Anyone recognize the man in the above photo?

Meet Thomas Lake Harris who died on this day 110 years ago. Although not the first individual to mythologize an exploded planet, he certainly is probably the most astonishing example of one. In November and December of 2003, at the Enterprise Mission conference, I first introduced the anomalist (or “Cydonia”) community to this man who, for lack of a better term, is simply WEIRD. He could have easily fit into a 60’s counter-culture milieu. But there he was, way back in the 19^th century with his truly remarkable ideas, including that our predicament on planet Earth is all because of a planet with a race of people with a bad set of morals decided to annihilate itself. For decades those of us who have been following the work of Richard C. Hoagland and those who have taken up Richard’s ideas and ran with them, such as Joseph P. Farrell, all of this sounds kind of familiar…

I am taking this opportunity to give a “heads up” about the article series “THE FALL OF LUCIFER: Dismembered Gods and Exploding Planets in Myth, Mysticism, Religion and Science” of which this post is but a brief intro. As I noted in Part 1 of the “Ragnarok, Lucifer and War in Heaven” series of articles,¹⁾The Ragnarok series of articles are devoted to mainly an metaphysical interpretation on the Atlantean polysemy in relationship to the “War in Heaven” meme of Brother Manly Palmer Hall, 33° D.Litt.we will in this series explore the motif of the exploded planet specifically how it relates to science, religion, myths, fiction etc.

The idea that a planet once existed between Mars and Jupiter and is now the asteroid belt is certainly not a recent or novel concept. ²⁾A recent hypothesis of Richard C. Hoagland and Mike Bara on the exploded planet, introduces us to an idea that Mars may have been a moon of the exploded planet—shades a wee bit of Thomas Lake Harris’ take on the subject…but all this in due time…In fact, as I had argued at the Enterprise Mission for years in my “Face on Mars in a 1958 comic book” thread, it usually takes science to first give us an idea in the real “consensus” universe, and then all the reactions and speculations take place after that. Although not strictly true in every sense, especially when it comes to occult knowledge or esoteric lore, science leads the way and then the mystics follow. But, as we shall see as we proceed in the various parts of this series—from the Sumerians and Egyptians, from the myths of the druids and the Polynesians and Maya from Plato to Jacob Boehme, Iamblichus and Proclus to Lurianic Kaballah, Thomas Lake Harris and James Joyce and many others, there are strange premonitional “Memory-Dreams” that sublimate echoes of the exploded planet, much like the imaginitive model we are exploring in our Night Land series of articles. And yet, the specifics don’t seem to clarify themselves until science finds the facts. It’s as if our premonitions and mythic “hunches” are rationalized around an abstracted set of circumstances at the liminal edge of vision. Like a supposed shadow just out of the line of sight, we turn, and realize that there was nothing there…or was there? Is there?

In any event, given the best and most authentic evidence we have concerning artifacts in our solar system, from Mercury to Pluto (and perhaps even beyond), it seems best to not only keep an open mind, but a courageous heart for the possibility we are “remembering”, on fundamentals levels, the nature of reality.

Although we will not focus on Thomas Lake Harris exclusively, we mention him at the outset in this brief intro to our subject because, as we proceed, the culminating anxieties of occidental mankind’s strange pre-historic preoccupation with a ruinous “Fall” seem almost embodied as a total in Harris’ basic cosmology. We therefore will look at Thomas Lake Harris’s concept of the “Fall” and explore where this idea comes from and where we are today with it.

So hang on, this is going to be a rough trip…