Sir Humphry Davy’s Belief in Heavenly Extraterrestrials

Humphry Davy believed in superior, extraterrestrial beings throughout his life and wondered if he might be joining them in death.

Sir Davy (1778-1829) was a brilliant English chemist and exponent of science. This eldest son of a middle-class family discovered five major chemical elements; invented the miner’s

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safety lamp; and experimented with nitrous oxide (laughing gas). He also made significant contributions to agricultural chemistry, tanning, and a variety of fields from geology to electrochemistry. His close friends included Coleridge, Southey, and Roget. He was made a professor of the Royal Society, given the Copley medal, honored by Napoleon in the course of a world war, and knighted in 1812. In 1820 he was elected head of the Royal Institution. Humphry took ill in 1825 and felt “burned out.” He spent most of the rest of his life traveling for his health. In 1829, at age 50, he died soon after completing the book, Consolations in Travel, or The Last Days of a Philosopher.

In January, l983, in the course of a sabbatical semester in England, I came across some of Sir Humphry’s letters at the Science Museum in London. These, along with his poetry, prose, and dreams, provide ample evidence that the existence of heavenly extraterrestrials was central to his belief system. His childhood experiences had influenced him to study the “sacred stream of science” which “flows from Nature’s bosom.” Upon separation from his parents at age six he found an idealized surrogate mother in Mother Nature. Unlike his real-life mother who had left him to live on a farm with his father and three younger siblings, his surrogate mother was there to shine down upon him whenever he needed solace. His adolescent poetry provides evidence of his having come to believe that he was descended from extraterrestrial beings, geniuses who came to the earth with a much higher level of civilization and who would periodically select certain “sons” to further the progress of mankind. This formulation enabled me to unravel some of the paradoxes, explaining how such an extraordinarily successful scientist and articulate spokesman for the scientific method, could also be a believer in magic.

His brother writes that throughout Davy’s life “he was very subject in sleep to dream[s] and … that his dreams were frequently of a very vivid and often terrific kind.” He remembered more dreams than is usual and believed “that their source was on high, according to the old Homeric notion, and given to forewarning.” There are ample materials on his dreams and his ideas on dreams throughout his notebooks and memoirs. In no case, however, is there so much emphasis on dreams as in his final work. Consolations in Travel is organized around a dream, or “vision,” which is presented to the reader. The book is set up as a series of seven dialogues between five individuals who have been identified by his brother and subsequent biographers, as representing Davy and certain of his friends. I found it very useful to treat the different individuals in the dialogue as representing different feelings, thoughts, and impulses within Davy himself.

One character represents Davy’s practical, cultivated, scholarly, and traditional religious self. Another is Onuphrio who represents Davy’s adolescent doubts about “Our Heavenly Father” and religion in general that occurred after the death of his father when he was 15 years old. Onuphrio lumps an “instinct of religion or superstition” together. This character’s materialistic view of causation and doubts about the value of dreams and religion were clearly not Davy’s mature views of l829. The religious/traditionalist character rejects Onuphrio’s view as “not uncommon amongst young men of very superior talents, who have only slightly examined the evidences of revealed religion.” The issue of why Davy the man of 50 must repudiate the opinions of his youth is bound up with his impending death. As he struggled with what his chief contemporary biographer calls his “death wish,” he had the need to reject the notion that his early death would destroy his spirit as well as his body.

In the actual “vision” in the book, Philalethes, as Davy calls himself, is with two friends in the Roman Colosseum. All three are supposed to leave for social engagements, but when he chooses to stay behind, they wish him “the company of some of the spectres of the ancient Romans.” What he’s waiting for is obvious to his friends. At this point he drifts off into a reverie — into what he calls a new state of existence. He hears a distinct and harp-like voice that explains to him it is an “intelligence.” This extraterrestrial then takes him through a historical tour that presents mankind’s progress, extending from the caveman into the historical period and further still into ancient Greece, Rome, and the Colosseum. The voice which he calls that of the Genius discusses how a few superior minds enabled mankind to advance by teaching them to live in houses, domesticate cattle, and sow and reap. The Romans are focused upon as a great group of conquerors and civilizers. Attention is devoted to the sciences including the experiment on electricity and to some political leaders who are

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praised for their contributions to the progress of society.

Davy travels not only into man’s past, but into outer space and to areas that are far superior to the “damp, dreary, dark, and cold” existence of mankind, areas “where all is life, light, and enjoyment.” He sees strange creatures whose elephant trunk-like tubes disgust him. Yet these creatures with their peculiar motions gain their pleasures from “the highest intellectual nature.” They live without wars, and their ambitions are “intellectual greatness.” They are very much the opposite of mankind. Davy’s vision extends on for some 25 pages of description of a wonderland of fascinating and superior beings from outer space. Davy then falls back to earth. The vision is over.

Philalethes (Davy) then asserts that there “are certainly no absolutely new ideas produced in sleep,” but the ones produced have greatly affected his feelings, health, and imagination. He quickly moves onto discussing another dream which we would call pre-cognitive. When a young man, he was stricken with typhus. While hovering between life and death, he had a vision of a lady with blue eyes, long blond hair, and bright rosy complexion who was unlike any woman of his youth. He engaged in the most interesting and intelligent conversation with this “good angel” who was so vivid that he almost had a visual picture of her. Upon his recovery she disappeared. Ten years later, he chanced to meet the image of this woman in a girl of 14 or 15 in Illyria (present day Croatia). Another 10 years later, when traveling for his health, he again met her and she nursed him back to the health he still had. She became his “guardian genius.”

There are several themes expressed in Davy’s vision and dream. Life is better above the earth than on it and “the guardian angel of my recovery” has a heavenly quality. The extraterrestrial Genius shows the heavens to be superior, and even the elephant-trunk-type creatures there are superior to mankind. Man is portrayed as bestial, deformed, or helpless without the heavenly touch. The hero in all the dreams is primarily an observer or a passive recipient of the actions of others.

Davy believed dreams revealed that he, or at least his spirit, had lived in other times and places. He thought that there was an analogy between the fragmentary nature of the remembered dream and his fragmentary sense of other existences. His task, however, was to find out what form his future life would take. In short, how immortality was to be achieved. He did not believe that our ideas or spirit are destroyed, they are simply forgotten in the way a child forgets what happened to it in the womb or in infancy before the age of two.

Since immortality of the spirit is what is truly important to him, Davy in the dialogues dismisses the idea of immortality in the present “corporate [corporeal] form” as merely the immortality of the “machinery.” It’s the mind that truly counts. Philalethes says that he has this view of the immortality of the spirit as opposed to the materialistic view, which was formed “in my imagination” when “it was employed upon a vision of the Colosseum”:

I felt connected with new sensations and infinite hopes, a thirst for immortality; the great names of other ages and distant nations appear to me to be still living around me; and, even in the funeral monuments of the heroic and the great I saw, as it were, the degree of the indestructibility of mind.

This notion of his merging with the minds of others is clearest in his dreams. It helps to explain why Davy introduced the writing of obituaries at the Royal Institution, since he could feel a closeness, an imbibing of their spirits into himself, as he recounted the lives and ideas of others.

Davy’s wrestling with his ill health and impending death can be traced to the issues of his reactions to the death of his parents and his reaction to success. He was one of those people who was “wrecked by success” on this earth. He longed to head the Royal Institution and then found himself presiding over squabbling factions. He married his ideal woman and then became such a “martyr to matrimony” that an informal separation was arranged. In print he was satirized as one of the humbugs of the age.

After the death of his mother in l826 he declared “that which I regard most tenderly is in the grave.” His “death wish” became apparent. His health collapsed and he subjected himself to the strains of travel as he sought to revive his faltering spirits by changing the scenery. Davy was torn between desire to join his mother in death and his dwindling wish to continue living in his state of ill health up to the very end of his life.

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While precariously holding onto life, he took what joy he could from companionship, intellect, Mother Nature, and the Catholic religion.

The collapse of Sir Davy’s world was intimately connected with its very foundations. As a young child he learned to live without his real mother close at hand by projecting his mother onto nature and worshipping Mother Nature. He then projected his maternal benefactor onto the stars to light the terrifying night. His next step was to become her chosen son. This idealized mother was insufficient when Humphry was struck down with typhus. He then needed someone close at hand, the way every little boy does. So he unconsciously conjured up an Illyrian maid whom he periodically sought out to nurse him back to health.

For some inclination as to what his next incarnation might be like, Humphry turned to the dreams that had brought him images of his extraterrestrial parents. Still, the images in dreams are often polar opposites. Like other men, this scientist, poet, and philosopher died not knowing if he faced a heavenly bliss or a horrible nightmare. Yet he hoped that he might join the godlike, extraterrestrial beings whose presence, in his mind, had consoled him throughout his life and helped inspire him to scientific greatness.

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