Axis Mundi

The Axis Mundi — literally "axis of the world" — is an object or structure that, metaphorically or literally, represents the connection between heaven and earth or serves as a physical or metaphysical support for existence. In some cases, the Axis may very literally support the universe by holding up the sky or the world. Instead of or in addition to this, it may "pin" reality in place and provide it with metaphysical stability. The Axis Mundi also tends to be given spiritual or religious significance and may be a place of considerable mystical power. As a result, regardless of what precisely it does, the Axis becoming damaged or destroyed is always a very bad thing.

Physically, the Axis Mundi is typically something huge and imposing. The World Tree often serves in this capacity; giant mountains are also common. Artificial, or at least normally artificial, structures also turn up in this role; immense pillars and towers are the most common variants of this kind.

The Axis Mundi is one of the things that you can find at The Exact Center of Everything or at the innermost sphere of a Heavenly Concentric Circles arrangement. See also Cosmic Keystone, which covers all instances where a person, place, or thing plays a key role in maintaining the universe.

(A note on plurals: A singular axis that supports multiple worlds would be called an Axis Mundorum. Multiple axes that hold up a single world be called Axes Mundi. Many axes each holding up their own world would be called Axes Mundorum.)

Has nothing to do with greengrocers (fruit and vegetable shops) which are typically called mundi in India.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• The Incredible Hercules: During "Love & War" (issues #121-125), a group of Amazons seek the omphalos (the "Navel of the Earth") to rewrite reality. To do this they need to perform a ritual at the Axis Mundi, which is wherever Atlas is holding up the sky. Atlas was visible to George Washington when the foundation of America's central office of government was being officiated. He can also appear as analogous structures from other mythologies like the World Tree when reality gets weird.

Fan Works

• The Archmage's Last Bow: The Alicorn city of Elysium is given all manner of epithets that refer to how magnificent a city it is, such as "Scala ad Caelum", or the "Apex of the World", and even "Where the Cosmos Met the Earth". While the city itself is more of an Advanced Ancient Acropolis than anything by the present day of the story, it was deliberately built next to a massive hole where the mana that circulates under the planet's surface would erupt to protect the planet during an event known as Harmonic Convergence. King Sombra's plan is to assemble the Crown of Life, a ludicrously powerful magical artifact, and to use its power in conjunction with the massive amounts of power set off by Harmonic Convergence to bend the entire world to his whims.
• The Rise of Darth Vulcan: Vulcan's first reaction to the Tree of Harmony is stark terror because he feels like he's standing underneath a pillar of the universe and one good shove will send the world off its axis. He resolves that A) none of the other supervillains are getting it, and B) the Elements of Harmony need to be returned to it tute suite. He only barely succeeds in both goals.
• Shattered Skies: The Morning Lights: "The Lighthouse" is the name given to a crystalline sanctuary that sits at the nexus of The Multiverse. Its five arms, arranged around its central spire in the shape of an immense star, each end in a point that dips into one of the story's five primary universes, or "Vertices".

Film — Animation

• Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie takes place on Planet Freedom, which is divided into the Land of the Sky (a mass of Floating Continents where most of the population lives) and the Land of Darkness (the actual surface). An ice cap at the North Pole is the one place where the two Lands connect, and the only thing holding the floating continents in place. If the ice cap were to melt, then the entire Land of the Sky would be flung into space—so naturally, Dr. Robotnik and Metal Sonic try to make this happen in the climax.

Literature

• The Dark Tower: The titular tower acts as the lynchpin of all realities, holding together the many universes that make up existence. The primary antagonist, the Crimson King, seeks to topple the Dark Tower, end ordered reality, and rule in the "Discordia" that follows.
• Discworld: The Hub of the Disc is the ten-mile-high mountain Cori Celesti. It's both the Home of the Gods and the focal point of the Disc's Background Magic Field, hence why Magic Compasses point towards it.
• The Fall of Númenor: Meneltarma, the holy mountain in the center of Númenor, and the highest peak on the island. The Númenoreans viewed it as the most sacred site to Eru Ilúvatar and required absolute silence on it for all except the king during specific holy days. Animals did not approach it either, save for the Great Eagles that circled it as guards. After the sinking of Númenor, it was believed among the Númenoreans exiled that the Meneltarma rose again above the waters, since it was never sullied, not even when the Númenoreans had become greedy, imperialistic, Morgoth-worshippers.
• "The Groaning Hinges of the World", by RA Lafferty, is a fable where the turning point and axis of Europe runs through Germany. Periodically it flips and the shadow-Germany, populated by unreason and negativity, is flipped into the world and can cause lasting discord and chaos.
  It is the Germanies, the whole great country between these hinges that turns over, he wrote, after either a long generation or a short generation. The only indication of the turning over is a groaning of the World Hinges too brief to terrify. That which rises out of the Earth has the same appearance in mountains and rivers and towns and people as the land that it replaces...
• Labyrinths of Echo is set in a world where most magic is derived from a single wellspring of magical energy known as "the Heart of the World". It is physically located under a small river island, around which a sprawling metropolis (the eponymous Echo) rose up over the millennia since its discovery. Late in the series, it is revealed that the Heart is not a single point, but an actual axle going right through the planet, meaning that there is another wellspring of power on the diametrically opposite side of it, though because it's located under several kilometers of ocean, very few have ever been there or partaken of its much weirder powers.
• The Unicorn Chronicles: Literal case with the Axis Mundi, a World Tree that forms the very heart of the world of Luster; it sprouted when Elihu embedded a stolen seed into a piece of mass from a star and watered it with his own blood, and Luster grew out from it. When a gate is formed through it, allowing the Hunters to invade Luster, it very nearly destroys that realm. Elihu himself, along with others, eventually has to sacrifice his life to close the gate and heal the damage done to both the tree and Luster itself.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who: The Eye of Harmony on Gallifrey is the heart of power for the Time Lords and the "hitching-post of chronology", the central node of the structure of history as we know it. Only the Master and the Daleks have been crazy or stupid enough to screw with it.
• The Leftovers: The Season 2 opener is called "Axis Mundi", and it's implied to be that this is how the characters, especially Nora, feel about Jarden ("Miracle") in Texas, a town where nobody departed. The rest of Season 2 is about dissecting the understandings and beliefs of the miracles in Miracle and why it might have been chosen (if it even was).
• Star Trek: Voyager: In "Thirty Days", Tom Paris is incarcerated in Voyager's brig for an unknown crime, that isn't revealed until the end of the episode. As we see in flashback, Voyager visited a planet, known as "the Waters", that, as one can tell by the name, is completely water; no landmasses or atmosphere. It's being held together by a containment energy field. Unfortunately, the humanoid beings who live there, the Moneans, are in danger of losing their home, because of an unknown crisis that releases water from the planet. When they collaborate on a mission to figure out what is causing the loss, they find a 100,000-year-old computer-driven structure in the center of the water mass that seems to be generating the containment field. Furthermore, the structure is deliberately releasing water to ease pressure, caused by the Monean's oxygen refineries extracting the gas from the water. When the Moneans refuse to do anything to fix their problem, Paris, along with one of the Moneans, attempts to destroy a refinery in violation of the Prime Directive, only to be stopped by Voyager, whereby Janeway demotes his rank and sentences him to thirty days of solitary confinement in the brig.
• Torchwood: Miracle Day has "the Blessing", a giant tube-shaped hole through the Earth, running from Buenos Aires to its antipode in Shanghai. It looks organic inside and supposedly emanates a "morphic field" that influences all life on Earth. The villains of the story tried to make everybody on Earth immortal by introducing the immortal Jack Harkness's blood to it, but only managed to give the human race Age Without Youth. Another infusion of Jack's blood reverses the process.

Religion & Mythology

• Historic Judaism gave this role to Jerusalem's Temple Mount, which was believed to be the place where God began the world and later where Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac.
• Mount Meru is a sacred mountain considered by many traditions among the Dharmic religions to be the center of existence. It's not usually identified with any particular physical peak, although some traditions do so, most commonly associating it with Mount Kailash in Tibet, which is considered to be the place where all the Dragon Lines of the world converge. Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu temples have often been built in manners that symbolically represent the mythical mountain, usually in the form of a large spire or peaked building in their center.
• Norse Mythology: Yggdrassil is a massive, cosmic tree that holds the nine realms upon its branches and roots.
• Irish Mythology: The Stone of Divisions was the exact center of the cosmos and the source of creation that both separated the mortal world and the Otherworld and linked the two together. The stone bearing this name that sits at the hill of Ushnagh is meant to represent not only the center of Ireland where the four provinces meet, but this cosmic structure as well.

Tabletop Games

• Ars Magica: Magi of House Criamon believe that their home base, the Cave of Twisting Shadows, is the fabled Axis Magica — the hub of all magical energy in the world and a bridge to the realms beyond. This is speculative, as are most quirks of Criamon philosophy, but the Cave is an exceptional Place of Power.
• Dungeons & Dragons: The centre of the Outer Planes in the Great Wheel cosmology is the Outlands, a Portal Crossroad World where Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos are in balance. The centre of the Outlands is an infinitely tall spire with a De-Power Zone powerful enough to keep even visiting gods on their best behaviour.
• Exalted: At the precise center of Creation, in the heart of the Blessed Isle, stands Mount Meru, the world's largest mountain — its roots alone are the size of lesser mountain ranges, and it can be seen, distant or looming, from every part of the Isle. It is also the Elemental Pole of Earth and, in addition to pinning Creation in place alongside the other four poles, the metaphysical influence of the stubborn, hard, and unchanging element of Earth serves to stabilize the laws of nature around it; Creation grows increasingly orderly as one approaches Mount Meru, while heading away from it gradually breaks down and dissolves into the Wyld. In Return of the Scarlet Empress, one of the key steps of the Ebon Dragon's plan to bring about Hell on Earth is destroying Mount Meru.
• Mage: The Awakening: In Astral Space, the Spire Perilous is a zone of no fixed form that links humanity's collective subconscious to the World Soul. Legend holds that it was the true Axis Mundi, bridging all realms of existence for Dimensional Travelers, but it shattered when Man Grew Proud and abused it to invade the Supernal Realms.
• Pathfinder: Pharasma's Spire is an impossible tall stone tower in the Outer Planes, at whose peak sits the Boneyard when Pharasma holds her court and judges the souls of the dead. It plays an integral part in the setting's cosmology — all mortal souls pass through it on their way to the other Outer Planes and, as they do so, the spire grows infinitesimally taller each day. One day, unguessable far in the future, some prophecies say that it will grow tall enough to reach the far side of the hollow sphere that makes up the outer layer of the cosmos and pierce it, causing the universe to collapse like a bubble pierced by a needle.
• RuneQuest: In the atemporal depths of divine prehistory, an immense mountain sat in the precise center of the world — all other mounts are simply tiny, imperfect copies of this first great peak. It was home to the court of the gods, until Wakboth the Devil destroyed it at the onset of the Great Darkness, leaving a ragged, gaping hole into the Void at the heart of the world. This threatened to consume everything, until the sea god Magasta led his kin into filling the hole up with the waters of the oceans.
• Warhammer Fantasy: The planet's poles have the Chaos Gates, a pair of enormous shattered portals built by the Precursors, where the Winds of Magic flow into the world from the Realm of Chaos. They also let Chaos and its denizens into the world, hence why the Arctic and Antarctic are nigh-uninhabitable Eldritch Locations.

Video Games

• The titular artifact of Elden Ring represents the collective rules of reality within the Lands Between. It's been shattered for ages, leaving some rules of reality suspended. One of them is Destined Death, and is the reason everything within the Lands Between has Resurrective Immortality. The Elden Ring itself is unusually small for this example, being only about six feet/two meters across you can tell because the missing Top God is crucified on it, though it's housed inside the appropriately grand Erdtree at the center of the map.
• The Elder Scrolls: The Adamantine Tower ("Ada-Mantia") on Balfiera Island in Iliac Bay was constructed by the surviving et'Ada (now Aedra) following the creation of the world. It is said to "define reality in [its] Aurbic vicinity" and to be where linear time first began, before spreading throughout the rest of creation (meaning it is older than time itself). There, the et'Ada held "Convention", during which they decided to punish Lorkhan for his treachery during creation. The Adamantine Tower remains on Balfiera, and, although the exterior is weathered, the interior remains almost exactly the same — a single great, seamless, impregnable spire of ageless metal which is at least half-embedded in the ground. It is entirely smooth, except for one point known as the "Argent Aperture" which is thought to be a door. (Despite the best efforts of mages and scholars throughout history, it has never been opened.) Many years later, the mortal races discovered a means to construct their own "Towers" in emulation of the Adamantine atop the "joint-points" of reality, granting them power and being involved in the plots of several of the games.
• Gamedec: The Axis Mundi is the background program that keeps all the virtual worlds in the Metaverse running; you visit it in the fourth case.
• God of War: The Greek era has two Axes Mundi: the Pillar of Olympus, which supports the Temple of the Fates as well as the whole surface of the Earth, and the Chain of Balance, a titanic chain connecting Olympus on one end and the Underworld on the other one. Kratos indirectly destroys the first one by killing Persephone and breaks the second one in his quest for Pandora.

Webcomics

• Kill Six Billion Demons: Creation Myth holds that The Multiverse radiates outward from Throne, an extradimensional World in the Sky with a vast central tower. For aeons, it was populated only by angels and dead gods; since the Multiversal Conqueror Zoss made it his base of operations, it became a City of Adventure.
  Cio: For all creation is akin to a burning wheel. The Flame Immortal is its axle. Throne its hub. Its spokes — the great flames of the Gods. The heat that nourishes their creation... and its heirs.

Web Original

• Codex Inversus: In the World Before, Olympus Mons served as a very literal connection between the mortal world and the higher planes — it rose so high that its summit rose entirely outside of the world and ended in Heaven, allowing for a direct physical link between the habitations of mortals and those of blessed souls and angels. It was utterly destroyed in the last, cataclysmic battle of the War in Heaven, when the leader of the devils, Eosphorus, caused himself to detonate by transforming all of his mass into energy; doing so wiped out the opposing angelic army and blasted Olympus Mons into oblivion, which in turn began the great Collapse of the multiverse that saw the planes buckle, shatter, and fall inwards into a single patchwork world. Today, the former location of the great mountain the Olympus Crater, a vast basin still teeming with magical energy.

Western Animation

• Transformers: Prime: Following up to its appearance in Transformers: War for Cybertron, the Core of Cybertron is explained to contain the essence of the Transformer creator-god Primus. In the Grand Finale, Unicron attempts to send an army of undead Predacons into the Core to destroy Primus once and for all, while the Autobots, alongside Knockout and a group of Vehicons, desperately attempt to stop him. While the most urgent goal is naturally preserving the existence of their creator (because without him Cybertron will remain a dead world), it's also made clear that the Core also holds Cybertron together in a physical sense.

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