Myths and Marvels of Astronomy
greater, then, in a sixfold greater degree than their strength, and, so
far as their mere weight was concerned, their condition would have
resembled that of an ordinary man under a load five times exceeding his
own weight. As no man could walk or stand upright under such a load, so
the Brobdingnags would have been powerless to move, despite, or rather
because of, their enormous stature. Applying the general considerations
here enunciated to the question of the probable size of creatures like
ourselves in other planets, we see that men in Jupiter should be much
smaller, men in Mercury much larger, than men on the earth. So also with
other animals.
But Swedenborg's spirit visitors from these planets taught differently.
'The horses of our earth,' he says, 'when seen by the spirits of
Jupiter, appeared to me smaller than usual, though rather robust; which
arose from the idea those spirits had respecting them. They informed me
that among them there are animals similar, though much larger; but that
they are wild, and in the woods, and that when they come in sight they
cause terror though they are harmless; they added that their terror of
them is natural or innate.'[28] On the other hand the inhabitants of
Mercury, who might be thirteen feet high yet as active as our men,
appeared slenderer than Terrene men. 'I was desirous to know,' says
Swedenborg, 'what kind of face and person the people in Mercury have,
compared with those of the people on our earth. There therefore stood
before me a female exactly resembling the women on that earth. Her face
was beautiful, but it was smaller than that of a woman of our earth; she
was more slender, but of equal height; she wore a linen head-dress, not
artfully yet gracefully disposed. A man also was presented. He, too, was
more slender than the men of our earth; he wore a garment of deep blue,
closely fitted to his body without folds or flowing skirts. Such, I
learn, were the personal form and costume of the humans of that earth.
Afterwards there was shown me a species of the oxen and cows, which did
not indeed differ much from those on our earth, except that they were
smaller, and made some approach to the stag and hind species.' We have
seen, too, that the lunar spirits were no larger than children seven
years old.
One passage of Swedenborg's description of Jupiter is curious. 'Although
on that earth,' he says, 'spirits speak with men' (_i.e._ with Jovian
men) 'man in his turn does not speak with spirits, except to say, when
instructed, _that he will do so no more_,'--which we should regard as a
bull if it were not news from the Jovian spirit world. 'Nor is man
allowed to tell anyone that a spirit has spoken to him; if he does so,
he is punished. Those spirits of Jupiter when they were with me, at
first supposed they were with a man of their own earth; but when in my
turn I spoke with them, and thought of publishing what passed between us
and so relating it to others, then, because they were not allowed to
chastise me, they discovered they were with a stranger.'
It has been a favourite idea with those who delight in the argument from
design, that the moons of the remoter planets have been provided for the
express purpose of making up for the small amount of sunlight which
reaches those planets. Jupiter receives only about one twenty-seventh
part of the light which we receive from the sun; but then, has he not
four moons to make his nights glorious? Saturn is yet farther away from
the sun, and receives only the ninetieth part of the light we get from
the sun; but then he has eight moons and his rings, and the nocturnal
glory of his skies must go far to compensate the Saturnians for the
small quantity of sunlight they receive. The Saturnian spirits who
visited Swedenborg were manifestly indoctrinated with these ideas. For
they informed him that the nocturnal light of Saturn is so great that
some Saturnians worship it, calling it the Lord. These wicked spirits
are separated from the rest, and are not tolerated by them. 'The
nocturnal light,' say the spirits, 'comes from the immense ring which at
a distance encircles that earth, and from the moons which are called the
satellites of Saturn.' And again, being questioned further 'concerning
the great ring which appears from our earth to rise above the horizon of
that planet, and to vary its situations, they said that it does not
appear to them as a ring, but only as a snow-white substance in heaven
in various directions.' Unfortunately for our faith in the veracity of
these spirits, it is certain that the moons of Saturn cannot give nearly
so much light as ours, while the rings are much more effective as
darkeners than as illuminators. One can readily calculate the apparent
size of each of the moons as seen from Saturn, and thence show that the
eight discs of the moons together are larger than our moon's disc in
about the proportion of forty-five to eight. So that if they were all
shining as brightly as our full moon and all full at the same time,
their combined light would exceed hers in that degree. But they are not
illuminated as our moon is. They are illuminated by the same remote sun
which illuminates Saturn, while our moon is illuminated by a sun giving
her as much light as we ourselves receive. Our moon then is illuminated
ninety times more brightly than the moons of Saturn, and as her disc is
less than all theirs together, not as one to ninety, but as sixteen to
ninety, it follows that all the Saturnian moons, if full at the same
time, would reflect to Saturn one-sixteenth part of the light which we
receive from the full moon.[29] As regards the rings of Saturn, nothing
can be more certain than that they tend much more to deprive Saturn of
light then to make up by reflection for the small amount of light which
Saturn receives directly from the sun. The part of the ring which lies
between the planet and the sun casts a black shadow upon Saturn, this
shadow sometimes covering an extent of surface many times exceeding the
entire surface of our earth. The shadow thus thrown upon the planet
creeps slowly, first one way, then another, northwards and southwards
over the illuminated hemisphere of the planet (as pictured in the 13th
plate of my treatise on Saturn), requiring for its passage from the
arctic to the antarctic regions and back again to the arctic regions of
the planet, a period nearly equal to that of a generation of terrestrial
men. Nearly thirty of our years the process lasts, during half of which
time the northern hemisphere suffers, and during the other half the
southern. The shadow band, which be it remembered stretches right
athwart the planet from the extreme eastern to the extreme western side
of the illuminated hemisphere, is so broad during the greater part of
the time that in some regions (those corresponding to our temperate
zones) the shadow takes two years in passing, during which time the sun
cannot be seen at all, unless for a few moments through some chinks in
the rings, which are known to be not solid bodies, but made up of
closely crowded small moons. And the slow passage of this fearful
shadow, which advances at the average rate of some twenty miles a day,
but yet hangs for years over the regions athwart which it sweeps, occurs
in the very season when the sun's small direct supply of heat would
require to be most freely compensated by nocturnal light--in the winter
season, namely, of the planet. Moreover, not only during the time of the
shadow's passage, but during the entire winter half of the Saturnian
year, the ring reflects no light during the night time, the sun being on
the other or summer side of the ring's plane.[30] The only nocturnal
effect which would be observable would be the obliteration of the stars
covered by the ring system. It is strange that, this being so, the
spirits from Saturn should have made no mention of the circumstance;
and even more strange that these spirits and others should have asserted
that the moons and rings of Saturn compensate for the small amount of
light directly received from the sun. Most certainly a Swedenborg of our
own time would find the spirits from Saturn more veracious and more
communicative about these matters, though even what _he_ would hear from
the spirits would doubtless appear to sceptics of the twenty-first
century to be no more than he could have inferred from the known facts
of the science of his day.
But Swedenborg was not content merely to receive visits from the
inhabitants of other planets in the solar system. He was visited also by
the spirits of earths in the starry heaven; nay, he was enabled to visit
those earths himself. For man, even while living in the world, 'is a
spirit as to his interiors, the body which he carries about in the world
only serving him for performing functions in this natural or terrestrial
sphere, which is the lowest.' And to certain men it is granted not only
to converse as a spirit with angels and spirits, but to traverse in a
spiritual way the vast distances which separate world from world and
system from system, all the while remaining in the body. Swedenborg was
one of these. 'The interiors of my spirit,' he says, 'are opened by the
Lord, so that while I am in the body I can at the same time be with
angels in heaven, and not only converse with them, but behold the
wonderful things which are there and describe them, that henceforth it
may no more be said, "Who ever came from heaven to assure us it exists
and tell us what is there?" He who is unacquainted with the arcana of
heaven cannot believe that man can see earths so remote, and give any
account of them from sensible experience. But let him know that spaces
and distances, and consequently progressions, existing in the natural
world, in their origin and first causes are changes of the state of the
interiors; that with angels and spirits progressions appear according to
changes of state; and that by changes of state they may be apparently
translated from one place to another, and from one earth to another,
even to earths at the boundaries of the universe; so likewise may man as
to his spirit, his body still remaining in its place. This has been the
case with me.'
Before describing his visits to earths in the starry heavens, Swedenborg
is careful to indicate the probability that such earths exist. 'It is
well known to the learned world,' he says, 'that every star is a sun in
its place, remaining fixed like the sun of our earth.' The proper
motions of the stars had, alas! not been discovered in Swedenborg's day,
nor does he seem to have been aware what a wild chase he was really
entering upon in his spiritual progressions. Conceive the pursuit of
Sirius or Vega as either sun rushed through space with a velocity of
thirty or forty miles in every second of time! To resume, however, the
account which Swedenborg gives of the ideas of the learned world of his
day. 'It is the distance which makes a star appear in a small form;
consequently' (the logical necessity is not manifest, however) 'each
star, like the sun of our system, has around it planets which are
earths; and the reason these are not visible to us is because of their
immense distance and their having no light but from their own star,
which light cannot be reflected so far as to reach us.' 'To what other
end,' proceeds this most convincing reasoning, 'can be so immense a
heaven with such a multitude of stars? For man is the end for which the
universe was created. It has been ascertained by calculation that
supposing there were in the universe a million earths, and on every
earth three hundred millions of men and two hundred generations within
six thousand years, and that to every man or spirit was allotted a space
of three cubic ells, the collective number of men or spirits could not