If you’ve ever had any truck with some of the more peculiar imaginative traditions of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then you’ve certainly come across fictional representations of the so-called “Hollow Earth,” the terra concava or terra succava of the Ancients.
In modern times, the idea has a fairly old pedigree, stretching back perhaps originally to the scientific speculations of Edmond Halley, who envisioned a kind of “onion-like” earth with concentric, alternating layers or shells. The idea was further developed in the works of Athanasius Kircher (Mundus Subterraneus, 1664) and the early science fiction novel Iter Subterraneum (Subterranean Journey, 1741) of Nicholas Klim (Ludvig Holberg).
In the nineteenth century, the idea gained a degree of currency and even fashionability in certain circles, after it was popularized by Capt. John Cleves Symmes, who introduced the concept of the “Symmes’ Holes”—immense openings to the inner world at the north and south poles.
The tales of strange journeys to the Hollow Earth in the literature of the nineteenth century are almost too numerous to list. There is, for instance, the famous mysterious ending of Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), which hints at a journey into the interior world via an entrance at the South Pole (although neither this journey, nor the interior world, are explicitly described or mentioned in the novel); and there are many other works, of lesser quality perhaps, such as Capt. Adam Seaborn’s Symzonia (1820), or William R. Bradshaw’s The Goddess of Atvatabar (1892), or the famous “Pellucidar” novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. And that doesn’t even include the many works of “nonfiction” on this subject from the twentieth century, such as William Reed’s Phantom of the Poles (1906) and Marshall Gardner’s A Journey to the Earth’s Interior (1913), the accounts of Agarrtha or Agharti in D’Alveydre’s Mission de l’Inde (1910) or Ossendowski’s Beast, Men and Gods (1922) (which inspired René Guénon’s The King of the World), or even later works like Dr. Raymond Bernard’s The Hollow Earth (1964) or Richard Shaver’s infamous “true stories” of the advanced subterranean races of the “Deros” and “Teros.”
Notions of subterranean lost races and civilizations are one thing, but the concept of a Hollow Earth—with an inhabited country on the planet’s interior shell illuminated by some sort of miniature sun at the precise center of the earth—is something else entirely. These ideas elicit derision and scorn, and I suppose that makes a great deal of sense.
Or does it?
Equally intriguing, to me at least, is why there is a such a persistent psychological need for the existence of some such underground domain or underworld. For the idea is not merely the product of the discredited scientific or pseudo-scientific notions of yesteryear. All Traditions have spoken of the underworld, an Acherontic underground kingdom, and have peopled it with strange races or the shades of those who died in the upper world—the world of light and love and life.
It is no wonder, then, that the idea has persisted, even dressed up in the scientistic guise of the Hollow Earth theory. More significantly, it is clearly an analogical representation of the dichotomy between the esoteric and the exoteric realms—the latter, of course, represented by the profane world of the “surface.” It is also not at all clear to me that the idea of the Hollow Earth has been, or even can be, altogether discredited or dismissed.
The importance and the metaphysical symbolism of this idea can be better understood through a Traditionalist exegesis. In simple terms, and what should come as no surprise to anyone, the Hollow Earth represents the “Center of the World,” and is a metaphor not merely for the afterlife or the posthumous state of being, but more importantly it is a metaphor for the initiatic journey.
Every ancient tradition has attached tremendous significance to the idea of the Center. In his essay “The Idea of the Center in the Traditions of Antiquity,” René Guénon explains:
“The Center is before all else the origin, the point of departure of all things; it is the principial point, without form, without dimensions, therefore indivisible, and consequently the only image that can be given to primordial Unity. From it, by its radiation, all things are produced…”1
This concept is graphically represented by the astrological or astronomical “symbol of the sun,” ⨀, the point of course representing the Principle, and the encompassing circle representing the world of manifestation, the changing and “evolving” world—it is, in other words, a symbol compounded of the emblems of Being and Becoming.
It is also a perfect schematic diagram of the Hollow Earth, with the point or Principle corresponding to the “inner sun,” and the outer crust of the earth representing that upon which this interior luminary—the “truer sun” (ὁ ἀληθέστερος ἥλιος) or “intelligible or transmundane sun” (ὁ νοητὸς καὶ ὑπερκόσμιος ἥλιος) of the Chaldeans—sheds its light. The symbology of the Hollow Earth, then, is a perfect analogical representation of the cosmos in miniature: the Absolute, or cosmic Principle, and the world of Becoming or Manifestation that it produces:
“The central point is the Principle, it is pure Being, and the space which it fills by its radiation and which exists only by that same radiation (the Fiat Lux of Genesis), without which it would be only ‘privation’ and nothingness, is the World in the widest sense of the word, the totality of all beings and all states of existence constituting universal manifestation.”2
Even the concentric schema envisioned by Halley in his original system can be accommodated:
“Sometimes the point is surrounded by concentric circles which seem to represent the different states or degrees of manifested existence, arranged hierarchically according to their greater or lesser distance from the primordial Principle.”3
The image of the Hollow Earth then—with its Central Sun and the world of manifold strange races, civilizations, and creatures that is often imagined to inhabit the inner crust of the earth—answers to a deep and pervasive spiritual impulse in mankind. Of even greater significance is the correspondence between the Mundus Subterraneus, or Hollow Earth, with the concept of initiation and the “initiatic cave.” And there’s nothing particularly remarkable about this identification, either—you can see it in virtually every fictional tale of the Hollow Earth, where the explorers find not merely adventure and novelty, but spiritual and intellectual illumination in this subterraneous realm.
For instance, in Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, the protagonists are swept into a strange region of the earth at the South Pole—a place of darkness, immense cataracts, of strange white ashfalls and the huge white birds eternally screaming “Tekeli-li!”4—and finally descend the cataract into an abyss, where they are met by a “shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men.” The story ends there, but an after-note suggests that the eponymous narrator returns to the civilized world after many months, greatly changed and perhaps, one is led to believe, initiated into the Mysteries; ere he dies, in his own turn, and mysteriously.
The whole story is an allegory for the journey into the world of mystery and initiation and finally death (signaled by the narrator’s inadvertent discovery of immense Hebrew characters—supposedly God’s judgment—graven in the black cliffs of the Antarctic continent of Tsalal), followed perhaps by an initiatic “second birth,” which is to be found in the ultimate initiatic cave at the Center of the World.
And the very geography of the supposed Hollow Earth only increases the resemblance to the initiatic cave, with the polar openings or “Symmes’ Holes” corresponding to the “roof of the cave” that gives ingress to the place of initiation, of illumination, as well as egress from it…to return to the world beyond or the “outer darkness” (ὁ σκότος ἐξώτερος). As Guénon further observes:
“…death to the profane world must be seen as nothing more than a preparation for initiation, followed by the ‘descent into hell,’ which is of course the same thing as the journey into the subterranean world to which the cave gives access. As for initiation itself, far from being considered as a death, it is on the contrary like a ‘second birth,’ as well as like a passage from darkness into light. Now, the place of this birth is still the cave, at least in those instances when in fact or symbolically the initiation takes place in the cave…”5
It is also then entirely understandable why it is widely assumed in the fictional as well as the supposed factual literature of the Hollow Earth that to journey into this inner world is to find enlightenment—either through mysterious and supernatural means, as in Poe’s Narrative, or at the feet of an advanced civilization belonging to a subterranean race. The interior world as initiatic cave is the true goal of all serious seekers and students of Tradition, as it corresponds analogically with the inner world of the soul of every individual, which is the only place that true enlightenment and advancement can be found.6
This theme is elaborated upon further by Guénon in his essay “The Cave and the Labyrinth,” in a passage that is worth quoting at some length:
“…when what is outside the cave represents only the profane world, or the ‘outer’ darkness, the cave then appears as the only illuminated place, and necessarily illuminated from within, moreover, for indeed no light can then come to it from without. Now, since ‘extra-cosmic’ possibilities must be taken into account, the cave, despite this illumination, becomes dark relative, we do not say to whatever is outside it without distinction, but, more precisely, to what is above it, beyond its vault, for that is indeed what really represents the ‘extra-cosmic’ domain. From this new point of view, we could consider the inner illumination as merely the reflection of a light penetrating through the ‘roof of the world’ by the ‘solar door’ which is the ‘eye’ of the cosmic vault or the upper opening of the cave. In the microcosmic order, this opening corresponds to the Brahma-randhra, that is to say to the individuality’s point of contact with the ‘seventh ray’ of the spiritual sun, a point ‘localized,’ according to organic correspondences, at the crown of the head, and that is also represented by the upper opening of the Hermetic athanor. We might add in this connection that the ‘philosophic egg,’ which obviously plays the part of the ‘World Egg,’ is enclosed within the athanor, but that the latter can itself be assimilated to the ‘cosmos,’ and this in both the macrocosmic and the microcosmic applications. The cave can thus also be identified at one and the same time with the ‘philosophic egg’ and with the athanor, according to the particular degree of development in the initiatic process under consideration, but in any case without its fundamental meaning being altered in any way.
“We can also observe that, with this illumination by reflection, we rediscover the image of Plato’s cave, in which only shadows are seen, thanks to a light that comes from without; and this light is indeed ‘extra-cosmic,’ since its source is the ‘intelligible Sun.’ The liberation of the prisoners and their exodus from the cave is a ‘coming into the daylight,’ by which they can contemplate directly the reality of which they had hitherto perceived only a reflection. This reality consists of the eternal ‘archetypes,’ the possibilities contained in the ‘permanent actuality’ of the immutable essence.”7
The Hollow Earth, in this analogy, is a place that one must journey to—in the classic katabasis or descent into the underworld, the land of the dead and the place of shades—in order to bathe in the illumination of its Central Sun, a stand-in for the Absolute or the First Principle, and receive that enlightenment that can only come from within, through the higher-order gnosis of intellectual intuition, which proceeds from the “spiritual Sun” or the ideal realm. It is then for the initiate to make his exit from the cave through its “roof,” one of the polar openings, and experience his initiatic “second birth” back into the world of the outer darkness, bearing with him his gnosis or enlightenment.
Now, a final point must be made regarding the physical or material, as opposed to the metaphysical, reality of the Hollow Earth. I mentioned before that I do not think the actuality of this concept can be entirely discarded or scoffed at. Obviously that doesn’t mean that I necessarily concur with the idea that there is an interior world precisely of the kind imagined by nineteenth-century fictioneers. But I know of more than one esoteric society and secret organization that believes in the existence of an interior world—more or less corresponding to a kind of “hollow earth”—and does so in a way that is not merely allegorical.
The Order of the Black Sun, for instance, preserves a curious mythology in which mankind is said to have arisen from within “antechambers” to a kind of Hollow Earth of mysterious races and civilizations; these “antechambers,” which I envision as a series of immense caverns or chambers that are still far lesser in size than the actual “world beneath,”8 are supposed to exist, or to once have existed, at the poles. At some point in the remote past, possibly in an anterior cycle, humankind was exiled or compelled to migrate from these subterranean worlds and populate the surface realm.
The Ordo Dei Nefandi, moreover, claim to be the votaries of an ancient deus nefandus or “unspeakable god” that is represented as dwelling in a mysterious “underworld of the underworld” or “an unseen Tartarus,” which could very well be thought of as a kind of Hollow Earth or world below.
Then there is the matter of the College of Seth, and its curious cosmology, which I have mentioned before. Its members speak of something very similar, I suppose, to a Hollow Earth; but it is something negative and sinister, and instead of a terrestrial paradise existing in a perpetual summer beneath its Central Sun, they speak of a kind of prison, a vast carcer subterraneus, enclosing not the Principle of the World that Guénon spoke of, but rather its antithesis—something they call “the Inhabitant,” and which certain traditions know as the entitas infanda or “eldritch being” or “eldritch entity.”
I don’t know much more about it, save that they seem to regard it as a kind of “anti-Principle” and wholly evil, in a metaphysical sense, and in their weird cosmogony they even think of it as something that actually belongs to the remote future. It is certainly the strangest conception of the Hollow Earth that I’ve ever encountered; it seems to be totally opposed to the Traditionalist exegesis as expounded by Guénon, and I know that the College even has a kind of eschatology of “counter-“ or “anti-initiation,” in which a hubristic mankind, sometime in the future, will break into this hypogean world and release the Inhabitant, to its great and everlasting cost.
Anyhow, I leave that matter aside as an example of a countervailing metaphysics of the Hollow Earth. For my own part, I think it likely that the Hollow Earth, or a subterranean world of some fashion, may have been more readily accessible at an earlier period of the present cycle or Manvantara, as well as in remoter anterior cycles; this interior world, and the civilizations it sustained, has retreated from us as the declension of the cycle has progressed, and our ability to discover it has only become more difficult as the present cycle draws nearer to its end. It is the counterpart, I suppose, to Guénon’s “reign of quantity” and the increasing materialization of the world.
The “world below” or the “underworld,” the subterranean Orbis Altera of Celtic lore, the “St. Martin’s Land” of the fabled Green Children of Woolpit, the “Center of the World,” Agarttha or Agharti, the “Hollow Earth”—these are all nothing less than the spiritual center or heart toward which all traditions are directed, and whence Tradition itself flows:
“But the further the Kali-Yuga progresses, the more difficult it becomes to establish contact with this center, which becomes increasingly more closed and hidden at the same time that these secondary centers representing it externally become increasingly more rare; yet when this period comes to an end the tradition will be manifested anew in its integrality, for the beginning of each Manvantara, coinciding with the end of the preceding one, necessarily implies for terrestrial humanity the return to the ‘primordial state.’”9
Perhaps, at the end of this cycle, or the beginning of the next, the polar openings will reveal their secrets once again, and disclose the wonders of the interior world to the heroic men and women of that future age. This, undoubtedly, will be but one—and perhaps even among the least—of the marvels and miracles of that incognizable epoch; for now, with the great initiatic cave of the underworld kingdom seemingly forever closed to us, we must be content with finding our own paths to initiation and the “second birth”…
Symboles fondamentaux de la Science sacrée (Éditions Gallimard, 1962) [Symbols of Sacred Science (Hillsdale NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001) pg. 57].
Ibid., pg. 58.
Ibid.
Although Poe situates his mysterious white land at the South Pole (which is indeed, of course, a “white land,” though for other reasons than imagined in the story), there is a curious correspondence here with some remarks that Guénon makes in The King of the World about Hyperborean Thule, Thyle, or Tula:
“Tula is also called the ‘white isle,’ the color white, as we have seen, representing spiritual authority. In the American [i.e., Amerindian] traditions, Aztlan is symbolized by a white mountain, but this symbolism originally applied to the Hpyerborean Tula and the ‘polar mountain.’ In India, the ‘white isle’ (Shvēta-dvīpa), which was generally set in the remote regions of the North, is regarded as the ‘Abode of the Blessed,’ which clearly identifies it with the ‘Land of the Living’” (Le Roi du Monde [Éditions Gallimard, 1958] [The King of the World (Hillsdale NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001) pg. 64]).
Cf., also, the famous and enigmatic concluding line of Poe’s novel: “And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow…”
Op. cit., “The Cave and the Labyrinth,” pg. 195.
Cf. further on in the above-cited essay of René Guénon:
“The truth is that, far from being a place of darkness, the initiatic cave is illuminated from within, so that is is outside the cave on the contrary that darkness reigns, the profane world naturally being likened to the ‘outer darkness’ and the ‘second birth’ being at the same time an ‘illumination.’ If it now be asked why the cave is considered in this way from the initiatic point of view, we will reply that the answer to this question is found, on the one hand, in the fact that the symbol of the cave is complementary to that of the mountain, and, on the other, in the connection that closely links the symbolism of the cave to that of the heart” (ibid., pp. 196-7).
Ibid., pp. 216-7.
Perhaps these “antechambers” are analogous to the network of labyrinths that sometimes leads by tortuous ways to the initiatic cave, as mentioned by Guénon in his essay “The Cave and the Labyrinth;” their successful negotiation is considered a part of the initiate’s journey.
René Guénon, The King of the World, pg. 51.
This is one of my favorite essays of yours to date.
"This concept is graphically represented by the astrological or astronomical “symbol of the sun,” ⨀, the point of course representing the Principle, and the encompassing circle representing the world of manifestation, the changing and “evolving” world—it is, in other words, a symbol compounded of the emblems of Being and Becoming."
In a strange serendipity, I just encountered the symbol of the sun in the work of Wolfgang Smith. I did not realize Smith had derived to from Guenon. His traditionalist roots are deeper than I knew. Where could I find the two essays from Guenon that you shared?
The Order of the Black Sun's view seems reminiscent of (or at least compatible with) the "polar origin" of the Zoroastrian, Vedic, and Homeric writings. The College of Seth's views strike me as highly Zoroastrian or Middle Platonic in having evil appear as a true anti-principal rather than merely a privation of the good.