|
|
|
|
Camille Flammarion: Romantic Astronomer
Camille Flammarion was a romantic - a turn-of-the-century French astronomer who loved the stars, life on other worlds - and women.
 Camille and Gabrielle Flammarion So, depending on which website you happen to land on when seeking Flammarion, you may find a sober scientific astronomer who stuck to his telescope and calculations, earning himself a top scientific prize in 1900 for his observations and experiments and getting named after him an asteroid and two craters -- one on Mars and one on the Moon; or you may find a passionate and prolific populariser, a turn-of-the-century Carl Sagan who wrote reams of immensely popular books, not only on astronomy but also on such occult topics as life on other worlds, the afterlife, and psychic phenomena & spiritualism.  Flammarion's famous woodcut: find, or forgery? But what about his arguments for life on the Moon and on Mars? Regarding life on the moon, the case now seems pretty much closed. For Mars, Flammarion envisioned "an earth almost similar to ours with water, air ... showers, brooks, fountains ...." By 1892, in "The Planet Mars and its Inhabitability" (1892), his prose is less florid and his claims less certain, suggesting its so-called canals "may be due to superficial fissures produced by geological forces or perhaps even to the rectification of old rivers by the inhabitants for the purpose of the general distribution of water ..." Yet, about those supposed "inhabitants," he concludes: "The habitation of Mars by a race superior to our own is in our opinion very probable." At the other end of the evolutionary ladder Flammarion had, early on, envisioned extra-terrestrial life-forms inferior to ours. In "Real and Imaginary Worlds" (1864) and "Lumen" (1887) he imagined a series of missing links between plants and animals, including plants that feel, and that digest and breathe in a single process. Like Herbert Spencer in the late 19th century, and Henri Bergson in the 1930's, Flammarion believed in a "creative evolution" in which species evolve in an endless continum from "lower" to "higher" forms of life. Like those thinkers, and like many folks still, he believed evolution was not just random but was goal-oriented, aimed at a final product that was the highest form of intellectual and spiritual life. This 19th century belief in Progress, a form of Utopian idealism, today seems romantic or naive, maybe even absurd. "Quaint," to use a current euphemism. Not that Flammarion believed any of us are now perfect, or that some of us are so saved or so good that after death we shall go directly to heaven. Like other forms of life, we are all on a ladder aimed toward the sky, toward perfection. His Martians were, like angels of old, farther up the ladder to heaven, to perfection, than we humans. Whether he believed in "fallen" individuals or species, Martians or human, is doubtful. We humans are high up, "citizens of the sky," but Martians are higher, and beings on other worlds higher still -- all of us being but "studios": workshops where souls learn to be better. Whether any of us ever become godlike, or ever meet God, or even whether there is a God who designed all this, is not clear. Like other 19th century thinkers tinged by Eastern thought and religion, Flammarion also believed in "metempsychosis": the transmigration of souls. In his "Tales of the Infinite" (1872) he described how a spirit might re-incarnate in different forms on other worlds. As he grew older and came closer to the "dreadful boundary," he became more and more interested in spiritualism and psychical research, and apparently attended many a seance in which so-called "mediums" claimed to have contacted and even "materialized" the spirits of the dead. He wrote many books on this, including the 3 volumes of "Death and Its Mystery" (1920-1921). Though warning the reader of the unscientific nature of the mediums' claims, he was neither a total sceptic like the illusionist Harry Houdini, nor an utter believer like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, an impressionable physician whose own wife was a medium and who -- unlike his protagonist Sherlock Holmes -- was so spell-bound by anything supernatural he even believed in fairies -- and in the two girls who claimed to have seen and photographed them. Photographs of "ectoplasmic" apparitions of dead spirits were then all the rage, as one can see from the recent exibition and catalogue of them by the Metropolitan Museum in New York -- reviewed in "Summoning the Spirits" in the February 23 issue of The New York Review of Books, which mentions Flammarion as the "leader of the [spiritualist] movement in France." But Flammarion, who had spent decades analyzing blurry spectral photos of stars, first at the Paris Observatory, and later at his own observatory (donated by a wealthy admirer) at Juvisy, was not fooled by them.   The cover of "We are all Citizens of the Sky," originally called "Astronomy for Women." The American edition added an introduction on women astronomers. In the background is his observatory at Juvisy. Flammarion, so far as I know, was no womanizer. But he could have been, had he taken advantage of the hundreds of women enraptured by his 70-odd popular books. Here's how one of them responded: "Flammarion earned the amorous attention of a French countess who died prematurely of tuberculosis. Although they never met, the young woman made an unusual request to her doctor, that when she died he would cut a large piece of skin from her back, bring it to Flammarion, and ask that he have it tanned and used to bind a copy of his next book. (The woman also had a picture of Flammarion tattooed on herself!) Flammarion's first copy of Terres du Ciel was bound thus, with an inscription in gold on the front cover: 'Pious fulfillment of an anonymous wish/ Binding in human skin (woman) 1882'." Imagine that! Giving one's beloved the skin off your own back. Here, at last, a real message from the dead, from one who's gone beyond? And, finally, a true Valentine for Camille? Sorry I don't have a photo of her, her tattooed back, or the skin-bound volume. If you come across one, please share it! Love to all, from DIonysia Xanthippos Valentine's Day, Feb 14, 2006 Sources on the web: -- The account of the countess who bequeathed her skin is quoted from the fine article on Flammarion in The Encyclopedia of Astrobiology, Astronomy and Space Flight: www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/F/Flammarion.html -- Also recommended, even if you don't read French, is the source of my two photos, the illustrated bio by the French government, "Camille Flammarion" at: www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/flammarion/cflam/camille.htm |
Library
~ Table of Contents ~
TYCHE & OEDIPUS
Fatal Boar Hunts, Fatal Loves: Meleager & Adonis A Valentine for Camille Flammarion The Met returns its Euphronios vase! The Eye of God Is Ganymede the Boy from Marathon Bay? THE ANCIENT OLYMPIEIA FESTIVAL AT ATHENS Which satyr would you choose... The Marathon Boy and the Satyr Contrapossto from Praxiteles to Rubens and Playboy The Afternoon of a Faun The Dancing Satyr - A Lost Bronze of Praxiteles? Hermes, The Liar Who Invented the Lyre Inanna Adored: The Uruk Vase The Moon-God Nanna-Sin Visits his Ziggurat at Ur Apollo Sauroktonos, or How the Romans Killed the Lizard-Killer Jacob's Ladder Lilith: Wild Demon of Sex and Death DUMUZI FEEDS INANNA'S SHEEP The Sun God in his Dragon Boat Lassalle's Post-Modern Male Torso Brancusi's Torsos: Pure Platonic Forms? Brancusi on Men and Women: Take the Tate Test? Four Gods Greet the Rising Sun God Rilke's Archaic Torso of Apollo Culsu & Vanth Lead the Dead into Hades Aita, the Etruscan Hades Socrates' Apology: The Background THE GREEK SPHINX Hypnos & Thanatos, Sleep & Death The SPHINX and The ROBOT PYTHAGOREAN HARMONICS: FROM PYTHAGORAS TO NEWTON Orestes Pursued by Furies in The Eumenides |
