Journey to the center of the earth

Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth's Surface
By David Standish
Da Capo, 303 pp., illustrated, $24.95

Throughout history, scientists, philosophers , and religious leaders have fathomed the shape and substance of our world. The Babylonians and Mesopotamians thought the earth was a flat, circular disk surrounded by oceans. The Egyptian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes of Alexandria believed four massive walls held in the seas and supported a firmament of heavenly bodies. Referring to ``four angels standing on four corners of the earth," the Bible's Revelation 7:1 suggests a flat earth. The sixth-century Bishop Isidore of Seville claimed the earth was wheel-shaped.

Even the brainy classical thinkers figured our planet was drum-shaped, until Pythagoras promoted his spherical model. Still, Greeks and Romans persisted in their belief in Hades, a repository for souls beneath the earth's surface. Since then, different traditions have dreamed up subterranean resting places for the dead, whether benign, like the Jewish Sheol, or more nasty, such as the Christian-conceived hell.

Religion then, just like today, was slow to catch up with science. Along the way, Western civilization invented an even more outlandish notion about the earth -- that it contained not just an underworld, but that its innards might be entirely hollow.

David Standish's lively and intriguing ``Hollow Earth" charts the evolution of this idea, careening from scientific theory to utopian pipe dream to speculative fiction.

The book begins with a caveat: Standish doesn't delve into imaginary territory covered by Dante's ``Inferno" or Lewis Carroll's `` Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." (Oddly, Standish misspells and wrongly includes J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth in this category of ``popular underground realms.") Rather, Standish sticks to ``real" theories about belief in an actual hollow earth, which began in 1691, when Sir Edmond Halley (of Halley's Comet fame) proposed that within the earth's surface spin three concentric spheres, roughly the size of Venus, Mars , and Mercury, and inside them all an interior sun, bright enough to support life.

Halley was a pioneer; he had invented a new way of thinking about the earth's insides -- ``not the dark flowering of fearful, gloomy meditation on death; not conjecture about the eternal reward or punishment of fragile, ineffable souls; not mythology or religion or metaphysics, but science." For Halley, this scheme helped explain (at least in his mind) the observable variations in the earth's magnetic poles.

Of course, Halley was totally inaccurate. But he gave birth to an amusing and surprisingly resilient myth that has stuck in the public consciousness for three centuries, revised or mutated periodically for various questionable purposes, as Standish's at times mocking prose reminds us. There was the American John Cleves Symmes, who in the early 19th century tried to convince the world the earth was a hollow shell with huge openings at both poles, ``Symmes' Holes." He tried to finance an expedition to the North Pole, which would have crossed a reputed ice-free ``open polar sea" replete with lush vegetation and giant animals. ``Symzonia," the first ``hollow earth novel ," as Standish dubs the genre, appeared around this time, fueling the myth that tunnels at each pole led to a wondrous interior peopled with humanoid races living in some quasi-paradise. This was a scenario -- sometimes taken as truth, sometimes fantasy -- that inspired writers as varied as Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs (who set six novels in an earth's core land called Pellucidar, including one starring his beloved Tarzan character).

The promise of a hollow earth also attracted religious cuckoos like Cyrus Teed, a doctor from upstate New York who took the premise to ludicrous extremes. He believed that we actually live inside a concave earth, whose crust contains the entire cosmos. The idea was spread by Teed's cult, Koreshan Unity, which died out by 1910, around the time polar exploration made it painfully clear no hole at the North Pole could exist.

Standish aims to strike a balance between explaining these beliefs and ridiculing them. The commentary can be insightful, but too often veers into pointless chatter like ``If this makes much sense to you, you're ahead of me," or none-too-clever asides that end, smirking, with exclamation marks: ``Yes, the true origin of flying saucers lay in the hollow earth!"

When the history of hollow earth believers dies out, so does the book's momentum. Standish shifts tactics to describe the plots of countless novels, but the summaries become repetitive. The last chapter deals with Nazis, pulp fiction, and Indiana Jones, which brings the reader almost up to the present. Then Standish misses a huge opportunity. For despite overwhelming evidence disproving them, ``Symmes' Holes" have remained a remarkably evergreen delusion.

Standish, a journalism professor at Northwestern, closes his book by glossing over a couple of websites by current believers. But he fails to interview anyone directly. First hand reportage would have added immediacy and vitality to a decent introductory book that otherwise loses its steam at the half way mark.

The omission is a shame, because the crackpots are fascinating. Fanatics like Rodney M. Cluff, author of ``World Top Secret: Our Earth Is Hollow!," still unabashedly carry the torch. Symmes never made it to the North Pole, but Cluff has helped organize an expedition in June 2007 on the Russian nuclear icebreaker Yamal. One hundred adventurers will have the chance to ``take a monorail trip to [the] City of Eden to visit [the] Palace of the King of the Inner World," among other delights.

Only $18,950 to $20,950. Deposit required, of course.

Ethan Gilsdorf is a freelance writer living in Somerville. He can be reached through his website, www.ethangilsdorf.com.