INTRODUCTION

Here’s one:

What do Sir Edmond Halley, Cotton Mather, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, L. Frank Baum, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Adolph Hitler, Admiral Byrd, flying saucers, Superman, Mount Shasta, and Pat Boone all have in common?

If you answered the hollow earth, you’re way ahead of where I was before I started looking into this.

Like most kids of my time, I first encountered the idea that the earth might be hollow in Verne’s A Journey to the Center of the Earth—even though he seemed to take forever to get down there. Because my tastes were resolutely low-rent, tending toward rock ’n’ roll and science fiction, as a teenager I also read several of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar novels of wild adventures in a prehistoric world beneath the earth’s crust, starting in the middle with Tarzan at the Earth’s Core. As an undergraduate at Miami University in southern Ohio, I lived for awhile in a dorm named for John Cleves Symmes, an early prominent settler in the area, and learned that he had a namesake nephew, a veteran of the War of 1812, who devoted the last years of his life to proselytizing for an expedition to the North Pole, where he expected to find a vast opening leading into the earth’s interior, which, he believed, was hollow, and contained an unspoiled paradise just waiting, well, to be spoiled. And then in a grad school Poe seminar, I found out that he’d liked Symmes’ peculiar idea enough to use it as an ending for one of his short stories, “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” and as a motif in his only published novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

Years pass. I’d stuck all this vital information into a corner of the attic I call my brain and pretty much forgotten about it, just as I’d figured the rest of the world had—since everyone knows that it’s not hollow, right? Wrong. While surfing around on the Internet a couple of years ago, I came across a website for a newsletter called The Hollow Earth Insider—along with much else. It turns out that the idea is still alive and well, at least among a cadre of fringe devotees. Not a few claim they make regular astral-travel visits inside, where they find a New Age civilization of peaceful vegetarians. Type the phrase “Hollow Earth” into your favorite search engine, and prepare to be amazed at the amount of material that turns up. Google produced 2,100,000 hits the last time I looked.

The hollow earth has had a long history. Right down to the present, the idea has been used again and again, changing and evolving in ways that suit the needs and concerns of each succeeding time.

Virtually every ancient culture worldwide, and most religions, has shared a belief in some sort of mysterious subterranean world, inhabited by strange and powerful creatures, right beneath our feet. These underworlds were myriad. The Sumerians believed in a vast netherworld they called Ki-Gal; in Egypt, it was Duat; in Greece and Rome, Hades; in ancient Indian mythology, it was Naraka; certain schools of Buddhism believed in a worldwide subterranean labyrinth called Agartha; in Japan, there was Jigoku; the Germanic people had Hellheim; the Inca called it Uca Pacha, while to the Aztecs it was Mictlan, and to the Mayans, Mitnal. And of course, to the Christians, it’s good old Hell, toured most elegantly by Dante in the fourteenth century in his Inferno. The near-universality of these underworlds isn’t surprising. They’re the dark terrain of the unconscious given tangible form and structure, embodiments of the boogie-man who ran howling through our nightmares when we were kids.

But such mythic/religious ideas started to take on a scientific cast in the seventeenth century, beginning with English astronomer and mathematician Edmond Halley, best remembered for his famous comet. He gave us our first scientific theory of the hollow earth—in his formulation, consisting of independently turning concentric spheres down there, one inside the other. Halley arrived at this notion, which he presented to the prestigious Royal Society of London, to account for observed variations in the earth’s magnetic poles. His true imaginative leap, however, lay in the additional thought that these interior spheres were lit with some sort of glowing luminosity, and that they might well be able to support life. Generations of science fiction writers have been thankful to him for this ever since.

Although the distinction between “hollow” and “riddled with subterranean labyrinths” is sometimes unclear, I have leaned as much as possible toward truly “hollow,” and so haven’t discussed such popular underground realms as Alice’s Wonderland or other cavern-like subterranean places. What I have tried to do here is trace the permutations on Halley’s idea from his time down to the present. The story weaves in and out of literature and what passes for real life, and veers over into the charmingly delusional more than once. It includes writers major and minor, scientists, pseudo-scientists, religious visionaries and cranks, explorers, evil dictators, New Agers, scam artists, and comic book characters.

One thing I found fascinating was the hollow earth idea’s continuing elasticity—it has been equally useful as a late-seventeenth-century scientific theory, an expression of early-nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny, a vehicle for mid-nineteenth-century musings on paleontology and Darwin, late-nineteenth-century religious utopianism, Teddy Roosevelt–style imperialism, a perfect creepy vehicle for 1950s Cold War paranoia, and a cozy home for dreamy contemporary New Age utopias.

There have been many books recently about important ideas or commodities that have changed the world. This one, I am happy to say, traces the cultural history of an idea that was wrong and changed nothing—but which has nevertheless had an ongoing appeal.