Cosmas Indicopleustes and the Bal-Chatri that is the World

Cosmas Indicopleustes, in his Topographia Christiana, surveyed his world and discovered it to correspond to the plan of the Tabernacle in Exodus. His cosmology has the virtue of being theologically and aesthetically pleasing even if it is scientifically laughable. The world is shaped like a coffin. It is a coffin. A receptacle for the living God and the dead human. From the ontological viewpoint of I Am that I Am on Mount Sinai how can Everest not look like a foot-hill? A great pile of earth piled at the edge of a vast shallow grave, waiting to be shovelled in. The Indicopleustes surname indicates 'he who sailed to India'. There is considerable doubt that he would have seen the boy's umbrella - the bal-chatri- which was used to catch hawks there and which is still in use, though a common shape, an example of which I possess, is in fact shaped like Cosmas' world and the Tabernacle. You place a couple of rats in it, preferably a male and a female, so they'll keep each other active in a tableaux of dervish copulation. The rat, familiar of Satan, disease vector of homo sapiens, and consubstantial for the most part with that species condition.