Astronomy from the Top Down: Percival Lowell

Percival Lowell was the quintessential “top-down” astronomer. He never looked at things from the ground level, always from on high. The American literary critic Christopher Benfey writes, in introducing Lowell’s 1891 ascent of the sacred Japanese mountain Ontaké, in order to study Shinto trances, “Percival Lowell loved heights. Standing on a jagged peak above the clouds, with the humdrum human world forgotten and the stars for aristocratic company, Lowell felt right at home.” [1] Lowell’s book Occult Japan (1894), in which he described this ascent, was finished just as he prepared to set out for the new heights of “Mars Hill” in Flagstaff, as he called the mesa where he would found his observatory and from which he would attempt to climb a much higher mountain yet—the planet Mars. Here, too, he was to be “a sort of high priest and hardy pilgrim” (says Benfey), “who must travel alone to distant and elevated shrines.” As Lowell himself was to put it in Mars and Its Canals (1906), the astronomer