World Turtle

An example of a reference to the World Turtle in Hindu literature is found in Jñānarāja (the author of Siddhantasundara, writing c. 1500): "A vulture, whichever has only little strength, rests in the sky holding a snake in its beak for a prahara [three hours].

Why can [the deity] in the form of a tortoise, who possesses an inconceivable potency, not hold the Earth in the sky for a kalpa [billions of years]?

[8] The Discworld book series, created by Terry Pratchett, takes place on a fictional world that is a flat disc sitting on top of four elephants astride the shell of a giant turtle named Great A'Tuin.

In the book Monday Begins on Saturday by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, a disc upon elephants on a turtle is said to have been discovered by a pupil who entered an ideal world of imagination.

The television series It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia references this idea in the episode “Charlie Rules the World”, as Frank Reynolds, arguing with Dennis Reynolds about what is real, claims that they could be in “a turtle’s dream in outer space.” Sturgill Simpson’s “Turtles All the Way Down” is a modern country psychedelic ballad from his 2014 album, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music.

Sturgill comes to a conclusion, choosing to encourage listeners to live their life the way they please, and don’t waste their time trying to find the answers, because “it’s turtles all the way down the line.” The regress argument in epistemology and the infinite regress in philosophy often use the expression "turtles all the way down" to indicate an explanatory failure based on an explanation that needs a potentially infinite series of additional explanations to support it.