Monument to Tsiolkovsky in Borovsk, Russia. Nearly all monuments to him depict him looking to the heavens.

Here’s one for all the folks who think scientific progress and mysticism are at war with one another:

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of the Russian space program, was a brilliant scientist and engineer, but his motivation and drive came from his philosophical convictions, his belief in humanity’s destiny to leave the Earth and colonize the universe, and his vision of a deep unity between man and the cosmos.

The real protagonist of Carey’s film is Tsiolkovsky’s mentor, Nikolai Fedorov, who taught that science would make us immortal. The film shows how the Russian space program was strongly inspired by Cosmist philosophers and mystics, who believed that we should evolve into super-humans who could leave our overcrowded planet to colonize the universe.

Giulio Prisco is writing about George Carey’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door, a documentary about the less than rational origins of the Soviet space program.

One problem is that Cosmism not only sounds like religion, but was actually a spinoff of Russian Orthodox Christianity. This may upset those space enthusiasts who are also militant atheists but, as recently noted by Charlie Jane Anders on io9, smug atheists should read more science fiction. “A lot of the best science fiction is intensely ‘cosmic,’ conveying just how huge and unknowable the universe is, and how little we still understand it,” says Anders. “In a sense, the huge cosmic imagery of science fiction resembles some of the best religious paintings.”

Not having watched the documentary, I’m not sure what Prisco means by “a spinoff of Russian Orthodox Christianity,” but if Old Believers in Space was a plausible alternate title, Carey missed one heck of an opportunity.

Hat tip to Adrian Mather Ryan.

Comments (6)

6 Comments

Fredösphere
January 10th, 2013 | 10:24 am

Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (and colleagues) has covered this topic well in _The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture_. I wonder, do you know her, or this book? Probably, but I mention it for the sake of your readers who want to dig deeper.

This is a fascinating topic with many surprises. Because Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin were atheists, it’s easy to underestimate how much seriously weird metaphysical, mystical, magical and even outright demonic experimentation was stirred up by the Russian Revolution.

Mike Walsh, MM
January 10th, 2013 | 10:47 am

The turn to gnostic or superstitious practices is the inevitable consequence of materialism. For all their gung-ho enthusiasm, a reading of the human spaceflight fan blogs generally reveals a pretty anemic spirituality, and a sad faith in an ersatz eschaton.

nobody.really
January 10th, 2013 | 11:49 am

“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is ‘mere’…. It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”

Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964).

Ray Ingles
January 10th, 2013 | 1:18 pm

“A lot of the best science fiction is intensely ‘cosmic,’ conveying just how huge and unknowable the universe is, and how little we still understand it,”

Not understood is different from not understandable, though. From the science fiction novel “Time Pressure”, by Spider Robinson:

People who read a lot of sf are the least gullible, most skeptical people on earth. A longtime reader of sf will examine the flying saucer very carefully and knowledgeably for concealed wires, hidden seams, gimmicks with mirrors: he’s seen them all before. Spotting a fake is child’s play for him. (A tough house for a musician is a roomful of other musicians.) On the other hand, he’ll recognize a real flying saucer, and he’ll waste very little time on astonishment. Rearranging his entire personal universe in the light of startlingly new data is what he does for fun. One of sf’s basic axioms, first propounded by Arthur Clarke, is that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Confronted with a nominally supernatural occurrence, a normal person will first freeze in shock, then back away in fear. An sf reader will pause cautiously, then move closer. The normal person will hastily review a checklist of escape-hatches—”I am drunk”; “I am dreaming”; “I have been drugged”; and so forth—hoping to find one which applies. The sf reader will check the same list—hoping to come up empty. But meanwhile he’ll already have begun analyzing this new puzzle-piece which the game of life has offered him. What is it good for? What are its limitations? Where does it pinch? The thing he will be most afraid of is appearing stupid in retrospect.

Emmanuel Karavousanos
January 10th, 2013 | 8:30 pm

Sciene and theology — and mysticism as well — are not only closely related, but they need one another to attain the gift of mystical insight — which is the onset of the mystical state — higher consciousness. Once one realizes that quesitoning one’s own mind is science and that without questioning one’s mind and thoughts, the mystical experience can never arrive. It is here where faith (theology) must be applied, faith in what some very prominent names called analysis of obvious, familiar and known things, and things we take for granted. Whitehead said, “Familiar things happen and mankind does not bother about them.” Hegel gave us, “Because it’s familiar, a thing remains unknown.” These are only two of several others who reinforce this concept. Once it is realized that many things — consciousness in particular– are known only on the surface or superficially, then we can see that it is necessary to analyze these things so they can become INTUITIVELY realized.
Emmanuel Karavousanos
Author

Micha Elyi
January 11th, 2013 | 10:50 pm

“An sf reader will pause cautiously, then move closer.”
–Spyder Robinson

Moses read sf? I didn’t know that.