Failed Science: The Mythical Hollow Earth
 

I was doing my usual weekly Google search for "nudist hermaphroditic dwarves", and that happened to turn up this New York Times [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/books/review/Glenn.t.html?ref=science]book review[/url] of the just-released "HOLLOW EARTH" by David Standish:
[quote]Sunday Book Review: [b]Journeys to the Center[/b]

By JOSHUA GLENN
Published: January 28, 2007

[quote]HOLLOW EARTH: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth’s Surface.

By David Standish.

Illustrated. 303 pp. Da Capo Press. $24.95.[/quote]

Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” a survey of mid-19th-century geological controversies thinly disguised as a ripping yarn set in a dinosaur-inhabited subterranean realm, was a best seller when it was first published in France in 1864. Five years later, an upstate New York alternative healer named Cyrus Teed had a vision revealing that the earth is hollow and that we’re all living on its concave inner surface. He eventually renamed himself Koresh, and established a thriving colony of hollow-earthers in the wilds of Florida. Then, in 1871, “The Coming Race,” by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, in which the narrator discovers an advanced civilization underground, helped give rise to dozens of science-fiction novels in which travelers penetrated the icy polar realms and descended into a well-lighted netherworld via a whirlpool or tunnel.

Where did the outlandish notion that the earth is hollow come from, and why did it capture the imagination of 19th-century Americans? In his entertaining new book, the journalist David Standish traces America’s hollow-earth craze to one John Cleves Symmes, a St. Louis trader who in 1818 self-published a circular gravely announcing that “the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles. ...” The zone of ice near the poles, he argued, was merely a frozen ring surrounding a warm open sea leading to the interior.

The kookiest thing about Symmes’s theory is how believable many found it. Not that it was without a semi-respectable scientific pedigree. As Standish recounts, several pioneering modern scientists and thinkers, including the English astronomer Edmond Halley, the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher and the Boston cleric Cotton Mather, had also advanced hollow-earth theories. (Since God would probably not have wanted to waste any space, Mather argued, an inhabitable hollow earth made perfect sense.)

Symmes was less persuasive as a scientist, however, than as an advocate for a national expedition to locate the polar opening. One of his converts, an Ohio newspaper editor named Jeremiah Reynolds, joined Symmes on his lecture tour and later embarked on a failed polar expedition. Reynolds’s speeches and writings would in turn inspire the young Edgar Allan Poe to write “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” a career-launching story about a traveler sucked into an immense whirlpool at the South Pole. Poe later reprised the idea in “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” which in turn inspired Jules Verne.

Standish’s research is impressive, taking in everything from the British Enlightenment and American religious utopianism to such hollow-earth literature as Jacques Casanova’s five-volume 1788 novel “Icosameron” (about a society of nudist hermaphroditic dwarves) to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar novels, in one of which Tarzan descends into a “Symmes’s Hole” via zeppelin. But his efforts to explain the popularity of hollow-earth-ism — a Koreshan remnant survives today with the cult newsletter Hollow Earth Insider — are weak. Standish rather lamely suggests it “can be seen as a sort of ultimate metaphysical retreat to the womb.” As for the proliferation of hollow-earth fiction from the 1870s on, it can be chalked up to the fact that writers needed “somewhere to set improbable romances now that formerly remote, unknown corners of the earth were becoming less believable as settings the more they were explored.” Ho-hum!

In the topsy-turvy America of the 19th century, in which the Civil War, industrialization, and urbanization caused all that was solid to melt into air (as a contemporary of Symmes put it), what could have made more sense than an inside-out world? Today, when utopian literature is so often dismissed as proto-totalitarian, we need dismissive explanations of hollow-earth mania like we need a Symmes’s Hole in the head. If Standish’s larger ideas are less than satisfying, it’s not because he’s wrong. It’s only because we surface-dwellers have lost the capacity to imagine that another world is possible.

[i]Joshua Glenn, an editor and blogger at The Boston Globe, is a co-editor of “Taking Things Seriously,” a book of photos and essays that will be published this fall.[/i][/quote]

:surprised What??? The Earth isn't hollow???

[QUOTE=rogue;97282]:surprised What??? The Earth isn't hollow???[/QUOTE]

Sorry for the rude shock - but the news isn't all bad: it does have a delicious hard-candy coating and creamy nougat center!

(There is still a fierce scientific debate swirling about whether the deep core is in fact made of Marzipan, as a Viennese scientist has suggested.)

And I was really looking forward to the possibility of meeting nudist hermaphroditic dwarves in my lifetime...

Amazingly, some people still believe in this:

[url]http://www.onelight.com/[/url]

Wow.....

[quote]Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” a survey of mid-19th-century geological controversies thinly disguised as a ripping yarn set in a dinosaur-inhabited subterranean realm, was a best seller when it was first published in France in 1864.[/quote]When the 1959 movie version was released, it was the first time I ever saw a line of people waiting to buy movie theater tickets that went, literally, around the entire city block.

[quote]Then, in 1871, “The Coming Race,” by Edward Bulwer-Lytton[/quote](... who also wrote the novel [I]Paul Clifford[/I], from which Snoopy, the "Peanuts" comic strip beagle, repeatedly plagiarized these opening words: "It was a dark and stormy night ...".)

[quote]dozens of science-fiction novels in which travelers penetrated the icy polar realms and descended into a well-lighted netherworld via a whirlpool or tunnel.[/quote] [I]Plutonia[/I], by Vladimir Obruchev, is one of the best of this genre I've ever read. My recollection follows:

In it, Russian arctic explorer-scientists travelling north from Siberia enter an increasingly strange situation. As visibility drops, they find themselves climbing gradually upward (sleds slide backwards on the snow if released), but barometric pressure keeps rising, rather than falling with altitude as they would expect (especially in thick clouds typical of low-pressure regions). Eventually the clouds lighten and the sun reappears ... in an impossible (for Arctic latitudes) position high in the sky. Then it gets warmer and stranger ...

It's really good!

[URL]http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/5050016916/[/URL]

[quote]As for the proliferation of hollow-earth fiction from the 1870s on, it can be chalked up to the fact that writers needed “somewhere to set improbable romances now that formerly remote, unknown corners of the earth were becoming less believable as settings the more they were explored.” Ho-hum![/quote]"Ho-hum"? In which exotic settings would Joshua Glenn have set those improbable dinosaur romances? Arthur Conan Doyle already had dibs on inaccessible South American plateaus.

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[quote=MooooMoo][URL]http://www.onelight.com/[/URL][/quote]They accept Visa / MasterCard / PayPal / checks from USA banks / money order / Postal Money Order / international money order / USA cash.

Note the link to
"Occult Merchants Top 100
The Rarest Occult / Pagan Products on the Web."
at the bottom of the page.

Everyone knows that the earth isn't hollow.

Every sane person knows that it is flat.

[quote=Uncwilly;97302]Everyone knows that the earth isn't hollow.

Every sane person knows that it is flat.[/quote]
[URL]http://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forums/[/URL]
Like all these completely sane people.
Their best argument is that the reason you go east and end up where you were is because north is the center of the world, so if you follow east, you'll end up back where you were.
:oolong:

[quote=cheesehead;97301]Arthur Conan Doyle already had dibs on inaccessible South American plateaus.[/quote]By the time I recalled that [i]The Lost World[/i] was published quite a bit later than 1870, a database error was preventing me from further fiddling. :mad:

[QUOTE=cheesehead;97301](... who also wrote the novel [I]Paul Clifford[/I], from which Snoopy, the "Peanuts" comic strip beagle, repeatedly plagiarized these opening words: "It was a dark and stormy night ...".)[/QUOTE]

Although, to be fair to Bulwer-Lytton, his legacy is not all risible - he did also coin the phrase "The pen is mightier than the sword." One of my pet hypotheses is that current awful-prose stylist and megamillion bestselling author Dan Brown is none other than the [url=http://hogranch.com/mayer/dvc.html]second coming of Bulwer-Lytton,[/url] but in true modern-day fashion, with even more popular success and utterly devoid of even a glimmer of talent.

A retreat.
 

:smile:

[Quote:But his efforts to explain the popularity of hollow-earth-ism — a Koreshan remnant survives today with the cult newsletter Hollow Earth Insider — are weak. Standish rather lamely suggests it “can be seen as a sort of ultimate metaphysical retreat to the womb.” As for the proliferation of hollow-earth.....]

Well I think Freud and Jung would have agreed with him. Its an unconscious urge to seek the safety and comfort of a dark and hollow womb.
Even the learned pharisee Nicodemus gave up all his learning to seek Jesus in the night to learn something from the Master.

When Jesus told him "Unless you are born again of water and the spirit.....
Nicodemus took it literally and asked plain and simply 'Do you mean that one should go back into his mothers womb ?'
Jesus chided him " What, you are a master of Israel and you dont know?"

I would also put it back to the olden times when people took refuge in caves to protect themselves from wild animals and the weather and some of these caves were huge and hollow.

Mortal enemies like David and King Saul took refuge in the same cave and neither knew that the other was there.

I noticed many a time like at Divali (festival of lights and fire works) that My dog would seek refuge in the darkest and most remote places in my apartment.

This is a behaviour that has been inbulit in the collective universal consciousness of all beings and men with intellect have moved from the physical to the metaphysical world to let their imaginations unreigned.

It is no wonder that people could postualte a hollow earth in the preceding centuries when not enough was known about it.

Today it is no wonder that we are reaching for the stars and yesterday's imaginations have become a reality in space travel.

Once again it is the urge to break free of the womb and reach out and be born again.

There is no reality unless one can visualise it first!

Mally :coffee: