Fate & Fabled

I have a tattoo you haven't seen yet.

This is my "turtles all the way down" tattoo.

No, it does not go all the way down.

That would've been very expensive.

The phrase probably rings a bell if you're a fan of John Green or Stephen Hawking.

Maybe you know the story about the woman who raises her hand after a lecture on the solar system to say that the world actually rests on the back of a turtle.

Skeptical, the lecturer asks, "Well, what's that turtle standing on?"

And the woman swerves his "gotcha" by saying, "It's simply turtles all the way down."

Co-opted over and over, this phrase has deep roots in folklore about the cosmic turtle from around the world, except none of those myths actually feature an infinite stack of turtles.

So what's the origin of this mysterious phrase?

And more importantly, is my tattoo wrong?

[bright music] It makes total sense to me that turtles are seen as magical creatures.

They hatch from the ground as if they were created from nothing.

Most of them can walk on land and swim in water, and they move like they have all the time in the universe to finish their business.

Which is basically true because Jonathan, the world's oldest known tortoise, -is a spry 191 years young.

-[audience applauding] So many cultures saw turtles for the deserved story divas they are, like the Japanese Yokai Minogame-- so ancient, a long trail of seaweed grows from its back, or Wayamba, the first turtle in indigenous Australian lore.

But only a handful took their turtle myths so far as to believe they lived on the back of one.

So where did this idea begin?

In the late 19th century, anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor claimed that stories about these cosmic or world turtles originated in India.

One oft told stories written in the Hindu Pranas is about the time when the Devas, or gods, were poisoned and all life was threatened.

Vishnu the Preserver devised a plan to retrieve the elixir of life from the milky primordial ocean.

It was a simple plan, really.

Fear not for I am Vishnu and I know what we need to do.

Step one, convince our sworn demonic enemies to help us.

I mean, that sounds tricky, but doable.

Fantastic.

Step two, uproot Mount Mandara.

You don't want to start with, like, a tree or a boulder or something?

No?

A mountain it is.

All right.

What's step three?

Last, you must find a poisoned snake long enough to wrap around the mountain.

No rope.

I have my reasons.

Oh, that one's actually easy.

We'll go get Vasuki.

Clearly the only hitch in this foolproof, giddy-up of a plan was that the mountain and its turning snake rope needed something sturdy to rest on.

Vishnu took the form of Kurma, a great tortoise strong enough to hold the entire mountain on his back.

Thanks to Vishnu's cunning and Kurma's kelonian endurance, the Deva's power and immortality were restored.

But holding up a mountain isn't the same as holding up the world.

Elsewhere in Hindu lore, the Earth is said to be a flat plane help up by four or sometimes eight elephants, representing different directions.

Each of the elephants stood on the shell of a great turtle named Akupara.

Some even believed that the turtle was the cosmos.

Earth was the turtle's bottom shell, people lived in its body, and the upper shell was beyond our atmosphere.

In these Hindu stories, we see turtles supporting mountains and elephants, and though in some art they may be standing on a snake, what we don't see is them standing on other turtles.

Nor do we see them making or becoming the land themselves, which is a common motif in many Native American myths.

To several indigenous groups across the North American continent, the land I'm on right now is known as Turtle Island, because, well, you'll see why.

The Haudenosaunee people, called the Iroquois by the French, lived around what is now the New York/Canada border.

In their cosmology, Earth was originally nothing but ocean.

And a race of sky people lived on an island in the sky, free from sickness or aging.

No one died and no one was born.

And I need to take some notes for our utopia episode later this season.

One day, a sky woman realized she was pregnant, with twins, no less.

Her husband was furious and cast her down to the ocean below.

Two seabirds caught her and enlisted other animals' help in finding her a more stable place to rest.

Another simple plan was hatched.

Collect a fistful of mud from the bottom of the ocean and use it to make a continent.

The first part, at least, was easier said than done.

Several animals bravely attempted the dive, but it was the toad who succeeded, gathering the mud in the holes on his back.

The strong and steady turtle had the animals smear the mud on its back, and the mud spread as big as a continent, and sky woman gave birth to two sons, Sapling and Flint.

Together they made the sun, moon, and everything else on Earth, all thanks to that selfless turtle.

The Ojibwe, or Anishinaabe in the Midwest, tell a similar story that incorporates another recurring myth theme, the great flood.

In order to rebuild the world after the Creator God destroyed it, a man named Nanaboozhoo convinced the surviving animals to dive beneath the floodwaters and grab some mud.

All of this mud stuff is a common trope in mythology, by the way.

They're a recognized category of creation stories called the Earth Dover Myths, with examples across the globe.

I know it didn't happen this way, but I like to imagine that long ago someone really did see an inter-species group of animals jumping into the water one by one, like the swimsuit contest in the Miss Animal Kingdom Pageant.

Thank you for your answer, Miss Toad.

Now, Miss Muskrat, if you were going to rebuild the Earth from scratch, what would you use?

I'm gonna go with mud.

It can expand exponentially with magic, and it's literally the only solid substance that we have.

And we have our winner for Miss Animal Kingdom for the year minus 10,000-- Miss Muskrat.

[celebratory music] In the Ojibwe story, it was the underdog muskrat who succeeded against all odds.

Again, the turtle volunteered to serve as the foundation for the new land.

Question is, was that turtle resting on a stack of other turtles?

Nope.

It was just floating on the water.

Which is a perfectly acceptable metaphor for the fabric of space-time, in my professional opinion.

The Hindu turtle Akupara's position isn't so easy to explain, suspended in the cosmic void under her elephants.

From the 16th to 19th centuries, word about India's world turtle myth spread.

It was well enough known that people like John Locke and Henry David Thoreau referenced it, but importantly, people originally claimed not to know what the turtle stood on.

By the mid 19th century, the myth seems to have been conflated with a folktale about some woman who responds to a lecture by claiming that the Earth sits on a stack of rocks all the way down.

In 1854, a preacher wrote about the heathens who believed that Earth rested on the back of a turtle with another turtle underneath that one, and so on, all the way down.

He was doubly wrong, because he added turtles and left out the elephants.

But this is the origin of the modern saying, "Turtles all the way down."

It alludes to a widespread sacred belief, but unfortunately muddies it with a misinterpretation through a Western lens.

So what about my tattoo?

I didn't get it to commemorate a particular myth.

I got it to honor the study of mythology in general.

When I was but a wee folklore major in college, taking an Introduction to Ethnography course, I read a paper from 1973 by anthropologist Clifford Geertz on how to observe and understand other cultures.

He made the point that no matter how much time you spend studying a culture, there will always be deeper layers to uncover.

And he illustrated it with the smeared version of Akupara's legend.

To my classmates and me, "Turtles all the way down" became shorthand for remembering your place as a visitor and learner in someone else's culture.

That felt like a lesson worth remembering forever.

In so many ways, this phrase about folklore has become folklore itself.

So no, my tattoo isn't wrong, but I might add a little elephant at the top anyway, just for fun.

Now it's time for our next Pantheon Pick.

Dr. Z, it is your turn to choose.

This one might seem a little bit obvious for this episode, but I'm actually gonna pick Vishnu.

-Oh.

-I like that he's protector, I also think the different avatars could be helpful.

But the balancing energy might be something that we need with some of our chaotic deities.

Also really big into meditation, which I think that inner perspective would be great.

Plus, I'm hoping he'll come with Garuda, his bird stead.

Oh yeah, okay.

Great choice.

I'm so excited to see how that works out in our utopia.

(Dr. Z) Same.

[laughing] I can see the light.

Yeah, that's why.

I'm like a hammerhead, Everybody But doable if we're careful.

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