“That good anchorite, who boasted of having been as far as the end of the world, said likewise, that he had been obliged to stoop low, on account of the joining of the sky and earth in that distant region.”
— Francois de la Mothe Le Vayer, 1662
The lovely engraving of a pilgrim — having come to where the flat Earth meets the sky, peers through to the cosmos beyond — was originally popularized by Carl Jung in his fanciful book Flying Saucers, published in 1959. Since then, it’s appeared everywhere, just about, on book covers, record albums, podcast logos and in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s re-telling of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos TV series. Finding the origin of the engraving turned out to be a detective story in its own right. Was it made in the 15th or 16th century during the German Renaissance? Did the Rosicrucians create it?
Two independent researchers, Bruno Weber in Zurich, and Arthur Beer in Cambridge, finally nailed it down in 1973. They established that the engraving first appeared in 1888 in (in English) The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology by the French astronomer, parapsychologist and popularizer of science Camille Flammarion (1842-1925). Flammarion learned engraving as an apprentice in Paris from the age of 12, so it’s possible he engraved it himself.
The accompanying text illustrates what Flammarion was trying to explain. “Whether the sky be clear or cloudy, it always seems to us to have the shape of an elliptic arch; far from having the form of a circular arch, it always seems flattened and depressed above our heads, and gradually to become farther removed toward the horizon … .” This, incidentally, is one explanation for the “moon effect,” where the moon appears larger near the horizon than overhead.
He goes on, “A naïve missionary of the Middle Ages even tells us that, in one of his voyages in search of the terrestrial paradise, he reached the horizon where the earth and the heavens met … .” Here, Flammarion is spoofing the earlier belief held by Aristotle, Ptolemy and even Copernicus, that the stars are bright lights embedded into a celestial sphere that rotates every 24 hours. This sort of makes sense if you think that the stars are fixed, unchanging in their relative positions. It took modern telescopes to show that stars aren’t fixed, and that the night sky 5,000 years ago, or 5,000 years hence, would look very different to us. (Another version has the celestial sphere perforated with holes through which an eternal fire can be seen.)
Somewhat more radical is the argument by the modern science historian Stefano Gattei that Flammarion is illustrating the infinitude of space, that is, that the universe is unbounded. This goes way back to the ancient Greeks, but was restated explicitly by pagan philosopher Simplicius of Cilicia around A.D. 500. “If I came to be at the edge [of the universe], could I not stretch my hand out [beyond the edge]… .” In Flammarion’s engraving, the pilgrim apparently sees no end to the universe — beyond the sun and stars lies an infinity of wonders.
So there’s a lot in Flammarion’s picture, beyond its beauty as a work of art. Now that it’s been “found,” expect to see a lot more of it in the future.
Barry Evans (barryevans9@yahoo.com) invites you to visit his Humboldt-themed Substack blog: planethumboldt.substack.com
This article appears in ‘Fire Teaches Us Many Lessons’.