Inside the Earth

While the theory of the Hollow Earth is the main ‘competitor’ for the Flat Earth movement, we should not forget Dr Cyrus Teed (1839-1908) and his theory that rather than the Earth being even hollow (let alone flat) it was in fact inverted – that we were living on the inside of a globe. The Sun is somehow just a batterypowered thing that presumably moves around and turns itself off (I can find little on my cursory searches).

“According to Teed’s cosmology the sun, moon, stars – indeed everything we can see – are inside the earth and outside there is nothing. It was all quite literally a womb – that of the earth goddess [whom he had seen in a vision]”. (From Bizarrism – Strange Lives, Cults, Celebrated Lunacy by Chris Mikul, Critical Vision, 1999)

After Teed’s death his idea about being inside the globe was revived in Nazi Germany by Peter Bender

– a former pilot from World War I who, it is said, counted Goering amongst his high level Nazi friends. In 1933 German engineers built a rocket to send vertically upwards – if the theory were correct it would land on the opposite side of the planet. On the day it misfired (but what if this was the moment that got the Nazis thinking about other rocket applications?) The German Navy – the same book reports – also investigated whether, with strong enough telescopes, they could see enemy ships over the horizon. What if the lights that twinkle in the night sky are simply the street lights of cities in the other hemisphere?

Anyway, nothing more than a curious side note that had a tragic ending for Bender – he and his family are thought to have perished in a concentration camp.

Bert Gray-Malkin

Portishead, Bristol

Editor’s note: There is a chapter on Teed, known to his followers as Koresh, in John Michell’s wonderful book, Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions (1984), entitled “The community that dwelt within the Earth”, pp.41-50.