Professor Who Claimed Satan Was an Asteroid Says Dante Predicted Plate Tectonics

​A couple of months ago, I offered a critique of the presentation English professor Timothy Burbery was scheduled to give to a European space conference in which he claimed that the fall of Satan in Dante’s Inferno offered an early attempt to grapple with the physics of a large, asteroid-type body hitting the Earth, resulting in a “remarkably accurate description” of an impact crater. I noted at the time that Dante’s depiction of Satan’s fall bears scant resemblance to the actual physics of such a collision and that Dante’s poem has too little detail to draw any solid conclusions about his conception of the science involved. 

In a new interview with Nautilus, Burbery told the interviewer that I had described his proposal as “quite frankly, insane.” I am glad that my critique was helpful, even if my language was perhaps a bit harsh out of context. I was speaking specifically of his allegation that Dante anticipated non-Euclidean mathematics and understood crustal breach and the physics of terminal velocity, not his overall thesis relating the fall of Satan to a meteor strike. Burbery took my criticisms to heart and revised his conclusions to clarify that he is not proposing that Dante had any specific scientific knowledge. Indeed, he concedes that the text itself doesn’t really provide the evidence to support his speculative hypothesis:
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As far as we know, Dante probably didn’t see any craters firsthand. On the other hand, he could have heard about craters, like in Mount Etna or Vesuvius, and maybe he imagined some connection with the fall of Satan. Although even that’s kind of tricky—whether his text suggests that Satan actually caused the crater in hell or not. 

​To be more specific: The Inferno does not state that Satan, who became wedged in the ice (!) at the center of the Earth, created the nine circles of Hell through his fall. One might read it that way if one assumes that the mountain of Purgatory is made from the material thrown out of Hell, but it isn’t explicit.
 
Burbery suggests, though, that Dante was the first writer to consider what happens when a being falls from the heavens and hits the Earth. Comparing to Bellerophon, Icarus, and Phaethon from Greek mythology, he says 

“These are very dramatic falls. But no one gave consideration as far as I know to what happens when they fall. You also have the titans and the giants, going even further back, really ancient Greek mythology. They do have some pretty spectacular descents, but these myths don’t say much about what happens when they hit the planet.” 

​These characters are all human beings who hit as any human would. They were not celestial objects. But Phaethon is a bit different. He was driving the sun’s chariot, and the Greeks and Romans did indeed contemplate the results—the burning of the earth, the boiling of the seas. But it is true that they did not dwell too much on this, and Phaethon is typically said to have plunged in to the river Eridanus (Po), so he didn’t leave an impact on land. Hyginus, in Fabula 152, offers the most unusual but geologically rooted version of the story, saying that Jupiter (Zeus) struck him with a thunderbolt, and the plunging chariot set the planet alight, and in order to douse the flames, he loosed the Great Flood. That, in a nutshell, is the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, if you take the chariot to be a comet and apply a little bit of imagination!
 
The Titans and Giants did not fall from the heavens. A closer parallel might be the casting of Hephaestus from Mount Olympus, but he too fell into water—the ocean. (A second story of his fall has him land on Lemnos, though no details are given of the crash.)
 
The interviewer asked Burbery what he thought of my critique of his work, and he said it was a good thing that I criticized some of its more extreme claims: “I ended up being grateful for it. He was very tough on me, and he went after a number of things. His critique and the critiques of a number of other folks have caused me to refine the theory, and I think it’s in better shape now.”
 
Unfortunately, Burbery then said that the critique of his asteroid analogy led him to another unusual claim, that Dante anticipated plate tectonics!

Another thing, and this is brand new, Dante may have anticipated the theory of continental drift or continental movement. Dante does mention that when Satan hits the Earth, he hits the Southern Hemisphere, tunnels into the center of the Earth, and it kicks up all the dirt and so on. And the continents actually move away from him. In Dante’s time, he didn’t know about Australia or South America. He thought all the continents were in the Northern Hemisphere. But is there a little bit of a sense of Pangea, the notion at all that the continents might be moving? When Alfred Wegener proposed this about a century ago, people laughed. But Dante actually wrote an essay titled, A Question of the Water and the Land, which attempts to investigate why dry land rises above sea level.

​Now, the warrant for this is that Dante was poetically explaining why all the (known) land in his day was in one quadrant of the Earth, with sea covering the rest. Since this is, in fact, not how the Earth actually is, I’m not sure it’s entirely fair to suggest that Dante imagined this as a scientific process of plate tectonics occurring naturally over time so much as he did a catastrophist trauma caused by Satan. There is no indication he imagined the land every moving again. I wouldn’t call this a premonition of plate tectonics (or, worse, Pangea), as much as an anticipation of Immanuel Velikovsky.
 
Dante, after all, did not invent the myth of Satan’s fall, and Burbery tends to minimize the spiritual element that went into the creation of the Inferno’s geography. Having Satan’s fall create the mountain of Purgatory was a moment of poetic genius, but it has nothing to do with the real physics of heavenly bodies in collision, and at best we might argue that Dante tried to give some thought to making a plausible-sounding result for Satan’s fall that also matched Catholic theology.