Godwin, Arktos, "Antarctica"

[Dave Monroe]

...okay, I'm going to skip ahead here to Chapter Ten,
"Antarctica," pp. 125-138, of, again, Joscelyn Godwin,
Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi
Survival (Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Pres, 1993) ...

[Athanasius] Kircher's analogy of the earth's body
with that of an animal places the south Pole in a most
undignified position.  It may be that this is not
merely northern chauvinism, for the earth itself
presents a marked contrast between its two polar
regions ... (125)

As Charles Fort phrased it, "History, like South
America and Africa, tapers southward. [...] 
Preponderantly peninsulas are southward droops." (125)

The German Antarctic expedition to Queen Maud Land in
1938-39 made some surprising discoveries ... (126)

According to Miguel serrano, the Germans also foun
there a way of communiction with the Hollow Earth and
its secret cities, wher the first Hyperboreans had
taken refuge from the disaster that reversed the
poles.  There was a secret base prepared during the
war years ... (127)

But Serrano was only repeating a favorite theme of
neo-Nazi and sensational literature.  In his
well-documented [?] study The Hitler Survival Myth
(1981), Donald McKale identifies the earliuest source
of the myth of Hitler's esape to the southern
hemisphre as the unexpected surrender of a German
submarine in early 1945 at Mar del Plata, Argentina. 
(127)

Writers of fictions about Antarctica seem anxious fo
their work to be mistaken as fact.  This wa a common
affectation in nineteenth-century fiction, and often
used by the first great imaginative writer on
Antarctica, Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849).  The South
Pole appears in the short story MS. Found in a Bottle
(1833) ....  Scribbling frantically in the face of
certain doom, [Poe' narrator] writes of his descent
into a gigantic whirlpool ... (129)

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym .... teh narrator
discovers, beyond the ice-floes, a warm land inhabited
by disagreeable black-toothed savages ....  The
natives of this black land have a suprstitious horror
of anything white ... (130)

Jules Verne ....  Le Sphinx des Glaces ... (130-1)

Howard Phillips Lovecraft .... At teh Mountains of
Madness ... (131-2)

The mythology surrounding the North Pole has tended to
be positive: it is always the Arctic that is imagined
as th location of endless springtime and teh cradle of
noble races.  The Antarctic, on the othr hand, is
negative: it evokes tales of gloom an destruction, and
is populated by primordial horrors, or els by their
recent representatives, the Nazis.  (134)

... the active (North) and passive (South), or male
and female principles.  (135)

... the Rainbow City myth, hich has its roots in a
document known as the Hefferlin manuscript, circulated
priavately since the 1940s.  (137)

Rainbow City derives its name from its construction,
which, like some monstrous Legoland, is entirely out
of colored plastic blocks.  (137)

... there is no clear definition of what the myth of
Antarctica is, but the continent is as mythopoeic as
any place on earth.  Fully discovered only in the
twentieth century, it is the ideal location for the
favorite myths of our time: those of extraterrstrial
visitations, secret technology, the eternal war of
good against evil, and the coming New Age. (138)

Hm, one might also throw in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s
'Who Goes There?," the basis for The Thing in both of
its filmed versions (1951, 1982) ...




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