HIDDEN WORLD Volume 5: THE SHAVER MYSTERY - THE INNER EARTH MYSTERY

All of the material in this 5th issue of THE HIDDEN WORLD is being published for the first time anywhere. More than twelve years ago Richard S. Shaver began the writing of a book which he called "The Elder World" in which he intended to tell the whole Shaver Mystery with all the fiction removed, and with all his own research and thinking on it in evidence of its authenticity.

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Excerpt:

He never achieved that goal. The Elder World never became more than a helter-skelter collection of individual and unrelated chapters, and various conglomerations of notes. In this issue, a good portion of this material is presented, without editing, exactly as he wrote it, with no continuity, no form, no definite conclusions, Whatever the final book might have been, can now never be. Therefore, because of the wealth of valuable information in the portions written, it is being published "as is", so that it may not be lost.

Shaver handed us this portfolio, tossed up his hands helplessly, and said: "Ray, you finish this book - it has me licked!". To be perfectly frank, it has your editor licked, too! How does one make a comprehensive and orderly book out of what you are about to read in this (and future) publications of THE HIDDEN WORLD? We don't intend to try. But would it really be necessary?

A book marshalling all the evidence for The Shaver Mystery in such things as legends, mythology, anthropology, history, ancient and modern science, religions, collected testimony, unpublished manuscripts found in trunks, bottles, the dead-letter office, or what have you, would have to be. a miracle of editorial genius at categorizing and selecting and presentation to make what would be properly called a "book" that could be classified as a research reference work. It has been this tremendous task that has always halted our plans to complete the book. The only answer has been to publish it as is, and allow the reader to utilize the material as best he can.

Certainly what you are about to read is valuable. It is of tremendous implication, and every word of it can be found in your public library (if you have a lifetime to search for it!).

It also points the way toward further research, which the truly interested reader is urged to do, for a reward that may be greater than the searcher can suspect. Actually, to present the material in this way is probably of more value than to attempt the perfection of marshaled completeness - because in a subject as ramified as this, there can never be any real completeness. With the exception of this editorial, everything in this issue of THE HIDDEN WORLD is either the opinion or the research or the experience of Richard Shaver. What you read here he honestly believes, and most of it he can prove. His quoted authorities are authentic. His mythology is excellent. His history is impeccable. His deductions are convincing. But it should' be borne in mind that from this point on, the Shaver Mystery is strictly Shaver, and your editor, Ray Palmer intends at last, after a strictly held silence on his own thinking, to present the results of that thinking, and quite frankly, they differ greatly from Shaver. This is not to say that we are telling you Shaver is wrong. Quite the contrary, your editor became convinced years ago that Shaver was telling the absolute truth, and that his case is based on actual experience and on very remarkable and correct deduction. That is, the experiences of Shaver are real, and his explanation of their meaning is an example of very fine reasoning. There is only one factor on which your editor is very firm, and is able to prove it, Shaver never was in any cave world, and he knows it! His caverns are a deduction!

They are the only POSSIBLE answer a reasoning man can find for a set of experiences which cannot be denied. They are answers produced "upon demand", largely from this editor and his original reading audience. The demand was imperative, and the deduction necessary, in order to comply, and still be accepted. There are some things all of us find we cannot tell in literal form, because we know that they will be totally rejected if we do, and yet they are true; so we must cloak them in acceptability. This is what your editor himself did when he first presented "I Remember Lemuria I" in Amazing Stories in 1945. He found Shaver's account so incredible that he called it "racial memory" and presented it as such. Later we admitted we had taken this liberty, but at that time we did not suspect that Shaver himself had resorted to the same thing when he told us his Mystery, and placed its locale in caverns beneath the surface of the earth!