Dreams about the (exploding) Moon

By Mark Andrew.

The Moon guides the rhythms of life on Earth, and we believe that it has done so for billions of years. Or has it? Two men in the early twentieth century had very different ideas – ideas that were influenced by their dreams.

The first man was Hanns Hörbiger, an Austrian engineer and amateur astronomer. Hörbiger had a ‘vision’ whilst he was observing the Moon. First he was struck by the notion that the brightness and roughness of the Moon’s surface was due to ice¹. This led him to his World Ice theory – a serious idea long since discredited.

Shortly after, Hörbiger had a dream. He dreamt that he was floating in space watching the swinging of a pendulum that grew longer and longer until it broke. This dream helped him take forward his thinking on gravity in the solar system.

Out of all this emerged his idea that any small planet between Earth and Mars would eventually spiral past the Earth en route to the Sun, and would in all probability be captured by Earth’s gravitational field.

In this way Hörbiger believed that the Earth had captured many moons, which had gradually spiralled inwards towards their host planet. Once they reached a certain point, they began to disintegrate. Large fragments of moon would rain down on the Earth, destroying all that was beneath them, and ending geological epochs and starting new ones². Over time, this process added considerably to Earth’s bulk.

Another man who had a dream about the Moon was H.S. Bellamy (which was probably short for Hans Schindler Bellamy). He was also Austrian, or Anglo-Austrian, and a rather enigmatic figure (see Atlantipedia profile).

Bellamy’s fascination with the Moon started at a young age. When he was a boy, he had a vivid dream about a large moon, glaringly bright, and so near that he believed he could touch its surface. Then, the large moon changed its aspect, and – almost explosively – burst into fragments. The ground beneath the young Bellamy rolled and pitched, causing him to awaken from his terrible nightmare³.

This was quite a cataclysmic dream – and Bellamy wasn’t the last to experience a dream of this nature. (In his book Transformation, Whitley Strieber tells of a dream he had where the moon exploded and its fragments destroyed the world below).

For H.S. Bellamy, the dream inspired a deep interest in astronomy and mythology, and he sought to find mythological evidence to support the ideas of Hanns Hörbiger – who he encountered at one point at a talk.

One of Bellamy’s publications was Moons, Myths and Man, published in 1936. In this book, Bellamy suggested that we are in the ‘Aeon of Luna’⁴ (Luna being the Latin word for the Moon). His thinking was that this was effectively a temporary age associated with Earth’s current celestial companion.

Bellamy’s ideas, like those of Hörbiger, didn’t hold sway, and more recently he has been referred to as a “demented mythologist”⁵. Surprisingly though, even today we don’t quite know what the origins of the Moon are. The prevailing theory doesn’t quite explain all of the evidence. In the rather blunt words of the author Louis Proud: “science cannot explain the origin of the Moon” and this is “almost embarrassing”⁶.

Science moves on, with new discoveries all the time. The Earth apparently had a second moon, whose fate was to be splatted on the backside of our current Moon⁷. The Earth also has a mini-moon in orbit around it, suspected of being an asteroid temporarily caught up in Earth’s gravitational field⁸. And recently, a researcher concluded that one of Jupiter’s moons had grown in size from a speck of dust, based on his observations of a beer bottle⁹.

So perhaps there is still a place for dreaming and reflection when it comes to advancing our knowledge and understanding – indeed, five scientific discoveries were apparently derived from dreams. The Moon however, continues to prove elusive.

This article was first published in Hermes Magazine / Hermes Risen; it is being published here with the author’s permission.

Endnotes

[1] Wikipedia, 2020

[2] Bellamy, 1949

[3] Bellamy, 1949

[4] Bellamy, 1949

[5] Bullock, 2009

[6] Proud, 2013

[7] Borenstein, 2001

[8] Letzter, 2016

[9] Stirone, 2020

References

Atlantipedia (2020). Bellamy, Hans Schindler. [online] Available at: http://atlantipedia.ie/samples/hans-schindler-bellamy/ [Accessed 16 May 2020].

Bellamy, H.S. (1949). Moons, Myths and Man – A Reinterpretation (second edition), Faber & Faber, London.

Borenstein, S (2001). Earth had a second moon. That is, until the ‘big splat.’ [online] thestar.com. Available at: https://www.thestar.com/business/tech_news/2011/08/03/earth_had_a_second_moon_that_is_until_the_big_splat.html [Accessed 25 May 2020].

Bullock, P. (2009). Reich For The Wrong Reasons. [online] James Randi Educational Foundation. Available at: http://archive.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/769-reich-for-the-wrong-reasons.html [Accessed 16 May 2020]

Letzter, R. (2016). Earth Has a Second, “Mini” Moon, Says NASA. [online] ScienceAlert. Available at: https://www.sciencealert.com/earth-might-actually-have-a-second-moon [Accessed 25 May 2020].

MacIsaac, T (2015). Five Scientific Discoveries Made in Dreams. [online] www.ancient-origins.net. Available at: https://www.ancient-origins.net/unexplained-phenomena/five-scientific-discoveries-made-dreams-004491 [Accessed 25 May 2020].

Proud, L. (2013). The Secret Influence of the Moon: Alien Origins and Occult Powers. Destiny Books, Rochester, Vermont.

Stirone, S. (2020). Jupiter’s Biggest Moons Started as Tiny Grains of Hail. The New York Times. [online] 18 May. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/18/science/jupiter-moons-europa.html [Accessed 25 May 2020].

Wikipedia. (2020). Welteislehre. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welteislehre [Accessed 25 May 2020].

Author info

Mark Andrew

Mark Andrew has a longstanding interest in most things ancient and mysterious, from Atlantis to the Zoroastrians. He studied environmental sciences at university and has worked in the fields of planning, heritage and conservation. He lives in southern England.