In his novella Vril: The Power of the Coming Race (1871), Bulwer-Lytton depicts a master race living in the bowels of the Earth. How did Teed’s ideas gain a foothold in the upper echelons of the Third Reich? A less cosmic, more conspiratorial notion of a hollow Earth was introduced in Europe by the English novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. After all, there’s no place to hide inside a globe. According to the Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper, elements of the Nazi military might have even advocated looking up through the sky to spy on the Allies on the other side of the world. Anti-intellectual sentiment within the Nazi party embraced concave hollow-Earth theory – or Hohlwelttheorie as it is called in German. Yet his influence was not limited to the United States, nor to the 19th century. To many, Teed’s ideas sound like snake oil so thick only the most gullible could imbibe. Motivated by his new cosmology, Teed published a book, started a new religion, amassed disciples, and founded a new town in Florida. The Earth’s crust is an infinitely thick layer of rock encasing the entire Universe. In this strange cosmology, the Sun, planets, stars and galaxies all occupy the Earth’s interior. But while Verne imagined a subterranean cavern of fantastic creatures, Teed declared in earnest that we were literally living inside the sphere. Jules Verne had explored a similar concept five years prior in his science-fiction adventure Journey to the Centre of the Earth. In 1869, the Baptist fundamentalist Cyrus Reed Teed reported his divine revelation that the Earth was hollow.
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