On the World as Outline

It is here, at the most primordial layer of a geological template, that our journey must begin. We will be running counter to Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, as we ascend from the centre to the surface. In order to reach this core without digging our way in, we must travel back in time to the infancy of this geological body—to a time equivalent to the one in the history of our planet Earth, when, as a group of planetesimals (a compacted cluster of stellar dust, about a cubic kilometre each), it was at the brink of entering a state of runaway accretion. And so here we find ourselves. Laying our eyes upon a suspended mineral chaos arising from vast obscurity as sharp outlines in the harsh light of a nearby star, we catch our active, organising gaze as it sees a map. An advocate of hollow Earth theory would probably point out that their preferred world view would yield a far more elegant metaphor for one who decides to place the map at the centre of their world. Nevertheless, as seductive as that sounds, in this case it cannot work. For a start, the fact that the mythical subterranean city of Agartha and the Vril-energy-manipulating superhumans of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race are recurrent fantasies of far-right mystics is symptomatic of the ideological ramifications of hollow Earth theory.

(1) Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity, New York University Press, New York, 2003.