hollow earth & miniature gardens

[Doug Millison]

In some reading I've been doing prior to going to China next week, I've
encountered something that may help to draw a connection between Dixon's
journey into the hollow earth and the threads of Chinese lore and history
that TRP draws through M&D.:

"Whoever passes through the narrow gate enters into another world, closed
off and completely sufficient to itself. This paradisiacal, perfect, happy
place is far from this vulgar world, just like the miniature gardens that
play the same role for cultivated people. ... It is a cave, just like the
Grotto of the Immortals' Retreat in the miniature garden of the Pagoda of
the Great Buddah."
--Rolf Stein, _The World in Miniature:  Container Gardens and Dwellings in
Far Eastern Religious Thought_

Stein traces Chinese miniature gardens back to the Tang dynasty and
suggests older roots. Especially interesting, to me, are the tales of
Taoist adepts who could shrink themselves down small enough to enter and
explore these tabletop landscapes, many of which depict fabled lands of the
Immortals -- that reminds me a bit of Zoyd's astral traveling, too ("remote
viewing" is the term I think that was used in the CIA LSD experiments of
the 60s that TRP may be parodying in his depiction of Dr. Pointsman and
"The White Visitation"). Stein's book is well worth reading for those with
an interest in Chinese aesthetics, philosophy, literature.

P.S.  re GR and the Holocaust. Yesterday I had a chance to talk at length
on the phone with an old friend -- not a TRP reader, yet -- who has done
exhaustive research into the occult origins of Nazism (in the process of
researching the neoNazi revival). When I read him part of GRGR(5) that I
quoted yesterday ( "Was Mauritius some first poison trickle through the
sheltering dikes of Earth? Christians must stem it here, or perish in a
second Flood, loosed this time not by God but by the Enemy. The act of
ramming home the charges into their musketry became for these men a
devotional act, one whose symbolism they understood.") he immediately
identified it as a echoing the kind of anti-Semitic propaganda that
informed the Nazis' racial philosophy and genocide project.

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