How the sailors discovered Purgatory

Bruce Lincoln wrote “Myth, History, Cosmology and Hydrology in Achaemenian Iran” ed. Michael Kozuh, Extraction & Control STUDIES IN ANCIENT ORIENTAL CIVILIZATION v. 68 (Oriental Institute of University of Chicago - pdf), ch. 14. This starts with a cosmology from Late Sasanian Iran to whit, the Bundahishn. This cosmology - credited to the now-lost Damdad Nask - was Euclidean. Lincoln argues that the Damdad Nask's hydrology was known to the Achaemenids a millennium before Khusro I. I deem this argument reasonable. As to whether I deem the Damdad Nask reasonable . . .

The key constraint of the pre-Classical cosmos is that Purgatory cannot exist. We live upon that middle-earth which divides heaven from hell. Uranus and Hades have no connexion beside Gaea.

Where you see myths of the dying-and-resurrected god, the drama plays out right here. The so-called "mythicists" would claim that the drama doesn't have to. In the preChristian world, it did have to; there existed no other stage possible. If Christ died, I don't know, at Tehuantepec or on Gor's STL3 libration-orbit then there should exist some mythology which tells us as much. Maybe post-Valentinian Coptic speculations. Which should count as much as The Book of Mormon.

Neolithic thinkers ate mushrooms or peyote and stylised this triverse as cruciform. Heaven is infinitely up; hell infinitely down, so middle-earth should be infinitely sideways. The middle earth would be flat. Because ancient astrologers were quacks who didn't give a fig, flat-earth worked right up to the moment seamen ventured out of sight of land. (I fully accept that the Polynesians were wiser than Persians and their Iraq.)

Coastal Greek philosophers soon allowed that an infinitely wide Earth wasn't needed, nor even wanted, because gods were greater. Since the curve of the earth does not (visibly) differ north-south and east west the Greeks concluded: sphere. That is: it is finite. The epicycles of the heavens are finite too; that famous minority-opinion of heliocentric cycles altered nothing here. The Greeks went so far as to measure Earth's [north-south] circumference. I don't know if they measured Saturn's orbit, which we now know is semimajor 9-10 AU or 8-11 if geocentric. If the ancients couldn't measure 10 AU they could muse that some number could be had, eventually.

A finite Earth (more exactly: a Saturn-bounded system) cannot interpose between heaven and hell. Then came a lively debate about whether our universe is, still, finite; not fully resolved among the public until Fred Hoyle got patted on the head and bidden a pleasant retirement.

Intuitively thermodynamics apply: creations wind down. If we inhabit a 20 AU diameter sphere of crystal and clockwork today, then something had to have wound it all up... at some point. Philosophers up to Hoyle never explained what, in an infinite universe, is still creating suns; nobody could catch the demiurges at the job. Theists had it easier: some gods said "fiat lux", one time, some finite number of years ago, and this is what we got.

Christianity inherited a Bible stating as much. A universe bounded in time, and spherical, cannot be a middle-earth. Heaven and Sheol could meet somewhere else.

Purgatory is made thereby possible. So also made irrelevant, to the cosmos, is the dying-and-resurrected myth. For those still interested, Easter could have taken place on some other plane.

The proto orthodox Church took in all these musings and came up with the compromise: Easter did happen and took place here, by God's mercy. Purgatory was accepted as real - but it is not a respite a mortal can count on. In fact the difference between "purgatory" and "Lovecraftian chaos" might not be constrainable.