NP Hollow Earths

[Robert Mahnke]

New York Times Book Review

January 28, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/books/review/Glenn.t.html?ref=review


Journeys to the Center 


By JOSHUA GLENN


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. 

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
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/edgar_allan_po
e/index.html?inline=nyt-per>  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.

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.

 

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