Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio
Page 32
31
This letter is quoted by Edna St. Vincent Millay, in her 1936 translation with George Dillon of Les Fleurs du Mal. She comments that “Baudelaire made it the patient and worshipful task of half his writing years to translate the prose of Poe into French, to present to the European public a writer whom he considered to be a genius unappreciated at home.”
32
While 7,254 miles above the North Pole, Hans makes an observation that the earth there becomes “not a little concave” and that the “dusky hue” of the Pole itself, “varying in intensity, was, at all times darker than any other spot on the visible hemisphere, and occasionally deepened into the most absolute blackness. Farther than this, little could be ascertained.” This description, while deliberately elliptical, seems to be a definite allusion to a sighting by Hans of a Symmes’ Hole up there.
33
Humphrey Davy, Humphrey Davy on Geology: The 1805 Lectures for the General Audience, edited by Robert Siegfried and Robert H. Dott, Jr. (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980).
34
The translation here is Robert Baldick’s, for a 1965 Penguin edition of the novel.
35
This article, “Nothing New Under the Earth: The Geology of Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth,” first published in 2003, is available at http://home.netvigator.com/~wbutcher/articles/nothing%20new.htm. His annotated JTCOE text is also online at http://home.netvigator.com/~wbutcher/books/journey_to_the_centre_of_the_earth.htm.
36
The Illumination of Koresh: Marvelous Experiences of the Great Alchemist Thirty Years Ago, at Utica, NY (Chicago: Guiding Star, n.d.).
37
Aboron would appear to be an element of Teed’s own invention—or one God told him about that hasn’t been revealed to the rest of us. The word doesn’t appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, and a Google search turns up only a West African tribe of that name.
38
Robert S. Fogarty, introduction to a reprint of The Cellular Cosmogony by Cyrus Teed and Professor U. G. Morrow (Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1975). The original edition appeared in 1898.
39
This idea hearkens back to the notion of an “abundant creation” that was a commonplace in the seventeenth century, invoked by Halley in his hollow earth paper to suggest that there might be life down there, and used by Symmes as well to explain the paradise he expected to find inside.
40
Hicks was a ranger at the Koreshan State Historic Site in Estero, Florida, at the time of writing this unpublished article, which is available online at http://koreshan.mwweb.org/teed.htm.
41
From Plain Talks upon Practical Religion by George Albert Lomas (Watervliet, NY, 1873), quoted in Charles Nordhoff ’s The Communistic Societies of the United States (London: John Murray, 1875; New York: Harper & Brothers, 1875).
42
Howard D. Fine, “The Koreshan Unity: The Chicago Years of a Utopian Community,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 68 (1975).
43
The Koreshan Story by Sara Weber Rea (Estero, Florida: Guiding Star Publishing House, 1994).
44
Quoted by Howard D. Fine.
45
Robert Lynn Rainard, unpublished 1974 master’s thesis, “In The Name of Humanity: The Koreshan Unity,” for the University of South Florida, Tampa.
46
Koreshan Unity: Communistic and Co-operative Gathering of the People by Frank D. Jackson and Mary Everts Daniels (Chicago: Guiding Star Publishing House, 1895). Quoted in The Koreshan Unity in Florida, unpublished 1971 master’s thesis by Elliott J. Mackle Jr. for the University of Miami.
47
From American Communities and Co-operative Colonies by William A. Hinds, 2ND edition (Chicago: C. H. Kerr, 1908). Quoted by James E. Landing in America’s Communal Utopias (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
48
The Koreshan Unity in Florida by Elliott J. Mackle Jr., an unpublished 1971 master’s thesis for the University of Miami. He is quoting the Koreshan newspaper, The American Eagle, February 14, 1907.
49
Carl Carmer, Dark Trees to the Wind (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1949).
50
A Short History of the United States by Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager (New York: The Modern Library, 1945).
51
Can’t resist deconstructing this just a bit. Lola Montez (1821–1861) was born in Ireland as Marie Gilbert, but debuted on the London stage in 1843 as “Lola Montez, the Spanish Dancer,” famous for her “Spider Dance” and inspiration for the phrase, “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets.” She married at least three men, not always bothering to get divorced first. On first seeing her, Ludwig I of Bavaria was so struck by her beauty he offered her a castle, which she accepted. She became his mistress in 1846 (making Editha putatively a daughter from this illicit union), and he bestowed the titles Baroness Rosenthal and Countess of Landsfeld on her the following year. In between fooling around, she helped him govern the country until he was dethroned in 1848. She also had reported dalliances with Franz Liszt and Alexandre Dumas and found herself in 1853 doing her Spider Dance for gold miners in San Francisco. I can find no information about General Diss Debar or James Dutton Jackson. Madame Blavatsky, born in the Ukraine in 1831, claimed to have studied for years under Hindu and Tibetan masters before arriving in New York in 1873 and soon founding the Theosophical Society, a “philosophico-religious” organization giving the occult scientific trappings. Like Teed’s, her writing was both voluminous and opaque, her principal work being The Secret Doctrine, published in 1888. Still a name to conjure with in occult circles, she died in London in 1891 after years of chronic illness. While living in New York, she kept on display in her flat a stuffed baboon, fully dressed and wearing spectacles, holding a copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species.
52
I am indebted to Elliott Mackle, Jr. for the details that follow, pieced together by him in The Koreshan Unity in Florida, his unpublished 1971 master’s thesis for the University of Miami.
53
Carl Carmer, Dark Trees to the Wind
54
Chicago in 1850 had a population of about 30,000; by 1900, despite an 1871 fire that burned down most of the city, that number was 1,698,575. Cleveland jumped from 17,034 to 381,768 in that same time, and Detroit went from 21,019 to 285,704.
55
The full opening line is: “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”
56
There were a few curmudgeonly counterexamples. One such was Samuel Butler’s Erewhon from 1872, which early readers supposed was written directly in response to The Coming Race—an idea that Butler is at pains to dispel in the preface to the second edition. Both deal with evolution and machines, but in Butler’s utopia (set on the surface, in a remote part of the world suspiciously like New Zealand), people evolved to produce marvelous machines, and then evolved a little more and got rid of them all when they began to fear that the machines themselves might evolve into monstrous mechanical creatures that would somehow do away with mere fleshy humanity. This fear of a mechanical takeover became a staple of science fiction thereafter.
57
Mizora: A Prophecy by Mary E. Bradley Lane (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), edited and with a Critical Introduction by Jean Pfaelzer. The cover provides an additional subhead: AN 1880s RADICAL FEMINIST UTOPIA.
58
The book is listed thusly in one bibliography of feminist utopian novels: Wood, Mrs. J. (pseud.) Pantaletta: A Romance of Hesheland (1882: American News Co., New York). A full listing of feminist science fiction, fantasy, and utopian fiction can be
found at http://www.feministsf.org/femsf/.
59
This summary is part of a section about Prehistoric Fiction on Trossel’s extensive and wide-ranging website, EclectiCity, http:/.trussel.com.
60
Lasting between 1879 and 1881, the so-called “Jeannette expedition,” led by Lieutenant Commander George Washington De Long of the U.S. Navy, went in search of the North Pole via the Bering Straits with the goal of verifying Augustus Petermann’s “open polar sea” theory. Funded by newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett (whose New York Herald had also financed Stanley’s 1871 effort to find Livingstone in Africa) and popularly named for the small steamship bearing them, the Jeannette expedition spent two winters trapped in ice before the ship was crushed and sank. The diminishing number of survivors suffered horribly, crossing the Siberian arctic islands dragging boats and supplies for hundreds of miles—one of those expeditions rightly known as “ill-fated.”
61
A Short History of the United States by Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager (New York: The Modern Library, 1945).
62
Cautiously, however, he didn’t give up his day job right away. In 1897, among his many stray professional interests—which is to say, attempts to stay afloat—he had started The Show Window, a trade magazine for window dressers, founding the National Association of Window Trimmers the following year, and continuing as editor of the magazine until 1902.
63
From an article by Dale R. Broadhurst titled “The Sword of Theosophy Revisited” on the ERBzine website (http:www.erbzine.com/mag11/1107.html). Bill and Sue-On Hillman’s ERBzine site is a terrific resource for Burroughs fans, whether the interest ranges from mild to total fanatic. Articles, novel summaries, etexts, and tons of mouthwatering graphics scanned from most of his works—a true ERB treasure trove.
64
From “Invitation to Adventure” in the first issue of Palmer’s Hidden World magazine, Spring 1961.
65
The Hollow Earth Insider, http://www.thehollowearthinsider.com/news/wmview.php?ArtID=20. This site, maintained and largely written by Dennis Crenshaw, contains many articles on hollow earth and related phenomena.
66
For more of this weirdness, the website address is http://paranormal.about.com/library/weekly/aa011199. htm?once=true&terms=hollow+earth+nazi. You can also check out “Paranormal Basics,” “Lost Worlds,” and “Time and Dimension Travel” while you’re there.
67
Quoted in The Hollow Earth Insider at http://thehollowearthinsider.com/news/wmprint.php?ArtID=19.
68
Review of Unknown World by Jeff Berkwits at http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue110/cool.html.
Copyright © 2006 by David Standish
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Standish, David.
Hollow earth : the long and curious history of imagining strange lands, fantastical creatures, advanced civilizations, and marvelous machines below the earth’s surface / David Standish.—1st Da Capo Press ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-0-306-81638-3
PN3433.6.S73 2006
809.3’8762—dc22
2006011035
First Da Capo Press edition 2006
First Da Capo Press paperback edition 2007
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—
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