Cosmology & Realms

This section holds the accounts traditions give of how the cosmos is built: the otherworlds, heavens and underworlds of the various mythologies, and the four worlds of Kabbalah through which emanation is held to descend. It gathers the realms themselves, the Norse nine worlds, the Hindu and Buddhist lokas, the Greek Hades, and many more.

Cosmologies disagree sharply, and productively, about how many realms there are, how they are stacked or arranged, who inhabits them, and how the living pass between them. The entries report each tradition's own map rather than reconciling them into one.

A cosmology is rarely just a description of space; it usually encodes a tradition's account of value, destiny and the moral order: what lies above and below, where the soul goes, what the axis of the world is. Reading several side by side shows both the recurring patterns (a world-tree or world-mountain, an upper and lower world, an intermediate place of the dead) and the sharp differences in what those patterns are made to mean.

Related material is close by: the largest cycles of cosmic time are under Cosmic Cycles, and the calendars that measure ordinary time under Calendars & Time.