Dear MindReach Members,
I wanted to announce the availability of a work by an early Latter-day Saint (or Mormon) pioneer named Frederick Culmer Sr., regarding the hollow earth and the location of the lost ten tribes. See the link below:
Frederick Culmer Sr. (1822–1892) was a Salt Lake City contractor and builder, an ordained elder and a lay member of the Church all his life, who in 1886 published a small book entitled The Inner World: A New Theory, Based on Scientific and Theological Facts, Showing That the Earth Is a Hollow Sphere Containing an Internal and Inhabited Region. He assured his readers, "humbly but positively," that "this earth—a hollow sphere—has an opening at each pole of about one thousand miles in diameter to admit light and heat from the sun," and that "the inner world has everything necessary for the requirements of the animal and vegetable creation."
He also stated that he knew who lived there: "The Ten Tribes of Israel are lost to the world, but not to the Father," he wrote; "they went to the land of the North, a mighty host, according to the prophet Esdras." He built his case from the sources an ordinary Latter-day Saint had at hand, namely the ice-and-highway verses of Doctrine and Covenants 133 and George Reynolds' pamphlet Are We of Israel? (first serialized in the Millennial Star in 1878; the link is to the first edition of 1883, digitized in full view by HathiTrust from a Harvard copy, and the second edition of 1895 is on the Internet Archive), and then gave his own ideas: "I maintain that there is no ship passage into the interior of the earth but that the openings are land . . . and it will be the only one that will be used when the Lord's time shall come for the Ten Tribes of Israel to come forth again to the outside of the earth. I maintain that the interior of this globe has been inhabited by them for thousands of years." He even supplied the route in, across the Bering Strait to Alaska, then east and north into the Inner World.
This book survives in two versions, and until now only the shorter one has been generally accessible. The copies held by most libraries and offered by booksellers (for example the Harvard copy digitized at HathiTrust: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044018812198) end at page 18, complete only through chapter III; Culmer apparently having released his work in installments. Those 18 pages contain his physical argument (chapters I–III, The Universal Vacuity of Centres, The Polar Orifices of the Earth, and The Alleged North-West Passage and Symmes' Hole) but stop short of everything he had to say about the lost ten tribes.
This new scan by the Church History Library in Salt Lake City provides the fuller 41-page version in complete fidelity, now viewable in the Library's online catalog at the link above (call number 550.1 C967i), where every page can be read in the viewer free of charge. The fuller version carries two further chapters, namely chapter IV, Theological Evidences of an Inner World (pages 19–37), and chapter V, Joseph in Egypt (pages 38–41), and it is within those pages that Culmer applies the hollow-earth theory to the whereabouts of the lost ten tribes, to the Doctrine and Covenants, and to the scriptures generally. As far as I have been able to determine, this is the first time the complete text has been available to readers outside the Library's reading room. Another informal transcription has circulated online, but it contains heavy polemical taint, as well as transcription defects, and is therefore unsuitable for meticulous scholarly usage.
I discussed Culmer's book, and the larger picture of hollow-earth belief among nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints (of which it forms a part), in Part 5 of my series, which I had posted here previously and which gives the fuller context: