Many ancient cultures possessed the notion of there being a symbolic world centre – a "world navel" or omphalos as it was called in the Classical age. Although strange to us, of all the ruling themes of ancient thought, it was one of the most fundamental and pervasive.
    The ancient mind perceived the world navel motif at all scales. At the largest, cosmic, level the north or pole star, Polaris, was often its symbol for peoples in the northern hemisphere, because it marks the fixed position around which the heavens appear to rotate. Even as far south as Vijayanagara, India, the axis of the ancient royal city is aligned towards Polaris, which at that latitude appears low in the sky, shining above the Virabhadra temple on the summit of a nearby holy hill.
    At the next stage down, the landscape or territorial level, the world navel took many guises. The tree offered itself as one symbolic image of the motif in the form of an axis mundi linking heaven and earth. The Yakuts of Siberia, for instance, conceived of a magical tree at the "golden navel of the Earth", but the most famous northern World Tree is doubtless the Norse Yggdrasil, the mighty ash tree, where the gods met. The pagan Celts, like many other peoples, made this mythic tree tangible in the form of a pole: for example, in the Iron Age ritual landscape of Navan Fort, in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, a massive oak post 36 feet tall was erected. The tree from which it was fashioned was 200 years old at the time it was felled, and had probably been a sacred tree. The giant post would have formed a powerful ritual landmark. It is quite likely that the Christmas tree and the European maypole are latter-day reflexes of sacred trees and the ceremonial poles that derived from them.
    Versions of the axis mundi, in the form of a pole or tree, also figured in several American traditions. The ancient Maya envisaged a mythic "Central Tree", and deep within their ritual cave of Balankanche, in the Yucatan, the Maya found its physical image in a remarkably tree-like fused stalactite-stalagmite, which they ardently venerated.
    Hills and mountains provided another landscape feature suitable for symbolising the ancient motif of the world navel. In pagan Ireland, the hill of Uisnecht, Westmeath, has on it slopes a large boulder called Aill na Mireann, the Stone of Divisions. An ancient text refers to this stone as "the navel of Uisnecht". The most famous World Mountain of all, though, is Mount Meru, the mythical sacred peak of both Hindu and Buddhist cosmologies. Its physical representative is Mount Kailas in the Himalayas, which pilgrims still circumambulate, often in the arduous form of repeated prostrations.

Contemplating the National Navel

Many lands have an optimum geographical centre point which may or may not coincide with the symbolic territorial omphalos. Because of this, the true location of the English or British navel is an uncertain matter. The Venerable Bede identified the site of Lichfield Cathedral in Staffordshire as the centre of England, but the place often touted as the geographical centre of England today is the village of Meriden, Warwickshire. The Roman surveyors, on the other hand, identified the centre as Venonae, where they placed the crossing point of two of their great roads, Watling Street and the Fosse Way. This is now known as High Cross, an isolated point on the Warwickshire-Leicestershire border where four parishes meet.
    Of all the candidates for the British omphalos, my personal preference is for the little-known Croft Hill, a few miles southwest of Leicester. In writing about this solitary hill in 1879, local historian, T.L.Walker, observed that in ancient Gaul there was said to have been a "mesomphalos" in the centre of the country, on the River Loire, where the Druids met. "This Mesomphalos was an isolated hill in the midst of a plain . . . The idea of such a Mesomphalos was said to have been borrowed from Britain."
    Walker was sure that Croft Hill was this lost British mesomphalos. There is strong supportive evidence for his idea in that not only does Croft Hill stand near the River Soar, it is close to the village of Leir, a version of "Loire". Croft Hill was also important in past times: in A.D. 836, King Wiglaf of Mercia held a council there attended by dignitaries including the Archbishop of Canterbury and other bishops, and was also used as an open-air court as well as the site of an annual fair. Further, it sits almost exactly midpoint between the Norfolk coast in the east and the Welsh coast in the west, and only five miles from High Cross. The name "Croft" apparently comes from Crebre, a Celtic word comprised of two elements, bre, "hill", and cre, which may derive from craeft, "(rotating) machine". In nearby Croft village there is an Arbor Road, and "arbor" also refers to the axis around which a wheel turns. Taken together, these clues hint at a former symbolic hub or fulcrum association with the hill. Croft Hill gets my vote as being the pre-Roman navel of southern Britain.

Town and Temple

In following a reducing scale of the world navel motif, after cosmos and landscape, we come to town and temple. The Etruscans of pre-Roman Italy dug a ritual pit called the mundus ("world" or "universe") when founding a city, from which point the usually grid-iron street plan was laid out. Following this tradition, the Romans also put the equivalent of a mundus at the centre of their towns, where the north-south (cardo) and east-west (decumanus) roads crossed (cardo gives us the cardinal points).
    The classic example of a city as a world navel is Jerusalem. The Jewish perception of this is conveyed in Hershon's Talmudic Miscellany:

The land of Israel is situated in the centre of the world, and Jerusalem in the centre of the land of Israel, and the Temple in the centre of Jerusalem, and the Holy of Holies in the centre of the Temple, and the foundation-stone on which the world was founded is situated in front of the ark.

    There was, indeed, a widespread association in the ancient world between temple and world navel. In Hindu towns the central temple represented Mount Meru, just as the tallest tower at Angkor Wat in Cambodia also represented Mount Meru. In Greece and the eastern Mediterranean area, temples often displayed "navel stones" or omphaloi. In their classic form, these were usually domed stones a few feet high. A legend associated with the oracle temple of Delphi says that Zeus released each of his two eagles from the opposite ends of the Earth, and where their flight paths met was deemed to be the centre of the world, and was marked with a stone. There are two surviving omphaloi at Delphi.

Body Image

If the sky and land are the macrocosm, and the city and temple the mesocosm, then the human body is the microcosm, and as such it was always regarded by the scholars of antiquity – the Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, "Man is the measure of all things". The human body is the hub of the four bodily directions of front, back, left, right. These have been conceptually projected on the outer world as the cardinal directions. We are all at the perceptual centre of our world. In other words, world centre symbolism has a physiological basis, and that is why it is a universal motif.
    At birth, the navel or belly button is at the centre of the infant’s body, but in the course of maturation its relative position moves up the body. The canonical (ideal) drawings of the human form by masters such as Leonardo da Vinci and Dürer give the navel a phi (ø) or Golden Section relationship in the proportions of the body. In ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Japanese traditional canonical systems the navel is similarly associated with the phi division of the body.

All in the Mind

Finally, the world navel motif reaches its most fundamental level – the mind. This is particularly well revealed by shamanism, that most ancient of religious expressions still found in many tribal societies worldwide. The basic cosmological model of shamanism is of three worlds connected by a "vertical" axis: the underworld, the middle world of human existence, and the upper world of the gods. The shaman used this axis mundi to access the upper and lower worlds while in his out-of-body trance. Indeed, in some Siberian tribes, the frame of a shaman's drum was believed to have been fashioned from a branch of the World Tree.
    The representation of the universal world navel motif at different scales and in differing forms is like a series of conceptual gear wheels that used to orient people in space, time, and spirit. Our modern globalised culture, which is eccentric in the literal sense that it has lost its centre, should perhaps consider re-inventing the inherent psychology of the perennial ancient wisdom of the world centre motif.

Paul Devereux is the author of many books on ancient sacred sites and traditional lifeways. The world navel is just one of four key themes of ancient thought he explores in depth in his recent book, Living Ancient Wisdom (Rider, 2002). See the review on page 57.