It is still there, in the European place-names which dispossessed the Indian ones. In the seventeenth century, the neat, orderly and wholly bland appearance of the early atlases portrayed an imaginary landscape that pushed the social and economic contrasts and political disorders of real life out of mind. By the late eighteenth century, standardized shading had reduced the entire urban scene, with the houses and workplaces of the great and the poor, to a mythical uniformity, another landscape of the mind. In Search of an Earthy Paradise Finally, but fundamentally, maps have been used from the beginning to portray the imagined worlds of religious man. Like the question of the shape of the geographical world, the structure of the cosmos has varied according to the sacred myths and the teaching of the gods in each society.
Cosmological maps tend to be schematic in style and often symmetrical.
Common to many cosmologies, especially in Asia, dominated by the heights of the Himalayas, is the concept of a central mountain, the vertical axis of the cosmos, like the Mount Sumeru of the Buddhists and the Mount Meru of the Hindus. Muslim cosmological maps placed Mecca at the centre of the Earth because of its position opposite the centre of the sky. Of vital concern to every believer is the journey from this world to the next. Maps have been made to guid the newly dead. In the New Hebrides early in the twentieth century, the labyrinth design was still being sketched out in the sand to teach initiates.