Sara Weiss’s Journeys to the Planet Mars

Stuff You Missed in History Class

This episode explores the fascinating intersection of late-19th-century astronomy and spiritualism through the life of Sarah Weiss, a St. Louis woman who claimed to have made psychic journeys to Mars starting in 1892. Hosts Tracy

Key takeaways

• Sarah Weiss published Journeys to the Planet Mars in 1903 after claiming two years of semi-automatic writing guided by spirits like Carl de Lester and George Brooks.
• Late 19th-century astronomers like Percival Lowell mapped Martian 'canals,' fueling public fascination with intelligent life on Mars that directly influenced Weiss's spiritual voyages.

Main topics

• spiritualism and automatic writing
• late-19th-century astronomy and Mars observation

Notable quotes

"If anyone is seeking a curiosity, not to say freak, in literature, Journeys to the Planet Mars should be perfectly satisfactory."

Conclusion

The episode highlights how cultural anxieties and scientific limitation

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:00) This is an iHeart Podcast. Speaker 5 (0:02) Guaranteed human. Detectives said he had stalked her before she died. Years later, they said he remained the person they continued to focus on. This is Hunter Gilmore, host of Hunting for Answers, a true crime podcast, shedding light on the silent epidemic of missing and murdered black women and girls, bringing attention to stories that equally deserve to be told and to the questions that still remain. Listen to Hunting for Answers, a true crime podcast from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 6 (0:34) Is there an epidemic against literature? More specifically, Black literature. I'm Jacquees Peace Thomas, and on this season of the Black Lit Podcast, we're outside asking why. They don't want a whole bunch of little Ella Bakers, Malcolm Xs, and Martin Luther Kings running around. And when you look at Speaker 3 (0:49) a lot of different cultures, they're like, we need to know where you came from. And Speaker 6 (0:53) considering this is Black Reading Month, the only real question is, what are you reading next? Listen to Black Lit from the Black Effect Podcast Network on our iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 4 (1:07) Hey, it's Bobby Bones. Join me and former NFL quarterback Matt Castle every Wednesday on our podcast, Lots to Say, with me, Bobby Bones, and Matt Castle. You're in training camp, and the rookie quarterback has one good throwing session in front of the media. Suddenly, everybody online says he should start over you week one. How do you handle this? You just go back out to practice the next day and wait for him to mess up. Listen to Lots to Say with Bobby Bones and Matt Castle on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 1 (1:37) Hi, I'm Michael Imperioli. I want to tell you about my new podcast, Underground Zero. We're looking at the opportunity of a lifetime for us and the other families. It's about the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks. What's in the tunnels? Gold bars, silver ingots. It could be worth half a billion. Starring Steve Schirrippa, Ray Abruzzo, and me, Michael Imperioli. How far are you prepared to go? Depends how far you are. Listen to Underground Zero on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What up? This is Jay Valentine, co-host of the R &B Money Podcast alongside my brother, R &B legend, Tank. Together, we've built a space for artists, executives, and fans of R &B music to reminisce and tell the real stories behind the music. I Speaker 6 (2:20) have no money. I was hood famous. Speaker 1 (2:22) They think you're going to get everybody out. We Speaker 6 (2:23) lived in a project. Real Love came out. They're hearing the music and we had nothing. From Speaker 1 (2:27) Smokey Robinson to Mary J. Blige, B2K to Jill Scott, if you're a super dedicated R &B fan, This is where you belong. Listen to R &B Money from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 3 (2:43) Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Speaker 2 (2:54) Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. We have talked about the spiritualist movement that peaked in the United States and Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries on a bunch of previous episodes of the show. It is a frequent guest topic, not just during October, but a lot of other times of the year. It was a prevalent movement. We have also talked about... fantastical accounts of life on other worlds, and sometimes this world. One of those might be the Great Moon Hoax of 1835. So today we have something that combines the two. Sarah Weiss's account of life and afterlife on Mars. That's a place she said she visited through psychic travels starting in 1892. It is possible that she pronounced her last name in a more German way. I think the man she married, was a German immigrant, although I could not find a lot of information about him. We'll be sticking, though, to the pronunciation that is more familiar to our primarily English-speaking audience. Speaker 3 (4:02) So to set the stage, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, people in the U.S. and Europe were fascinated. with Mars. There are written descriptions of Mars going back thousands of years, with the oldest ones in Egyptian, Chinese, and Babylonian texts. Early astronomers observed things like how the planet moved across the sky and how it was brighter at some times than others. The first person to try to look at Mars through a telescope was probably Galileo, and that was something he did in the early 17th century. His telescope couldn't really reveal anything about the planet's surface, but by the late 19th century, telescopes were much bigger and more powerful, and newly discovered details on the surface of Mars got a lot of attention. Speaker 2 (4:52) One such telescope was at the U.S. Naval Observatory. Galileo's telescopes were fairly small devices. They could be held in the hands or mounted on a small stand. But the Naval Observatory's Great Equatorial Telescope had a 26-inch or 66-centimeter aperture. It had a lens that weighed 110 pounds or 50 kilograms. And it was mounted under a huge wooden dome that was plated with iron. When this telescope started operations in 1873, it was the largest refracting telescope in the world. And today, it's also the world's oldest continually operated research telescope. In 1877, Asaph Hall used this telescope to discover that Mars had two moons, which were later named Phobos and Deimos. That Speaker 3 (5:44) same year, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli was working at Brera Observatory in Milan and observed lines on the surface of Mars, which he described as canali. That meant channels, but it was translated into English as canals. Schiaparelli was not the first person to describe something like this. That was probably Italian astronomer Angelo Secchi, who was a Jesuit priest in 1859. But Schiaparelli started mapping these lines and publicizing his work, and other astronomers started trying to confirm his findings. This Speaker 2 (6:22) was challenging. The first successful attempt to photograph something that was not on Earth was in 1840, when John William Draper used a telescope to make a daguerreotype of the moon. Other attempts to photograph other astronomical objects followed. That included more pictures of the moon and of the sun and other stars. But it wasn't until the development of the dry plate process in the 1870s that photography became fast enough to try to capture pictures of Mars. Even then, though, there was almost no surface detail in these pictures. Photos of the moon taken in the 1880s and 90s show all kinds of craters and shadows and other surface features, while photos of Mars taken around those same years look more like smudgy blobs. Speaker 3 (7:12) So without the ability to take clear photographs, astronomers had to sketch what they were seeing. Because Mars and Earth are both in elliptical orbits around the sun, the relative distance between them varies dramatically. And Mars was much easier to observe during the windows when the two planets were closest together. That happens roughly every two years. Mars and Earth also both have atmospheres and clouds, which can obstruct the view. So astronomers spent a lot of time waiting for a clear look at the surface of Mars. And even if they got one, it tended to be very brief. Speaker 2 (7:50) Yeah, and that roughly two years closest point, sometimes that's a lot closer than others. It's many years between the two planets being actually closest together. The maps that made their way into public view through all of this work gave the impression that astronomers were looking up at Mars and seeing massive networks of linear structures. What was really happening was that they were mostly seeing tiny, short glimpses of different parts of the planet, and they were compiling all of those observations into maps. So these maps were composites, not... illustrations of what astronomers were seeing across the whole planet in any given moment. That, combined with the idea that these were canals to suggest that intelligent beings were living on Mars, and they were building huge systems of irrigation channels or other waterways, and astronomers on Earth were seeing and recording them. One of the astronomers who Speaker 3 (8:52) really popularized these kinds of maps and the idea that the canali were an irrigation system that had been constructed by intelligent beings was Percival Lowell, who started mapping Mars in 1894. He built an observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, specifically to study the planet and look for signs of intelligent life. Lowell published three books on Mars. The book simply titled Mars in 1895, Mars and Its Canals in 1906, and Mars as the Abode of Life, which came out in 1908. The Speaker 2 (9:28) popular fascination with Mars became known as Mars Mania. Newspapers ran headlines like A Call from Mars and Hello Mars and something like Human Intelligence on Mars. Laypeople poured over the work of Lowell and other astronomers. The idea of an inhabited Mars started to show up more often in fiction, including H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds in 1898 and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Under the Moons of Mars, which was later published as A Princess of Mars. That was the book that introduced the character of John Carter of Mars in 1912. As we said at the Speaker 3 (10:10) top of the show, this was also around the height of the spiritualist movement, a social and religious movement rooted in the idea that the souls of the deceased can connect to and communicate with the living. Timelines of this movement often start with the Fox sisters, who reported communicating with spirits in a farmhouse in Hydesville, New York, in 1848. Seances and other attempts to communicate with the dead became a popular pastime. I feel like seances on their own are a frequent guest visitor on this show. We talk about them a lot. The first formal spiritualist organizations in the U.S. were founded in the years after the Civil War. And the first national organization, the National Spiritualist Association, was established in 1893. Speaker 2 (10:59) The rise in spiritualism led to a corresponding effort by scientists and other researchers to explain or maybe disprove psychic and paranormal experiences and phenomena. The Society for Psychical Research was established in London in 1882, and the American branch followed in 1885. This also had some overlap with all of the Mars stuff. Simon Newcomb, first president of the American branch of the Society, was a Canadian-American astronomer. Percival Lowell had connections with members of the Society on both sides of the Atlantic. Lowell's other works had also included things like Occult Japan or The Way of the Gods, an esoteric study of Japanese personality and possession published in 1894. The field of psychology was also in its infancy, and there was a lot of interconnection between the research into human psychology and spiritualism and psychic phenomena. Speaker 3 (12:02) So that is some of what was happening in the world when Sarah Weiss wrote her book, and we are going to get to that after we pause for a sponsor break. Speaker 4 (12:13) There are thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself. Get Worse with Kyle Pru is not one of those podcasts. So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptides, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your bed, or getting closure, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. But if you're interested in blackmail, love bombing, cloning yourself, or getting revenge, then we've got a little something something for a dastardly individual like you. Take a listen to some of the incredible advice we've given so far. Fake a back injury. Get the spray tan. Up your alcohol consumption. Only women should be allowed to have guns. Kill them. Kill them. Kill them with a gun. Listen, it's already over. 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