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Hollow Earth

Many occult speculations revolve around variant cosmologies in which the Earth is not simply a solid sphere in a universe of other celestial bodies. One of them is the idea that the Earth is to some degree hollow. This theory takes two basic forms. The first, "the cellular cosmogony," proposes that we live on the inside of a sphere or oval, with sun, moon, and planets in the center. The second suggests that we live on the outside of a hollow sphere with a mysterious inner kingdom known only to a few initiates or intrepid travelers.

An early hollow Earth theory was proposed by the English astronomer Edmund Halley (of comet fame) in 1692. He suggested that the Earth is a shell 500 miles thick with two inner shells and a solid inner sphere, all capable of sustaining life. In 1721 Congregationalist minister Cotton Mather put forward a similar theory.

In 1818 Captain John Cleves Symmes, a retired army officer, spent the last years of his life trying to prove that the Earth consisted of five concentric spheres with holes several thousand miles in diameter at the poles. His theories are explained in detail in the books Symmes' Theory of Concentric Spheres (1826), by James McBridge, and The Symmes' Theory of Concentric Spheres (1878), by Americus Symmes, son of the captain.

In 1820 a writer with the probably pseudonymous name "Captain Seaborn" published a fictional narrative about a hollow Earth under the title Symzonia. In the book Seaborn finds his steamship drawn by strong currents to a southern polar opening, where he finds an inner world of happy utopiates. Edgar Allan Poe's "Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" develops a similar theme.

A later development of the Symmes theories was propounded with messianic zeal by Cyrus Reed Teed (1839-1908), who spent 38 years lecturing and writing on the hollow Earth theme. He had a laboratory for the study of alchemy, and claimed that in 1869 he had a vision of a beautiful woman who revealed to him the secret of the hollow Earth. This discovery was given to the world in a pamphlet titled The Illumination of Koresh: Marvelous Experience of the Great Alchemist at Utica, N.Y. In 1870 he published The Cellular Cosmogony under his religious name "Koresh" (Cyrus) and after many years of enthusiastic lecturing established a College of Life in Chicago in 1886. This was the beginning of a communal society called the Koreshan Unity. By the 1890s this had blossomed into the town of Estero, near Fort Myers, Florida, under the name The New Jerusalem.

In the 1930s, long after Teed's death and the decline of his Koreshan communities in the United States, his ideas were merged with theosophical and occult notions and also became part of some eccentric Nazi cosmologies. Remnants of the Hohlweltlehre (hollow Earth teaching) still have some following in Germany. Teed's ideas were later exploited by two famous occult swindlers, Mr. and Mrs. Frank Jackson, operating under the names Theodore and Laura Theodore Horos. The name "Horos" was taken from the writings of Cyrus Reed Teed. Mrs. Jackson (also known as "Mrs. Diss Debar," "Angel Anna," and "Editha Gilbert Montez") appears to have been born as Editha Salomon. In addition to representing herself as a founder of "Koreshan Unity," she stole the rituals of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Another hollow Earth theorist was Marshall B. Gardner, an Illinois maintenance engineer who worked for a corset manufacturer. His book Journey to the Earth's Interior (1906) might have been influenced by Jules Verne's story Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864). It rejects the theory of several concentric spheres and claims that there is only one hollow Earth and that we live on the outside of it. Gardner's "Earth" is 800 miles thick, and the interior has its own sun. There are openings at the poles, each 1,400 miles wide, through which the mammoths of Siberia and the Eskimoan people came. An enlarged edition of Gardner's book was published in 1920, with many impressive illustrations showing the everlasting summer of the interior.

Six years after the publication of the second edition of Gardner's book, Admiral Richard E. Byrd flew over the North Pole. Three years later Byrd flew over the South Pole, but he found no holes in either of the poles. Incredibly enough, however, his statements about his explorations have since been quoted out of context to make it seem as if he actually endorsed the hollow Earth myth. Claims that flying saucers really come from inside the Earth through the polar openings are made by, among others, Raymond Bernard in his book The Hollow Earth (1969).

A persistent variant of the hollow Earth cosmology is the idea that the Earth is honeycombed with a network of secret subterranean cities and caverns, the home of underground kingdoms. Such notions have been articulated by Richard Shaver. These are modern versions of older folklore about fairies and gnomes.