ABSTRACT 054NF TR GREAVES, ed.
[email protected] Paradise Found: a study of the prehistoric world, William F. Warren, 1885; Boston,
Houghton, Mifflin and Co. 505pp, illustrated, indexed
Doctor Warren, like many before him, and, no doubt, many more to come, wondered in earnest fashion where in the world the legendary Garden of Eden had been situated. So he set to work to find it and the result was a strange and wonderful book. Once president of Boston College and a scholar of international reputation, Warren was well equipped for the task and labored manfully to correlate ?modern? scientific data and discoveries with old sources of tradition concerning the Terrestrial Paradise,- sources within and without the Judeo-Christian corpus. Like much of the scientific output of his time, War-ren?s is superceded and obsolete. On the other side of the ledger, scholars of his period were oftentimes better schooled in Classical lore than our contemporaries. Many spoke, read and wrote Latin, if not Greek as well. Warren?s work remains valuable just for this religious and mythic material dredged up from even older and rarer sources. The illustra-tions of mythical geography and cosmology are particularly intriguing. But we must re-ject the conclusion that Eden was situated at the North Pole (!), although Warren was hardly alone in this view. Mercator suspected it, for one. A major problem for the Doc-tor?s thesis is the embarrassing fact that there is NO LAND at the North Pole,- only ice?. But Tradition is so adamant concerning the Garden?s location at the ?center of the earth?, the umbilicus orbis terram, that one of the two Poles seems the only viable candi-date. Warren does his best to prove that the North polar climate was originally temper-ate, but we remain unconvinced. Most of the ?science? in Paradise Found may be ignor-ed; for the mythologist and student of religion the book remains useful and a pleasure to read. Students of science will find it unintentionally amusing.
KEYWORDS
Terrestrial Paradise/ Mt. Meru/ Eden/ the navel of the earth/ Homer/ Columbus/ Hinduism/ flora and fauna of the Far North/ the Four Rivers/ the Tree of Paradise/
Tartaros/ ancient climatology/ Akkadia/ Delphi
