Planetary Myth in the Digital Age: Tracing the Maldek Narrative from 18th-Century Astronomy to Viral Cosmology

Abstract

The Maldek narrative—which holds that a former inhabited planet once occupied the Mars-Jupiter region before its catastrophic destruction, and that Mars itself was Maldek's displaced moon—represents one of the more persistent and culturally generative fringe cosmologies in contemporary digital discourse. The study examines the Maldek phenomenon not as a scientific hypothesis requiring refutation but as a historically layered knowledge object whose full significance demands an integrated genealogical, epistemological, and discursive analysis. Drawing on historical-genealogical methodology, systematic literature mapping across five thematic domains, and critical discourse analysis, the study pursues four objectives: reconstructing the scientific genealogy of the destroyed-planet hypothesis from the Titius-Bode tradition through Olbers' 1802 proposal to its supersession by modern dynamical scattering models; tracing its absorption into 19th- and 20th-century theosophical and New Age cosmology and its crystallization as "Maldek" in the Ra Material; examining the narrative's specific claims about Mars—including the hemispheric dichotomy, the anomalous properties of Phobos, and orbital eccentricity—against the current state of planetary science; and analyzing the epistemic conditions of its contemporary digital propagation. Findings establish that the Maldek narrative's apparent empirical engagement with Martian anomalies constitutes a rhetorical performance of scientific engagement rather than its substance—a systematic conversion of genuine frontier ambiguity into apparent evidential support. Its digital resilience derives not from scientific plausibility but from the interaction of platform amplification dynamics, motivated reasoning, institutional distrust, and an affective moral architecture absent from scientific accounts of planetary formation. The analysis identifies a significant interdisciplinary gap in existing scholarship—no prior study integrates planetary science history, Western esotericism studies, and digital misinformation research into a unified genealogical account of a single fringe cosmological narrative—and advances a replicable analytical framework applicable to comparable cases including ancient catastrophism, plasma cosmology, and electric universe theory. Discarded scientific hypotheses thus emerge as consequential cultural objects whose afterlives, particularly in algorithmically amplified digital environments, represent a critical and underexamined site of epistemic contestation.