From East Asian travel to astronomy
Lowell was born in Boston in 1855 and spent periods in Japan between 1883 and 1893. Travel supplied several books, including The Soul of the Far East, Noto and Occult Japan. He studied religious practices and sought explanations for the relationships between individual experience and social life.
In the 1890s he turned increasingly to astronomy and established the observatory at Flagstaff. His observations of Mars led him to argue for canals and an inhabited planet, a theory that helped make him famous but was subsequently discredited. The travel books preserve an earlier part of the same restless intellectual career, in which observation readily became the starting point for a much larger explanation.
A mountain and a theory of the self
Occult Japan opens on Mount Ontake and follows religious practices through accounts of pilgrim clubs, ritual and possession. Lowell then moves towards questions of will and selfhood. The Soul of the Far East, published in 1888, extends cultural comparison across subjects including family, language, art and religion. Its contrast between an individualistic West and an impersonal East carries the assumptions of a nineteenth-century American visitor. The particular people and practices he describes deserve attention alongside the judgments he builds upon them. Lumitheca’s Occult Japan has an 1895 title page.
