Mysterious Cyrus Reed Teed: The Hollow Earth as a Concave Sphere

This little work is part of the skirmish line of the Army of Revolution. It shall never cease its influence until every vestige of the fallacies and evils of a perverted science and religion shall have been relegated to oblivion

Excerpt:

Cyrus Reed Teed
Madman? False Prophet?
Or True Visionary?
By Sean Casteel

There have been many theories regarding the possibility that our Earth has a hollow interior in which some form of intelligent life exists practicing its own ways of civilization while only a few pre-selected visionaries are certain of its reality. The name Richard Shaver springs immediately to mind, and his tales of demonic deranged robots wreaking havoc on us surface dwellers still have a goodly number of believers. As an explanation for the extremes of evil in our world, Shaver's theory is as good as any other.

Yet for sheer originality and inventiveness, nothing can quite top the radical ideas of one Cyrus Reed Teed. He not only argued that the Earth is hollow, but declared further that we're living inside it! His theory is quite complex and here is one abbreviated version of it, taken from the Wikipedia online encyclopedia:

"He denounced the idea that the Earth revolved around the sun and instead pioneered his own theory of the Universe, known as the Cellular Cosmogony. According to this theory, human beings live on the inside of the planet, not the outside. Gravity thus does not exist, and humans are held in place due to centrifugal force. The sun is a giant battery-operated contraption, and the stars mere reflections of its light."

But before we go further in explaining Teed's beliefs, we need to take a look at the strange series of events that led to his propounding of this unorthodox view of reality.

THE EARLY YEARS OF CYRUS TEED

Cyrus Teed was born in 1839 in upstate New York. His parents had wanted him to become a Baptist minister, but he chose to study medicine instead. Around this same time, in 1859, he married his second cousin, Fidelia Rowe of Meredith, New York. His son Douglas Arthur Teed was born the next year, and Teed moved his family to Brooklyn, New York, and continued to study medicine. In 1862, he volunteered for the Union Army, but suffered a severe case of sunstroke which resulted in paralysis to his left arm and leg. After receiving a medical discharge, he returned to medical school in New York. Upon graduation, he joined his uncle's medical practice in Utica.

It was in 1869 that Teed had his revelation, an experience he called his "Illumination." While working in his laboratory on alchemical experiments, hoping to find the "Philosopher's Stone" and convert lead into gold, he had a vision in which he saw God in the form of a beautiful woman and learned the secret of the universe and his place in it. Since his alchemical experiments often involved the use of high voltage electricity, it is theorized that he may have accidentally shocked himself and suffered a kind of delirium while in an unconscious state.

Whatever may have happened, Teed chose to rename himself "Koresh," the Hebrew equivalent of his given first name Cyrus. The visionary woman he saw also informed him that he was to become a messiah and reveal the true cosmogony to the world. It was at this point that his own particular hollow earth theory began to take hold of him.

Here is another version of Koresh's theory, taken from a website called "The Cellular Cosmogony":

"Teed propounded that the surface of the earth is concave, not convex, and that the entire universe is contained within the 25,000 mile circumference of the inside-out earth. The sun is in the exact center of the 'cosmic egg,' 4,000 miles away, and is actually a helix. However, we never see this directly, only some kind of reflection of it. The sun is dark on one side, which produces day and night. The moon is a reflection of the earth, and Teed believed he could see outlines of the earth's continents and seas on it! Other astronomical phenomena are essentially optical illusions. Besides geology, he also denounces the scientific method, the Copernican theory, the atomic theory, modern chemistry, conventional surveying techniques, and last but not least, optics. Truly, 'everything you know is wrong.'" Later, when he had spent some years preaching about his Cellular Cosmogony, belief in which he considered necessary for a person to achieve true godliness, he and some of the followers he had gathered began to conduct scientific experiments in order to try to prove his theories to the world at large and silence the snickering and jeers of unbelievers and skeptics. Even after employing a scientific instrument developed just to prove the theory, called a "rectilineator," they remained unsuccessful in establishing concrete proof.

Nevertheless, Koresh continued to have absolute faith in his ideas and the revelations he had received. Without sharing his belief in the concave, hollow earth one could not be called righteous. He proclaimed, "All that is opposed to Koreshanity is antichrist."

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