The Underworld

 

The Book of Genesis in the Old Testament begins as follows. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." In the Christian account of the creation of the universe, the earth itself is described as a world of darkness, considered to be chaos. The world underground, however, occasionally provides glimpses of itself, in the eruption of volcanoes in ancient times and in excavations by humans since the early modern period; it is full of countless curiosities. Another example is the world of minerals that so impressed the people of the ancient Mediterranean world. Already in the very creation of the universe, the mineral world of nature had repeated ad infinitum the polyhedral geometry that man was finally able to discover during the Renaissance.

 

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Copyright 2003 Mark Dion & The University of Tokyo