Mount Meru (also Sumeru or Sineru) is the sacred mountain at the centre of the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain cosmological universe — the axis mundi around which the cosmos rotates, the peak that connects the earth, the heavens and the underworld on a single vertical axis, and the home of the gods in their celestial palaces. This is not mythology in the sense of fiction: it is a complete cosmological system, as mathematically and geographically precise in its own tradition as the Ptolemaic system was in the Western one, and considerably older. The Meru cosmology appears in the Vedas, the Puranas, the Buddhist Abhidhamma and the Jain Agamas — the foundational texts of the world's oldest continuous religious traditions — and its structural features reappear in the sacred architecture of temples, stupas and pyramids across Asia and beyond.
In the Puranic (Hindu) cosmological system, the universe consists of a series of concentric landmasses (dvipas) and oceans arranged in rings around Mount Meru, which rises at the centre. The innermost continent — Jambudvipa, the Rose-Apple Continent — contains the known world. Surrounding it are six further continents and oceans arranged concentrically outward. The whole arrangement is a flat disc (or series of discs) with Meru as the vertical axis at its centre.
Meru itself is described as a golden mountain of inconceivable height — 84,000 yojanas (a unit of measurement that varies in definition across texts, but on any interpretation places the mountain far beyond any earthly mountain). Its summit is the abode of Brahma; its slopes are home to the other major devas. The sun, moon and stars orbit around Meru, producing day and night by their distance from the observer. Mount Meru's north is the region of perpetual day (the home of the gods); its south is the region of shadow.
The North Pole connection: a persistent strand of alternative cosmological research has identified Mount Meru with the geographic North Pole — or rather, with a polar mountain that flat earth and alternative cosmology traditions identify as the literal axis mundi at the centre of the known world. In medieval European cartography, including the famous Mercator map of 1569 and earlier mappamundi, a magnetic mountain (the Rupes Nigra or Black Rock) is depicted at the North Pole — surrounded by four landmasses separated by channels, with a polar vortex pulling water (and compasses) toward the central mountain. This medieval European polar mountain has structural similarities to Mount Meru, and alternative cosmologists have argued they are descriptions of the same geographical feature, accessible in some traditions through direct experience and in others through cosmological revelation.
The axis mundi — the central pole or mountain connecting heaven, earth and underworld — is one of the most universally distributed cosmological ideas in human history. Its appearance across independent cultures is one of the strongest arguments for either primordial common knowledge or universal cognitive structure:
Norse: Yggdrasil, the world-tree, connects the nine worlds on its trunk, with the gods in Asgard at the top, humans in Midgard in the middle, and Helheim below. Mesopotamian: the ziggurat — the stepped temple-mountain of Babylonian cities — was understood as a representation of the cosmic mountain connecting heaven and earth. The Tower of Babel narrative describes a ziggurat reaching to heaven. Mesoamerican: the Maya pyramid temples are axis mundi structures — mountains whose peaks connect the human world with the celestial. The Maya Popol Vuh describes a world organised around a central axis. Chinese: Mount Kunlun — the mythological mountain at the western edge of the world, home of the Queen Mother of the West (Xi Wangmu) — functions as the Chinese axis mundi. Greek: Mount Olympus as the home of the gods, the navel of the world (omphalos) at Delphi, and the Axis Mundi concept in Pythagorean cosmology.