The images that follow explore the making of the globe in and beyond Western imaginations. Like the cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove (2001), we seek to draw attention to the importance of cosmography (the depiction of the heavens) in Western planetary aesthetics. There is a tendency to think of Indigenous and non-Western imaginations of the earth as mythical, mystical and infused with cultural ‘belief ‘, while Western scientific drawings of the globe are considered objective and universal. However, the history of globes and maps in all traditions are replete with imaginings of supernatural beings, otherworldly forces and nonhuman powers (see for example Figure 10). Meanwhile, non-Western traditions have also long been interested in representing planetary holisms. Here we explore icons/iconographies that emerge through the development of particular technologies of representation and historical experiences, yet configure distinct senses of planetarity. As we explain in Chapters 3 and 4, images like Madre Tierra, for example, seek to cultivate an earth politics on very different terms.

The drawing and text of Figure 11 is by Umar bin Muzaffar Ibn al-Wardi, an Arab historian. This work sums the geographical knowledge of the Arabic world of the time, referring to climate, terrain, fauna and flora, population, ways of living, existing states and their governments in individual regions of the world (Harley et al 1987). The original work is said to have been completed around the year 1419 AD, as stated on the earliest known copy which is dated 1479 AD (Harley et al 1987). At the centre of the map are Mecca and Medina, the two holiest cities of Islam. The north part of the map shows ‘China and India’, and the south part shows ‘Christian sects and the states of Byzantium’. The outer circles represent the seas. Islamic sacred geography differs from the Ptolemaic tradition in that it does not employ cartographic grids, or longitude and latitude scales; as a rule, these used Mecca and the Ka‘ba as the centre of the world (Virga 2008).

A key turning point in the history of representing the earth as a globe in the West, argues Cosgrove (2001), came with the lunar view of the earth provided by Apollo 8's ‘Earthrise’ image (Figure 12).