Description
In the history of astronomy, Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) has been understood as a popularizer and an advocate of the plurality of inhabited worlds whose ideas were influenced by his involvement in Allan Kardec’s spiritist movement. However, although Flammarion began as one of Kardec’s acolytes and did incorporate spiritist ideas into his first works on plurality, he quickly moved away from one of spiritism’s core principles—that séances put participants in contact with spirits. Flammarion instead moved into psychical research and became a leading voice in the pursuit of natural explanations for psychical phenomena. He did this with the belief that the findings of psychical research would form a new branch of physics. In his later writings, and particularly in his novels Lumen (1872), Urania (1889), and Stella (1897), he combined his dual commitments to psychical research and plurality into a philosophical viewpoint regarding the place of humanity in the universe. The “Uranian life,” described in these works through the imaginative exercise of fiction, invited Flammarion’s readers to see his vision of the unity of the immortal human soul and the intelligence of the infinite universe. A proper understanding of Flammarion will see him not merely as a popularizer or pluralist, but as a modern thinker engaged in a project of cosmopoesis.