Le Baron d' Espiard de Colonge
1865
trans. Jason Colavito
2024
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NOTE |
The Baron Espiard d'Colonge was a racist French writer of the middle nineteenth century who pioneered what later became ancient astronaut theory. His 1865 book Le Chute du Ciel (The Fall of the Sky, reissued in 1872) spends over 500 pages of extremely convoluted French prose outlining a hypothesis that the solar system is teeming with super-sized monsters, demons, and humanlike creatures, and that meteors repeatedly devastated all of the planets, including our own, and brought many of these being to earth, becoming the gods and monsters of mythology. Similarly, he attributed ancient monuments to either these giant aliens or to the white race, which he claimed was the descendant and heir of the godlike beings of Jupiter. His book is far too long for me to translate in full, but chapter 6 is representative of the work as a whole. In volume 1 of his book Alien Artifacts (2020), Chris Aubeck suggests that parallels between The Fall of the Sky and ancient astronaut books by W. Raymond Drake and others suggest influence. This is not unexpected, as twentieth century ancient astronaut writers frequently used obscure nineteenth century texts (or later summaries of them) as source material.
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CHAPTER VI
Man, the only intelligent being who was called to survive on earth, had to deliver himself and through supreme work, destroy or absorb everything that could prevent or hinder his forward march and his progress.
It is then also, in his moments of weariness, because the work with the sweat of the brow of the man of this last age, which is still ours, was considerable and often perilous as well as heroic, and several generations passed through these ruins of the world, always menacing before they were fully understood. It was then, I say, that astrology and astrolatry had to be born; in fact, at this time the stars, new to sight at least, seemed to destroy, regulate or dominate terrestrial magnetism, or that of beings remaining isolated on the earth. For a long time, this cult and this empiricism seemed sublime to the Orientals, who were never able to rise to the theory of any science.
The Greeks, equally incapable of scientific methods, did even more; with the help of pretended secrets, they carved gods from stones, but if they thus rose to the level of art, more than ever, we can say, the fragments of rocks or quarries are not Gods of any kind, and the stars are strangers to us and deserve no worship.
The West, busy recovering from its engulfment, had abandoned these peoples who, left to their own devices, only knew how to invent senseless theogonies and recount through childish fables the magnificent but formidable terrestrial events.
All the heterogeneous elements, which I will continue to call lunar, cannot and must not necessarily be bad everywhere and always, as it seems undoubted that they were on the earth to which they joined unexpectedly, an unusual, extraordinary manner, although still of a natural order in general facts; or on which more monsters and stones fell than gold and diamonds.
If these elements were always fatal, sinister, the four moons of Jupiter, the eight of Saturn and those of Uranus could have made for these planets a terrible visitor. But it's only a hypothesis. If these planets are inhabited—and we cannot doubt that they are, the contrary being absurd and appearing unnatural—these planets, in addition to having beings specific to them, might have so many kinds of heterogeneous elements, types of demons, mysteries of the universe, and monstrous animals, which each of their satellites of different nature was able to carry or throw over their spacious expanse. They would therefore have, at least in some of their parts, regions filled with indescribable monstrosities, all the more unapproachable for beings who might be similar to us. Since these celestial globes are larger, everything there must be infinitely more colossal.
M. Arouet de Voltaire, who did not believe in fossil shells and in many other things that today it would be foolish not to believe, nevertheless gave somewhere in his works the probable measure of these leviathans. I don't know that much about it, so I feel blocked here by my ignorance on this subject, and I continue by neglecting these details.
There is perhaps, in what I said above, a reason for the dark bands, gaseous, liquid or material, which we notice on the planet of Jupiter and which seem to divide the regions by zones; and these bands, if they are impassable, might be thus naturally formed on this planet to reduce the evils inherent in matter or on this planet’s surface. If this forced division of territory did not exist there, it would be possible that the complete destruction of beings would be feared there, despite the social laws and the obstacles that the most intelligent among them, whatever they may be on this planet, could oppose these devastations caused by interests that we can neither know nor appreciate.
According to certain traditions, such a thing almost happened in one of the ancient periods of the earth to the beings from our world, and the sons of Ouranos or Uranus had to share the terrestrial regions between them. The great wall of China either dates from this time or was at least made with the same idea to separate completely to put an end to the dissensions or this strange necessity of destruction which is also noticed among beings who have the gift of intelligence and among ferocious animals, whose needs violent are constantly renewed. Even in recent times, have we not seen the massacres which took place on the land of America? Many races and tribes are totally extinct there, which a foresight of nature, we can suppose, separated from other continents by seas which for a long time were not crossed. Also, among other places, in the Canary Islands, it is said that there is no longer a single man of its ancient race.
But if the intelligent and superior being, child of the spontaneous generation of the active forces of each planet of our solar system; if all those of this order were able to do the same work of absorption and destruction which had become necessary to a certain extent, as that which human heroes were able to complete with so much pain, labor and heroism, on earth in the time of the Herculean age, then the relative superiority of the heroes of these other worlds much larger than ours must also be a thousand times greater, because they required a natural, supreme or acquired power, much higher than that which man can have or can give himself, to dominate four different kinds of demons or monsters on Jupiter; eight on Saturn and an unknown number on Uranus. The earth never had more than one or two kinds; that was enough, or man would have succumbed to them.
This race or rather the intellectual races of these immense planetary worlds are therefore of a nature which far exceeds ours, and the children who come from it must be called Gods or sons of the Gods.
The oldest men on earth, by means unknown and which appear more immediate than ours, knew better than us, or in a more particular way, certain parts of things celestial or external to the earth; and certainly they knew a host of details about astronomy or extra-natural life that could not have been taught to them by vulgar means. A thousand confused traditions and numerous monuments indicate this in an irrefutable way to those who are not dominated by any political-Judaic concern or any modern prejudice.
Most of these facts, which fell into the disorder of a long fatal era, are today scientifically unknown, but men (or rather Europeans) can, I think, become aware of them again through study, and if some causes fortuitous events produced by genius and the derivatives of science one day lead them from deduction to deduction to deal with them in a direct manner.
Jupiter was first among the Gods; Olympus, his stay and that of the other Classical Gods. But here there is a confusion and a mixture of traditions, which can only have a very slight accuracy in the human history of the second, unscientific epoch, which they surpassed to a height which has not yet been able to be measured. And the Greeks who spoke last, having only ever known the romance of science, could not shed any light on it. On the contrary, absolutely wanting to be cousins of the Gods, they placed one Olympus on one of the small mountains of their country, and another in the part of Asia Minor which they have always claimed.
Now the men of the most ancient times, whom we have allowed to move away from us almost as much as the beings of the planets, had, I think, called by the name “Jupiter” the celestial globe fourteen hundred times larger than the earth. This must have been Olympus, and they gave it the name of this God because they knew that it is indeed a fortunate residence worthy of the Gods, and that their science, their great intuition, had taught them that nature is never inferior to itself, or rather that God knows how to give birth to beings proportional to the magnitudes of the worlds he has created. These beings can have an existence superior to that of man, but they are of a physical constitution like him and not God in the proper sense of this word, such as that which we currently attach to it by our enlarged ideas, which on the other hand preserve old cosmogonies, small and narrow, which science is still often forced to accept. However, it must also be said that recognized enormity and the open air in our solar system of the planet of which I am speaking would lead us to admit some of these data as the most natural consequences of the scientific suppositions under discussion. I have little taste for these hypotheses which are too external to us. I will only add that the beings who can exist on these vast planets, including even the sun, should, it seems, have the diaphaneity of angelic or divine shadows, of which many traditions have spoken to us. Indeed, according to science, if their bodies had the density of ours, they would be crushed by their own weight and could not be thus under normal conditions of existence in these lofty natures.
Throughout ancient times, these superior beings also resided on the earth and only withdrew from it or saw their immortality cease when it was uninhabitable for their igneous substance, and as a result of sublunary mixtures or extraterrestrial catastrophes that followed. Whichever way we turn these questions, we see that transcendent philosophy encounters historical truths that have been neglected for too long.
For nine nights and nine days, says Hesiod, the brazen anvil fell from heaven to earth!... But Hesiod and Homer with all paganism, spiritualizing the Gods, attributed, long after they were no more, an action on this world to these Gods who originally, admitting their possible and traditional reality, had a resemblance or material similarities with everything that exists.
This was therefore only a reality that had become fictitious, revived by religious feeling and poetic memories, while in this moment of transition we no longer knew on what basis to reject our beliefs, because man, isolated in the universe, has always nevertheless thought, when his reason has not been tainted by madness, that there are a thousand times a thousand things which equal or surpass him in time and space.
However, from the great antiquity which preceded our entire history, there remained a real positive, whatever some moderns may think: It is in truth from this disastrously ruined old world, which in several respects of morals and existence resembled ours so little, that the sources of all the human sciences emerged, nowadays so fortunately more and more developed in Europe, where their origin is also found above all. There is nothing new under the sun.
But the age cannot be determined; everything is uncertain in the traditions: We only know the versions of Orientals, who having never been able to explain anything about the physical world, saw the supernatural everywhere and even put in the monuments of men that the Gods, in the end, took their pleasure in the regions of the evening [i.e. in the direction of the West] and that they had their origin there; that it was mainly there that they found men capable of succeeding them or of understanding science; and that under their inspiration they founded the largest empires that have ever been seen on earth or a fortunate civilization, including ours, which is already on the same path, but still full of the declines of the new earth and all kinds of miseries. We have, until now, been unable to reach the same sublime elevation.
With the exception of a few wretched Arabian shepherds or other grassy shepherds in the vicinity, or the Hyksos, in short, those ancient pestilences of the East, which certain satisfied cupidities had exalted, and which affected them with the affectation of silence or their denigration, such was the opinion of all antiquity at whatever time it may be taken.
This very ancient state of earthly things can be clearly observed, as I will show in the course of this work. As for these Gods, who are so often spoken of as inhabitants of our countries, the Druids, who should have known them better than those who spoke of them so much, barely mentioned them in the few documents that they left. Therefore, one could believe that they only regarded them as wise men and of high knowledge, and the firstborn, as I said at the beginning, of the youthful action of our earth in its most celestial era. The white race today is still the only one worthy of claiming this high origin and seeking its ancestry there, because only it has some love of humanity, and knows how to recognize the laws of reason.
If the poets were able to make the majority of humanity forget, for a long time, that the impotence and inanity of the Gods, or of these beings whatever they were, had been as manifest as that of the man himself, during the great disturbances of nature which they had only been able to counter very imperfectly; nevertheless, the idea of a single God, soon becoming the only rational and possible one, grew more and more and took over. When the face of the gods was veiled from our eyes, the God of all immensities found himself in our comforted souls!
It is from this idea, which was in its time definitively revealed according to our accepted beliefs, that was born, after what we have called redemption, the purely moral Christian religion and which, in this respect, at least for the currently dominant and superior race, contains the one and absolute truth of this world.
When nothing remained visible of the excellently divine things, the men of the West especially preferred with reason and infinitely sublime wisdom, the idea of a singular God to atheism and the bestial instinct of eternal matter governed solely by chance: the invisible is still palpable to the blind!
It is then also, in his moments of weariness, because the work with the sweat of the brow of the man of this last age, which is still ours, was considerable and often perilous as well as heroic, and several generations passed through these ruins of the world, always menacing before they were fully understood. It was then, I say, that astrology and astrolatry had to be born; in fact, at this time the stars, new to sight at least, seemed to destroy, regulate or dominate terrestrial magnetism, or that of beings remaining isolated on the earth. For a long time, this cult and this empiricism seemed sublime to the Orientals, who were never able to rise to the theory of any science.
The Greeks, equally incapable of scientific methods, did even more; with the help of pretended secrets, they carved gods from stones, but if they thus rose to the level of art, more than ever, we can say, the fragments of rocks or quarries are not Gods of any kind, and the stars are strangers to us and deserve no worship.
The West, busy recovering from its engulfment, had abandoned these peoples who, left to their own devices, only knew how to invent senseless theogonies and recount through childish fables the magnificent but formidable terrestrial events.
All the heterogeneous elements, which I will continue to call lunar, cannot and must not necessarily be bad everywhere and always, as it seems undoubted that they were on the earth to which they joined unexpectedly, an unusual, extraordinary manner, although still of a natural order in general facts; or on which more monsters and stones fell than gold and diamonds.
If these elements were always fatal, sinister, the four moons of Jupiter, the eight of Saturn and those of Uranus could have made for these planets a terrible visitor. But it's only a hypothesis. If these planets are inhabited—and we cannot doubt that they are, the contrary being absurd and appearing unnatural—these planets, in addition to having beings specific to them, might have so many kinds of heterogeneous elements, types of demons, mysteries of the universe, and monstrous animals, which each of their satellites of different nature was able to carry or throw over their spacious expanse. They would therefore have, at least in some of their parts, regions filled with indescribable monstrosities, all the more unapproachable for beings who might be similar to us. Since these celestial globes are larger, everything there must be infinitely more colossal.
M. Arouet de Voltaire, who did not believe in fossil shells and in many other things that today it would be foolish not to believe, nevertheless gave somewhere in his works the probable measure of these leviathans. I don't know that much about it, so I feel blocked here by my ignorance on this subject, and I continue by neglecting these details.
There is perhaps, in what I said above, a reason for the dark bands, gaseous, liquid or material, which we notice on the planet of Jupiter and which seem to divide the regions by zones; and these bands, if they are impassable, might be thus naturally formed on this planet to reduce the evils inherent in matter or on this planet’s surface. If this forced division of territory did not exist there, it would be possible that the complete destruction of beings would be feared there, despite the social laws and the obstacles that the most intelligent among them, whatever they may be on this planet, could oppose these devastations caused by interests that we can neither know nor appreciate.
According to certain traditions, such a thing almost happened in one of the ancient periods of the earth to the beings from our world, and the sons of Ouranos or Uranus had to share the terrestrial regions between them. The great wall of China either dates from this time or was at least made with the same idea to separate completely to put an end to the dissensions or this strange necessity of destruction which is also noticed among beings who have the gift of intelligence and among ferocious animals, whose needs violent are constantly renewed. Even in recent times, have we not seen the massacres which took place on the land of America? Many races and tribes are totally extinct there, which a foresight of nature, we can suppose, separated from other continents by seas which for a long time were not crossed. Also, among other places, in the Canary Islands, it is said that there is no longer a single man of its ancient race.
But if the intelligent and superior being, child of the spontaneous generation of the active forces of each planet of our solar system; if all those of this order were able to do the same work of absorption and destruction which had become necessary to a certain extent, as that which human heroes were able to complete with so much pain, labor and heroism, on earth in the time of the Herculean age, then the relative superiority of the heroes of these other worlds much larger than ours must also be a thousand times greater, because they required a natural, supreme or acquired power, much higher than that which man can have or can give himself, to dominate four different kinds of demons or monsters on Jupiter; eight on Saturn and an unknown number on Uranus. The earth never had more than one or two kinds; that was enough, or man would have succumbed to them.
This race or rather the intellectual races of these immense planetary worlds are therefore of a nature which far exceeds ours, and the children who come from it must be called Gods or sons of the Gods.
The oldest men on earth, by means unknown and which appear more immediate than ours, knew better than us, or in a more particular way, certain parts of things celestial or external to the earth; and certainly they knew a host of details about astronomy or extra-natural life that could not have been taught to them by vulgar means. A thousand confused traditions and numerous monuments indicate this in an irrefutable way to those who are not dominated by any political-Judaic concern or any modern prejudice.
Most of these facts, which fell into the disorder of a long fatal era, are today scientifically unknown, but men (or rather Europeans) can, I think, become aware of them again through study, and if some causes fortuitous events produced by genius and the derivatives of science one day lead them from deduction to deduction to deal with them in a direct manner.
Jupiter was first among the Gods; Olympus, his stay and that of the other Classical Gods. But here there is a confusion and a mixture of traditions, which can only have a very slight accuracy in the human history of the second, unscientific epoch, which they surpassed to a height which has not yet been able to be measured. And the Greeks who spoke last, having only ever known the romance of science, could not shed any light on it. On the contrary, absolutely wanting to be cousins of the Gods, they placed one Olympus on one of the small mountains of their country, and another in the part of Asia Minor which they have always claimed.
Now the men of the most ancient times, whom we have allowed to move away from us almost as much as the beings of the planets, had, I think, called by the name “Jupiter” the celestial globe fourteen hundred times larger than the earth. This must have been Olympus, and they gave it the name of this God because they knew that it is indeed a fortunate residence worthy of the Gods, and that their science, their great intuition, had taught them that nature is never inferior to itself, or rather that God knows how to give birth to beings proportional to the magnitudes of the worlds he has created. These beings can have an existence superior to that of man, but they are of a physical constitution like him and not God in the proper sense of this word, such as that which we currently attach to it by our enlarged ideas, which on the other hand preserve old cosmogonies, small and narrow, which science is still often forced to accept. However, it must also be said that recognized enormity and the open air in our solar system of the planet of which I am speaking would lead us to admit some of these data as the most natural consequences of the scientific suppositions under discussion. I have little taste for these hypotheses which are too external to us. I will only add that the beings who can exist on these vast planets, including even the sun, should, it seems, have the diaphaneity of angelic or divine shadows, of which many traditions have spoken to us. Indeed, according to science, if their bodies had the density of ours, they would be crushed by their own weight and could not be thus under normal conditions of existence in these lofty natures.
Throughout ancient times, these superior beings also resided on the earth and only withdrew from it or saw their immortality cease when it was uninhabitable for their igneous substance, and as a result of sublunary mixtures or extraterrestrial catastrophes that followed. Whichever way we turn these questions, we see that transcendent philosophy encounters historical truths that have been neglected for too long.
For nine nights and nine days, says Hesiod, the brazen anvil fell from heaven to earth!... But Hesiod and Homer with all paganism, spiritualizing the Gods, attributed, long after they were no more, an action on this world to these Gods who originally, admitting their possible and traditional reality, had a resemblance or material similarities with everything that exists.
This was therefore only a reality that had become fictitious, revived by religious feeling and poetic memories, while in this moment of transition we no longer knew on what basis to reject our beliefs, because man, isolated in the universe, has always nevertheless thought, when his reason has not been tainted by madness, that there are a thousand times a thousand things which equal or surpass him in time and space.
However, from the great antiquity which preceded our entire history, there remained a real positive, whatever some moderns may think: It is in truth from this disastrously ruined old world, which in several respects of morals and existence resembled ours so little, that the sources of all the human sciences emerged, nowadays so fortunately more and more developed in Europe, where their origin is also found above all. There is nothing new under the sun.
But the age cannot be determined; everything is uncertain in the traditions: We only know the versions of Orientals, who having never been able to explain anything about the physical world, saw the supernatural everywhere and even put in the monuments of men that the Gods, in the end, took their pleasure in the regions of the evening [i.e. in the direction of the West] and that they had their origin there; that it was mainly there that they found men capable of succeeding them or of understanding science; and that under their inspiration they founded the largest empires that have ever been seen on earth or a fortunate civilization, including ours, which is already on the same path, but still full of the declines of the new earth and all kinds of miseries. We have, until now, been unable to reach the same sublime elevation.
With the exception of a few wretched Arabian shepherds or other grassy shepherds in the vicinity, or the Hyksos, in short, those ancient pestilences of the East, which certain satisfied cupidities had exalted, and which affected them with the affectation of silence or their denigration, such was the opinion of all antiquity at whatever time it may be taken.
This very ancient state of earthly things can be clearly observed, as I will show in the course of this work. As for these Gods, who are so often spoken of as inhabitants of our countries, the Druids, who should have known them better than those who spoke of them so much, barely mentioned them in the few documents that they left. Therefore, one could believe that they only regarded them as wise men and of high knowledge, and the firstborn, as I said at the beginning, of the youthful action of our earth in its most celestial era. The white race today is still the only one worthy of claiming this high origin and seeking its ancestry there, because only it has some love of humanity, and knows how to recognize the laws of reason.
If the poets were able to make the majority of humanity forget, for a long time, that the impotence and inanity of the Gods, or of these beings whatever they were, had been as manifest as that of the man himself, during the great disturbances of nature which they had only been able to counter very imperfectly; nevertheless, the idea of a single God, soon becoming the only rational and possible one, grew more and more and took over. When the face of the gods was veiled from our eyes, the God of all immensities found himself in our comforted souls!
It is from this idea, which was in its time definitively revealed according to our accepted beliefs, that was born, after what we have called redemption, the purely moral Christian religion and which, in this respect, at least for the currently dominant and superior race, contains the one and absolute truth of this world.
When nothing remained visible of the excellently divine things, the men of the West especially preferred with reason and infinitely sublime wisdom, the idea of a singular God to atheism and the bestial instinct of eternal matter governed solely by chance: the invisible is still palpable to the blind!
Source: Le Baron d' Espiard de Cologne, La Chute de Ciel, ou: Les antiques météores planétaires (Paris: Librarie Centrale des Sciences, 1872), 70-82.
