Turtles All the Way Down: Myth, Modernity, Enchantment
In the opening of A Brief History of Time (1988), Hawking tells it like this:
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"
Hawking uses the story as a starting point. Most people would find the image ridiculous, he says, but then asks: “Why do we think we know better?” That question leads into the book’s larger concern – what we really know about the universe and how it began.
The joke works because it highlights a problem that every cosmology faces. Whatever you present as the foundation of reality, someone can always ask what lies beneath it.
The Emergence of the Cosmic Turtle
1. Central Asian, Mongol, Buryat, and Tungus Mythologies
Carrying the World Mountain: Mongol mythology describes a giant golden turtle located at the center of the universe that carries the world mountain on its back.
Historical Monuments: The base of the famous Orhon inscriptions is designed in the shape of a turtle, reflecting the Central Asian belief in a world-bearing turtle.
End of the World (Apocalypse): According to Buryat, Tungus, and Mongol myths, the sun will one day emit so much heat that it scorches everything. Affected by this intense heat, the world-carrying turtle will flip upside down, bringing an end to the world.
2. Hindu Mythology
Foundation of the Earth: The world stands directly on the back of a turtle.
Cause of Earthquakes: When the turtle carrying the world gets tired and lifts one of its feet, earthquakes occur.
Avatar of Vishnu: The god Vishnu takes the form of a turtle multiple times. In one instance, during the churning of the ocean by the gods, Vishnu transforms into a turtle to support the sharp tip of the world mountain so it does not pierce the ocean floor.
3. Ojibwa Mythology (North America)
Creation of the World: The Ojibwa people believed that at the beginning of time, a turtle created the world on top of its own shell.
4. Inaru Mythology (Latin America / Flood Myth)
The Floating Island Turtle: During a great deluge sent by God, the turtle refuses an invitation to board the ark. Instead, it floats and swims on top of the water like an island, surviving the flood due to its stubborn nature and swimming ability.
Why a Turtle?
A turtle visibly carries its own shelter, almost like a small world, on its back.
Its rounded shell and flatter underside resemble older ideas of a domed sky above a flat earth.
Its long life makes it an obvious symbol of something ancient enough to exist before the human world.
Because turtles can move between land and water, they fit creation stories that begin with a vast, primordial ocean.
The Disenchantment of the World
In “Science as a Vocation” (1917), Weber argues that the defining feature of modernity is Entzauberung: disenchantment, or literally, the “de-magic-ing” of the world.
This does not mean modern people understand more about the world than so-called “savages” understood about theirs. Weber explicitly says that, in many ways, we understand less. His example is the streetcar: most of us use one without having any real idea how it works.
What has changed is our belief that there are no mysterious or unknowable forces at work – that, at least in principle, everything can be understood, predicted, and controlled through calculation. The world is no longer seen as a landscape full of spirits that must be appealed to or negotiated with. Instead, it becomes a system that can be measured and explained.
For Weber, this comes at a cost. Science can tell us how the world works, but it cannot tell us what the world is for. Questions of ultimate meaning are pushed outside the boundaries of what knowledge can answer.
Durkheim and the Elementary Forms
Around the same time that Weber was describing what modernity had lost, Durkheim was asking a different question: before science, what role did religion play?
In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), he studied the totemism of Australian Aboriginal clans. In these communities, each clan treated an ordinary object or animal as sacred – a turtle, a crow, or a plant. The totem was not worshipped because of its special qualities; a turtle, after all, is simply a turtle.
Durkheim concluded that the clan was really worshipping itself. The sense of awe people felt toward the sacred object was, in fact, the force of their own shared social life: the feeling of being held by something larger than any individual, expressed through an emblem. Society is too vast and abstract to see directly, so it becomes visible through a symbol.
That feeling was renewed when people gathered for rituals. In those moments, the crowd could build a shared emotional intensity that Durkheim called collective effervescence. For him, this powerful experience was where the very idea of the sacred began.
The Sacred Transformed
When the scientist dismisses the turtle, he thinks he is correcting a mistaken belief about animals. But the turtle was never really about animals. It was a community’s way of seeing itself – a way of saying, “Something larger holds us up.” What is lost, then, is not simply a bad theory. It is an image that helped people feel connected to something stable and shared.
This is where Weber and Durkheim differ. Weber describes the loss: the world once felt alive, enchanted, and full of meaning, but science stripped much of that away. Durkheim explains why that loss hurts. These symbols were doing real social work. They made the bonds of the group visible and gave people a felt sense of belonging.
But Durkheim also leaves room for hope. If the sacred was always an expression of the group’s own power, and groups still exist, then the sacred cannot simply disappear. It changes form. The turtle may fade, but the same energy appears elsewhere: in flags and nations, in the celebration of individual identity, in political movements, fandoms, concerts, and football stadiums – anywhere people feel part of something bigger than themselves.
Weber’s story ends with a colder, more rational world in which magic has been lost. Durkheim’s invites us to look again: the magic never disappeared. It simply changed costumes.
The Anticipated Superintelligent Turtle
If the sacred simply changes form, it is worth asking where it might have moved most recently. One obvious answer is the machine: the growing belief in a future superintelligence.
The language around it often sounds almost religious. The Singularity becomes a kind of rapture; existential risk becomes apocalypse; alignment becomes the problem of theodicy – how to ensure that a powerful force remains good. A Durkheimian would recognise the pattern. The sense of awe comes from the collective force behind the idea: trillion-dollar valuations built on shared belief, research communities united by a project that feels larger than any one person, and crowds gathering – mostly online – to take part in something expected to change everything.
What makes this especially striking is that the object of this awe does not yet exist. A sacred object sustained entirely by belief in its future arrival is not simply an engineering project. It is a totem in its purest form.
Weber might find the irony even more revealing. Superintelligence seems like the final expression of disenchantment: the belief that everything, including the mind, can eventually be understood through calculation. Yet the path towards it is already bringing a kind of re-enchantment.
Almost nobody fully understands how today’s AI systems – even the systems believers see as only early versions of what is to come – produce their results. This is Weber’s streetcar problem at a much larger scale. People consult these systems like oracles and shape their prompts with the care once given to petitions addressed to spirits. What was meant to be a mechanism we could calculate has started to feel like a mysterious world we must learn how to address.
Calculation, taken far enough, has recreated the incalculable. Superintelligence, then, may be the most literal turtle ever imagined: an intelligence that needs no turtle beneath it, stands outside our stack of beliefs, and delivers a final answer.
Or was the Old Lady Right?
Before we return to her, there is a third way to read the story. Instead of seeing the turtle as either bad physics or a social symbol, we might take it as a genuine description of reality.
In Science and the Akashic Field (2004), Ervin Laszlo suggests that ancient cosmologies may have been sensing something real. He connects the Akasha in Hindu thought – the womb from which the visible world emerges and to which it eventually returns – to the quantum vacuum: an information-preserving field from which atoms, galaxies, living beings, and even consciousness arise.
From this perspective, the feeling that we are held by something larger is not simply society misunderstanding itself. It may be an incomplete but accurate sense of a real underlying connection. Science, then, is not destroying the turtle story; it is rediscovering what the story was trying to say.
Durkheim argues that the sacred survives by changing its form. Laszlo takes a stronger position: the sacred survives because it was never merely a form or a costume in the first place. He also disagrees with the old lady in one important respect. For Laszlo, the stack does have a bottom: the field itself, the final turtle beneath all the others.
This essay cannot settle the debate between the sociologist and the field theorist. Laszlo’s interpretation of physics is contested, just as Durkheim’s interpretation of the sacred is open to challenge. But it does not need to resolve that question. What matters is what both views preserve: the scientist was too quick to smile. The turtle was pointing towards something that a lecture on orbits could not address.
Whether what supports us is the felt force of the collective or a field beneath spacetime, it is still something we cannot step outside of and examine from a distance. In that sense, the old lady’s answer holds up under both readings.
Where Do We Stand Now?
This brings us back to the little old lady. The scientist thought he had won the argument, but her answer did something more interesting: it refused the idea that there must be one final foundation beneath everything.
“Turtles all the way down” is not really a theory of physics. It is a way of saying that whatever holds the world up was never something we could step outside of and examine from a distance. Hawking asked, “Why do we think we know better?” as a starting point for cosmology. Durkheim, however, might take the question literally.
We do not know better – not about the deeper question the turtle was trying to answer. Our physics is vastly more advanced than hers, but our answer to “What holds us up?” is not necessarily stronger. We have simply replaced her turtle with our own: the nation, the market, the feed, the fandom, the model. Each rests on the shared belief that supports it.
The cosmic turtle has returned in 2026 not because someone revived an old myth, but because it never truly disappeared. Disenchantment, it turns out, may have been only the space between one costume and the next.
If you want to see the turtle now, do not look beneath the earth. Look at a stadium when an entire crowd rises together, and ask what, exactly, everyone is standing on.
