Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (also known as The Other World: Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon) is a first-person philosophical voyage narrative. Its narrator, who is named Cyrano and also calls himself Dyrcona, sets out to demonstrate that the Moon is an inhabited world and then to visit it. The book is less a continuous adventure story than an episodic “comic history” in which travel, parody, and philosophical debate are interwoven. Its central device is the lunar journey, but its real subject is the critique of European religion, philosophy, science, and custom.
The narrative opens with discussion among friends about the nature of the Moon and the plurality of worlds. The narrator argues that the Moon is not a mere satellite but another world, and that the Earth would appear as a moon to lunar observers. From this conversational frame the book turns to the narrator’s attempts at flight. He first tries an absurd device involving bottles of dew attached to his body; when the sun draws the dew upward, he is lifted, but the method does not carry him all the way to his destination. He later resorts to a rocket, which carries him free of the Earth and then falls away. The narrator arrives on the Moon, specifically in the Garden of Eden.
Once there, the book becomes a satirical anatomy of terrestrial beliefs. The narrator’s irreverent reading of Genesis, including a scandalous joke about the serpent, provokes the Prophet Elijah to expel him from Eden. He then moves through lunar cities and encounters a series of figures who serve as occasions for debate and satire: a race of giants, the ghost of Socrates, and Domingo Gonsales, the lunar traveler from Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone. These encounters allow discussions of the soul, the nature of matter, the authority of Scripture, the possibility of miracles, and the existence of God. In the exchanges with Gonsales, the narrator’s skeptical and materialist arguments are pressed furthest: the idea of God is treated as unnecessary, and received religion is measured against reason and experience.
Alongside its satire, the book advances a radical cosmology. The Moon is another world, not a subordinate light in the sky; the Earth is decentered. The narrator attacks anthropocentric and Aristotelian assumptions, argues for solid planets, for a force analogous to gravity, and for a universe governed by natural causes rather than miraculous intervention. Biblical literalism, scholastic philosophy, and the vanity of human claims to centrality are all targets. The lunar inhabitants function as mirrors: their customs, laws, religion, and science invert or exaggerate those of Europe, so that the fiction becomes a vehicle for relativizing human institutions. The “states and empires” of the title are less a sustained political blueprint than an occasion for satirical comparison.
The book’s mode is digressive and parodic. It combines travel adventure, grotesque comedy, philosophical dialogue, and mock-ethnography. The narrator is not a neutral reporter but a partisan of the new philosophy and of libertine critique, and the lunar setting gives him license to say what could not be said directly in his own world. The comedy is often aggressive: it targets biblical exegesis, clerical authority, judicial authority, and the self-importance of terrestrial humanity. At the same time, the narrative is not systematic; it moves by encounter and argument rather than by a single allegorical plot. The Moon serves as a laboratory for thought experiments about otherness, sensory relativity, and the limits of custom, and the book’s lasting interest lies in that combination of imaginative voyage and unsparing intellectual satire.
Beneath the voyage lies an epistemological comedy: the narrator’s confidence is repeatedly shown to depend on perspective, custom, and the senses. The Moon does not simply give him a vantage from which to judge Europe; it makes judgment itself a problem. The Eden episode turns the biblical fall into a comic parable of intellectual disobedience, so that expulsion becomes the condition for free inquiry rather than a tragedy to be mourned. The book’s satire is therefore not only anti-clerical or anti-scholastic but also self-critical: it asks how anyone, terrestrial or lunar, can claim to know the limits of nature, reason, or revelation.
Interpretation is one of its central preoccupations. Scripture is treated as a text to be argued with, while terrestrial certainties appear, from the lunar side, as strange local customs. This produces a relativizing effect, but not a consistently relativistic doctrine: the narrator still appeals to reason and experience as tribunals. The tension between cultural relativism and rationalist critique is part of the book’s intellectual drama. The lunar inhabitants are not merely exotic curiosities; they test the moral and metaphysical categories by which Europeans define humanity, law, and belief. The encounter with rational beings in different bodies raises the question of whether virtue, authority, and religion are grounded in nature or convention.
The “states and empires” of the title are handled as satirical counters rather than as a utopian blueprint. Lunar institutions expose the contingency of European ones, and the book’s politics are largely negative and comparative: it asks by what authority institutions claim obedience rather than how a perfect commonwealth should be arranged. Its significance lies in this hybrid use of fiction as a licensed space for heterodox argument. It makes the plurality of worlds a moral and theological shock as much as an astronomical thesis, and it turns the encounter with extraterrestrial reason into an occasion for self-critical anthropology. The comedy is not decoration but method: it keeps the debates open, resists system-building, and allows materialist, skeptical, and heterodox positions to be entertained without being reduced to a treatise.
