Hollow Can You Go?

Yo Ho Ho, YoYo's

Hope this writeywrite finds you well.

I am pleased to present you with a bit of follow-up to my recent segment on the latest Disinformation World News podcast.

The segment is called Insomnia - just like this glowing tome - and I plan on following up with extras on this blog for listeners who might want to dig a bit deeper into the 'cast segments.



This week's segment featured the early history of the Hollow Earth. My sources for the piece came from all over the Internet and from my own library. I modeled the arc of the story on this entertaining, short documentary that I am hosting at my YouTube Channel.




Here are some additional sources on The Hollow Earth:

Agartha
Edmond Halley
Hollow Earth
Hollow Earth page at the UnMuseum

If you missed the last podcast, here is a transcript of my segment about R. Crumb's new graphic project on the Book of Genesis:



When visual artist R. Crumb set out to create a new story based on Adam and Eve, a friend suggested "Why not the entire Book of Genesis?" Crumb – who had planned on a twisted tale of his own- soon found himself face-to-face with a much stranger story: the one found in the first book of the Bible itself.




Crumb first came to popular consciousness for creating timeless characters like Mr Natural and Fritz the Cat as well as the Keep on Truckin' comics that have become icons of the counter-cultural upheaval that marked the American 1960's and 70's. Although Crumb's savage satire continues to divide critics, it has engendered him to an avant garde that place him among some of the best storytellers and visual artists of his generation. Crumb's work was most recently given a mainstream resurgence with the release of Terry Zwigoff's 1994 documentary, “Crumb” which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in that same year. Ten years later, in 2004, the Guardian published one of the first articles about Crumb's Genesis project. The book is finally set to be published this fall by Norton.

Even after he'd returned to the original biblical story, Crumb still planned on the kind of satirical approach he's best known for. Imagining a tale full of slapstick hi-jinx and Yiddish humor, Crumb – who was raised Catholic – set about re-reading the Book of Genesis and was stunned by what he found.


A recent New Yorker article claims that Crumb was so stupefied by the sheer weirdness of the Biblical tale that he quickly changed his approach from a satirical send up to a straight illustration job that he applied himself to with fervent devotion.

Its easy to understand why.

The New Yorker piece included pages of Crumb's story, telling the entire tale of the creation of the world, the birth of Adam, God's creation of Eve and their eventual expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Crumb's illustrations bring the story to life in such a simple matter-of-fact style that the odd, eerie, quirks in the narration pop out in stark relief in a way that is easier to miss when simply reading the text from a Bible.
The three strangest points that are brought to the fore by Crumb's take on the tale are the identity of the Forbidden Fruit eve shares with Adam, the nature of the creature that eve meets in the Garden, and the nature of the God in the story, angry, worried, and referencing himself in the plural at the oddest moments.

If you'd like to read a great essay about apples, pick up Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire. Pollan discusses the apple's evolution from a few fruiting trees on a tiny hillside in Kazakhstan to a world wide staple. He also touches lightly on Eve's apple, wondering aloud – as many have – if actual apples could have even been available in an earthly Garden of Eden that the Bible states was located in the region of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Many have posited the notion that the apple could have actually been a fig or a pomegranate or another species more easily found in the region. However, if we are going to concern ourselves with actual geography and real botany, we must quickly admit that neither apples or pomegranates or figs, seem to be capable of the kind of world-changing, shattering of consciousness that occurred when Adam and Eve first plucked and sucked their way into the longest after-school detention of all time. But what if the fruit wasn't a fruit at all? What if it was a mushroom?

The late great Terence mckenna provides us with one of the most entertaining creation narratives of all time in his book Food of the Gods. Mckenna posits that early proto-humans, faced with receding forests and food sources, left the trees for the grass lands where they discovered the first holy trinity: cows, cowpies and psilocybin mushrooms. Another book that every loyal listener should pour over for their own satisfaction, McKenna's hypothesis goes on to claim that our ancestors who ate the mushrooms would hunt better, screw more effectively, and eventually be so overwhelmed with the spiritual tremendum revealed at the core of the mushroom's mystery that they would found the first religion, focused on the great horned female deity that represented the origin of the foodstuff that had made them something more than monkees. According to Mckenna they lived in communal villages as gentle hunters and gatherers who encouraged extended families, eschewed monogamy in favor of group bonding orgies and created the first spoken language while they sang their songs to an ancient sky.
In other words - Paradise.

Or not.



There doesn't seem to be a way to identify the Forbidden Fruit of the Bible's first book , or even to determine if it is strictly a symbol for a time when man became aware of himself in a way that he wasn't before. But what about the snake? Is the serpent in the garden to be taken literally? Symbolically? And are we even correct to think of the serpent as a serpent?

Again, dear listener, it is beyond the scope of this report to determine whether or not a real creature actually spoke to the first woman in that garden so long ago. But one thing we can't ignore is the nature of the serpent the bible itself describes. A creature that is brought weirdly to life in Crumb's new book.



The most striking detail in Crumb's Genesis is his representation of the serpent in the garden as a scaly lizard man walking upright on two legs. I was taken aback by this until I remembered my own catholic upbringing in which we learned that the serpent doesn't crawl on its belly until God curses him to do so as punishment for interfering with eve and encouraging her to eat the fruit. Most Bibles don't say so explicitly, but the implication, one that is backed up by most theologians, is that the serpent walked like a man before he was cursed.

The obvious leap – and one we will now gleefully take together – is to David Ikke and his reptilian conspiracy theory. Listeners to this program are no doubt familiar with David Ikke and his theory that the Illuminati rulers of this world are in fact not human at all. In the Wikipedia entry about Icke it is stated that “In 1999, he published The Biggest Secret, in which he wrote that the Illuminati are a race of reptilian humanoids known as the Babylonian Brotherhood, and that many prominent figures are reptilian, including George W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth II, Kris Kristofferson, and Boxcar Willie ” For Icke, the shape-shifters are aliens that have come to the earth from the constellation Draco. They are required to drink human blood to shapeshift and they have interbred with humans so that they can continue to appear normal to us, but still hold on to traces of their true DNA. Does this account for the prominence of the dragon in myths and fables from all over the world and does the serpent still whisper in our ears when we turn on the television to listen to the latest political debate? Is it possible that the Draco's do exist on Earth and that they may have been here since time immemorial interfering with man's development all along?



Crumb addresses the birth of man like he does the rest of the story of Creation – simply illustrating a strictly biblical narrative of the tale – and what a tale it is. Although there are a number of contradictions and oddities to the bible's story of the creation of man, we'll only take a look at the oddest bits. When God creates Adam he builds him out of dust and breathes life into his nostrils. This strikes me as a fairly straight fable that one would expect in any of the creation myths from around the world. However, when he creates Eve, God performs a weird surgery of sorts, causing a deep sleep to fall over Adam, removing his rib and fashioning her from what I feel comfortable referring to as his genetic material. In addition God states “Now we have made man in our own image”. Who is the we god is referring to?
Perhaps we can clear up some of these questions by referring to an earlier text.

In his Twelfth Planet series, scholar Zachariah Sitchin claims that ancient Sumerian texts tell the creation story in greater detail then the bible he claims they influenced. Sitchins interpretations state that the man was genetically engineered by aliens from the planet Niburu to mine gold that the visitors required to stabilize the atmosphere on their home planet. Sitchin would argue that we were created by Gods and that the plural references in the bible are an important clue pointing to this deeper tale. The idea that an advance race engineered humanity also provides some kind of explanation regarding why the God of the bible would need to perform some strange medical procedure to create a woman when he has been able to think the entirety of the universe into existence by evocation alone.

If the rest of Crumb's book is as thought provoking as the snippets that have been published, written up and leaked on the Internet, we are certainly in for a wild ride, one that will surely provoke more questions than it will be able to provide answers for. But – dear listeners – if you keep wondering, we'll keep asking and together we'll take a tip from the man himself and keep on trucking.



For Disinformation World News,

I'm Joe Nolan

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Love,
Joe Nolan