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John Crowley, if I recall correctly, recently referred to David Standish’s new book Hollow Earth, a popular summary of the assorted theories of subterrean realms and of the notion that we are living on the inside of a hollow earth, viewing an illusory universe that in reality is no more than a few thousand miles across.
All of this was also written about, a decade or so ago, in Joscelyn Godwin’s Arktos, and of course the whole notion was first made available to a wide readership in the famous Morning of the Magicians forty years ago. But there can never be enough moderately serious books on one of the most peculiar of ideas in its nineteenth century embodiments (let us leave to one side, as Standish seemingly does, a whole host of subterranean-civilization myths that never found their way into the pseudo-sciences of the Victorian era).
Those holes in the poles and subterranean dwellers show up in Scott Trafton’s Egypt Land book on racial anxieties in nineteenth century America, too. Egyptomania was, in the words of his wonderful scholarly website, one of the parents of science fiction, hollow earth novels included: for which exact phrase, see http://chnm.gmu.edu/egyptomania/sources.php?function=find&tpd=1850
Clearly, someone (and it won’t be me) needs to write a review essay on the actual psychosocial forces at work in this particular improbable-seeming evolution of the sciento-religious imagination, evaluating the relative merits of the available survey literature. Europe’s versions of the fantasy seem to have turned particularly grim, but this is where hearsay and distorted stories take over from certified fact (cf. those legendary Tibetan volunteers found in Berlin in 1945, who apparently turn out to have been a couple of Kalmyks or Kazakhs --- I don’t recall the details of the story --- who had ended up stranded, unable to speak either German or Russian, after passing through a succession of labor camps).
My personal favorite among the hollow-earthers is the Koreshan community that flourished (to overstate the case) in Estero, Florida from 1894 to 1908, its property deeded in 1961 to the state park system by the last four practitioners of Koreshanity. I no longer remember if I actually visited the site once I learned about it from an American Studies doctoral candidate (for a long while, I wanted to), but the photos on the state park system’s website reveals it to be a wondrous natural setting with a couple of attractive Victorian buildings, one of which contains a split globe modeling the hollow earth and the globular heavens.
Florida’s visionary history doesn’t rival California’s or upstate New York’s, but migrants from the hotbeds of visionary religion made their way to the Sunshine State in the heyday of Florida’s first development boom, circa 1890. Cassadega, across the St. John’s River from my hometown, is a spiritualist encampment that turned out rather more successfully than the Koreshan community, having a picturesque hotel for spiritualists and psychic who winter there every year and a much smaller number of permanent residents. Then there are the solo projects such as the Latvian émigré Edgar Leedskalnin who built his Coral Castle (originally called Rock Gate, apparently) according to principles, he claimed, by which the Pyramids were constructed. I learned about Leedskalnin through another American Studies doctoral candidate (whose main interest was folk environments that pose less of a technological mystery) and have preferred not to spend much time reading the voluminous literature on the man and his curious magnetic theories. Even more than with crop circles, it would be interesting to know how the trick was done, since Leedskalnin was reportedly too poor to have secretly hired large numbers of laborers to help quarry and move the tons of coral blocks that make up his folk-art castle. I bring up crop circles because one critical theory fellow hereabouts not only keeps us up to date on the latest blends of psychoanalysis and neo-Marxism and such, he posts annual reports on the crop circle season. Most of them look do-able in a good night’s work, but the most elaborate would require large teams and major equipment to produce them between sundown and sunrise. I don’t subscribe to any theories whatsoever about them (in fact, I don’t read most of them), I just wonder why any pranksters willing to expend that much money and effort would go on year after year without bothering to advertise their expertise, skills that would render them marketable as artists if not as technicians. It can’t be working artists doing it, or someone would already be producing the more elaborate versions as installation art; best guess would be a consortium of engineering and landscape architecture students, which seems improbable. As with so many combinations of mystery and hokum, any prosaic explanation that covers all the known facts ends up being almost as unlikely as the fantasy theories, though the debunkers do us the inestimable service of demonstrating that certain mysteries can be explained as never having existed in the first place. Item: the supposed tomb from which Poussin painted “Les Bergers d’Arcadie” (a painting which, by the way, will be on exhibit in Atlanta as of January 30). The tomb so identified was constructed in 1903 and demolished in 1988, and it’s useful to know this, if we do know it. As the filmmakers had Leigh Teabing say in the movie version of The Da Vinci Code, “That’s what they want you to think.”
Since there are no holy bloodlines involved, just a spurned proposal of marriage back home in Latvia, Leedskalnin has not attracted the same sort of intensive biographical investigation as the priest of Rennes-le-Chateau, who built his Tour Magdala by the well-established technique of paying stonemasons to do it.
All of this was also written about, a decade or so ago, in Joscelyn Godwin’s Arktos, and of course the whole notion was first made available to a wide readership in the famous Morning of the Magicians forty years ago. But there can never be enough moderately serious books on one of the most peculiar of ideas in its nineteenth century embodiments (let us leave to one side, as Standish seemingly does, a whole host of subterranean-civilization myths that never found their way into the pseudo-sciences of the Victorian era).
Those holes in the poles and subterranean dwellers show up in Scott Trafton’s Egypt Land book on racial anxieties in nineteenth century America, too. Egyptomania was, in the words of his wonderful scholarly website, one of the parents of science fiction, hollow earth novels included: for which exact phrase, see http://chnm.gmu.edu/egyptomania/sources.php?function=find&tpd=1850
Clearly, someone (and it won’t be me) needs to write a review essay on the actual psychosocial forces at work in this particular improbable-seeming evolution of the sciento-religious imagination, evaluating the relative merits of the available survey literature. Europe’s versions of the fantasy seem to have turned particularly grim, but this is where hearsay and distorted stories take over from certified fact (cf. those legendary Tibetan volunteers found in Berlin in 1945, who apparently turn out to have been a couple of Kalmyks or Kazakhs --- I don’t recall the details of the story --- who had ended up stranded, unable to speak either German or Russian, after passing through a succession of labor camps).
My personal favorite among the hollow-earthers is the Koreshan community that flourished (to overstate the case) in Estero, Florida from 1894 to 1908, its property deeded in 1961 to the state park system by the last four practitioners of Koreshanity. I no longer remember if I actually visited the site once I learned about it from an American Studies doctoral candidate (for a long while, I wanted to), but the photos on the state park system’s website reveals it to be a wondrous natural setting with a couple of attractive Victorian buildings, one of which contains a split globe modeling the hollow earth and the globular heavens.
Florida’s visionary history doesn’t rival California’s or upstate New York’s, but migrants from the hotbeds of visionary religion made their way to the Sunshine State in the heyday of Florida’s first development boom, circa 1890. Cassadega, across the St. John’s River from my hometown, is a spiritualist encampment that turned out rather more successfully than the Koreshan community, having a picturesque hotel for spiritualists and psychic who winter there every year and a much smaller number of permanent residents. Then there are the solo projects such as the Latvian émigré Edgar Leedskalnin who built his Coral Castle (originally called Rock Gate, apparently) according to principles, he claimed, by which the Pyramids were constructed. I learned about Leedskalnin through another American Studies doctoral candidate (whose main interest was folk environments that pose less of a technological mystery) and have preferred not to spend much time reading the voluminous literature on the man and his curious magnetic theories. Even more than with crop circles, it would be interesting to know how the trick was done, since Leedskalnin was reportedly too poor to have secretly hired large numbers of laborers to help quarry and move the tons of coral blocks that make up his folk-art castle. I bring up crop circles because one critical theory fellow hereabouts not only keeps us up to date on the latest blends of psychoanalysis and neo-Marxism and such, he posts annual reports on the crop circle season. Most of them look do-able in a good night’s work, but the most elaborate would require large teams and major equipment to produce them between sundown and sunrise. I don’t subscribe to any theories whatsoever about them (in fact, I don’t read most of them), I just wonder why any pranksters willing to expend that much money and effort would go on year after year without bothering to advertise their expertise, skills that would render them marketable as artists if not as technicians. It can’t be working artists doing it, or someone would already be producing the more elaborate versions as installation art; best guess would be a consortium of engineering and landscape architecture students, which seems improbable. As with so many combinations of mystery and hokum, any prosaic explanation that covers all the known facts ends up being almost as unlikely as the fantasy theories, though the debunkers do us the inestimable service of demonstrating that certain mysteries can be explained as never having existed in the first place. Item: the supposed tomb from which Poussin painted “Les Bergers d’Arcadie” (a painting which, by the way, will be on exhibit in Atlanta as of January 30). The tomb so identified was constructed in 1903 and demolished in 1988, and it’s useful to know this, if we do know it. As the filmmakers had Leigh Teabing say in the movie version of The Da Vinci Code, “That’s what they want you to think.”
Since there are no holy bloodlines involved, just a spurned proposal of marriage back home in Latvia, Leedskalnin has not attracted the same sort of intensive biographical investigation as the priest of Rennes-le-Chateau, who built his Tour Magdala by the well-established technique of paying stonemasons to do it.
