Chilean Artist Alejandra Acosta's Exquisite Embroidery Illustrations for the World's First Book Describing Life on Other Worlds – The Marginalian
Written by Maria Popova
Sunset in the 1600s. Milton just started using this word space to integrate the external environment. Kepler recently pioneered science fiction by considering space travel, but he only went as far as the Moon. Gravity is a brand new concept and the idea of a galaxy is more than two centuries away. The universe is as big as our Solar System, with six planets orbiting the sun that we just admitted, after burning the seers at the stake, do not revolve around us.
Against this background, after making the Scientific Revolution possible with his landmark contributions to optics, mechanics, and astronomy, the Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens has just completed his most difficult task: The Cosmotheoros: or, Ideas Concerning the Inhabitants of the Planets — our first book in the world that speculates about the existence of life on other worlds not from a religious but from a scientific point of view.
Although Huygens outlived his age twice, he did not live to see its publication – published in Latin and English by his brother at his own expense, The Cosmotheoros entered the world like a shockwave three years after Huygens' death, changing not only the course of science but of art. It was the spark that led Shelley to shame Georgian England with the “many worlds” he portrayed in his philosophical poem. Queen Mab. It was the seed of a multi-disciplinary field of astronomy, where the heart beat question is not where life is but what life is.
More than three hundred years later, the Chilean painter Alejandra Acosta created the spirit of the vision of The Cosmotheoros in a beautiful Spanish edition illustrated with his intricate embroidery of life forms that Huygens imagined inhabiting other worlds, striking a fine line between Borges' imaginary creatures and the mythical creatures of Indian origin, yet as original, as artistically daring as the book was scientific.
Without a middle ground The Cosmotheoroswe could not have the best metaphor in all of literature: “There is nothing new under the sun,” wrote Octavia Butler, “but there are new days.”
