Authors: David Standish
Tags: #Gnostic Dementia, #Mythology, #Alternative History, #v.5, #Literary Studies, #Amazon.com, #Retail
Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio (23 page)
BOOK: Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio
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Futurama! The multiple divisions of the roadway seem unduly complicated, but the ecological concern shown here is definitely enlightened for the time, even if it’s hard to envision the continuously moving “earth closet.” Not dumping sewage into waterways and recycling for fertilizer were practically unheard of then. And proclaiming “no smudge or smoke” is definitely utopian, as is the plan to achieve it by using a new Koreshan form of clean energy—“the electromagnetic currents of the earth and air.” Ditto accomplishing all of this “without the use of so called money”!
Estero never quite got that far, but in its prime it was pretty nice, if decidedly smaller and more homey than it appeared in Teed’s fertile imagination. As a visiting Shaker described it around 1904:
The buildings are mostly set in a park along the right bank of the Estero River for about a mile. This park contains sunken gardens filled with flowers, banana trees loaded with fruit, paw-paw trees in fruit, palm trees of many varieties, the tall and stately eucalyptus, the bamboo waving its beautiful foliage, and many flowering trees and shrubs. Mounds are cast up, and crowned with large urns or vases for flowering plants. Steps lead down into the sunken gardens and to the water’s edge at the river. This land, where the park and the buildings are located, was at times swallowed with water before the Koreshans came. They expended $3,000 or more in dredging the river, besides making a deep ravine to carry off the surplus water into the river. The ravine is now beautified with Para and Guinea grasses, both native of Cuba, and is crossed by several artistic foot-bridges made of bamboo and other woods. Almost every kind of tropical fruit possible to grow in Florida can be found in this delightful garden, flowering vines cover the verandas of the houses and the foot-bridges in the park. Steps leading down to the boat landing, made of concrete colored with red clay, are quite grand, and were made and designed by the brethren. In fact, all the work in this magnificent garden is the product of home brains and industry. Koresh says he intends parking the river on both sides down to the bay, a distance of five miles.
47
Shortly after 1900, at its height, Estero had a population of about two hundred people, who engaged in all sorts of self-sustaining enterprises. Among the first of these was a Fort Myers sawmill they bought in 1895 and moved to nearby Estero Island, where they produced lumber both for their own construction purposes and for sale to others. Members working the mill also built houses on the island, and soon there was a small satellite colony there. A substantial three-story dining hall went up in 1896, with a large eating area on the first floor (where seating arrangements were sexually segregated), while the floors above served as dormitories for the “sisters.” Next came the Master’s House, a snazzy residence for their visionary leader, along with structures to serve their many cottage industries. They also had their own post office, and the general store they opened where the Estero River crossed the trail that would become Route 41 did a brisk business. (The old frame building is still standing, just off the highway, seeming to cringe from the traffic roaring by.) The Koreshans were a busy, productive bunch.
One of the most ambitious Koreshan buildings at Estero was Art Hall, which included an expansive stage where plays, concerts, and musicales were regularly performed. Music and art were important to the Koreshans, as were aesthetics of every sort. Those ornamental urns set on mounds around the property, aglow with flowering plants, were emblematic. Nearly everyone was musical in some way. The Koreshan orchestra gave weekly concerts at Art Hall, and the brass band took first prize at the state fair one year—an expensive pair of well-bred horses. “Victor concerts” were another musical diversion. One of the female members had a collection of two hundred or so records, and getting together ’round the old Victrola was a popular pastime. “Picnics were frequently organized and held in the woods around Estero, or on one of the islands in the bay,” writes Elliott Mackle Jr. “These were ‘enlivened with music by the band, speeches, jokes, and the playing of various games’ … Pleasure boating added to the enjoyment of life at Estero, and moonlight cruises were often organized. Assembling the brass band in one boat, the Koreshans would follow in others, music filling the night as the little flotilla cruised up the river and around the bay. There were, in addition, fishing and hunting expeditions, classes, rehearsals, and trips to various points of interest in the area.”
48
48
Koreshan children dressed in costumes, standing in front of the Tea House. (Koreshan State Historic Site)
They also had a little riverside outdoor theater. As Carl Carmer, a
New Yorker
writer who visited Estero in 1948, describes it in
Dark Trees to the Wind,
New Yorker
writer who visited Estero in 1948, describes it in
Dark Trees to the Wind,
They built a floating stage at a bend where the river had made from its banks a natural amphitheater and there they played dramas by Lord Dunsany and other modern playwrights … Some evenings their string and wood-wind orchestra gave programs of classical music on the stage of their raft theater and the audience, sitting under the palms beside the star-reflecting river, found life as good as they had thought it would be when they left their northern homes to follow Koresh.
49
Sounds pleasant, doesn’t it? Almost utopian. The peaceful scenes Mackle and Carmer depict go a long way toward explaining why these two hundred or so people were willing to leave Chicago and follow Teed into the Florida wilderness—even given his peculiar messianic hollow earth theology. Koreshanity, and Estero as its physical incarnation, provided sanctuary. Teed’s belief that we are living inside the earth, beyond which there is
nothing,
can be seen as a sort of ultimate metaphysical retreat to the womb—the entire universe as a small enclosed protective egg, finite, comprehensible, safe. And in the later innings of the nineteenth century, there was a lot to retreat from.
nothing,
can be seen as a sort of ultimate metaphysical retreat to the womb—the entire universe as a small enclosed protective egg, finite, comprehensible, safe. And in the later innings of the nineteenth century, there was a lot to retreat from.
Teed’s illumination had come in October 1869, just four years after the Civil War ended. Teed had seen its horrors firsthand as a member of the medical corps. Reconstruction and the fate of freed slaves was not a pretty picture, and President Grant’s administration set new standards for incompetence and corruption. The transcontinental railroad, completed in May 1869, seemed a tangible symbol of the way things were racing along. That it had been “financed by a group of crooked promoters who hired Congressmen to do their bidding” was a sign of the times as well.
50
America had been largely rural in 1860, and businesses were mainly farms and small private enterprises. But in the 1870s and 1880s, greed, materialism, and the application of Darwinism to the social fabric inspired the first of the robber barons to suit up and begin constructing the vast impersonal corporate trusts that would dominate the American economy by 1900, amassing profits in the multimillions while their factory workers living in grimy cities grubbed along at sixteen-hour days for crummy wages. Darwinism itself seemed the second hit of a one-two punch after Copernicus had eighty-sixed the formerly supreme earth and its solar system to an obscure corner of an obscure galaxy; now in 1871 Darwin announced that we were all descended from monkeys. Teed’s theology repudiated both these assaults on human self-esteem.
50
America had been largely rural in 1860, and businesses were mainly farms and small private enterprises. But in the 1870s and 1880s, greed, materialism, and the application of Darwinism to the social fabric inspired the first of the robber barons to suit up and begin constructing the vast impersonal corporate trusts that would dominate the American economy by 1900, amassing profits in the multimillions while their factory workers living in grimy cities grubbed along at sixteen-hour days for crummy wages. Darwinism itself seemed the second hit of a one-two punch after Copernicus had eighty-sixed the formerly supreme earth and its solar system to an obscure corner of an obscure galaxy; now in 1871 Darwin announced that we were all descended from monkeys. Teed’s theology repudiated both these assaults on human self-esteem.
The primarily Anglo ethnic makeup of the United States was being altered as Germans, Italians, and Eastern Europeans poured in—nearly 12 million between 1870 and 1900, and this out of a total population in 1900 of 76 million. Overcrowded Italy alone provided over 650,000 immigrants, two-thirds of them men, between 1890 and 1900. These new arrivals sent cultural jolts through the formerly homogeneous communities where they settled, as well as giving unwanted competition for jobs. Most landed in cities; between 1880 and 1900 urban populations grew by 16 million. The cities became noisy, overcrowded rats-warrens, darkened by smoke, painted black by coal dust. The Koreshans knew about this firsthand, having lived in Chicago for ten years before moving to Estero. It was also a period of political upheaval, bracketed by the assassination in 1865 of Lincoln and President McKinley’s 1901 shooting at the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition by anarchist Leon Czolgosz, with the assassination in 1881 of President Garfield by that infamous Disappointed Office Seeker in between. Garfield himself had commented on “the general tendency to fast living, increased nervousness, and the general spirit of rush that seems to pervade life and thought in our times.” Much of the upheaval during this time was fueled by economic problems, the two largest manifestations being the Panic of 1873, which dragged into a prolonged depression, and the worse Panic of 1893, whose effects were being felt even as Teed negotiated with Damkohler for his remote Florida land. Nearly a fourth of the country’s railroads went bankrupt, and in some cities, unemployment hit 25 percent. The so-called Coxey’s Army of disgruntled unemployed workers marched on Washington, arriving on April 30, 1894, and briefly camped out under the Washington Monument before the leaders were arrested and the others dispersed. Not two weeks later, workers for the Pullman railroad car works in Chicago—only a few miles from Teed’s South Side headquarters—went on strike and were soon joined by 50,000 sympathetic rail workers who refused to handle Pullman cars, which promised to shut down the nation’s rail system. Federal troops were called in to keep the trains moving, as rioting, bloodshed, and looting broke out in Chicago. On July 6, several thousand rioters destroyed seven hundred railcars, to the tune of $340,000 damage, and the next day a fire demolished seven buildings at the Columbian Exposition. National Guardsmen were assaulted and fired into the crowd, killing or wounding dozens. And all of this practically in Teed’s backyard.
So to Teed’s adherents, sitting about on a soft warm evening listening to a string quartet down by the riverside beneath the palms probably seemed like the best place to be. It was a peaceful existence, far from the turmoil of what passed for modern life elsewhere. “They saw a world in chaos,” writes Robert S. Fogarty in his introduction to a 1975 reprint of Teed’s
The Cellular Cosmogony,
“with force and greed central elements in that universe; therefore, they constructed a static world that closed in on itself, denied progress and affirmed man’s place in that world. Cyrus Reed Teed may have been a lunatic, a fraud, and a swindler; however, to his followers he was Koresh, the prophet whose philosophy was a divine mandate to cultivate the earth and save it for future generations.”
The Cellular Cosmogony,
“with force and greed central elements in that universe; therefore, they constructed a static world that closed in on itself, denied progress and affirmed man’s place in that world. Cyrus Reed Teed may have been a lunatic, a fraud, and a swindler; however, to his followers he was Koresh, the prophet whose philosophy was a divine mandate to cultivate the earth and save it for future generations.”
Teed hadn’t forgotten about the hollow earth. Starting in 1896, after his little colony was well established in Florida, he began orchestrating a series of experiments to prove scientifically his contention that we are living inside—that the earth around us is concave, not convex, as most people believed in their delusion. In 1898 he produced, in collaboration with Professor Ulysses Grant Morrow, a definitive volume combining a long section by himself about Koreshan cosmology with a detailed account by Morrow of their “geodesic” experiments. It’s revealing to reproduce the entire title page from the 1905 edition:
THECELLULAR COSMOGONY…OR…THE EARTH A CONCAVE SPHERECYRUS. R. TEEDPART IThe Universology of Koreshanity(WITH ADDENDUM: “ASTRONOMY’S FALSE FOUNDATION.”)BY KORESHTHE FOUNDER OF THE KORESHAN SYSTEM OF RELIGIO-SCIENCE; AUTHOROF VOLUMES OF KORESHAN LITERATUREPART IIThe New GeodesyBY PROFESSOR U. G. MORROWASTRONOMER AND GEODESIST FOR THE KORESHAN UNITY,AND EDITOR OFTHE FLAMING SWORD
Judging from the defensive tone of his introduction, it would appear that one common question asked of Teed was, Well, if we’re inside the earth like you say, and from that perspective it’s concave, why does it
look
convex, curving downward in the distance? And what about all those stars and galaxies that sure seem like they’re millions of miles away? Huh, Koresh?
look
convex, curving downward in the distance? And what about all those stars and galaxies that sure seem like they’re millions of miles away? Huh, Koresh?
BOOK: Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio
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