{"collection":"earth","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/earth/eti/index.htm","path":"earth/eti/index.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/earth/eti/index.htm","text":"Take a Victorian scifi premise, say, a trip to the center of the earth,\nand by the way, it's hollow.\nAdd a tale of a soul condemned by the Illuminati to a perilous underground\nquest to find the Goddess of Love (spoiler alert: spell Aphrodite backwards).\nTop it off with a wild magic mushroom trip.\nThat's Etidorhpa!\nThis may be the very source of the 'adepts living in hollow\nearth who abduct humans' meme, later developed by\nRay Palmer, and many others.\nThe book is larded with long passages of speculative science.\nThe structure of the hollow earth and the effects of gravitation at\nvarious places is much better worked out than some of the 'nonfiction'\nhollow earth books (e.g. Reed\nor Gardner).\nThe journey of 'I-am-the-man' is a not-so-subtle allegory\nof spiritual progression to being a disembodied adept.\nAlong the way he loses his youth, loses sunlight, becomes weightless,\nstops breathing, can hear without ears,\nthen his heart stops, ... and still he lives.\nEach of this steps is symbolic of a progression to a more ethereal plane\nof existence.\nAt times, the narrative recursion is three levels deep.\nThis is an acquired taste.\nL. Sprague de Camp called Etidorpha 'unreadable.'\nModern readers accustomed to consuming multiple narrative streams\nat the same time (i.e. channel hopping),\nwith long recursive breaks (i.e. commercials) might do better.\nExcept for the titular Etidorhpa, there are no female characters.\nAnd she only appears briefly in a hallucination.\nWhy such a small part in the book?\nOther genre novels, such as Atlantida\nand The Lost Continent, are\ndriven by strong female characters.\nAnd once the main character is inside the hollow earth, it just halts.\nHe doesn't even get to meet Etidorhpa again.\nWhether the author ran out of steam, or the ending was only supposed\nto be implied, is unknown.","title":"Etidorhpa Index","type":"page"}