PARADISE NOWHERE AND ELSEWHERE

Bayazid said, 'paradise is of no worth to those who love'. Rabia had a related saying: 'First the neighbour, then the house'. That is, the neighbour, or God, is more important than the house, or paradise.

FARID UD-DIN ATTAR, IRAN, TWELFTH CENTURY

BEYOND THE CLOUD OF THE PRESENT MOMENT

United States of America, 9 September 1971: an English musician releases an album whose first track is a three-minute song imbued with melody and poetry. War is escalating in Vietnam; nuclear weapons pose a serious threat to the earth's environment and humanity; authoritarian governments and big multinational businesses impose a fabric of exploitation and oppression everywhere. The message of the new song is a call for peace, a reminder that we are all one country, one world, one people.

The song, Imagine by John Lennon, soon becomes iconic, soaring to worldwide fame and commercial success. For some, it is still one of the greatest melodies of modern times. Through it, the Liverpudlian singer and songwriter urged his listeners to envisage '... all the people living life in peace' and challenged them to imagine, with him, a world without any other world: 'Imagine there's no heaven, It's easy if you try, No hell below us, Above us only sky'.

Is it possible to imagine a world where there are no other worlds? With no heaven or hell and with only the sky above? The history of religion shows that throughout the ages and in various places humankind has yearned for a timeless elsewhere. For several millennia human civilisations have borne witness to a deeply rooted longing, pressing against the boundaries of history and geography, moving in search of a beyond: a universal nostalgia for perfect bliss, remote either in time or in space. There have even been people who have maintained that there is nothing beyond the visible universe, and yet have nevertheless tried to open their own windows on to the horizon of some unattainable 'otherness'. All around the globe throughout human history and in the most varied of ways, people have longed for another world. They have imagined a perfect happiness existing somewhere at some time, as John Lennon did in his song of a world without religion and without the concepts of heaven and hell. Whatever the guise, secular or religious, a recurring trait across humanity has been to envisage perfect happiness at some past or future time, and/or in some remote place in the present.

In Hindu tradition, for example, original harmony and perfection, now lost, return to the world at the end of a series of cosmic cycles. Then, after the destruction of the universe, the earth will once again offer up its fruits spontaneously, and humankind will, no less spontaneously, follow the law and order of the cosmos. Hindu sources also refer to a mythical Mount Meru, located in the middle of the universe and surrounded by the cosmic ocean, on the peak of which is the paradise of Brahma, god of creation and of all supernatural beings. Tales of mountain islands inhabited by immortals, furnished with palaces of gold and where jewels grow on trees, are found also in Taoism and Buddhism. The ancient civilisations, such as those of the Chinese, the Sumerians, the Babylonians and Egyptians, all had their visions of other worlds. The Inuit of the Arctic lands, the Celts of central Europe, the peoples of South American forests and African deserts all have their 'paradises'. The Greeks and Romans conceived of a Golden Age and 'Islands of the Blessed'. As the perfect habitat for the first human couple, the Garden of Eden was a Hebrew tradition long before Christians adopted the Hebrew Bible as their Old Testament and closed their New Testament with the promise of a final perfection, to be established by God at the end of human history.

However described, all these paradises embody the past, refer to an inaccessible present and anticipate the future. In Europe, the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer drew attention to the way that the enchantment of distance reveals paradises which then evaporate like a mirage. Happiness, according to Schopenhauer, is always in the future or in the past, never the present, which he likened to a small dark cloud driven by the wind over a sunny plain: all before and all behind is bright light, only the cloud itself casts a deep shadow. Yet however gloomy the place, and however cloudy the season, humankind yearns for the brightness that went before and is promised to come, and continues to search for the light beyond the horizon.

THE VICISSITUDES OF A WORD

As far as we know, a term pointing to 'paradise' first emerged on the lips of the Medes, a powerful and, for us, enigmatic ancient tribe in the Middle East and central Asia. In the late second millennium BC – more or less at the time when, according to the Bible, Moses led the Israelites to their Promised Land and when, according to Homeric mythology, the city of Troy fell to Odysseus's ruse of the Wooden Horse – the Medes settled on the Iranian plateau. By the seventh century bc they had formed a political confederation that a century later was conquered by Cyrus the Great and transformed into the Persian Empire. The Medes are important to our story, as we speculate that a Median word, possibly *pari-daiza-, passed to the Persians (but here pronounced as pari-daida-) to signify an enclosure. From pari-, meaning 'around', and daiza-, meaning 'a wall made of a malleable substance', such as clay (and derived from diz-, 'to mould' or 'to form'), in ancient Iran the word stood for something surrounded by a wall.

Words travel, and are liable to change their meaning along the way. The Persians conquered Babylon in 539 BC, and Babylonian documents dating from after the conquest contain the word pardesu, here referring to a vineyard. Clay tablets written between the sixth and the fifth centuries BC in Elamite, one of the official languages of the Persian administration, feature the word partetas (corresponding to a related Old Persian word, pari-daida-), indicating a storage place.

Shared historical events – such as the Graeco-Persian wars and the return of the Hebrew exiles to Judaea after the Babylonian captivity – as well as trade gave contemporary Hebrews and Greeks the word 'paradise' in their respective languages. Thus the Jewish prophet Nehemiah, who lived in the second half of the fifth century BC, and the unknown author of the Song of Songs (c.400 BC) used the Hebrew pardes to describe an orchard, a place in which to grow trees. Paridaiza- also appeared in ancient Greek as parádeisos [pron. parádêsos]. The word was used in this form by Xenophon, the fourth-century BC Greek soldier and historian.

As a matter of fact, we are left with no direct textual evidence of the early Median or Persian usage of...