Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 - HOLLOW SCIENCE

  Chapter 2 - SYMMES’ HOLES

  Chapter 3 - POLAR GOTHIC: REYNOLDS AND POE

  Chapter 4 - JULES VERNE: A JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF GEOLOGY

  Chapter 5 - CYRUS TEED AND KORESHANITY

  Chapter 6 - HOLLOW UTOPIAS, ROMANCES, AND A LITTLE KIDDIE LIT

  Chapter 7 - EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS AT THE EARTH’S CORE

  Chapter 8 - THE HOLLOW EARTH LIVES: EVIL NAZIS, FLYING SAUCERS, SUPERMAN, NEW …

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  PRAISE FOR HOLLOW EARTH

  “A surprising history of imaginary voyages to the planet’s core … entertaining … Standish’s research is impressive.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Standish … has an engaging affection for his cast of fantasists and misguided visionaries.”

  —The New Yorker

  “Gives us fascinating and often bizarre tales … Hollow Earth is full of lively illustrations and curious lore. Standish is a good explorer of the dusty corners of history, science and popular myth. His prose is clear and often humorous … He’s a good guide to the imaginary hollows.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Standish … treat[s] us to a chronicle of fantasies in life and literature about subterranean worlds … Spelunkers of the imagination may enjoy this guide to a place not found on any map.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “Lively and intriguing.”

  —Boston Sunday Globe

  “Standish proves a shimmering, informed guide … displaying a genuine care and admiration for those whose creations were scientifically, socially, or literarily worthy, or at least deeply, appealingly eccentric … smart and closely read.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “[Hollow Earth] basks in the lurid glow of a theory whose hypnotic appeal will long outlive its rational plausibility.”

  —Village Voice

  “Fans of Jules Verne, pulp-fiction adventure stories, and schlocky 1950s movies will get a thoughtful laugh out of Hollow Earth … A thoroughly enjoyable and fascinating read.”

  —Popular Science

  “The hole story is … semi-tortuous and often quite amusing. A journey, so to speak, to the center of mirth.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “The single strangest and most fascinating book published so far this year … a marvel.”

  —Palm Beach Post

  “Standish seems to have a genuine affection for his assorted crackpots and dreamers, and he provides an amusing tour of their various underground utopias … a fun romp.”

  —Publishers Weekly”

  “[A] lively and intriguing illustrated cultural history … Highly recommended for both science and literature collections.”

  —Library Journal

  “A monumental work of screwball scholarship … A highly entertaining romp through the history of a theory.”

  —Seed

  “[An] entertaining cultural history of a delusion.”

  —Times Literary Supplement (London)

  For Lisa, Maude, and Wilson

  Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought… . What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition, with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone…. It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. Yet do this till you can do better, and you may perhaps find some “Symmes’ Hole” by which to get at the inside at last.

  —Henry David Thoreau, Walden

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In roughly chronological order, I would like to thank Senior Editor Kathleen Burke at Smithsonian magazine for giving me the go-ahead to do an article on the hollow earth for them, which got me started on this, and my apologies for going crazy and turning in a manuscript far too long. Great thanks, too, to my wonderful agent, Leslie Breed, for believing in the idea and finding a home for it. Senior Editor Ben Schafer at Da Capo stuck with the book despite many opportunities to bail out, given my turtle-like pace, fondness for digression, and writerly crabbiness. I am also grateful to several friends who read the manuscript in progress, offering both encouragement and helpful critiques—Scott Guthery, Beth Meredith, Chris Miller, and Lucie Singh. Medill School of Journalism graduate students Keith Chu and Michael Andersen were resourceful and persistent in tracking down source material and fact-checking. And a number of people provided invaluable assistance in sharing art and photography for the book’s illustrations: Klaus-Peter Gelber of the Mineralogical Institute at the University of Würzburg for Athanasius Kircher engravings; Rick Loomis of Sumner & Stillman Antiquarian Booksellers (www.sumnerandstillman.com) for pictures of early Jules Verne editions; Michael Widner, archivist for the Koreshan State Historical Site in Estero, Florida, for many photographs of the Koreshan community; Bill and Sue-On Hillman, proprietors of the ERBzine website (www.erbzine.com), for artwork from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar novels; also the Frank Frazetta Museum (www.frazettaartgallery.com), for permission to use his terrific Pelludicar cover art from the 1960s and 1970s; and Jean-Luc Rivera for sending scans of sci-fi magazine covers from his extensive “Shaver Mystery” collection. And finally, I would like to remember John Weigel and Walter Havighurst, Miami University English professors whose influence on me proved both deep and lasting.

  INTRODUCTION

  Here’s one:

  What do Sir Edmond Halley, Cotton Mather, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, L. Frank Baum, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Adolph Hitler, Admiral Byrd, flying saucers, Superman, Mount Shasta, and Pat Boone all have in common?

  If you answered the hollow earth, you’re way ahead of where I was before I started looking into this.

  Like most kids of my time, I first encountered the idea that the earth might be hollow in Verne’s A Journey to the Center of the Earth—even though he seemed to take forever to get down there. Because my tastes were resolutely low-rent, tending toward rock ’n’ roll and science fiction, as a teenager I also read several of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar novels of wild adventures in a prehistoric world beneath the earth’s crust, starting in the middle with Tarzan at the Earth’s Core. As an undergraduate at Miami University in southern Ohio, I lived for awhile in a dorm named for John Cleves Symmes, an early prominent settler in the area, and learned that he had a namesake nephew, a veteran of the War of 1812, who devoted the last years of his life to proselytizing for an expedition to the North Pole, where he expected to find a vast opening leading into the earth’s interior, which, he believed, was hollow, and contained an unspoiled paradise just waiting, well, to be spoiled. And then in a grad school Poe seminar, I found out that he’d liked Symmes’ peculiar idea enough to use it as an ending for one of his short stories, “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” and as a motif in his only published novel, The Narrative of Arthur G
ordon Pym.

  Years pass. I’d stuck all this vital information into a corner of the attic I call my brain and pretty much forgotten about it, just as I’d figured the rest of the world had—since everyone knows that it’s not hollow, right? Wrong. While surfing around on the Internet a couple of years ago, I came across a website for a newsletter called The Hollow Earth Insider—along with much else. It turns out that the idea is still alive and well, at least among a cadre of fringe devotees. Not a few claim they make regular astral-travel visits inside, where they find a New Age civilization of peaceful vegetarians. Type the phrase “Hollow Earth” into your favorite search engine, and prepare to be amazed at the amount of material that turns up. Google produced 2,100,000 hits the last time I looked.

  The hollow earth has had a long history. Right down to the present, the idea has been used again and again, changing and evolving in ways that suit the needs and concerns of each succeeding time.

  Virtually every ancient culture worldwide, and most religions, has shared a belief in some sort of mysterious subterranean world, inhabited by strange and powerful creatures, right beneath our feet. These underworlds were myriad. The Sumerians believed in a vast netherworld they called Ki-Gal; in Egypt, it was Duat; in Greece and Rome, Hades; in ancient Indian mythology, it was Naraka; certain schools of Buddhism believed in a worldwide subterranean labyrinth called Agartha; in Japan, there was Jigoku; the Germanic people had Hellheim; the Inca called it Uca Pacha, while to the Aztecs it was Mictlan, and to the Mayans, Mitnal. And of course, to the Christians, it’s good old Hell, toured most elegantly by Dante in the fourteenth century in his Inferno. The near-universality of these underworlds isn’t surprising. They’re the dark terrain of the unconscious given tangible form and structure, embodiments of the boogie-man who ran howling through our nightmares when we were kids.

  But such mythic/religious ideas started to take on a scientific cast in the seventeenth century, beginning with English astronomer and mathematician Edmond Halley, best remembered for his famous comet. He gave us our first scientific theory of the hollow earth—in his formulation, consisting of independently turning concentric spheres down there, one inside the other. Halley arrived at this notion, which he presented to the prestigious Royal Society of London, to account for observed variations in the earth’s magnetic poles. His true imaginative leap, however, lay in the additional thought that these interior spheres were lit with some sort of glowing luminosity, and that they might well be able to support life. Generations of science fiction writers have been thankful to him for this ever since.

  Although the distinction between “hollow” and “riddled with subterranean labyrinths” is sometimes unclear, I have leaned as much as possible toward truly “hollow,” and so haven’t discussed such popular underground realms as Alice’s Wonderland or other cavern-like subterranean places. What I have tried to do here is trace the permutations on Halley’s idea from his time down to the present. The story weaves in and out of literature and what passes for real life, and veers over into the charmingly delusional more than once. It includes writers major and minor, scientists, pseudo-scientists, religious visionaries and cranks, explorers, evil dictators, New Agers, scam artists, and comic book characters.

  One thing I found fascinating was the hollow earth idea’s continuing elasticity—it has been equally useful as a late-seventeenth-century scientific theory, an expression of early-nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny, a vehicle for mid-nineteenth-century musings on paleontology and Darwin, late-nineteenth-century religious utopianism, Teddy Roosevelt–style imperialism, a perfect creepy vehicle for 1950s Cold War paranoia, and a cozy home for dreamy contemporary New Age utopias.

  There have been many books recently about important ideas or commodities that have changed the world. This one, I am happy to say, traces the cultural history of an idea that was wrong and changed nothing—but which has nevertheless had an ongoing appeal.

  Portrait of Edmond Halley at age eighty in 1736. He is holding one of his drawings of the earth’s interior spheres. (Reproduced by permission of the President and Council of the Royal Society)

  1

  HOLLOW SCIENCE

  THREE TIMES LATE IN 1691 EDMOND HALLEY stood before the London Royal Society to read papers proposing that the earth is hollow, or nearly so. In a carefully elaborated hypothesis based on principles expressed in Newton’s landmark Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (which Halley had helped bring to publication in 1687), he suggested that three concentric spheres lay beneath the surface, turning independently on a north–south axis, each smaller than the next, all nesting within one another, rather like matrushkas, those adorable Russian dolls. He theorized further that there might be life inside, supported by a source of light like that of the sun itself.

  Here was a new sort of thinking about the earth’s interior, qualitatively different from all earlier ideas. Not the dark flowering of fearful, gloomy meditation on death; not conjecture about the eternal reward or punishment of fragile, ineffable souls; not mythology or religion or metaphysics, but science. A serious stab at it, at any rate.

  Why was he thinking these peculiar thoughts?

  Scientific curiosity, certainly, but a curiosity driven by commerce as well.

  Today Edmond Halley is known only for the comet of 1682, which he predicted would return in 1758. Until the late seventeenth century, comets were little understood and greatly feared, omens of terrible portent, an alarming anarchic presence in the otherwise orderly heavens. Their motions had been a great mystery. In 1680, a comet had for weeks cut a brilliant path through the night sky, seemingly hurtling toward oblivion on a collision course with the sun. The following year yet another came catapulting in the opposite direction through the solar system on its way to some unimaginable destination. Halley determined that these were not two comets, but one, traveling an epic ellipse on a regular circuit, as did the comet posthumously named for him. Its interval of seventy-four to seventy-nine years (occasional close swipes with the gravitational pull of Jupiter and Saturn slightly alter the timing) means it had been visible at Agrippa’s death in 12 B.C.E., Attila’s defeat at Chalons in 451 C.E., and the Norman conquest of England in 1066 (it’s shown blazing across a section of the Bayeux Tapestry, with a group of frightened onlookers pointing skyward at it). Maybe there was something to the idea of portents, after all. It has been repeatedly suggested that the Star of Bethlehem was a comet—perhaps Halley’s.

  Halley would be important to the history of science if only for his influence on Newton’s Principia. The train of thought leading to it was triggered by discussions Halley provoked with Newton about planetary orbits, and Halley not only nudged Newton along during the three years he spent writing it, he also served as editor and publisher, carefully reading and correcting page proofs. Principia appeared under the imprint of the Royal Society, but the money to pay the printer came out of Halley’s own pocket. At every stage he shepherded it along.

  It seems fitting, then, that Halley’s hollow earth theory was the first scientific hypothesis to draw on Newton’s revolutionary ideas, and it wasn’t as off the wall as it may seem.

  Throughout his life Halley pursued far-ranging interests and scientific investigations. Elected to the Royal Society in 1678 at the age of twenty-two, over the years he presented papers to that body on a hodgepodge of subjects. “The annals of the Royal Society are littered with enterprising papers by Halley,” writes Lisa Jardine in Ingenious Pursuits, “on everything from the global patterns of trade winds, to the mechanics of diving bells, the rise and fall of mercury in the barometer, compass variation, and the beneficial effects of opium-taking.” Of the last, he tried it and liked it. “Instead of sleep,” he wrote in his January 1690 paper, “which he did design to procure by it, he lay waking all night, not as if disquiet with any thoughts but in a state of indolence, and perfectly at ease, in whatsoever posture he lay.”

  Such catholicity of interest was true to the idea of the Royal
Society at its founding in 1660. One member, Henry Oldenburg, described the group as “a Corporation of a number of Ingenious and knowing persons—for improving Naturall knowledge, whose dessein it is, by Observations and experiments to advance ye Contemplation of Nature to Use and Practice.”1

  Members included Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Christopher Wren. These were some of the chief laborers constructing a new machine. Together and separately they were fashioning the first cogs and wheels of that whirring rational device, the Enlightenment. The dreamy romanticism that had passed for thought until then—magic, alchemy, astrology, even religion—was being buried, and a shiny new mechanical creature was being put together piece by piece: the universe, newly seen!

  The first tangible signs of the Enlightenment-to-be came early in the seventeenth century, with the initial stirrings of what became known as the scientific revolution. Francis Bacon kicked things off by overturning Aristotle and proposing a search for knowledge not through antiquarian study but by firsthand investigation—the basis for the scientific method. This was accompanied by a technological revolution still going full tilt in Halley’s time. Dutch eyeglass maker Hans Lippershey had registered the first known patent for a telescope in The Hague in October 1608, and not a year later Galileo began pointing one of his own construction at the night sky, soon observing mountains on the moon and sunspots, discovering four satellites of Jupiter, and confirming Copernican theories about a heliocentric universe. Sir Isaac Newton first gained notice in 1671 by presenting the Royal Society with a reflecting telescope of his own design. Meanwhile Robert Hooke was looking in the opposite direction through compound microscopes he devised to peer into previously invisible worlds. His self-illustrated Micrographia, an early “coffee table” book published in 1665, inspired Samuel Pepys to buy a microscope and encouraged Anton van Leeuwenhoek, a merchant in Holland, to make his own microscopes from lenses he ground himself. Van Leeuwenhoek began sending to the Royal Society his exquisite drawings of the creatures he was discovering in ordinary drops of water: “an incredible number of very small animals of divers kinds.”