The Insane Cult Leader Who Lived Inside The Earth

Cyrus Teed’s remains sat in a custom-built zinc bathtub for 5 days after he died. On the first day doctors had declared him dead of natural causes. By Day 3 his earthly body displayed the usual post mortem changes… and worse. It was the undignified, decaying end for a man who commanded celibacy, promised immortality and revealed a brand new science of the cosmos. There’s actually a photo of Teed’s decomposing body from that third day. It was significant to his devoted followers because it was Christmas. And… I can’t show you because YouTube will ban this video. They stuck with him to the end, and past the end, until the county forced his burial, because his followers believed that he wasn’t really dead at all. They thought he was just in a state of suspended animation. They were convinced that Cyrus Teed would be resurrected. He was Koresh, their messiah. But he was also their trusted astronomer. He was the man who had succeeded where Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Galileo, and Copernicus had all failed. He preached that they’d all been told a lie based on a truth, and then he proved that he’d unraveled one of the universe’s greatest secrets. The true part was that the Earth is round. The lie he exposed to his followers, and the world, was that they were all living on its surface. Because Cyrus Teed knew that they weren’t living on the Earth at all. They were living inside of it. Before Cyrus Teed realized that he was humanity’s 7th messianic leader, and the first to arrive since Jesus, he worked as a “hoggee” -- one of the boys who drove the mules that pulled boats on the Erie Canal. He’d left school at 11 to work, and his day consisted of a 6-hour, 15-mile walk down the canal, taking a break, and then walking for another 6 hours and 15 miles before loading the animals and boating back. He’d grown up in Utica, NY, the population of which had grown by 500% since its founding a few decades earlier -- which was about 190 years before Dunder-Mifflin put a branch there. It’s actually not that surprising that a kid from this part of the world grew up to build a fringe scientific-religious movement. That part of New York was a hotbed of religious activity through the Second and Third “Great Awakenings,” and people there were exploring the viability of alternative religious living. The communalist Oneida Community was formed just miles from Teed’s home, together making bags and hats and furniture for income. The commune would eventually make silverware, and though the community itself dissolved in 1881, the business survived -- and Oneida Limited is still one of the largest silverware manufacturers in the world. Teed was immersed in a cultural environment of communal experimentation and religious revival, and he was inspired by being a distant relative of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. But even a messiah needs a job, the last one had to learn carpentry -- so at 20 Teed began an apprenticeship with his physician uncle in Utica. He enlisted as a corporal in the Union Army in 1862, and he was discharged after severe sunstroke caused temporary paralysis in one of his legs. The rank of “Corporal” was the 16th highest rank out of 17 during the Civil War -- behind 10 officer ranks and 5 enlisted ranks, and only ahead of Private. But by the time Teed had completed his studies at the Eclectic Medical College of the City of New York in 1868, his story about his past military service had changed. Now he'd been a medic in the war, and he’d seen with his own eyes that wounded men of faith healed faster and better. His followers later morphed that lore into Teed having been a doctor in the war, so… yeah. We have the origins of a grifter. Wait. What is “ECLECTIC” medicine?! I’m making more videos than ever. On top of Vsauce2 videos, and the brand new Mind Blow channel, I am now producing weekly uploads for a science publication that’s been around longer than the telephone. I’ve re-launched the

Popular Science channel with a bunch of videos you can watch right now. One explores trepanation and the 7,000 year old tradition of putting holes in our heads. Next, I tell the story of a forgotten 40-year-old virtual assistant called Butler In A Box and I try to get one to work today. And finally, there’s a 3D-animated visualizer showcasing the solar system to-scale as animals. I have so many ideas for videos, inspired directly from the pages of 150 years of the magazine that covered visions of the flying cars we still don't have, crazy inventions that ended up being really smart... and some really dumb, x-ray glasses and basement toilets that flushed up. It's all about exploring the hearts and minds of two centuries of humans launching themselves head-first into an unknown future. So please go subscribe to the new Popular Science channel. Link in description. If you like Vsauce2 you’re going to love what I’m doing over on Popular Science. Balloon Kevin is already there – now it’s time for you to join us. Click the link down in the description below and subscribe now. As medical training improved, expanded, and professionalized, a movement sprung up that encompassed… everything else. Eclectic Medicine rejected traditional medicine; it was part herbalism, part chemistry, part spiritualism, part native remedies, and whatever its practitioners wanted to experiment with. It didn’t have any rules. … which made it perfect for Cyrus Teed. The sign for his practice in Utica said, “He who deals out poison deals out death,” and next door he built what he called an “electro-alchemical laboratory. ” He was married, he had a son, and he had a career. And then everything changed in 1869 when Teed became the first human to ever successfully conduct an experiment in Chrysopoeia -- which means he’d transmuted lead into gold. Cyrus Teed did… not turn lead into gold. But he believed he had, and that an angel, exactly as described in the Book of Revelation, told him, “Thou art chosen to redeem the race. ” Cool. He described the encounter in detail in “The Illumination of Koresh: Marvelous Experience of the Great Alchemist Thirty Years Ago, at Utica, NY” -- books didn’t really have snappy titles then -- including the knowledge that his followers would live forever, and that a “Divine Motherhood” in the form of a female partner would join him. Okay…so we have… Weird science, conversations with God, promises of immortality, and orders to grow a movement around it all -- that’s how you get a Hollow Earth cult. Teed tried to convince his medical patients of his religious truths, and he tried to convince the religious community of his scientific truths, which meant that no one liked him. His eclectic medical practice dried up instantly, and his career was over… in Utica. He moved 100 miles south to Binghamton, where his scientific-religious movement of 1 -- just him -- doubled in size. He met Dr. Abie Andrews, who found Teed to be intelligent and compelling; he was a sort of like Watson to Teed’s eccentric Sherlock. Practicing alternative-medicine-plus-new-religion in Binghamton worked out about how you’d expect, and uhh... Which was not very good. And Teed moved further west toward Ontario. Lyn Myllner describes Teed in “The Allure of Immortality” as being “A doctor without patients and a shepherd with no flock. ” He tried to ingratiate himself with already-existing religious communities, like the Harmony Society in Pennsylvania, with very little to no success. People just didn’t trust him. Teed began using the name “Koresh,” which is just the Hebrew version of his actual name Cyrus -- and its Persian and Hebrew roots express the concepts of sun and a guiding light, foresight, and cultivation. Really, everything you want in a messiah. That’s also why David Koresh changed his name, “David Koresh” had a little more Biblical gravitas than VERNON HOWELL.

Teed planned a society that completely rejected capitalism and was built on equal rights, especially for women. He considered marriage to be an institution of female enslavement, which resonated with women in loveless, abusive, or just… really bad marriages. He promised them freedom. Celibacy returned full autonomy over one’s body to its owner, which has a certain logic to it. But then things got weird. Lyn Myllner writes that instead of acting on their physical desires, his followers should instead: “... redirect sexual desire toward a desire for closeness with God, specifically, toward Teed. By focusing their love on him, they would ensure their immortality on earth. Once enough followers did this, their energy would cause an electromagnetic explosion in his brain and consume the pineal gland, responsible for sexual potency. This would enable him to pass into his chosen woman and become divine, both male and female, a mother-father god. At this point, his believers would become immortal…” Yeah... slick move, buddy! What’s this have to do with a HOLLOW EARTH? Nothing! And… everything. Every movement -- cultural, political, social -- needs some kind of differentiator. Otherwise it’s just too close to something else that already exists. Teed’s eclectic Koreshanity took on science, society’s most rapidly-advancing body of knowledge, and said it was all wrong. Robert Fogerty summarized Teed’s understanding of the universe: “The Copernican theory of an illimitable universe was false because the earth had a limited form: it was concave… The sun is an invisible electro-magnetic battery revolving in the universe’s center on a 24-year cycle. Our visible sun is only a reflection, as is the moon, with the stars reflecting off seven mercurial disks that float in the sphere’s center. Inside the earth there are three separate atmospheres: the first composed of oxygen and nitrogen and closest to the earth; the second, a hydrogen atmosphere above it; third, an aboron atmosphere at the center. The earth’s shell is one hundred miles thick and has seventeen layers. The outer seven are metallic with a gold rind on the outermost layer, the middle five are mineral and the five inward layers are geologic strata. Inside the shell there is life, outside a void. ” If you’ve never heard of the element “Aboron,” that’s because it doesn’t exist. Cyrus Teed made it up. Koreshanity was part physics, part metaphysics, part politics, and part religion -- and it was starting to work. Teed traveled around the Northeast spreading his gospel, and after running a mop business into the ground, he moved to New York City to start a small commune of Koreshans. It’s worth noting that part of that move seems to have been running away from a lawsuit claiming he’d defrauded a woman out of her fortune. So… there’s that. Oh, and his wife? His wife had gotten sick and died while he was on the Koreshanity circuit, so Teed was past all that. At least in the New York City of the late 1800s he could operate on the fringes of religion, science, and medicine without really getting kicked out of any of them. And in 1886 an invitation to speak at a National Association of Mental Science conference in Chicago turned into Teed and the Koreshans moving there, and that’s where he founded a metaphysical institution called World College of Life and a monthly newsletter called The Guiding Light. By 1888, Teed and 126 followers were living on 8 picturesque acres in Chicago. Most of the residents were women, and all of them believed they were living deep inside the gold rind of the earth. But the more followers Koreshanity attracted, the more conflicts they had with the City of Chicago and their neighbors. And Teed had a lot of problems with his followers' husbands. A LOT. So what did he do? He became one of the first true Florida Men. Teed promised the Koreshans that their new community on the Southwest coast of Florida would be a New Jerusalem that would soon be the home of 8 million

people walking on perfectly-planned streets paved with gold. Teed wrote: “There will be no smudge or smoke. Power by which machinery will be moved will be by the utilization of the electromagnetic currents of the earth and air, independently of steam application to so called “Dynamos. ” Motors will take the place of motion derived from steam pressure. The city will be constructed on the most magnificent scale, without the use of so called money. These things can be done easily…” Initially they got thatched-roof shacks and ate a lot of loggerhead turtles. But the 200 Koreshans eventually constructed a bakery, a sawmill, lecture halls, schools, and an outdoor theater. They built and grew a broad range of sustainable businesses and enterprises. The Koreshan community was actually working… or at least not failing miserably. He’d crafted the religion and the community -- but Teed still had to prove that we were all living inside a shell. The openness of the land and the water into the Gulf of Mexico was a perfect testing ground for Teed’s concave earth theory, so he built a device that could prove to the world they were living inside a “cosmogenic egg. ” We really don’t hear about “cosmogony” all that much -- in the scientific sense, it goes beyond cosmology’s study of the observable universe to speculate on its deepest origins. It’s a broader approach that could include creation myths like the “World Egg” models that still exist everywhere from Finland to Polynesia. Deciding where cosmology stops and cosmogony begins can get really murky, so… it was perfect for Teed, who still insisted his ideas were rooted in hard science. In “Hollow Earth,” David Standish describes what Teed was trying to prove: “The idea was simple. If the earth’s curvature were convex, a straight line extended for any distance would touch at only one point; but if it were concave and the line long enough it would eventually bump into the upcurving surface. ” He worked with Ulysses Grant Morrow, a flat-earther who Teed had converted into a concave earther, to detail his theories in “The Cellular Cosmogony” -- including the results of their scientific experiments using a device Morrow built called a “rectilineator. ” Which sounds like something you shouldn’t Google. Or you should? I… The task was to prove that everything we think we know largely comes from optical illusions by projecting a straight line far enough to generate conclusive measurements of concavity. The Cellular Cosmogony describes the rectilineator as: “... a number of sections in the form of double T squares, each 12 feet in length, whith braced and tensioned cross-arms 4 feet in length. The length of the cross-arms is to section, as 1 is to 3. The material of which the sections of the Rectilineator are constructed, is inch mahogany, seasoned for twelve years in the shops of the Pullman Palace Car Co., Pullman, Illinois. ” The Koreshans built a Rectilineator on the beach, taking sections that looked like pieces of a fence and joining them with screws and brass fittings, making sure that they were perfectly level, and using fine gauges to ensure the tolerance was within one one-thousandth of an inch. They took exhaustive measurements in changes of the projected line, which were then officially signed by Mrs. Bertheldine Boomer, and then detached the back-most part of the rectilineator to extend the front part, until they hit a pre-determined point at which they did the whole thing backwards to the starting point to verify that the alignment had been correct. They measured for 2 and a half miles on land before they ran into water. They did about 2 more miles measuring with boats -- and they got all the data they needed to prove that the earth’s surface was indeed concave. Morrow was so confident in the brilliance of the Koreshan experiment that even before they started, he planned to submit an application for a Nobel Prize. Cyrus Teed and Ulysses Grant Morrow did not win a Nobel Prize. The rectilineator was flawed, believe it or not, the data was bad, and although mahogany is one

of the more stable woods, any furniture maker at the time of Teed could’ve told him it would swell and contract from spending months in the most volatile humidity the United States had to offer. The measurements were garbage. But they put it all in The Cellular Cosmogeny and Morrow told a reporter that, “Nothing can now impede the progress of the Koreshan system. It is invincible. ” But despite being invincible, no one cared. And no one took them seriously. Teed said, “The startling information… flashed from city to city, continent to continent, reverberating around the world. ” But a quick search of archives like Newspapers. com shows that’s not true. The startling information only seemed to flash around inside the Koreshans’ concave enclave. And then the whole Teed thing started to fall apart. Toward the end, it was lawsuits and in-fighting and perpetual battle with nearby residents and local politicians -- all culminating in a horrible street brawl involving Koreshans in Fort Myers. When Teed tried to break it up, the town Marshal beat him severely. No one was worried because Teed was immortal. But he was unable to fully recover from the beating, and he died a few years later. And he never resurrected. The Koreshan Unity kept going for years after Teed’s death, and prominent people like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford visited them. But the community was leaderless and rudderless; it slowly began to disperse and die out. Its last member was a German woman named Hedwig Michel, who arrived in 1940 to escape Nazi persecution. She died in 1981. The land and its remaining buildings now comprise Florida’s Koreshan State Park. Hollow-earthers still exist; Mostafa Abdelkader of Egypt published papers advocating its truth into the early 1980s. And there’s still a shocking amount of mystery regarding what’s inside -- the deepest we’ve dug is the Kola Superdeep Borehole, which goes less than 8 miles down. That only leaves another 3,951 miles for epic tales of science fiction novels. We know that Teed and the hollow earthers are wrong. We know the earth is a sphere and that we exist on its convex surface, and now we have pictures from space to prove it. We know why ships disappear over the horizon, and we know why train tracks appear to get increasingly close together the further away they run. But in a way, Cyrus Teed may have been more right than he knew. Ever-expanding, limitless nothingness is unsettling. Chaos on an incredible scale, all beyond our control, or even beyond our ability to understand, is ominous. It becomes increasingly impossible to know where you are, to know who you are. We all start out inside the womb, it’s our smallest hollow earth. Then our world gets bigger, slowly, as we experience more of it and its people. We push those boundaries, we push against that golden rind, so that we’re just comfortably uncomfortable as it expands -- because anything beyond that pace can be too much to bear. We like the Italian restaurant in town and the neighbor’s overly friendly cat and sports games that operate on carefully-designed fields with a strict rulebook, all within 60- or 90-minute bounds… because all those things are a tiny bit of order in a chaotic, perpetually-dilating world. And when we finally realize who we really are, what we think and what we feel, we start to exist in an entire universe of our own contained within a hollow spheroid. The earth’s surface is not concave, and we don’t live inside a giant hollow ball. We tell ourselves that we’re always in pursuit of infinite, that we need to explore… other people, other places, other planets… But maybe we always need to feel like we live inside something.

And as always, thanks for watching.