Nicolas Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) was a French astronomer founder of the French Astronomical Society, a prolific writer, and an advocate of the Spiritism, a doctrine heralded by Allan Kardec.
Flammarion was a man in continuous search for new horizons of understanding and was ready to explore some non mainstream science fields for the sake of discovering hidden paths for new discoveries. Some of his books still survive because they represent the prevalent ideas of his epoch, and in particular, the ideas of an adventurer of the night sky, and the cosmos.
Associated and sometimes attributed to him —and about picturing the mysterious cosmos— there is an enigmatic and perplexing woodcut, shown at right, that depicts a medieval pilgrim carrying a staff, crossing the border of the known universe and entering into another world. This explorer is just crossing the boundaries of a bubble, and he is inside this bubble, or sphere, as the Aristotelians called it. The border of our knowledgeable universe is just beyond the orbit Moon, and beyond all visible stars.
The pilgrim's land is almost flat, we don't see high mountains, we see just some small mounds and organized hills. The horizon is almost a straight line. Maybe that's the reason why some commentators say that Flammarion was an advocate and a propagandist of the flat-earth theory.
This assertion is quite unbelievable for an astronomer that should have known that on September 20, 1519 the naval commander and explorer Portuguese-born Ferdinand Magellan started an exploration for the crown of Spain with 5 ships and 256 men. Only one of the five ships managed to arrive to Spain again: it was the famous Victoria (Victory) with the crew greatly reduced to only 18 men.
Magellan did not complete the journey because he was killed in the Philippines. It was Juan Sebastián del Cano who managed to finish the exploration when he arrived on September 6, 1522, to the same place from where he departed: the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda.
The most important fact, from the cosmographical point of view, is that they were always traveling in the same direction: to the west. That expedition settled once and for all, (although this was not their original intention), the roundness on the Earth.
The Flammarion's woodcut picture is said to have appeared in the Flammarion's book: L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire (The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology) in 1888, but its true origin is not settled. The original artist is unknown, but possibly he worked under Flammarion's supervision. The original figure had no colors, colorization was added later by subsequent artists and amateurs: that's the reason why there are different coloring schemes for this wood engraving. The art is accompanied by the following caption: A medieval missionary tells that he has found the point where heaven and Earth meet... Well, that's what we at first glance see: a person crossing the border between Earth and Heaven.
The cover page of Daniel Boorstin's The Discoverers: A history of man's search to know his world and himself, uses this woodcut in his cover page as the paradigm of all man's searches. To Boorstin, every search or discovery is a trip to another world where the new findings may not reflect the searcher's world. For some other interesting color alterations of this woodcut, see the flat-earth woodcut as visual rhetoric.
The figure is very interesting for the many elements that it incorporates. Note that the pilgrim is crawling from a flat Earth into a world that seems to be spherical. From this flat Earth rises a tall tree that may evoke the myth of the Garden of Eden. The flat Earth, the stars and planets, even the surprised Sun are enclosed into an all-encompassing sphere that harmoniously keep together the day and the night elements.
Outside of his bounding sphere –the one that still keeps him bounded to the Earth– everything is new: there is no more Earth, no more vegetation, no more days and nights, the stars are different, there appear to be more and more bounding spheres and in the very upper left corner he sees the double wheel "described" by Ezekiel in the Bible.
The enigmatic Ezekiel's double wheel has been represented in many illustrations for many centuries before the "Flammarion woodcut" was carved. The description of the so-called Ezekiel's wheels is found in Chapter 1 of Ezekiel 15-18 and it goes like this:
As I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature with its four faces. This was the appearance and structure of the wheels: They sparkled like topaz, and all four looked alike. Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel. As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not change direction as the creatures went. Their rims were high and awesome, and all four rims were full of eyes all around.
The picture shown at left was done in 1627, some two hundred and fifty years before Popular Meteorology. The similarity of the wheels between both works is extreme. The wheel vision of Ezekiel captures the imagination of believers so powerfully that by 1900, the Reverend Burrell Cannon, from Texas, said that he'd been called by God to replicate Ezekiel's Wheel and tried to build an Ezekiel Wheel flying machine.
For the fate of Burrell's aeroplane take a look at Ezekiel Flys. Meanwhile, some paragraphs:
It was quite a machine -- an almost-circular flying-wing, with a secondary lower wing below. The supporting structure was a light tubular metal frame. The Book of Ezekiel had spoken of the construction being "as it were a wheel within a wheel." It'd gone on to say, "the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels." So Cannon created two pairs of wheels, nested below the wings.
....
Then, in 1902, one of Cannon's workers flew the machine. It gained speed, took off, seemed to drift in the air, began vibrating violently, and then crashed into a fence. The flight, if you can call it that, had covered a distance of 167 feet.
The machine that Burrell constructed is very far from the two intersecting wheels model that we see in Flammarion's woodcut and that Ezekiel describes.
Returning to the woodcut, the wheel artifact can better described as two mutually intersecting wheels, which possibly can move at two directions at the same time. This space pilgrim is asking for help because he doesn't understand the new world he is seeing. In this strange world anything can happen, and the metaphor of two mutually intersecting wheel that can move in two directions at the same time is the perfect one to describe the sense and idea of the impossible and the unreachable. For this reason, the pilgrim is entering this new world on his knees, with a humble attitude; like a child asking his father a helping hand to get him out of the ground.
At right is shown an illustration titled: L'arc-en-ciel from his book Atmosphere. (NOAA Photo Library)
His passion for the life in other planets led Flammarion to write ��among many other books –Les Mondes Imaginaires et les Mondes Reels (The Imaginary and the Real Worlds) in 1864 and Les Terres du Ciel (The Earth in the Sky) in 1884 among other.
Among his more than twenty publications, in 1904, Flammarion published an interesting astronomy book translated to English as: Astronomy for Amateurs, but that in the original French version the title meaning was Astronomy for Women. The book was dedicated to Madame C. R. Cavar, "original member of the Astronomical Society of France, Chateau de Mauperthuis." Romantic as he was he finished the Dedication of the book with: "[the book] can not be better placed than upon the table of a lady whose erudition is equal to her virtues."
Astronomy for Women was an astronomy book as the state of this science was at that time with lot of illustrations, constellation and diagrams, and we will not go into it except for two curious illustrations included in the book. The book was written for women in honor of many women astronomers he mentions. Among them are:
This picture at left was captioned The Earth viewed from Mars. Obviously, he tacitly assumed that there is life in Mars. The vegetation, palms and pine trees are clearly seen. In the distant horizon we see some light rays from a sunset.
In complete analogy with the reality we see here on Earth, when Venus is visible during sunsets, to the Martians the Earth must be visible during some sunsets.
The following excerpt from the book are a reference to this figure:
Among the finest and most interesting of the celestial phenomena admired by the Martians, at certain epochs of the year,—now at night when the Sun has plunged into his fiery bed, now in the morning, a little before the aurora,—is a magnificent star of first magnitude, never far removed from the orb of day, which presents to them the same aspects as does Venus to ourselves. This splendid orb, which has doubtless received the most flattering names from those who contemplate it, this radiant star of a beautiful greenish blue, courses in space accompanied by a little satellite, sparkling like some splendid diamond, after sunset, in the clear sky of Mars. This superb orb is the Earth, and the little star accompanying it is the Moon.
The "splendid orb" he is taking about is the Earth near the center of the figure.
Yes, to the Martians our Earth is a star of the morning and evening; doubtless they have determined her phases. Many a vow, and many a hope must have been wafted toward her, more than one broken heart must have permitted its unrealized dreams to wander forth to our planet as to an abode of happiness where all who have suffered in their native world might find a haven. But our planet, alas! is not as perfect as they imagine.
Respect to life in other worlds, Flammarion is more splendid in his convictions:
The substance of the terrestrial human body is due to the elements of our planet, and notably to carbon. The terrestrial human form derives from the ancestral animal forms to which it has gradually raised itself by the continuous progress of the transformation of species. To us it seems obvious that we are man or woman, because we have a head, a heart, lungs, two legs, two arms, and so on. Nothing is less a matter of course. That we are constituted as we are, is simply the result of our pro-simian ancestors having also had a head, a heart, lungs, legs, and arms—less elegant than your own, it is true, Madam, but still of the same anatomy.
In this paragraph he exposed his evolutionist convictions, and to the dismay of his lady, he is asserting that we all are tied to, and evolved from, ancestral environmental conditions.
His convictions are extrapolated to other worlds, because every conceivable world is subject to the same physical laws. In the next paragraph Flammarion is playing with the many possible life forms and evolution mechanisms.
The multitude of worlds is surely peopled by every imaginable and unimaginable form. Terrestrial man is endowed with five senses, or perhaps it is better to say six. Why should Nature stop at this point? Why, for instance, may she not have given to certain beings an electrical sense, a magnetic sense, a sense of orientation, an organ able to perceive the ethereal vibrations of the infra-red or ultra-violet, or permitted them to hear at a distance, or to see through walls? We eat and digest like coarse animals, we are slaves to our digestive tube: may there not be worlds in which a nutritive atmosphere enables its fortunate inhabitants to dispense with this absurd process? The least sparrow, even the dusky bat, has an advantage over us in that it can fly through the air. Think how inferior are our conditions, since the man of greatest genius, the most exquisite woman, are nailed to the soil like any vulgar caterpillar before its metamorphosis!
Even when he assumes in the paragraph above that we are descendants of 'pro-simian ancestors', he believes that we must be something special in this planet. ... the man of greatest genius, the most exquisite woman, are nailed to the soil like any vulgar caterpillar before its metamorphosis.
In the next paragraph he exposes the argument known as the Copernican principle that states that the Earth is not it in a central, specially favoured position. This principle is simply an extension of the fact that the Earth is not the center of the solar system, thus our position in place and time is not an exceptional one. Further extensions and modifications to this philosophical schools are the Anthropic principle, and the Mediocrity principle. Let's see how he exposed his ideas.
One important point seems always to be ignored expressly by those who blindly deny the doctrine of the plurality of worlds. It is that this doctrine does not apply more particularly to the present epoch than to any other, is of no importance, no absolute value. Eternity is the field of the Eternal Sower. There is no reason why the other worlds should be inhabited now more than at any other epoch.
To pretend that our globe must be the only inhabited world because the others do not resemble it, is to reason, not like a philosopher, but, as we remarked before, like a fish. Every rational fish ought to assume that it is impossible to live out of water, since its outlook and its philosophy do not extend beyond its daily life. There is no answer to this order of reasoning, except to advise a little wider perception, and extension of the too narrow horizon of habitual ideas.
The Anthropic Principle is an attempt to explain the observed fact that the fundamental constants of physics and chemistry are just right or fine-tuned to allow the universe and life as we know it to exist. Somehow, the laws and constants of nature are in necessary equilibrium to produce and sustain life so that at least one of this forms can observe and quantify the constants and the equilibrium.
On the other hand, this principle states that there is nothing special about humans or the Earth.
Going back to the Copernicus times, the dethronement of the Earth as the favorite of God's creation implied the rise of the Mediocrity Principle: we are just one of the manipulations and the outcome of the physical laws over an infinite time in an infinite place.
Another illustration I want to bring to the readers is more mundane and not so romantic as the woodcut shown at the beginning of the article, but it is more practical.
When I was a kid and I needed to remember the days of the months of the calendar, my mother taught me to use the knuckles of my hands for this. It was a simple trick that I had long forgotten, but to my surprise, Flammarion included in his Astronomy for Women a figure of how to remember it easily. See how easy is to remember how many days each one of the calendar months has. Note that in this figure every month corresponding to a knuckle has 31 days, and that each one of the months between knuckles are of 30 days each, except February, that sometimes is 28 or 29 days.
As an occasional commentary he observes that:
Returning to the calendar, it must be remarked in conclusion, that the human race has not exhibited great sense in fixing the New Year on January 1. No more disagreeable season could have been selected.
These months, again, are unequal, as every one knows. Witness the simple expedient of remembering the long and short months, by closing the left hand and counting the knobs and hollows of the fist, the former corresponding to the long months, the latter to the short: first knob = January; first hollow, February; second knob, March; and so on.
It is a pity that our modern science textbooks do not mention those "romantic" passages of the history of science. Mainstream astronomers are in a frenetic race to find planets in other places very far away from our Solar system, but their search are just for applications and verification of their mathematical formulas, and nobody is searching –in the spirit of Flammarion�� for vegetation in other systems. If Flammarion were alive and with access the modern intricate telescopes, possibly he would still be looking for life wherever there is, in any possible form.
At the end of the road, summarizing Flammarion's production, we can go back to the famous "woodcut" and conclude that the pilgrim in this figure is Flammarion himself. He explored the skies, annotated its stars and planets, deciphered the comets and the atmosphere. He went with his telescope and with his fertile imagination where other authors maybe never thought of, or were afraid of writing about it. He ventured to the impossible worlds beyond the limiting atmosphere and brought back captivating stories from other worlds. For his times, and for most of his readers, he was the messenger from the skies.
Kevin Krisciunas, in his article: Strange Cases from the Files of Astronomical Sociology mentions the following about the admiration that Flammarion rose among his fans:
The French astronomy popularizer Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) was the love object of a French countess who died at a young age of tuberculosis. They never even met, but 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 and bring it to Flammarion with the request that he have it tanned, and that it be used to bind a copy of his next book. (Part of the reason was that the woman had a picture of Flammarion tatooed on herself!) And so it happened. Flammarion's first copy of Terres du Ciel was so bound, with an inscription in gold in the front cover:
In pious fulfillment of an anonymous wish.
Binding in human skin (woman) 1882.
This bizarre anecdote remembers me that maybe is true the lemma I once saw at the beginning of a book:
Yes, there are other worlds, but all of them are within this one.
E. Pérez