Point your camera at the celestial pole and expose for star trails and you will conjure the polar axis. The Earth turns around this central point that underpins many of our concepts of the cosmos. It separates the earth and sky, points to the four directions and provides for our seasons (because it is tilted 23.5° from the solar plane.)

Scholars have found common metaphors in many world cultures that make reference to the polar axis. They call it the World Tree for in many myths it is represented as such as in the Judaic and Christian Tree of Paradise, or the Scandinavian giant ash tree, Yggdrasil. The Mayans represented it by a giant stalk of maize. There seems to be in all myths a central point that holds aloft the stars, or in the case of Plato, the perfect god that rotates the Celestial Sphere.

Other myths have a metaphor for the polar axis as the self-fertilizing point of creation or the union of earth and sky (which one is Mother and Father varies in different myths) out of which come the stars, sun, moon, and planets. Such poetry!