University of Virginia Library

II

It seems ironic that one of the last voyages to employ
the supernatural as a device for journeying to the moon
should have been the work of a great scientist. Johann
Kepler's Somnium was published posthumously in
1634, though it had been written much earlier. Kepler
had hesitated to publish it during his lifetime since it
contained veiled references to his mother who had been
condemned as a witch and would have been executed
had it not been for the heroic efforts of her son. As
the title indicates, the work was in the form of a dream.
The author says that while he had been reading Bohe-
mian legends, he fell into deep sleep, and dreamed that
he was reading a book on magic. The story concerns
a young man named Duracotus, whose mother was a
“wise woman,” who supported herself and her son by
selling mariners little bags of herbs containing charms.
Upon one occasion when her young son pried too
curiously into the bags, Fioxhilda, a woman of un-
governable temper, gave the boy to a sea-captain in
place of one of the bags. Duracotus—a disguise for
Kepler himself—made a voyage to Denmark with the
captain. He was set ashore to deliver letters to the
astronomer Tycho Brahe, with whom Kepler actually
spent several years at the observatory, Uraniborg,
learning the principles of astronomy. After five years
Duracotus returned home to find that his mother had
long repented her rashness. He discovered that she
knew as much astronomy as he did, since she was in
league with the “daemons of Levania,” spirits of the
moon, whom she could call and with whom an occa-
sional mortal travelled to the moon.

From the daemon who appeared at his mother's
summons, Duracotus learned that mortals who trav-
elled to the moon were given a “dozing draught,” so
that they remembered few details of the journey.
Although this still sounds like magic, it was not. Kepler
was pondering the effect of gravity upon a human body
as it left the “attractive power” of the earth, consider-
ing too the probable effects of rarefied air upon human
physique. He considered “weightlessness,” since once
the daemons had lifted their passenger above the “at-
tractive power,” they needed no extra force but carried
the passenger without effort.

Fantasy and realism are mingled in the first part of
the Somnium, but when Duracotus reaches the moon,
fantasy falls away and we find ourselves on the moon
Galileo had seen through his tube. Seasons, length of
days and nights, climates are different from anything
known on earth. The moon-world is divided into two

zones, “Subvolva” and “Privolva.” In Privolva, “night
is 15 or 16 days long, and dreadful with uninterrupted
shadow.” No sun or moon shines there. All is intensely
cold. In Subvolva the situation is less drastic, thanks
to “Volva,” the moon, yet the cold is more extreme,
the heat more intense than anything experienced by
man in this world. The terrain is much like that of
earth, but the mountains tower to heights higher than
Everest, the declivities are more profound than any
terrestrial Grand Canyon.

In one detail Kepler departed from Galileo, since
he continued to posit atmosphere on the moon, and
believed that certain forms of life were possible. There
is nothing corresponding to human life in Subvolva,
but there are plants and animals. Some appear at dawn,
only to die at night. Others seem to bask in the hot
sun, then disappear into the caverns as evening comes.
The animals are of serpentine nature, like great lizards
or antediluvian monsters. The Somnium is a dream
with nightmare touches, the scale of everything on
exaggerated size, the lunar terrain forbidding and the
prehistoric creatures monstrous.

The influence of the Somnium continued well down
through the nineteenth century. There are reminis-
cences of its moon-world in Jules Verne's From the
Earth to the Moon (1865), although Verne's is a dead
world; if ever life existed there, it was in the remote
past, and is now extinct. The last specific reminiscences
to be found are in H. G. Wells, The First Men in the
Moon (1900). Wells's lunar landscape reflects Kepler's,
particularly in its mingling of beauty and terror. Wells
posits the existence of vegetation growing to incredible
heights in a single lunar day. When Bedford and Cavor
land, they think the moon lifeless, but as they watch
at dawn, what had seemed to be dry sticks and pebbles
prove to be seeds, showing lines of yellowish green.
The arid land becomes a combination of desert and
jungle, with plants and flowers growing in lush profu-
sion. When the lunar explorers are seized and thrown
into subterranean caverns, Cavor's mind goes back to
his reading. “Yes,” he said, “Kepler with his subvolvani
was right after all.”

The idea of a supernatural voyage continued for
some time, particularly among Roman Catholic writers
such as Athanasius Kircher (1601-80) an important
Jesuit traveller, Egyptologist, and scientist, whose Itin-
erarum exstaticum is in the tradition. The hero The-
odidactus set off with an angel guide upon a cosmic
tour as part of his education, an idea which Voltaire
perhaps picked up in his Micromégas. But the only
supernatural voyage that can vie with Kepler's in liter-
ary merit is Milton's in Paradise Lost, in which there
are Keplerian reminiscences. When a group of fallen
angels set out to chart the new world into which they
have fallen (II. 570-628), they find “fierce extremes,
extremes by change more fierce,” heat and cold, tow-
ering mountains and caverns vaster than any known
on earth, “a frozen continent... beat with perpetual
storms... a gulf profound as that Serbonian bog.”
Here the “parching air Burns frore, and cold performs
the effect of fire”:

In the meantime Satan, travelling in a different
direction, has met Sin and Death, and arrives at the
gates of Hell (II. 629-1055; III. 540-742). When Sin
opens the doors, even the intrepid Satan is momentarily
appalled, but after his first amazement

Satan was surprised to find that the intervening air was
“neither sea, nor good dry land,” requiring him to make
use of every part of his body for navigation:
Satan's is a cosmic rather than a moon-voyage. Unlike
many mariners he did not pause at the moon. He takes
He proceeds to the sun, where an astronomer observing
him would have taken him for another of Galileo's
sunspots. The world of the sun Satan found “beyond
expression bright.” Within the light he saw “a glorious
angel stand,” the archangel Uriel. From him Satan
learns about the new world which God has created
for man, to take the place of the fallen angels. The
unsuspecting Uriel gives him directions, and Satan
completes his cosmic journey by landing in