Lost Continents & The Hollow Earth

If you are someone who has had past lives in Lemuria or Atlantis,this may very well awaken some Soul memories. Richard Shaver brought some important info to the fore, and suffered ridicule and questioned his own sanity as a result, but that was the price he paid to do such . I feel he genuinely was tapping into what some call the Akashic records, where all the events any Soul has ever experienced are stored and I am grateful that he did. May we learn from the mistakes of these past civilizations and never surrender our decision making solely into the hands of the Techno lords, a direction we seem to be dangerously veering towards now.

This is one of the oddest and intriguing books I've ever read! As a long-time fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tolkien, and a myriad of science fiction authors, that's quite a statement. Richard Shaver was a welder working for the Ford assembly plant who claimed he received communications through the welding equipment. These communications triggered his memories of his past life in Lemuria, located in our hollow earth. OK, sounds lame right? But Richard Shaver maintained the tale was not a work of fiction, but was absolutely true and that all of the characters and adventures he describes actually happened.The curious thing about the Lemuria story(s) is that they do present a compelling possible ring of truth. Mr. Shaver uses Biblical references, "scientific" explanations, references to Greek and Norse mythologies and other such devices to tell of his past life. Perhaps one of the most intriguing of these elements is his references and inclusion of a "Mother alphabet" from which all surface languages largely evolved. If you purchase the book, do take time to examine the "alphabet." It's suggestive of the Bible story of the Tower of Babel in which God punished the tower builders by causing them to no longer speak a common language but instead to speak in languages each faction could not understand.The intricacies of the book are too numerous to go into here, and I risk boring the reader with my review. But I do recommend the book to those who are interested in reading something outside the usual sword and fantasy genre. I should also mention that the companion book by David Hatcher Childress, Lost Continents and the Hollow Earth, is possibly even more compelling. In it, Mr. Childress examines the hollow earth theory from a variety of viewpoints and his comments and research are an excellent addition to the Shaver story. All in all, a very intriguing, entertaining, and thought-provoking package, whether one believes the hollow earth\Lemuria scenario or not.

Writng about Ray Palmer (1910-1977), the gnomelike and energetic editor of _Amazing Stories_, Theodore Stugeon said: "To this day, fights start in bars over the 'Shaver Mystery' or the 'Shaver Hoax,' depending upon who's doing the swinging at the moment. There is as much documentation that Ray believed in it as that he didn't, and I for one don't much care: true or not, it was a colorful and kooky piece of business..." (_Sturgeon in Orbit_, 1964, 105).Richard S. Shaver (1907-1975) was a semi-literate welder at a Ford plant in Detroit who began to hear voices on the job-- at first, the thoughts of his fellow workers and then those of humans being tortured by evil creatures living in caverns deep underground. He was in and out of mental institutions, where he was treated for paranoid schizophrenia. (Among other things, he was convinced that he was being stalked by a demon named Max.)One day, Shaver began a correspondence with Ray Palmer at _Amazing_. Palmer encouraged Shaver to write more. Many of Shaver's tales were presented as factual: racial memories of real-life events in the past. There was a flood of letters in response, and the circulation of _Amazing_ shot up. It changed from a quarterly to a monthly magazine almost overnight.Shaver's thesis is that there were once a band of benevolent races living together in Lemuria: Titans, satyrs, sibyls, centaurs, and the like. But they began to be poisoned by radiation from the sun and were forced to leave the planet. Many of their descendants mutated into evil creatures called deros who live inside a hollow earth. The deros use ancient machines left underground to read the minds of humans. Other underground machines are used to emit rays that cause disease and insanity or that incite wars. The deros come in and out of holes at the North and South poles in flying machines to kidnap people to torture and eat.Authorship of Shaver's pieces is a bit problematic. Some pieces were rewritten by Palmer and other Ziff-Davis writers to smooth out grammar and mechanics, give them a more coherent plot, and excise or tone down sadomasochistic sex scenes. (One piece submitted by Shaver had a sex scene that ran on for fifty pages.) But they do have an odd charm. There are the numerous footnotes in which Shaver explains the odd bits of ancient language that pop up in the body of the text, or the reasons why the deros may form an alliance with the Nazis in the near future. There are the sections with off-trail observations. ("'Evil' is 'live' spelled backwards".)_Lost Continents & The Hollow Earth_ (1999) by David Hatcher Childress and Richard Shaver is, I suppose, a reasonably entertaining introduction to Shaverism. It has a garish and action-packed cover and a generous number of pulp illustrations (covers, interiors, cartoons, and original Shaver drawings) that graced Shaver oriented issues. It contains the two most reprinted Shaver pieces, "I Remember Lemuria" and "The Return of Sathanas". There is also an alphabet that Shaver claimed was the ancient source of all our languages today. Wow! And there are five essays by Childress on Shaverism in which he concludes that There Must Be Something In It.The Shaver Mystery pieces appeared in _Amazing_ from 1945 through 1947. By 1948, the publishers pulled the plug on the series. Shaver later continued to write Lemuria pieces for Palmer-edited magazines like _Other Worlds_ and _Fate_. But by the early 1950s, his heyday as a writer was over. It seems incredible that stories this wild, this nonsensical, and this badly written were taken seriously as fact by anybody. But they were. Raymond W. Bernard, a Rosicrucian leader, believed Shaver's claim that the hollow earth people had taught him the secrets of relativity before Einstein. Bernard died of pneumonia in 1965 on an expedition to South America. He was looking for openings into the hollow earth at the time.

Interesting. I enjoyed this tome.

I have heard a lot about the tales included here and I love the idea of the Hollow Earth Theory because I like the idea that there are places that we have not discovered yet here on Earth; however, despite being very open-minded, I find the stories here to be extremely poor and hard to believe that some people take them seriously. These books should have remained out of print. Although clearly fictional, which I would not mind if the books were entertaining, the stories here are poorly written and a waste of time.