Antipodes

The term antipodes refers both to an upside-down world at the other side of the planet and to its inhabitants, who supposedly live head down and feet up. The term, derived from the Greek anti (“against” or “opposed”) and podus (“foot”), appeared for the first time in Plato (ca. 427–347 BC), who used it to indicate a place diametrically opposite the city-state of Athens on the surface of the globe. Since then, the term became a crucial corollary of the theory of zones, the milestone of geographic speculation for almost 2,000 years. According to this theory, there are two temperate zones suited to human life, respectively in the boreal and in the austral hemisphere. The latter zone, called antichtone or antipodes, is unknowable because of the impossibility of crossing the Torrid Zone. Its scientific importance developed in parallel with its literary fortune: The antipodes challenged common sense and subverted the established order, becoming a great source of inspiration for artistic and social criticism.

A major problem arose when early Christian thinkers endeavored to reconcile hegemonic Greek-Roman geographical knowledge with Biblical topography. The existence of the antipodes contradicted both the common origins of humanity from Adam and the ecumenical aspiration of the evangelical message, jeopardizing the entire Christian vision of the world. Augustine of Ippona successfully proposed considering the antipodes as monsters. The presence of fabulous beings in faraway lands, attested to by ancient authorities, confirmed the great variety of products from the Creation and did not contradict any religious dogma. From then on and throughout the feudal era, the antipodes were represented as anthropomorphic freaks with deformed feet, turned backward.

Starting in the 11th century, revolutionary changes in the topography of the Christian afterlife, related to the invention of Purgatory, challenged the traditional geographies of the faraway. The rising merchant class needed a more sophisticated image of otherness to accompany its commercial expansion and found in the antipodes a transitional paradigm to shift from the late-medieval cosmology to a modern vision of geographical space. Antipodes become a question of puzzling political actuality in the second half of the 15th century, when Portuguese expeditions in Western Africa crossed the equator, demonstrating the fallacy of the theory of zones and opening the way to their conquests.

During the Renaissance, the antipodes acted as a powerful performative and rhetorical device that allowed imagining new possible worlds through a sophisticated system of inversions and a rich imaginary built throughout the centuries. At least four great myths nourished it: (1) the Universal Empire, revitalized by the rising national states; (2) the Golden Age that humanism borrowed from ancient thought; (3) the Jewish-Christian quest for Eden; and (4) the car-nivalesque land of Cocagne of medieval popular culture.

Practices and representations related to the antipodal imaginary reshaped naturalistic taxonomies and transformed the frontiers among animals, monsters, and human beings, contributing decidedly to the building of a new colonial order and of a modern subjectivity. As the material and symbolic appropriation of the world by European powers progressed, the antipodes progressively lost their importance. Nevertheless, it is precisely at the antipodes that the most powerful of modern myths originated—the myth of utopia.

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