This
is the story of a remarkable cosmology
concocted by an Austrian mining engineer,
Hans Hoerbiger.
Hoerbiger
was not only a mining engineer, he was an amateur astronomer. Often, he would
use a small telescope to look at assorted celestial bodies, especially the
Moon. According to his account, early in this century, as he was looking at the
Moon, he was struck by the apparent brightness of its surface. He had his first
"recognition," that what he was seeing was ice, piled up in blocks,
producing the brightness and roughness he saw. Some nights later, he had a
dream and his second "recognition." He dreamt that he was suspended
in space, watching the swinging of a silvery pendulum, which grew longer and
longer until it broke. "I knew that Newton was wrong and that the force of
gravity stops at three times the distance to Neptune," he concluded. This
was the starting point for his Cosmic Ice Theory. This theory he worked out, in
collaboration with a schoolteacher named Philipp Fauth, in a giant book called
_Glazial-Kosmogonie_.
Recent
German book on the role of Hoerbiger's Welteislehre in the "Third
Reich."
Here
is what it said: Once upon a time, there was a supergiant star in
the direction of the constellation Columba. A smaller star, dead, water-soaked
to the core, fell into it. It was heated up, vaporizing the water, and causing
a great explosion. The fragments of this smaller star were spewed out of the
supergiant into interstellar space. The water condensed out into ice, forming
giant ice blocks. A ring of this ice formed, as well as a small number of solar
systems. This ring is known to us all as the Milky Way. Among the solar systems
that formed was our own, with many more planets than exist today.
The
Solar System has had a long history of evolution. Interplanetary space is
filled with traces of hydrogen gas, which cause the planets to slowly spiral
in. Also spiraling in are ice blocks which approach closer than three times the
distance to Neptune. The outer planets are large because they have swallowed a
large number of ice blocks, but the inner planets have not swallowed nearly as
many. One can see ice blocks on the move in the form of meteors, and when one
collides with the Earth, it produces hailstorms over an area of
many square kilometers. When one falls into the Sun, it produces a sunspot. It
gets vaporized, making "fine ice," which covers the innermost
planets.
The
Earth has had several satellites before it acquired its current one. They were
once planets, in orbits of their own slightly beyond Earth's, but they were
captured one by one over the eons. Once captured, a satellite would slowly
spiral in, as the planets are doing toward the Sun, until it disintegrates and
becomes part of the Earth's structure. One can identify the rock strata of
several geological eras with these satellites.
The
last such episode, the infall of the Cenozoic Moon and the capture of out
present-day Moon, Luna, is remembered in the form of countless myths and
legends. This was worked out in some detail by Hoerbiger's English follower
Hans Schindler Bellamy, though some of it was originally due to Hoerbiger
himself.
Bellamy
tells us that, as a child, he would often dream about a large moon that would
spiral closer and closer in until it burst, making the ground beneath roll and
pitch, awakening him and giving him a very sick feeling. When he looked at the
Moon's surface through a telescope, he found its surface looking troublingly
familiar. When, in 1921, he learned of Hoerbiger's theory, he found it
practically a description of his dream.
He
explained the mythological support he found in such books as _Moons, Myths, and
Man_, _In the Beginning God_, and _The Book of Revelation is History_.
Mythology, Bellamy tells us, forms a "science of pre-Lunar culture."
As the Cenozoic Moon spiraled in, it pulled up the Earth's oceans into a
"girdle tide," while the rest of the Earth sank into an ice age. The
people were forced into mountainous highlands in such places as Tibet and the
Andes.
The
gigantic Moon, pitted and scaly, soon revolved around the Earth six times a
day, causing an equal number of eclipses of the Sun and itself. It inspired
legends of dragons, battles of gods in the sky, and the Devil. These final days
are recorded in the Book of Revelation in the Bible and inspired the idea of
_Goetterdaemmerung_, the twilight of the gods.
Eventually,
this moon broke up, and its pieces fell onto the Earth, causing rains of
hailstones. As the Earth went back to its old shape, there were gigantic
earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The girdle tide flowed back over the rest
of the Earth, inspiring countless flood legends, including Noah's Flood.
Bellamy tells us that he had always wistfully hoped that there is some
historical basis for the story of Noah's Flood.
What
followed was a time of peace and tranquility, remembered in a variety of
legends, including that of the Garden of Eden. The first chapters of the Book
of Genesis tell of the re-creation after that catastrophe. The story of Adam
and Eve is, in fact, the story of a Caesarean birth a heroine of the flood had.
Somehow, the myth got the sex wrong! Naturally, there was a serpent in this
paradise, and it was the capture of the Earth's present-day moon, Luna. When it
was captured, it caused more earthquakes and disasters, and sank the continent
of Atlantis.
It is
slowly spiraling in, and will one day share the fate of the earlier
moons. He had some interesting responses to the criticism that he inevitably
received. When anyone pointed out to him that this or that assertion of his did
not work mathematically, he responded: "Calculation can only lead you
astray." One recalls that he was an engineer. When anyone pointed out to
him that there existed pictures that show that the Milky Way consists of
billions of stars, he answered straightforwardly that the pictures had been
faked by "reactionary" astronomers.
He
had a similar response to accounts of measurements of the surface temperature
of the Moon, which exceeds 100 degrees Centigrade in the daytime. To one
critic, he wrote back: "Either you believe in me and learn, or you will be
treated as the enemy." Astronomers generally dismissed his views and the
following it acquired as a "carnival," though it took some very
un-carnival-ish overtones later on.
Although
Hoerbiger's theories have a lot in common with Immanuel Velikovsky's theorizing
about the recent history of the Solar System, the scientific community had a
much calmer reaction to Hoerbiger's theories than to Velikovsky's, and his
publisher was (as far as I could learn) never boycotted.
His
book came out in 1917, during the First World War, and did not attract much attention.
But afterward, a mass movement based on the theory appeared. Its members
exerted considerable public pressure to get the theory accepted. The
"movement" published posters, pamphlets, and books, and even a
newspaper, "The Key to World Events." One company would only hire
those who declared themselves convinced of the truth of the theory. One
astronomer at Treptow Observatory spent half his time answering questions on
the theory. Some followers even heckled astronomical meetings,
crying "Out with astronomical orthodoxy! Give us Hoerbiger!"
Along
the way, the name was changed from the Graeco-Latin _Glazial-Kosmogonie_ to the
Germanic _Welteislehre_ ("Cosmic Ice Theory"), or WEL for
short.
In the
1930's, the "movement" became more and more pro-Nazi (Hoerbiger died
in 1931, so we cannot tell what his opinion would have been). Supporters of the
WEL said things like: "Our Nordic ancestors grew strong in ice and snow;
belief in the Cosmic Ice is consequently the natural heritage of Nordic Man.",
"Just as it needed a child of Austrian culture--Hitler!--to put the Jewish
politicians in their place, so it needed an Austrian to cleanse the world of
Jewish science.", and "the Fuehrer, by his very life, has proved how
much a so-called 'amateur' can be superior to self-styled professionals; it
needed another 'amateur' to give us a complete understanding of the
Universe."
Alas,
Hitler himself was not enthusiastic about the idea, and the Propaganda Ministry
felt obliged to state that "one can be a good National Socialist without
believing in the WEL." After World War II, the WEL cult dropped out of
sight. But it revived sometime afterwards, and, according to my information,
continues to have members in both Germany and England. In the 1950's, a
pamphlet supporting the WEL stated that "proof of the theory awaits the
conclusion of the first successful interplanetary flight, a matter
in which the Institute is greatly interested." But more recently, some of
its supporters have dropped the idea of an icy lunar surface, though they
continue to support the view that it was captured and that its capture
destroyed Atlantis.
References:
Hans Schindler Bellamy: _Moons, Myths and Man_ Martin Gardner: _Fads and
Fallacies in the Name of Science_ Willy Ley: _Watchers of the Skies_ Patrick
Moore: _Can You Speak Venusian?_
