UNDERGROUND REALMS
Since ancient times, when myths filled the earth with underground kingdoms inhabited by monsters and goblins, the idea of hidden realms beneath the surface has captured the human imagination. As with mythology of other kinds, the truths behind the stories include spiritual and psychological symbolism, ancient astronomy and seasonal lore, visionary and shamanic experiences, and much else. Here and there, scraps of archaic history and half-forgotten memories have found their way into the mix, for – whatever else may or may not be true about the realms beneath the earth’s surface – natural caves and caverns exist; so do underground structures built by human hands, and both of these have been inhabited by people, sometimes for many centuries at a time.
One example much cited by folklore scholars in the nineteenth century are the “hollow hills” of Irish legend, where the sídhe or fairy-folk live. Most of the fairy hills of Ireland are ancient burial mounds dating back to the Bronze Age and before, and their inhabitants are in one sense the ghosts of the people who built them, still remembered in Irish legend as the Tuatha de Danaan, the race that inhabited Ireland before the present inhabitants arrived and conquered them. Yet those same ancient people, according to archeologists, lived in earth-sheltered lodges that looked much like the tombs of their dead.
Victorian scholars of fairy lore drew on these and other parallels to suggest that survivors of the older race might have endured for centuries, hidden away in deep forests and inaccessible areas, camouflaging their traditional houses until only the keenest eye could tell them apart from natural hills. Much of the old fairy lore makes perfect sense when read as lingering memories of a Neolithic people: small, lithe, close to nature, armed with stone-tipped arrows and subtle natural poisons, by turns fighting and bargaining with their larger Iron Age neighbors. It may not be accidental, these researchers pointed out, that a common Scottish folk name for fairies is “Picts,” the name of the pre-Scottish inhabitants of northern Britain, or that Hawaiian legends cheerfully admit that the menehune, the fairy-folk of the Hawaiian islands, are descended from ordinary humans who reached the islands from the Marquesas chain long before the ancestors of today’s Hawaiians crossed the sea from Tahiti.
Yet whatever historical realities fed into legends of underground kingdoms, they became tangled up early on with material from many other sources. By the end of the Middle Ages, old Celtic and Germanic stories about “little people” living in hollow hills had been blended with Classical accounts of Hades, Christian legends of journeys to Hell, Arabic and Hindi tales that came west along the Silk Road, and much else. The result was a vision, half literary and half serious, of an earth honeycombed with countless caverns and tunnels and peopled with creatures as strange or stranger than the legendary inhabitants of fairyland.
The great Renaissance Hermeticist Athanasius Kircher (1601–80) gave a crucial boost to this process with one of his most famous and widely read books, Mundus Subterraneus (The Subterranean World, 1665). Trying to explain everything that was known of geology, including the source of volcanoes and the presence of metals in underground veins, Kircher postulated a network of underground passages through which fire, water, and air move, and a vast central passage from the north pole to the south, through which all the earth’s oceans ebb and flow – an image that also provided a boost to the later idea of a hollow earth.
Most of the writers that followed Kircher’s lead, though, used fiction as their medium. Dozens of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century stories sent people from the surface into the subterranean world of caverns Kircher described. No less a figure than Giacomo Casanova the famous adventurer wrote a novel titled Icosameron (1788) in which his protagonists clambered down through caves in Transylvania to an underground world of “megamicros” who worshipped reptilian gods. Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1873) pictured an underground civilization wielding an omnipotent energy called vril. The torrent of underground adventures reached its peak in Jules Verne’s classic A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), which sent a team of explorers down an extinct volcano in Iceland, only to emerge from Vesuvius in southern Italy.
The transformation of the underground realm from a setting for stories to fodder for the rejected-knowledge industry was given an immense boost by the invention of Agharta, the great underground city of the Himalayan masters.
The spread of these ideas into twentieth-century popular occultism was hastened by the career of legendary science fiction magazine editor Raymond Palmer (1910–77), who padded the pages of Amazing Stories in the 1940s with tales of an underground world of tunnels and artificial caverns, originally made by long-vanished Lemurians and now inhabited by deranged mutants called deros. These stories originated from Richard Shaver, a Pennsylvania welder who started hearing voices in his head while welding and ended up as one of the formative influences on today’s alternative-realities scene. Shaver’s stories were presented now as fiction, now as fact, and shared space in the pages of Amazing Stories with breathless accounts of Agharta and Shambhala, Theosophical root races, paranormal phenomena, and unexplained events.
Real underground bases build in the Cold War provided more fodder for theories about underground realms. In the decades following the Second World War, faced with the prospect of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, the United States and many of its allies built extensive underground military complexes designed to survive direct nuclear attack. Several such bases in America, including the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) headquarters inside Cheyenne Mountain, Wyoming, and the Strategic Air Command headquarters near Omaha, Nebraska, are a matter of public knowledge; the existence of dozens, or possibly hundreds, more is classified under national security laws. Studies carried out in the 1960s by the RAND Corporation, a military think-tank, and later released in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, suggest that plans were made for bases 5000 feet (1520 meters) or more underground and many miles in extent, serviced with their own electric railways and capable of remaining functional for years with no contact with the surface at all.
The rise of rejected knowledge from the cultural fringe to the subject of international bestsellers in the last quarter of the twentieth century set the seal on the underground realm as a standard element of alternative realities around the world. UFO literature made room for vast underground alien bases; the more outré writings on Bigfoot speculated that the giant ape might live in some hidden underground refuge and venture onto the surface for purposes of its own; conspiracy theories inflated the admittedly extensive network of underground bases built by the US government during the height of the Cold War into a vast labyrinth of subterranean cities where the black helicopters of the New World Order have their home. Some of the more exotic theories fused the underground realms with the hollow earth and filled the planet’s crust with hidden passages leading from the surface to the unknown world inside.
The earth undoubtedly remains full of mysteries. Like many other aspects of the modern rejected-knowledge industry, though, the current lore of underground realms has ignored the role of symbolism and visionary experience and imposed a rigidly literal-minded materialism on the fluid and subtle legends of hidden places within the earth. While many ancient traditions look to the earth’s depths for contact with spirits and insights into reality, today’s less sophisticated mystics seek tunnels full of Lemurian machinery and the hidden city of Agharta. As physical realities, at least, these are unlikely to be found beneath the earth’s surface any time soon.
SOURCE:
The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies : the ultimate a-z of ancient mysteries, lost civilizations and forgotten wisdom written by John Michael Greer – © John Michael Greer 2006