by Jon Lackman | 30 June 2006 | Books
From the Economist: “For 3,000 years people have tried to imagine what paradise might look like … As Alessandro Scafi shows in his erudite history of the Christian effort to map paradise [Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth], pre-modern mapmakers focused on spiritual navigation, not the secular kind. They tried to portray time and space in a way that is still beautiful, but can seem baffling. Their maps showed God, history, and human woes and joys, often biblical ones. The Garden of Eden was a real place, just as Adam was a real man … Kevin Rushby’s book [Paradise: A History of the Idea that Rules the World], by contrast, starts earlier, spreads wider and ends later. His enjoyable and informative canter through three millennia of intellectual and religious history highlights the many ways, ingenious, beautiful, wrongheaded or mad, in which humans have tried to define paradise, seek it or, latterly, create it. The idea predates Christianity, coming from ancient Babylon, where a paradeiza was an enclosure used for easy hunting. That idea of abundance, or ‘endless bacon’ as Mr Rushby nicely puts it, is a persistent thread. It comes up again in the Muslim idea of flowing streams and plentiful virgins, though he notes that huri (Persian for nymph) may be a Koranic mistranslation of the Aramaic for ‘white raisin.’”
