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Authors: David Standish

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Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio (20 page)

BOOK: Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio
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Teed loves nine-dollar words and isn’t shy about making up new ones. Whatever he might mean about applying correspondential analogy to anthropostic biology (anthroposophy was a current term for knowledge of the nature of man), it seems he’s
trying
to say that what he had achieved in transforming material substances he now intended to apply to the spirit, to make manifest his “highest ideal of creative beauty,” though saying that
she
would be the embodiment of the “Fatherhood of Being” seems a little foggy. He sits in a thoughtful attitude and concentrates with all his might.
I bent myself to the task of projecting into tangibility the creative principle. Suddenly, I experienced a relaxation at the occiput or back part of the brain, and a peculiar buzzing tension at the forehead or sinciput; succeeding this was a sensation as of a Faradic battery of the softest tension, about the organs of the brain called the lyra, crura pinealis, and conarium. There gradually spread from the center of my brain to the extremities of my body, and, apparently to me, into the auric sphere of my being, miles outside of my body, a vibration so gentle, soft, and dulciferous that I was impressed to lay myself upon the bosom of this gently oscillating ocean of magnetic and spiritual ecstasy. I realized myself gently yielding to the impulse of reclining upon this vibratory sea of this, my newly-found delight. My every thought but one had departed from the contemplation of earthly and material things. I had but a lingering, vague remembrance of natural consciousness and desire.
36
 
It has been suggested that this illumination was nothing more than an accidental near-electrocution from the electricity he was so fond of fiddling with, a
zzzolt!
to the brain that, instead of killing him, produced this vision. Ye of little faith!
Suffused by this ocean of electro-magneto-spiritual energy, he lies back on it, as if on a mystical water bed, drifting away into an unknown ecstasy. He has lost his body. “I started in alarm, for I felt that I had departed from all material things, perhaps forever. ‘Has my thirst for knowledge consumed my body?’ was my question.” A touch of Faust here. He can’t feel his body. He opens his eyes but can’t see anything at first. Then he hears “a sweet, soft murmur which sounded as if thousands of miles away.” He tries to speak, but it is in a voice he has never heard before. “Yet it was my own effort, and I knew it came from me. I looked again; I was not there.”
“Fear not, my son,” he finds himself saying in this strange voice, “thou satisfactory offspring of my profoundest yearnings! I have nurtured thee through countless embodiments …” The voice continues its revelations, taking him on a journey through his many past lives, good, bad, and horrible. The voice then tells him to look and “see me as I am, for thou has desired it. Offspring of Osiris and Isis, behold the revailing [
sic
] of thy Mother.”
He sees a “light of dazzling brilliancy” appear. A sphere of luminescent swirling purple and gold, and “near the upper portion of its perpendicular axis, an effulgent prismatic bow like the rainbow, with surpassing brilliancy. Set in this corona or crown were twelve magnificent diamonds.” This acid trip light show gradually resolves into human form—a beautiful woman. A
very
beautiful woman. Standing on a silvery crescent, holding a winged staff with entwined serpents—a caduceus, symbol of the medical profession—she wears a royal purple and gold gown, has “golden tresses of profusely luxuriant growth over her shoulders,” and “exquisite” features. It is God herself! She reveals that she is the Father, the Son, and the Mother, all in one. “I have brought thee to this birth,” she says, “to sacrifice thee upon the altar of all human hopes, that through thy quickening of me, thy Mother and Bride, the Sons of God shall spring into visible creation.” And she has a lot more to tell him.
At last the vision ends and Teed finds himself lying on the couch in his laboratory. He closes the
Illumination
by recounting his achievement in demonstrating the “law of transmutation”:
I had … demonstrated the correlation of force and matter. I had formulated the axiom that matter and energy are two qualities or states of the same substance, and that they are each transposable to the other … In this I knew was held the key that would unlock all mysteries, even the mystery of Life itself.
 
What’s eerie about this is that through the most occult, electro-alchemical path, Teed has arrived at an idea—matter is energy, energy matter, simply different forms of the same thing—that would shortly become an essential scientific truth.
But then he says he made this transmutation spiritually as well:
I had transformed myself to spirituous essence, and through it had made myself the quickener and vivifier of the supreme feminine potency … While thus inherent and clothed upon with the femininity of my being, how vividly was awakened in my mind the memory of the passage of Scripture found in Jeremiah xxxi: 22: “How long wilt thou go about, O thou backsliding daughter? For the Lord hath created a new thing in the Earth, a woman shall compass a man.”
 
Through force of will Teed not only summoned God to appear to him, but he
really
got in touch with his feminine side! The main points of Teed’s
Illumination
are summarized in Sara Weber Rea’s
The Koreshan Story
(1994):
•
The universe is a cell, a hollow globe
, eternally and perpetually renewing itself by virtue of involution and evolution, and
all life exists on its inner concave surface
.
• God being perfect is both male and female—a biune being, and personal to every individual.
• Matter and energy are inter-convertible. Matter is destructible resulting in transmutation of its form to energy and conversely, from energy to form.
• Reincarnation is the central law of life—one generation passing into another with all humanity flowing down the stream of life together.
• Heaven and hell constitute the spiritual world. That is, they are mental conditions and within mankind.
• The Bible is the best written expression of the Divine Mind but is written symbolically. The symbolism must be interpreted by a prophet who would appear in every age and in the context of that age.
• Man lives best by communal principles to correspond with the primitive Christian church. The Koreshan form of socialism would be the expression of the natural laws of order, to include the elimination of money power and wage slavery.
• Equity, not equality, is a natural law for women as for men. There is no equality, and to say any two people are equal is merely trying to enforce uniformity.
Amazing that Teed got all this down without taking notes. And that wasn’t all. Rea adds, “Dr. Teed indicated there was a great deal more knowledge that had been imparted to his mental consciousness, but he felt the ordinary minds of mortals could not immediately comprehend or evaluate it. It would be presented to the world in time.”
So: the earth is hollow and we all live inside. Teed is the second coming of Christ. God is male and female. Matter and energy are interchangeable. Reincarnation is a fact of existence. Heaven and hell are within us. The Bible should be read symbolically, not literally. People should live according to communal socialist principles—no money. Equity for men and women.
These ideas are part of a mainstream of American millenarian thinking that goes back to the Pilgrims and the Boston Puritans. Eschatological details varied, but the thread of the last days being upon us shines through the fabric of American history, with new messiahs practically a dime a dozen. What sets Teed apart is his insistence that the earth is hollow and that we all live inside a “cosmic egg.” Robert S. Fogarty briefly summarizes Teed’s cosmology:
He discovered that the universe is all one substance, limited, integral, balanced and emanating from one source, God. The Copernican theory of an illimitable universe was false because the earth had a limited form: it was concave … The sun is an invisible electro-magnetic battery revolving in the universe’s center on a 24 year cycle. Our visible sun is only a reflection, as is the moon, with the stars reflecting off seven mercurial disks that float in the sphere’s center. Inside the earth there are three separate atmospheres: the first composed of oxygen and nitrogen and closest to the earth; the second, a hydrogen atmosphere above it; third, an aboron
37
atmosphere at the center. The earth’s shell is one hundred miles thick and has seventeen layers. The outer seven are metallic with a gold rind on the outermost layer, the middle five are mineral and the five inward layers are geologic strata. Inside the shell there is life, outside a void. One can then understand why the Koreshan group was reported to have sported badges which proclaimed “We live on the inside.”
38
 
 
Chart depicting Koreshan cosmogony from an 1880s edition of the
Flaming Sword.
(Koreshan State Historic Site)
These details were elaborated over time and remained central to Teed’s theology, even though his insistence on the earth’s hollowness and our interior living arrangements got him branded a crackpot and worse. Ready to take his lumps, he declared, “To know of the earth’s concavity is to know God, while to believe in the earth’s convexity is to deny Him and all His works.” No ambiguity there.
Although Teed’s conviction that the earth is hollow had antecedents in the work of Edmond Halley, Cotton Mather, John Cleves Symmes, and Jules Verne, he was the first to claim we’re living in it.
 
Teed’s hollow globe, on display in Art Hall at the Koreshan Historic Site in Estero, Florida. (Koreshan State Historic Site)
A “scientific” book supporting the earth’s hollowness appeared in 1871 and went through several editions in the next few years. Whether Teed read it isn’t known. But it contains notable parallels to his ideas, particularly in regard to their inspiration and electromagnetism. It had the slightly askew title
The Hollow Globe; or The World’s Agitator and Reconciler.
The title page writing credits are revealing:
Presented through the Organism of
M. L. SHERMAN, M.D.,
And Written by
PROF. WM. F. LYON
 
 
As Professor Lyon humbly relates in the preface, he had little to do with the “original, natural and startling ideas, which seem to be entirely irrefutable,” since they were channeled from the spirit world through Dr. Sherman, and Professor Lyon simply wrote them down. He says that in September 1868, he was sitting in his Sacramento office “when a strange gentleman made his appearance” and told Lyon that he had repeatedly “been thrown into a semi-trance condition becoming partially unconscious of his earthly surroundings” (sound familiar?). During this trance spirits gave him scientific information about the nature of the world. Over the next months, Sherman conveyed these ideas “in broken fragments” to Lyon, who organized them. In some respects they are a further iteration of existing hollow earth ideas and in others represent a new departure.
Like many hollow earth theorists going back to Halley, the authors in chapter 1 insist on divine purpose but give it a peculiarly American manifest destiny twist. After charting the American movement westward and citing the human universality of this drive, they point out that America is filling up and people will soon have nowhere to go. (This is actually forward-looking, since historian Frederick Jackson Turner didn’t declare the frontier a goner until 1893.) But an all-wise spirit wouldn’t permit this thwarting of human need and so, voilà, the paradisiacal hollow earth awaits! Humanity not only needs it to be there, it would be a horrible waste of space if it weren’t.
39
But how to get inside? Here the authors fall back on Symmes (without naming him): a vast opening at the pole. What about all that ice? Chapter 2 takes up another standby, the open polar sea. It definitely exists, and a passage will be found through the ice, probably through the Bering Straits. What about the burning heat that’s supposed to be down there, per prevailing geological thinking? Chapter 3, “The Igneous Theory,” demolishes that folly. Okay, then what about volcanoes and earthquakes? These occupy chapters 4 and 5. And here’s where we see a new wrinkle in hollow earth thinking. Lyons goes to great pains, and into frightening detail, to show that what causes them—as well as what holds the fabric of the earth together—is a complex electromagnetic matrix that I won’t even attempt to describe. This insistence on electromagnetism as the essential force at work is something new, and it’s also essential in Teed’s formulation.
BOOK: Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio
11.67Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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