Astronomical Myths: Based on Flammarions's "History of the Heavens"

by J. F. Blake; Camille Flammarion

In the map of the world in the Polychronicon of Ranulphus Uygden, now in the British Museum, it is stated: "The Island of Sicily was once a part of Italy. There is Mount Etna, containing the infernal regions and purgatory, and it has Scylla and Charybdis, two whirlpools."

Ulysses was said to reach the place of the dead by crossing the ocean to the Cimmerian land, Æneas to have entered it by the Lake of Avernus. Xenophon says that Hercules went there by the peninsula of Arechusiade.

Much of this, no doubt, depends on the exaggeration and misinterpretation of the accounts of voyagers; as when the Phœnicians related that, after passing the Columns of Hercules, to seek tin in Thule and amber in the Baltic, they came, at the extremity of the world, to the Fortunate Isles, the abode of eternal spring, and further on to the Hyperborean regions, where a perpetual night enveloped the country—the imagination of the people developed from this the Elysian fields, as the places of delight in the lower regions, having their own sun, moon, and stars, and Tartarus, a place of shades and desolation.

In every case, however, both among pagans and Christians, the locality was somewhere in the centre of the earth. The poets and philosophers of Greece and Rome made very detailed and circumstantial maps of the subterranean regions. They enumerated its rivers, its lakes, and woods, and mountains, and the places where the Furies perpetually tormented the wicked souls who were condemned to eternal punishment. These ideas passed naturally into the creeds of Christians through the sect of the Essenes, of whom Josephus writes as follows:—"They thought that the souls of the just go beyond the ocean to a place of repose and delight, where they were troubled by no inconvenience, no change of seasons. Those of the wicked, on the contrary, were relegated to places exposed to all the inclemencies of the weather, and suffered eternal torments. The Essenes," adds the same author, "have similar ideas about these torments to those of the Greeks about Tartarus and the kingdom of Pluto. The greater part of the Gnostic sects, on the contrary, considered the lower regions as simply a place of purgatory, where the soul is purified by fire."

Amongst all the writings of Christian ages in which matters such as we are now passing in review are described, there is one that stands out beyond all others as a masterpiece, and that is the magnificent poem of Dante, his Divine Comedy, wherein he described the infernal regions as they presented themselves to his lively and fertile imagination. We have in it a picture of mediæval ideas, painted for us in indelible lines, before the remembrance of them was lost in the past. The poem is at once a tomb and a cradle—the tomb of a world that was passing, the cradle of the world that was to come: a portico between two temples, that of the past and that of the future. In it are deposited the traditions, the ideas, the sciences of the past, as the Egyptians deposited their kings and symbolic gods in the sepulchres of Thebes and Memphis. The future brings into it its aspirations and its germs enveloped in the swaddling clothes of a rising language and a splendid poetry—a mysterious infant that is nourished by the two teats of sacred tradition and profane fiction, Moses and St. Paul, Homer and Virgil.

The theology of Dante, strictly orthodox, was that of St. Thomas and the other doctors of the Church. Natural philosophy, properly so called, was not yet in existence. In astronomy, Ptolemy reigned supreme, and in the explanation of celestial phenomena no one dreamt or dared to dream of departing in any way from the traditionally sacred system.

In those days astronomy was indissolubly linked with a complete series of philosophical and theological ideas, and included the physics of the world, the science of life in every being, of their organisation, and the causes on which depended the aptitudes, inclinations, and even in part the actions, of men, the destinies of individuals, and the events of history. In this theological, astronomical, and terrestrial universe everything emanated from God; He had created everything, and the creation embraced two orders of beings, the immaterial and the corporeal.

The pure spirits composed the nine choirs of the celestial hierarchy. Like so many circles, they were ranged round a fixed point, the Eternal Being, in an order determined by their relative perfection. First the seraphim, then the cherubim, and afterwards the simple angels. Those of the first circle received immediately from the central point the light and the virtue which they communicated to those of the second; and so on from circle to circle, like mirrors which reflect, with an ever-lessening light, the brilliancy of a single luminous point. The nine choirs, supported by Love, turned without ceasing round their centre in larger and larger circles according to their distance; and it was by their means that the motion and the divine inflatus was communicated to the material creation.

This latter had in the upper part of it the empyreal, or heaven of pure light. Below that, was the Primum mobile, the greatest body in the heavens, as Dante calls it, because it surrounds all the rest of the circle, and bounds the material world. Then came the heaven of the fixed stars; then, continuing to descend, the heavens of Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the sun, Venus, Mercury, the moon, and lastly, the earth, whose solid and compact nucleus is surrounded by the spheres of water, air, and fire.

As the choirs of angels turn about a fixed point, so the nine material circles turn also about another fixed point, and are moved by the pure spirits.