Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio
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Discovering the philosopher’s stone—figuring out the age-old mystery of turning base metal into gold—would seem to be enough for one day’s work. But Teed wasn’t done for the night. “I had compelled Nature to yield her secret so far as it pertained to the domain of pure physics. Now I deliberately set myself to the undertaking, of victory over death … the key of which I knew to be in the mystic hand of the alchemico-vietist.” Hard to say exactly what he meant by alchemico-vietist, but a likely deconstruction is an alchemist working on the mysteries of life forces. In any case Teed considered himself one. He next explains his view of the universe, which leads to his greater immediate goal:
I believed in the universal unity of law. I regarded the universe as an infinitely (the word is here employed in its commonly accepted use) grand and composite structure, with every part so adjusted to every other part as to constitute an integrality, constantly regenerating itself from and in itself; its structural arrangement in one common center, and its forces and laws being projected from this center, and returning to the common origin and end of all. I had taken the outermost degree of physical and material substance, that in which was the lowest degree of organic force and form, for my experimental research. Having in this material sphere made the discovery of the law of transmutation, law being universally uniform, I knew, by the accurate application of correspondential analogy to anthropostic biology, that I could cause to appear before me in a material, tangible, and objective form, my highest ideal of creative beauty, my true conception of her who must constitute the environing form of the masculinity and Fatherhood of Being, who quickeneth.
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.
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 aboron37 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.
Electromagnetism was a hot topic in science at the time. The nineteenth century could be designated the Electrical Century, starting in 1800 with the first electric battery developed by Alessandro Volta, followed by the discovery of electro-magnetism by Hans Christian Oersted in 1820. Samuel F. B. Morse was granted a patent on the electromagnetic telegraph in 1837, and this heralded all the electric wonders to come before century’s end: incandescent light, the telephone, phonograph records, movies, radio. So it makes sense that electromagnetism would also be incorporated into the most trendy and up-to-date metaphysics, both by Sherman/Lyon and Cyrus Teed.
Promulgating these ideas would be a large order for a young man whose life so far had been undistinguished at best. Teed had been born in 1839 in the village of Trout Creek, New York, one of two sons among eight children. The family moved north to the Utica area when he was just a year old. By an odd coincidence, he was a distant cousin to Joseph Smith, whose own vision (a pillar of fire that turned into God and Jesus) as a teenager in 1820, just three hundred miles from Utica, led to the founding of the Mormon Church.
As a child, Teed showed no particular spark. He quit school at age eleven to work on the Erie Canal, as a driver on the towpath of the canal, which had been completed twenty-five years earlier. At some point he started to study medicine with a physician uncle. At twenty-two he enlisted in the Union army as part of the medical corps; he had already married Delia M. Row, a distant cousin, and fathered a son, Douglas. After Teed was released from the army, he returned to New York to continue studying medicine at the Eclectic Medical College—an esoteric institution that emphasized what would be called alternative remedies today. As Fogarty characterizes it, “Eclectic practitioners were more poorly educated than regular physicians, combined a variety of methods derived from regular and homeopathic medicine and, in the main, had their practices in smaller communities. Some eclectics were disreputable charlatans while others worked in the botanical drug tradition and served their communities as well as the other sects.”
After graduating in 1868, Teed moved to Deerfield, New York, to join his uncle in practice. According to Peter Hicks, they hung out a sign saying, “He who deals out poison, deals out death.” Hicks explains: “They were referring to drugs— a very busy pharmacy … an hal
f block away shows no record of the Teeds ever writing a prescription. However, below the doctors’ office was a tavern, and people found this reference to poison very humorous.”40 Teed called his approach to medicine “electro-alchemy,” blending “modernized” alchemy with strategically placed zaps of electric current and doses of polar magnetism, a mixture of science (of a sort) and mysticism that would continue in his religious efforts. During his illumination, the lovely manifestation of God had also told him, as Hicks puts it, “that he would interpret the symbols of the Bible for the scientific age.”
After this profound spiritual experience, Teed couldn’t resist adding his metaphysical insights to the other restoratives he offered his patients. But most didn’t want to hear about how we’re living inside the hollow earth and that Copernicus had it all wrong from someone they were trusting to take care of their ailments. His practice, barely a year old when his illumination occurred, began to suffer, and the Teed family made the first of many moves in hopes of doing better somewhere else. He next tried his peculiar amalgam of doctoring and cosmic revelation in Binghamton, New York.
In 1873 he and Dr. A.W.K. Andrews—a close friend and one of his first true believers—visited the Harmony Society in Economy, Pennsylvania, a few miles above Pittsburgh. It was his first close-up look at a utopian religious community, and the experience put a gleam in his eye. As it happened, Harmonist founder George Rapp had been a fellow alchemist.
In their time, the Harmonists were among the more successful of the communal religious societies that sprouted like wildflowers all over the Northeast and Midwest during the nineteenth century. There were so many in New York alone that a swath through the center of the state was known as the “burned-out area” for the fervent religiosity and communal experiments it had seen. Teed’s spiritual revelation, leading him to create his own religious sect and utopian community, was not some isolated sport. His ideas about living inside the hollow earth were novel, but he was hardly alone in cooking up a new religion and establishing a community based on his ideas. It was going around. As Emerson famously wrote in a letter to Carlyle in 1840: