|
|
Thomas Burnet
1. Rivers flowing from Paradise
Genesis says that four rivers flowed out of Eden-Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, and
Phrath. Many scholars have struggled to identify these rivers with ones we
know, and most agree that the last two correspond to the Tigris and the
Euphrates. Pison, though, could be the Indus, Danube, Nile, or Ganges. And
Gihon might be the Nile.
If one of these is the Nile, though, scholars face the embarrassing problem
that the desert of Arabia, and the waters of the Red Sea stand between the
Nile we know and the traditional location for Paradise, in Mesopotamia
(today's Iraq). So how could the Nile start in Iraq and then appear in
Africa?
Lowes sums up the solution: "It must flow under ground and under sea. And
that myth of the subterranean-submarine passage of the Nile from Asia
through to Africa Coleridge certainly knew" 388 (from several authors,
including Burnet). The following passage, Lowes argues, may have suggested
an association between the holy rivers of Paradise, the Nile, and the river
that bursts up from the depths of the earth, then plunges down to caverns
measureless to man, in Kubla Khan.
Text
[The ancients] supposed generally, that paradise was in the other
hemisphere…and yet they believed that Tygris, Euphrates, Nile, and Ganges
were the rivers of paradise, or came out of it; and these two opinions they
could not reconcile…but by supposing that these four rivers had their
fountain-heads in the other hemisphere, and by some wonderful transjection
broke out again here. --Sacred Theory, I 226.
To this sense, also, Moses Bar Cepha often expresseth himself; as also
Ephiphanius, Procopius Gazaeus, and Severianus in Catena. Which notion among
the ancients, concerning the trajection or passage of the paradisiacal
rivers under ground, or under sea, from one continent into another, is to
me, I confess, unintelligible. --Sacred Theory, I 253. |
 Other sources
William Bartram
|