Camille Flammarion
http://www.sgny.org/main/Biographies/bio_CF.htm
Camille Flammarion was born in Montigny-Le-Roy, today known as Haute-Marne , France , on February 26th, 1842 . He disincarnated in Juvissy , France , on June 4th, 1925 .
Flammarion was a man whose works enlightened the XIX century. He was the oldest of a family of four children, and at a very young age revealed exceptional qualities. He usually complained that time did not allow him to accomplish a tenth of that which he had planned. At four he already knew how to read, at four and a half knew how to write, and at five already dominated the rudiments of grammar and arithmetic. He turned out to have the highest grades at the school that he attended.
In order to be able to follow the ecclesiastical career, he was enrolled with Vicar Lassalle to learn Latin. Through him Flammarion was introduced to the New Testament and Oratory. In a short time he was reading the speeches of Massilon and Bonsuet. Priest Mirbel spoke about the beauty of science and of the greatness of Astronomy and little did he know that one of his students was literally drinking up his words. That student was Camille Flammarion, the one that would illustrate and demonstrate the letter and the Gaelic-Roman significance of his name - Flammarion: "The one who carries the light ".
In the religious classes he was taught that only one thing is essential: "the salvation of the soul," and his teachers said: "Of what use can it be to man to conquer the Universe if he ends up losing his soul?"
The life of the Flammarion family was a very difficult one, and Camille understood his father's merit when he decided to delegate everything he possessed to the creditors. He recognized in him, the most beautiful example of energy and work; however, that situation led him to live with few resources.
After a long search, Camille finally found a job as an engraver’s apprentice, and received room and board as part of his payment. He had very little to eat and not of good quality. He slept on a hard bed, with the barest of comforts. The work was rough and his employer was very demanding, as he desired everything to be accomplished quickly. Flammarion intended to complete his studies, particularly mathematics, the English language and Latin. He desired to obtain a bachelor degree, and in order to achieve this he was obliged to study at night by himself. He went to bed late and not always had a candle. He usually wrote under the moonlight, yet he considered himself to be a very happy person. In spite of studying at night, he worked a 15 to16 hours day. He entered the School of Drawing of the Friars of São Roque's Church, which he attended every Thursdays. Naturally, his Sundays were free and he managed to find a way to occupy himself. On this day he attended the conferences given by the abbot on Astronomy. Soon thereafter he was diffusing the association of the drawing students of São Roque's Friars, all of the apprentices resided in the neighborhoods. His objective was to dedicate himself to the sciences, literature and drawing, which was quite an ambitious program.
At 16 years of age, Camille Flammarion was elected president of the Academy, and when it was inaugurated, Flammarion’s opening speech was "The Marvels of Nature." At that same time he wrote "Universal Cosmogony," a book of five hundred pages. His brother, who was very close to him, and he became his bookseller and publisher. Also, at 16 years of age, he wrote his first work called "The World Before the Appearance of Humankind." He liked Astronomy more than Geology. To summarize his life one could say: to pass with difficulty, to study excessively, and to work in exaggeration.
One Sunday he fainted during mass, but in fact it turned out to be a providential fainting. Doctor Edouvard Fornié went to see the patient. Next to his bed there was a manuscript of the book "Universal Cosmology." After seeing the work, Dr. Fornié thought that Camille deserved a better position, and promised, to place him in the Observatory, as a student of Astronomy. Upon entering the Observatory of Paris, which at the time was managed by Levèrrier, he suffered excessively due to the impertinences of the director's persecutions. Levèrrier could not conceive of the idea of such a young man actually being able to understand studies of such a transcendental order.
Leaving the Observatory of Paris, in 1862, he continued to pursue his studies more freely, thus being able to delegate to Humanity his most beautiful teachings on the silent areas of the Infinite. Free from the suffocating atmosphere of the Observatory, he published the "Plurality of the Inhabited Worlds," that same year, attracting the attention of all scholars. In order to understand the direction of the aerial currents, in 1868, he researched about aerostatic ascension.
For the publication of his "Popular Astronomy," in 1880 he received the Montyon prize from the French Academy , in 1880, In 1870 he wrote and published a study about the rotation of the celestial bodies, through which he demonstrated that the movement in the rotation of the planets, is an application of the gravity to its respective densities. He became a convicted spiritist, and a personal and dedicated friend of Allan Kardec. He was the speaker designated to give the last rites at the grave of the Codifier of Spiritism, whom he denominated "the reason incarnated."
His works, in a general way, rotate around the spiritist postulates of the plurality of the inhabited worlds. They are the following: "The Imaginary Worlds and the Real Worlds," "The Celestial Marvels," "God in Nature," "Scientific Contemplations," "Studies and Reading on Astronomy," "Atmosphere," "Popular Astronomy," " General Description of the Sky," "The World Before the Appearance of Humankind," "The Comets," "The Haunted Houses," "Narrations of the Infinite," "Stellar Dream," "Urânia," "Estella," "The Unknown," "Death and its Mystery," "Psychic Problems," "The End of the World," and others.
According to Gabriel Delanne, Camille Flammarion was a philosopher crafted in a wise person, possessing the art of the science and the science of the art. Flammarion--" poet of the Skies," as he was denominated by Michelet—"became an exponent of Spiritism, because, he was always coherent had unshakable convictions, a true and innovative idealist.
Source in Portuguese: http://www.sobiografias.hpg.ig.com.br
Camille Flammarion, L'Atmosphere: Météorologie Populaire (Paris, 1888), p. 163.
The Flammarion Woodcut is an enigmatic woodcut by an unknown artist. It is referred to as the Flammarion Woodcut because its first documented appearance is in page 163 of Camille Flammarion's L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire (Paris, 1888), a work on meteorology for a general audience. The woodcut depicts a man peering through the Earth's atmosphere as if it were a curtain to look at the inner workings of the universe.
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The widely circulated woodcut of a man poking his head through the firmament of a flat Earth to view the mechanics of the spheres, executed in the style of the 16th century cannot be traced to an earlier source than Camille Flammarion's L'Atmosphere: Météorologie Populaire (Paris, 1888, p. 163) [1]. The woodcut illustrates the statement in the text that a medieval missionary claimed that "he reached the horizon where the earth and the heavens met", an anecdote that may be traced back to Voltaire, but not to any known medieval source. In its original form, the woodcut included a decorative border that places it in the 19th century; in later publications, some claiming that the woodcut did, in fact, date to the 16th century, the border was removed. Flammarion, according to anecdotal evidence, had commissioned the woodcut himself. In any case, no source of the image earlier than Flammarion's book is known. (quote from en:Flat Earth)
The caption translates to "A medieval missionary tells that he has found the point where heaven and Earth meet...".
Flammarion, (Nicolas) Camille (1842-1925)
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/F/Flammarion.html His first book, La pluralité es mondes habité (The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds), originally published in 1862, secured his reputation as both a great popularizer and a leading advocate of extreme pluralism. By 1882, it had gone through 33 editions, and continued to be translated and reprinted well into the twentieth century. Flammarion's passionate belief in life on other worlds was nurtured by his readings of previous pluralist authors such as Fontanelle, Cyrano de Bergerac, Huygens, Lalande, and Brewster. He, and another French writer, J. H. Rosny, were the first to popularize the notion of beings that were genuinely alien and not merely minor variants on humans and other terrestrial forms. In his Real and Imaginary Worlds (1864) and Lumen (1887), he describes a range of exotic species, including sentient plants which combine the processes of digestion and respiration. This belief in extraterrestrial life, Flammarion combined with a religious conviction derived, not from the Catholic faith upon which he had been raised, but from the writings of Jean Reynaud and their emphasis upon the transmigration of souls. Man he considered to be a "citizen of the sky," others worlds "studios of human work, schools where the expanding soul progressively learns and develops, assimilating gradually the knowledge to which its aspirations tend, approaching thus evermore the end of its destiny." His linking of pluralism with transmigration, though an old idea, helps explain why these doctrines are often found together in writings from the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Flammarion's best-selling work, his epic Astronomie populaire (1880), translated as Popular Astronomy (1894), is filled with speculation about extraterrestrial life.
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Flammarion's fertile imagination moves from romantic science to scientific romance in his Recits de l'infini (1872) and La fin du monde (1893). The former includes several tales which describe the reincarnation of a spirit on other worlds in various alien forms, while the latter has been seen as a precursor to Stapledon's Last and First Men. His later studies were on psychical research, on which he wrote many works, among them Death and Its Mystery (3 vol., 1920-1921). Flammarion earned the amorous attention of a French countess who died prematurely of tuberculosis. Although they never met, the young woman made an unusual request to her doctor, that when she died he would cut a large piece of skin from her back, bring it to Flammarion, and ask that he have it tanned and used to bind a copy of his next book. (The woman also had a picture of Flammarion tattooed on herself!) Flammarion's first copy of Terres du Ciel was bound thus, with an inscription in gold on the front cover: "Pious fulfillment of an anonymous wish/ Binding in human skin (woman) 1882". It appears that Camille Flammarion was a child prodigy who continued to shine throughout his life. Maybe we should look a little more into his writing and other works?
The ‘German Woodcut’ that is, slowly but surely, becoming more apparent a work by his own hand has created much consternation through the years. Some have looked in awe, some have dated it 3-4 hundred years earlier and some have thought it was related to the ideology of the ‘flat earth’ society.
The translation - "A medieval missionary tells that he has found the point where heaven and Earth meet..." is interesting. I do not have the book L'Atmosphere: Météorologie Populaire or have access to it and therefore cannot confirm that this is the actually copy of page 163 in the book and the original caption. But if it is then we must look more closely at the image to understand what the author meant.
"Un missionnaire" does this truly translate into "A medieval missionary" or does it mean a traveller in the sense of a writer/illustrator in the mind of the author. In fact a way that he sees/saw the universe? Flammarion had a vivid imagination and was exceptionally talented. Can we assume that he had discovered knowledge not available to others and wished to record the fact without bringing his reputation into dispute? A common occurrence with those who are sceptics and dyed hard in the wool of controlled science.
Look at the picture above, consider the talents of Flammarion and his work and then please explain to me why he would presume that someone could look at the universe by ‘breaking through’ a curtain from an everyday terra firma landscape?
Had he made a discovery that would have been mindblowing not only to himself but also the scientific crowd and therefore depicted his theory in this manner?
So, what in my opinion, is this great discovery?
I see someone breaking through the time barrier between the reality of the 3rd density and the hard to explain 4th density. I say ‘hard to explain’ because if you look at the top left and notice the wheels they could be illustrated to be viewed in more than a 2 dimensional view. In the 4th density it is postulated that an object can be viewed and all details are seen even when the viewer is only looking from the one point of view. Is/are the wheel/s an attempt to show this phenomenon using a 2 dimensional drawing and thus the rest of the image ‘behind the curtain’ a reality of 4th density? Your guess is as good as mine but it is an interesting concept nonetheless.
