A cultural history of delusion

David Standish
HOLLOW EARTH
The long and curious history of imagining strange lands, fantastical creatures, advanced civilizations, and marvellous machines below the Earth’s surface
304pp. Oxford: Da Capo. £14.99 (US $24.95).
0 306 81373 4
 
 
It was almost midnight on an evening late in the autumn of 1869 when Cyrus Teed – family doctor, amateur philosopher and aspiring alchemist – made the discovery which was to change his life. He was working late in his “electro-alchemical” laboratory when he was struck by a “peculiar buzzing sensation” and sank into a deep trance. As he dreamed, God appeared in the form of a beautiful woman and told him that he had been chosen to tell the world an incredible secret – that the earth is hollow, and we all live on the inside.

Gently, God explained, we do not live, as mankind had previously believed, on the exterior of the globe, but rather on its inner concave surface, kept from tumbling into the depths by centrifugal force. What we think of as the night sky is actually the inky chasm of the inner world; what we see as stars are pinpricks of light from the earth’s core. Later, when confronted by sceptics and naysayers, Teed would always argue, with that strange brand of pugnacious dreaminess which typifies the zealot, that the earth must be hollow and we must be living on the inside because a loving God simply would not allow the universe to be as unknowably vast as physics suggests. Teed’s beliefs were founded on a kind of cosmic angst, premissed on the dogged insistence that Homo sapiens be at the centre of things.

Teed wasted no time in evangelizing for his new religion, which, calling himself “Koresh”, the Hebrew name for Cyrus, he dubbed Koreshanity”. He inspired an astonishing number of conversions and founded a commune in Florida that boasted a flock of more than 200. But by 1897, Teed was tired of the scepticism of the scientific community, and decided to seek unequivocal proof for his theories. He reasoned that if we were indeed living on the inside of a concave globe, then were a long straight line to be built, it would eventually bump into the curvature of its surface. He gave the invention (really just a long ruler) a name – “The Rectilineator” – and that year measured out a line to the length of four-and-a-half miles. By the time it was finished, though it bumped into nothing more than a modest hillock, he was satisfied that his beliefs had been absolutely vindicated.

Even the circumstances surrounding Teed death were accompanied by those same elements of delusion and farce which had coloured and characterized his life. When he died in his sleep in 1908, at the age of sixty-nine, his disciples at first refused to bury him, believing that he would rise again. But it was a long, hot summer in Florida that year and, following complaints from neighbours, health officials were forced to intervene and order the Koreshians to bury their messiah for the sake of public hygiene.

The curious story of Cyrus Teed is one of the highlights of David Standish’s entertaining cultural history of a delusion, Hollow Earth. Standish explains that, while Teed was unique in proposing that we live on the inside of the earth, there has never been any shortage of people ready to believe what is much the same thing: that the planet is hollow and something wonderful lies beneath our feet. In 1641, the German Renaissance man Athanasius Kircher, groping towards an understanding of plate tectonics, proposed that giants made of fire lived beneath the crust. Fifty years later, Edmond Halley presented a theory to the Royal Society which argued that the Earth is made up of three hollow concentric spheres, stacked together like Russian dolls. In 1818, the eccentric John Cleves Symmes wrote to every scientific society in America in an effort to raise money for his expedition to the South Pole where he intended to prove the existence of giant apertures, entrances to the inner earth, which he suggested should be named “Symmes’ Holes”. His evidence was the migratory pattern of the purple martin, whose mysterious disappearance every winter had to be explained by its lying in wait for summer beneath the earth’s crust. He even banded these birds in an effort to work out their exact route.

The dream of a hollow earth has had its hooks in the popular imagination for centuries, reeling in writers as often as it has scientists and adventurers. Standish identifies the eighteenth-century fantasy The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground by Ludvig Holberg as a prototype of the genre, in which Klim discovers a world inhabited by “trees with human heads and little feet on which they creep about”. Jacques Casanova’s Icosameron, published in 1788, sounds even stranger, with its juvenile protagonists, a brother and sister, stumbling upon a sexually liberated underground Utopia where they promptly turn to incest and feed by suckling each other’s breasts. Standish steers the discussion into more familiar waters – from Edgar Allan Poe to Jules Verne to Edgar Rice Burroughs, taking in a sequel to The Wizard of Oz which sees Dorothy descend to the “land of the Mangaboos”. The end of the Victorian era witnessed a surge in subterranean fantasy, and we are given a list of tantalizing titles: Baron Trump’s Marvellous Underground Journey; Forty Years with the Damned (or, Life Inside the Earth); Tyra: A romance of the polar pit; My Bride from Another World.

Despite the increasing burden of contrary evidence, the idea persisted into the twentieth century. In the 1950s, Richard S. Shaver, an itinerant psychotic who believed he was being persecuted by a demon called Max and regularly tormented by giant spiders, made a small fortune by melding the craze for UFOs with the hoary claims of Symmes and Teed. His suggestion – which made the cover of Life magazine, just below a gossipy piece on Marilyn Monroe – was that flying saucers originate from beneath the earth where they are controlled by a race of telepathic aliens.

Today, it is no surprise that the clammier reaches of the internet have proved fertile ground for similar speculation. Type “hollow earth” into Google and the search engine returns more than 12 million hits. Here can be found essays on “alien greys from the interior”, descriptions of a subterranean paradise where computers are powered by amino acids and pregnancy takes “a painless three months”, alongside claims that Hitler fled to the underground kingdom in 1945 and lurks there still, plotting his return to the surface.

That such notions have proved so enduring should not surprise us. Their appeal is the same as it has always been, the dream of a world which is richer and stranger than our own, the hope that we are only ever a few metres away from the fantastic, the belief that there are secrets kept from us which, if uncovered, would make sense of life. It is to this spirit of daft optimism that Hollow Earth pays tribute. Cyrus Teed would have understood – and approved.

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Jon Barnes's novel, The Somnambulist, will be published next year.