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#Repost///@publicdomainrev: Illustrations by J. Augustus Knapp for John Uri Lloyd’s mind-bending sci-fi adventure Etidorhpa (1895). ⠀⁠⠀⁠Written by the Cincinnati auto-experimenting pharmacologist in 1895, the novel features psychonautical learning long before Albert Hofmann discovered LSD. The novel’s story feels indebted both to John Symmes’ theory of “Hollow Earth” and the kidnapping of William Morgan by supposed Freemasons. Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Christopher Nolan’s Inception, the mise-en-abymic narrative creates a formal correlate for the supernatural plot. In brief: a man named Johannes Llewellyn Llongollyn Drury, studying occult and alchemic phenomena, receives an unexpected visitor late in the night: a white-haired man who teleports into his parlor. The elderly man entrusts a manuscript to our narrator, recounting events that transpired three decades earlier, and, eventually, introduces himself by the (almost) Old Testament moniker of “I—Am—The—Man—Who—Did—It”.⠀⁠⠀⁠We jump into the manuscript, which tells of the man’s kidnapping by a secret hermetic society. His captors forced him to prematurely age in order to disguise his identity. Soon after, I—Am—The—Man is indentured to a guide, whose face, “if a face it could be called, was wet, and water dripped from all parts of his slippery person. . . the moisture seemed to ooze as from the hide of a water lizard”. The lizardly usher leads the now-aged man to the underworld (the entrance of which, we learn, is to be found in Kentucky). It’s like Dante meets Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland meets contemporary internet conspiracy theories about “the reptilian elite”. As Drury and the creature descend into the earth’s interior, their ever-evolving philosophical debate finds new scenery: forests of colossal fungi; a field of Brobdingnag hands affixed to the bodies of Lilliputians; and the experience of “eternity without time”.⠀⁠.⠀⁠#drugs #scifi #etidorhpa #illustration #underworld #hollowearth #occult #lizard