MDDM Ch. 75 A Great Circum-Polar Emptiness

Sun Sep 8 14:55:10 CDT 2002

"'The Pole itself, to be nice, hung beyond us in empty
space,-- for as I was soon to observe, at the top of
the World, somewhere between eighty and ninety degres
North, the Earth's Surface, all 'round the Parallel,
began to curve sharply inward, leaving a great
circum-polar Emptiness,' as Mason shifts uncomfortably
and looks about for something to smoke or eat,
'directly toward which our path was taking us, at
first gently, then with some insistence, down-hill,
ever downward, and thus, gradually, around the great
Curve of its Rim.-- And 'twas so that we enter'd, by
its great northern Portal, upon the inner Surface of
the Earth.'" (M&D, Ch. 75, p. 739)

>From Joscelyn Godwin, Arktos: The Polar Myth in
Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival (London: Thames
& Hudson, 1993), Ch. 5, "The Hole at the Pole," pp.
105-23 ...

   "The Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher
(1602-1680), in his treatise on the Subterranean World
(Mundus Subterraneus, 1665), wrote of how the
preceding two centuries had witnessed the exploration
of the whole world, with the exception of the polar
regions....  This deficiency of practical experience
could, however, be made up by logical reasoning in
combination with tradition....  At the Pole itslef,
the waters enetr a great whirlpool, and then proceed
through the body of the earth in 'unknown recesses and
toturous channels' until they emerge in the open sea
of the South Pole....
   "Kircher's rationale for his extraodinary theory of
the polar vortices has two parts.  The first is rather
scholastic, for he states that everything in the
universe has to be in motion, or else it will stagnate
and die....
    "Kircher's second argument is through analogy of
the seas' movement through the earth with human
anatomy.... Kircher likens the circulation of waters
to the recently-dsicovered circulation of the blood. 
Thus he implies that the earth is constructed and
behaves like a living creature...." (pp. 106-7)

http://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/mineralogie/kircher/kircher2.html#mundus

http://www.hmnetwork.com/lightweb/discomundus.html

   "Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth also
had the waters flooding out of the earth's interior
through a cavity at the north Pole, but there the
resemblance stopped: Burnet's was a mechanical earth
....   A more obscure divine, Alexander Colcott of
Bristol ... instead of having the earth filled with
water like a balloon, he took the step ... of positing
a hollow globe whose inner surface was coated with an
ocean....

http://www.sentex.net/~tcc/burnet.html

"... Sir Edmund Halley (of comet fame) ... in 1692
published in the Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society the hypothesis of an earth of three
closed concentric hollow spheres with a hot spherical
core at the center...." (p. 108)

   "The apparent impossibility of attaining the poles
allowed hollow earth and polar opening theories to
command serious attention well into the nineteenth
century.  It also gave rise to a lively vein of
imaginative literature, beginning with the anonymous
Passage du pole arctique au pole antarticque par le
centre du monde (Passage from the Arctic Pole to the
Antarctic Pole via the center of the earth), a novella
of 1721....
   "While medieval theology, as celebrated in Dante's
Divine Comedy, had found the inetrior of the earth to
be a suitable location for Hell, later writers began
to imagine quite the contrary.... early novels on the
theme of a Utopia beneath the surface of the earth
....
   "The literature of the Romantic era, needless to
say, is rich in fanatsies of polar mysteries and lands
within the earth....  Edgar Allen Poe's The Narrative
of Arthur Gordon Pym ... Jules Verne's Voyage au
centre de la terre (Voyage to teh Center of the Earth)
and Le Sphinx des glaces (The Sphinx of the Ice)....
   "First, however, we must render his due to the one
man who lived and died for the hollow-earth theory:
John Cleves Symmes (178-1829 ...)....

CIRCULAR
Light gives light to discover--ad infinitum

St. Louis, Missouri Territory, North America
April 10, A.D. 1818

To all the World:
I declare the earth is hollow and habitable within;
containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one
with the other, and that it is open at the poles
tweleve or sixteen degrees.  I pledge my life in
support of this truth, and am ready to explore the
hollow, if the world will support and aid me in the
undertaking.

Jno. Cleves Symmes
Of Ohio, late Captain of Infantry

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/symmes2.html

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA98/silverman/poe/symz_diagram.html

   "In the following year, 1819, Symmes moved to
Newport, Kentucky, and, presumably, wrote the novel
Symzonia: A voyage of discovery, published in 1820
under the name of 'Captain Adam Seaborn.'....
    "Walter Kafton-Minkel surmises that Symmes got his
ideas from reading about Halley's theory in Cotton
Mather's Christian Philosopher ...." (pp. 108-111)

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA98/silverman/poe/symzonia.html

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA98/silverman/poe/symmes.html

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/symzonia.html

   "It is easy to laugh at Symmes and his holes.  But
researches in the occult will recognize him as a
familiar type: the man with a military background ...
sane and competent in worldly terms, who nurtures a
secret belief, perhaps founded on a moment of
inexplicable revelation, that is the antithesis of his
outward persona.... concretizing, as it were, the
subliminal contents of the mind, and crying out for
their exploration!" (p. 112)

   "But what if we were already there?  This was the
view of Cyrus or 'Korsh' Teed (1839-1908) founder of
Koreshanity.  One of the many products of that
breeding-gound of spiritual eccentricities, Upstate
New York, Teed receivedhis illumination in 1869 from
an angelic Anima figure who appeared in his alchemical
laboratory in Utica.  In 1870, he 'announced the
discovery of the cosmogonic form, which he then
declared to be cellular, the surface of the earth
being concave, with a curvature of about eight inches
to the mile.'  In other words, we live on the inside
surface of a sphere.
   "Koresh taught that the earth was a laminated shell
...  The sun and stars move within the sphere ....  In
the center .. there is a black counter-sun ...." (p.
115)

"... we proceed to 1906, when, amidst the anticipation
of an imminent atainment of the North Pole, William
Reed published his book The Phantom of the Poles....
he believed that all the recent polar explorers had
made their way a certain distance around the rim, or
even inside the cavity.
   "Reed's earth contains a central fire but no
nesting spheres; the Arctic ocean continues round the
rim to an inner world of lands and seas...." (p. 118)

And see in general ...

http://seekers.100megs6.com/HollowWorlds.htm

http://seekers.100megs6.com/is_the_earth_hollow.htm

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/6696/hollow.html

http://skepdic.com/hollowearth.html

http://www.ourhollowearth.com/OurHollowEarth.htm

http://www.onelight.com/thei/theiintro.html

Perhaps note polar exploration connection here ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0103&msg=53753&sort=date

Somebody please let me know about this ...

http://www.uni-erfurt.de/dekan_philfak/forschung/philosophie/projekte/algem/polar.html

And DEFINITELY download ...

Griffin, Duane.  "What Curiosity is in the Structure:
   The Hollow Earth in Science."  From Mercator
   Projection to Freudian Phantasm: The Myth of the
   Hollow Earth in Literature, Science and Culture.
   Eds. Hanjo Berressem [!] and Uwe Schwagmeier.
   Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2001.

http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/dgriffin/Research/Griffin-HE_in_Science.doc

Though I can't tell if the book is actually available
yet.  But wait, there's more ...

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes
http://finance.yahoo.com