Humans have a longstanding love of the cosmos, the environment in which we live and wherein our earth finds its home. We have progressed from our earlier cosmology toward a contemporary cosmology through adopting technology enabling observation, modelling, and representation.

Back in 1493, this was the Christian Aristotelian understanding of the universe, which I found here:

Here the geocentric thinking of Artistotle and Ptolemy won out over the heliocentric thinking of Aristarchus of Samos. This set us back 1 300 to 1 700 years! Thankfully the Copernican Revolution set the ball rolling enabling us, relatively recently, to create a new and more accurate representation of the cosmos. Fortunately the thinking of modern detractors pushing back against the Copernican Revolution and later scientific contributors serves as a voice on the fringe to the mainstream. There’s simply no chance that modern detractors can set us back in our thinking. Hence we arrive at a new modelling and representation of the cosmos.

And now we have a similar representation, which I found here:

What’s remarkably similar within each is the perspective and the work of understanding the cosmos by integrating available knowledge. We (meaning humanity and the earth) are centred, roughly, in each artwork. This really brings home that our view of the world and view of the cosmos is really our view thereof – our world(view). It is a representation in our hearts and minds that’s communicable visually. Yet tons of in-depth thinking and numerous contributors guides the artist as aggregator in producing each. There is an interplay between talents of understanding and representation brought together in order to produce the maps above.

And though, in each case, the map is not the terrain, they are the vantage point wherefrom we are driven toward the Transcendent. It is here on this earth and within each of us that we discover our centre which serves as orientation on the mystery of the Transcendent and God.

The mystic is, really, a cosmologist at heart.