, or the Cosmic Turtle, and its pacidermal counterparts. For those of you who are blissfully unaware of this myth, I shall explain:
The world is carried through space on the back of a giant turtle/tortoise. Sometimes it rests on the backs of four-to-eight elephants who stand on the shell of the turtle. The world is a dome or disk. Where the turtle is going on its immeasurable journey through the cosmos is unknown, and we can only speculate as to what will happen when we get there.
I am not a religious person, but this seems like a world-myth that 6-year-old me would have gotten on board with way easier than the whole “some man in the sky made the world in six days” bullshit that they taught me at catholic school. It’s a truly fantastic myth. It has everything: animals, mystery, a journey, flat-earth-ness. Perhaps this is why the myth is found in Hindu, Chinese, Lenape, Iroquois, and Anishinaabe mythologies.
This myth has also inspired a slew of artistic and philosophical offshoots. My favorite is Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, but the motif has been used by other speculative fiction writers such as Stephen King, John Green, and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The philosophical phrase “turtles all the way down” is a direct reference to this myth.
The thing that really interests me is the idea that if the universe is infinite and there are also infinite dimensions, there could very well be a World Turtle. Perhaps there is a dimension in which humanity has developed on the Cosmic Turtle, and these memories are seeping back into our spherical world via these mythologies. On the other hand, this could be an argument for the collective consciousness, or rather a collective imagination. The thing about this myth that makes it so interesting is the absurdity combined with a feeling of inexplicable rightness. Turtles and elephants are absolutely the correct animals. It wouldn’t feel right if they were replaced with four alligators on the back of a giant camel. The world would be far too unstable, for one thing.
My hope for the future is that we meet a World Turtle. It comes swimming up to our planet from the depths of space, blinking slowly. Knowing humanity, we would find some way to ruin the experience, like trying to colonise the disc or hunting the giant elephants for ivory. To finish off this blog post, I’d like to cleverly link back humanity’s capacity for imagination and violence to the phrase “it’s turtles all the way down”, but I can’t quite get the phrasing right. So, just imagine that’s what I’ve done.
If you were to create a world-myth like this one, what would it look like? What animals would you pick? Do you believe that this myth is true? Are we on the turtle now? The turtle moves!
[originally posted to Patreon on 19/4/25]
