Isegoria

Percival Lowell (1855 – 1916), the founder of the Lowell Observatory, inspired Martian romances like A Princess of Mars in multiple ways:

Lowell, the liberally bankrolled son of a New England manufacturing dynasty, led an eccentric but not unproductive life, devoting himself in his twenties and thirties to the study of Far-Eastern religious practices and in the last half of his life to the study of the planet Mars. More people know of Lowell’s Martian obsession than know of his interest in the shamanic practices of the Koreans and Japanese, but the earlier fascination thoroughly informs the later one. Lowell’s theory of the fourth planet as the home of an immensely ancient and philosophical civilization in turn informs the generic Martian Romance, beginning with Burroughs’ “John Carter” trilogy, whose writer-imitators found their venues in the pulpy purveyances of commercial fiction, the bright covers of which would beckon to hungry souls from the display rack. Lowell wrote up his ethnological forays in a series of books, among them Chosön – the Land of Morning Calm (1886), Noto – an Unexplored Corner of Japan (1891), and Occult Japan – Shinto, Shamanism, and the Way of the Gods (1894). Occult Japan begins with Lowell’s first-hand description of a shamanic ritual at the crater-edge of Ontake, a dormant volcano in Kagoshima prefecture. Two young monks help a third to enter a trance whereupon an ancestral spirit possesses and speaks through the medium. “The veil was thrown aside,” Lowell writes; “we stood face to face with the gods.”[xii] Occult Japan ends with a long chapter, “Noumena,” wherein Lowell goes in quest of “that innermost something that each of us calls ‘I,’” “the essence of the Ego,” or “the Self.”[xiii] Perhaps the gods and the Self are, in fact, one.

The symbolic features of the Shinto landscape recur in Lowell’s books about Mars. Lowell built his observatory in 1894 on what came to be known as Mars Hill in the then non-populous desert-town of Flagstaff, in the Arizona Territory. The astronomer, like the Shinto priests, must climb his mountain. He must, as well, alter his perspective. In The Evolution of Worlds (1910), Lowell writes that, whereas “astronomy is usually thought of as the study of the bodies visible in the sky” and is thought to concern itself only with “the present state of the universe”; the astronomer in fact “attempt[s] to peer into [the universe’s] past and to foresee its future.”[xiv] The astronomer deals, counter-intuitively, less with the visible than with “the contemplation of the invisible” through apperception “by the mind’s eye.”[xv] In Mars and its Canals (1906), having proven by his own lights the inhabited status of that world, Lowell writes that the Martians must qualify as “life of a high order,” in that “where the conditions of life have grown more difficult, mentality must characterize more and more its beings in order for them to survive.”[xvi] A certain rather Puritanical attitude might, Lowell grants, determine that “the very strangeness of Martian life precludes for it an appeal to human interest,” but quite the opposite is the case: “The less the life there proves a counterpart of our earthly state of things, the more it fires fancy and piques inquiry as to what it be.”[xvii] It matters little to Lowell whether the intellectual establishment acknowledges his argument. He quite candidly reveals himself as more the seer and adventurer than the staid man of science. It might be significant that in his youth, before his independence, he spent six years running a cotton-mill for his father. Lowell declares, and in so doing fuses himself with the science-fiction aficionado transfixed by a magazine cover on a high rack, that, in aging, “we but exchange… the romance of fiction for the more thrilling romance of fact,” and “the stranger the realization the better we are pleased.”[xviii]

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