“I called to remembrance the brasen Lyons, in Salomons Temple, which were of such fierce countenances, as that they would bring men to forgetfulness…”—From Hypnoteromachia Poliphili

“the flood of the First Noah took place on Mars. The garden (of Eden) was located in the Northern Hemisphere not far from the polar regions…The waters rushed down into the conduits and drowned all the original Adam-II people there.” —From “The Sky People” (originally published in 1961)

“…as I stood there in the vast embrasure, I had also a knowledge, or memory, of this present life of ours, deep down within me; but touched with a halo of dreams”—From “The Night Land”

Although The Night Land takes place on Earth in an imaginative future aeons away, I had already surmised the eerie rapport with Cydonia and the landscapes of the planet Mars when I initially read The Night Land in 1990. ¹⁾ Some of this I briefly mentioned in the November 4th 2015 open-lines episode of Richard C. Hoagland’s Other side of Midnight radio program. In this installment we will focus briefly on those resemblances and where it appears I am not alone in sensing them.

It is interesting to note that those who have no vested interest or conviction concerning Cydonia’s anomalies—indeed think it’s all imaginative paredolia, have also noted The Night Land’s resonance with the Cydonian landscape as seen here from the Night Speech discussion forum from the year 2002 which included a map (shown below) of Cydonia.  ²⁾See post #37 at the linked page at the Night Speech forum (where the  map, presumably made by “The Master Monstruwacian”(?)[sic],  no longer loads to the post) and also see post #40. The thread at the forum is entitled “The Scope of the Night Land” and is a very interesting thread devoted to speculations concerning the outlay and composition of what The Night Land’s cartography might look like. A good sceptic when confronted by a discussion of the layout The Night Land’s landscape which included a map of Cydonia appearing in that discussion might ask, “Did the discoverers of the Face and Pyramids at Cydonia read The Night Land?” Answer: Probably not.

This map is only an artistic embellishment of the lines and alignments that were in the current literature of the time and that had already been associated with the Cydonian area. ³⁾These can be found in The Monuments of Mars by Richard C. Hoagland. Additional material can also be found in The Mcdaniel Report by Dr. Stanley V. Mcdaniel. Also, see The Case for the Face edited by Stanley V. Mcdaniel and Monica Rix Paxson. Although the artist only slightly embellished some of the lines that had been previously published, he was not by this embellishment directly connecting the Cydonian concept with The Night Land. That certainly is clear as there is no direct correspondence suggested. However, it’s obvious the artist’s intent was to, in his mind, suggest one imaginary landscape (Cydonia) to another imaginative landscape (The Night Land) unintentionally, perhaps even unconsciously suggesting, a kind of typological connection of the architecture at Cydonia to the architecture of The Night Land. The fact that this kind of association was made in the first place, by someone who dismisses Cydonia as nothing but a fantasy itself, is remarkable. ⁴⁾Again, see Post #37 at this link. Also see post #40

The free-association of The Night Land with the features at Cydonia is significant within the apparent unintentional context. Maybe the placement of the Cydonia map in the context of The Night Land cartography discussion is merely incidental, relative to the nature of the discussion. But the occurrence is highly suggestive of the unconscious relationships involved here. It could also illustrate that there is a definite possible unconscious psychological archetype here that could be associated to the underlying creative impulse. This possibility is thus being underscored by those who think the “artificial looking” features at Cydonia are merely a trick of “light and shadow”, and are, in their mind, only coincidentally reminiscent of The Night Land’s haunting landscape and pyramidal arcology. In fact, that is the most remarkable and important component of this inclusion of a Cydonia map in a Night Land discussion that has absolutely no vested interest in the veracity of an artificial pyramids on Mars hypothesis.⁵⁾The connection with the pyramids of Mars with the Great Redoubt of The Night Land has also been mentioned by Alan Baker in Chapter 10 of his 2013 book The Edge of Science: Mysteries of Mind, Space and Time, published by Random House.

Although the landscapes between Cydonia and The Night Land are not literally the same, there is a dream like sympathy between them. Yes, the “Great Redoubt” is almost 8 miles high, far higher than any martian pyramids we can point to yet. Yes, the “Watchers” are huge statue mountains, that look to the pyramid and not up into space like the famous “Face on Mars”. But to say the landscapes are nothing alike is not being honest. You could perhaps say there is a “coincidental” sympathy, but none is simply inaccurate. ⁶⁾ There are, interestingly, other face like massifs in the general Cydonia area, some of which I have found and presented to The Enterprise Mission conference in the years 2003-4. Those discoveries will be re-posted here at Suburbs of Heaven in the future.

However, to be clear, there are indications of earlier arcologies in literature, and perhaps H. G. Wells, once again, was one place that Hodgson got the idea? ⁷⁾As see the arcology idea in Wells’ “When the Sleeper Awakes” discussed here. Also, I have uniquely discovered a possibility of Hodgson encountering an earlier pyramidal arcology idea.  In part 3 of this series on The Night Land I said the following:

We may yet find that some obscure architectural theme Hodgson picked up on may have given him the idea for the pyramidal redoubt. One possible place where he may have garnered the idea of a pyramidal city could have come from the 1891 book The Crystal Button by Chauncey Thomas. In fact, a detailed study could be made that it formed a blueprint for The Night Land and it’s unforgettable Mighty Pyramid.  Regardless, Hodgson still gave the “local habitation and a name” in which that “Mighty Pyramid” resided. 

The Great Pyramid in Egypt appears to be the inspiration for the pyramids in Chauncey Thomas’s The Crystal Button. They are also described as being on the same scale as the Great Pyramid. The Pyramids in The Crystal Button  were self-contained buildings (arcologies) that housed thousands and not millions as in the case of the “Great Redoubt.” It is possible that Hodgson imagined what it would be like to extend the scales of these smaller scale arcologies of The Crystal Button story into a far more distant future through influences of his reading of The Time Machine (as we explored in parts 2 and 3 of this series). We have no way of proving that Hodgson had even read The Crystal Button. I assume that he had done so.

As we have previously noted, the “Great Redoubt” arcology is probably the first of it’s kind and scale (miles high, pressurized and pyramidal) in literature, and as a result of this, has probably wittingly and unwittingly contributed to the influence of many arcologies that appear in literature and movies ever since it’s appearance in The Night Land. Even if subsequent authors who wrote stories with arcologies occurring in them had never read The Night Land specifically, some echo of the “Great Redoubt” may have occurred in some other story that particular authors had read. Granted, the arcology concept in literature may have had it’s original evolution and various conceptual flourishes earlier, but ever since,  the modern sci-fi arcology meme probably unwittingly pays homage to the “Great Redoubt” concept of William Hope Hodgson. And, if some of the weird imagery that occurs in The Night Land were really some sort of strange memory of Mars, the highly speculative and virtually unproveable implication of this would be that the subsequent fictional arcologies, in their “flourishes”, might also be in their own weird ways a result of some sort of memory-multiplier effect from concepts or “Ideas” stemming from a more “accurate” reality to use the Platonic “Theory of Forms” model. The various notions that arise in the composition of The Night Land landscape are mimicking, but not directly copying, the image that in some strange way may have deeper root and ground.

For our purpose, it’s not so much the arcology concept per se that we are concerned with as with its use in a pyramidal fashion and in a setting highly reminiscent of various martian-like landscape features.

We will now explore some quotations from The Night Land. Again, as in the previous installment, our quotations will be quite lengthy but are necessary for our purpose. And, as previously, our reference will be from the online edition of The Night Land which is available at Project Gutenberg.

(Here follows various quotations from The Night Land wherein the “Great Redoubt”, a miles-high pyramidal arcology, is invoked):

“And when the humans had built the great Pyramid, it had one thousand three hundred and twenty floors; and the thickness of each floor was according to the strength of its need. And the whole height of this pyramid exceeded seven miles, by near a mile, and above it was a tower from which the Watchmen looked (these being called the Monstruwacans). But where the Redoubt was built, I know not; save that I believe in a mighty valley, of which I may tell more in due time.”

***

“And when the Pyramid was built, the last millions, who were the Builders thereof, went within, and made themselves a great house and city of this Last Redoubt. And thus began the Second History of this world. And how shall I set it all down in these little pages! For my task, even as I see it, is too great for the power of a single life and a single pen. Yet, to it!”

***

“And, later, through hundreds and thousands of years, there grew up in the Outer Lands, beyond those which lay under the guard of the Redoubt, mighty and lost races of terrible creatures, half men and half beast, and evil and dreadful; and these made war upon the Redoubt; but were beaten off from that grim, metal mountain, with a vast slaughter. Yet, must there have been many such attacks, until the electric circle was put about the Pyramid, and lit from the Earth-Current. And the lowest half-mile of the Pyramid was sealed; and so at last there was a peace, and the beginnings of that Eternity of quiet watching for the day when the Earth-Current shall become exhausted.”

***

“I have said not overmuch concerning the air of the Night Land and the Mighty Pyramid; for truly I have been so set to tell my story of all that I did truly see and adventure upon. Yet, though I have said but little, you will surely have perceived that the air of that far and chill time was not as the air of this; but was thin and keen within the Night Land, and lay not, as I do think, to a great height above the land, but only nigh to the earth.”

***

“And as you do know through my tellings, there was a wondrous difference between the air within the Mighty Pyramid, and that which lay without around the base; for upward beyond that, I did understand that there was no outward air that any should breathe; and so was all the Pyramid sealed in certain wise in all the upper Cities for ever; and whether it was sealed utterly from the outward air at the base, I do not surely remember, if, in truth that I did ever bother my head to such matters.”

***

“Yet, if I be set proper in memory and understanding, we did draw air from the Underground Fields; but whether they gat any change or newness of air from the Night Land, I have no knowledge; and do lament that I have no sure knowing. Yet, as you shall believe, I could surely write an hundred books upon that Wonder of the Future, and be still lacking in the half of all that there is to be told; and so do I try to have courage to this my task, and to have no over-trouble, because that I do tell but a little of a Great Tale.”

***

“Yet that the Peoples of the Upper Cities had great chests, I do well know; for this was a common knowledge; even as we of this age do acknowledge the Peoples of Africa to be of blackness, or those of Patagonia to be of great stature. And by this one thing should any know a man of the Upper Cities, from a man of the Lower Cities. And because that there grew this difference among the Peoples, there had been once, as any could learn from the Histories, a plan whereby the Peoples should be moved upward and downward through the great height of the Mighty Pyramid, from this city unto that. Yet had it met with great disfavour; and was put out of force; and this is easy to be seen as the natural way of the human heart.”

***

“And here it doth occur unto me that it was like enough to be a plan for health, beside of training of the mind, that each youth and maid was put to travel through all the cities of the Mighty Pyramid; the which did take three years and two hundred and twenty-five days, as I have told before this. For by this plan, were they made to breathe the air of every height, and this, mayhaps, unto the good of their developing. And they also to discover that air which was best to their need.”

As already indicated, even the late, great, Carl Sagan admitted that Mars might have artificially constructed pyramids, going so far as to say on page 130 of Cosmos:

“The largest [pyramids of Mars] are 3 kilometers across at the base and 1 kilometer high—much larger than the pyramids of Sumer, Egypt, or Mexico on Earth. They seem eroded and ancient,and are, perhaps, only small mountains, sandblasted for ages. But they warrant, I think, a careful look.”[Emphasis mine.]

Compare this with what was explored in the “Secrets of Carl Sagan” article series where a quotation was mentioned from Intelligent Life in the Universe, published 14 years prior to the publication of Cosmos:

 “If, some hundreds of millions of years ago, a Martian civilization was advanced enough to launch 10 million ton satellites, then their works on the planet must have been mighty indeed. Are the sands of Mars today drifting over the edifices and MONUMENTS [emphasis mine] of an ancient civilization? If that society were still extant, it seems likely that we should have some sign of it; and if it is now extinct, evidence of its past existence, character, and achievements can likely be garnered by the first Martian exploration teams.”

One of the more profound examples of a pyramid on Mars lies not too far from the “Watcher”, er, I mean “Face on Mars” at Cydonia (which I dubbed “Nergal” at the Enterprise Mission conference in 2003). This five sided flabbergaster has been one of my favorite anomalies in the 30+ years that I have been researching in this field. It was initially discovered from the old Viking imagery,  and is considered to be the largest pyramidal feature to have yet been found in the solar system. It is dubbed the “D & M” from the initials of the last names of the scientists who originally discovered it, namely, Vince Dipietro and Greg Molenaar (the “D & M” moniker was originally invoked by Richard Hoagland in his The Monuments of Mars).  Although it is not as large as the “Great Redoubt” described in The Night Land, it is huge. ⁸⁾UPDATE: For other large pyramidal massifs see the  pyramids of Elysium that Carl Sagan mentioned in Cosmic Connection and Cosmos. (Keith Laney has also provided a Gigapan of the area.) For more on the early story behind the “D & M”, see The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever, 4th edition; 1996, pages 8, 150, et. seq. and index.

It is not our purpose at this time to argue for the artificiality of this incredible martian pyramid, however, a few striking pictures of it may be all that is needed to make the point to the curious (Thanks goes to Keith Laney for the incredible GigaPan images of the “D & M” pyramid ⁹⁾see here. for allowing the use of his processed imagery here):

Zooming in closer to the southeastern part of this edifice we can see stunning details including the surrounding “terrain” that includes what look like…roads and…suburbs. Ancient, ruined, dust-covered extra-terrestrial suburbs. ¹⁰⁾Perhaps the Rosie Crucian allusion to the “Suburbs of Heaven” was a polysemous phraseology. One that indicated some strange meme of these ancient roads and dwellings in the “heavens”?

On its western side, more “suburbs in the heavens”:

As seen in the image process below (detailed extensively by Robert Harrison at his Cydonia Quest)  the surface nature of the “D & M” pyramid with its girders not only has a “macro-geometry” to its architecture, it has a “micro-geometry” as well:

Zooming back out and getting our bearings we can further examine the symmetry involved in this pyramid the intricate nature of which has also been focused on in detail by Robert Harrison at his Cydonia quest website:

Although the “D & M” has something about it that is resonant with the “Great Redoubt” of The Night Land, especially with it’s close proximity to “Watcher-like” massifs including the “Face on Mars”, there are actually plenty of pyramidal massifs to find on Mars of a large nature. Nor are these pyramids just located at Elysium, or at Cydonia. I and many others over the last two decades since the new imagery started coming in have noticed that they appear to be almost everywhere on Mars. ¹¹⁾ For examples of additional martian arcologies, both pyramidal and non-pyramidal, see here and here. This echoes, once again, the mimicking of Mars in The Night Land imagery, not the exact copying, as we mentioned above.

Perhaps a more appropriate pyramid to compare or contrast with the scales involved with the “Great Redoubt” of The Night Land would be the enormous collapsed one proposed by Richard C. Hoagland. He suggests this might once have resided in Gale Crater and was a kind of “Reuleaux Tetrahedron“. If it once was a real pyramid, it would have had an, ahem, “Circle” around it (crater rim).

One noteworthy point that Mr. Hoagland mentions in his “Gale Arcology Hypothesis” article, and which is applicable to the overall scale of the artificial pyramids proposed on Mars in general, is the following:

“Now, before our critics go totally ballistic–

“But — no such monstrous BUILDING could possibly even be constructed … under all the laws of physics … let alone, rise to such impossible heights!!”

I would gently remind those folks that the largest shield volcano in the solar system — “Olympus Mons” […] rises over 15 miles above the Mars “mean datum.” And, it is composed, layer upon layer (from millions of years of successive eruptions at “19.5” on Mars … ) of simple volcanic basalt — which is NOT known as “the strongest of structural materials” ….¹²⁾See the article “It Only Takes ONE White Crow …” by Richard C. Hoagland, The Enterprise Mission, 2013

Speaking of Olympus Mons…there is something reminiscent of that too in The Night Land...the mountain that “did go upward into the night, maybe fifteen and maybe twenty miles…”

Here is where the scale of features described in The Night Land is closer to the scale of certain features on Mars. This is evident in the comparison of Olympus Mons to the “great mountain” and its companion volcanoes—or rather “fire hills” as Hodgson’s narrator calls them.

Granted, as is clear in the relevant quotations below, the fire hills are out of the side of the “great mountain”, and although the images are of a future Earth, as you read it, the impression is very martian indeed:

“…there was a huge and blackened mountain unto the left of the mouth of the Gorge, and the mountain did go upward into the night, maybe fifteen and maybe twenty miles. And there was a mighty peaked volcano that grew out from the side of the mountain so high up as five miles, as I did guess that height; and this was upon the far side. And above this there was a second, maybe nine or ten great miles up in the blackness of the night that hung afar upward. And, as that this were not great wonder enough, there did burn and glow two other mighty fire-hills, at an utter height, upon the left crest of that black mountain; and these were upward so monstrous a way, as that they did seem to make strange and smouldering suns within the night. And truly, as you shall perceive, this was a wondrous thing.

***

And below these upward fire-hills there rose up from the earth vast mountains of ash and burned stuff, that had been cast forth by these perched volcanoes, and had poured downward unto the earth throughout Eternity, and so to build grey and sombre monuments unto the dreadful glory of Time.”

***

“And there did seem to me, as it were within
the red atmosphere of that place, as that
there were a muttering thunder, low and
constant, shaking the air, now from that
distance and now from this, and this did I
judge to be the voices of the fire-hills,
speaking with the fire that lived in them.”

***

“And you shall conceive how utter new was all
this unto me; for there was in that Country a
constant Voice of the Energy of Life, so that
the World-Noise of this our Age was even
there again, and with a keen and undoubted
apparentness; and the more so some ways, than
now.”

The height of the volcanic cones described by Hodgson is very atmospheric. Imagine what it would be like on Mars when the volcanoes were brooding on the horizon in days when their angry molten interiors were constantly belching forth (perhaps all the geologic disturbance being invoked by a near-by exploded planet), a pall would hang over the blacked world of Mars and the fires at the tops of the cones would glow like “strange and smouldering suns” in the Martian sky!

William Hope Hodgson mentions, as noted in one of the quotations above from The Night Land, that the “Great Redoubt” arcology is at the bottom of a “mighty valley.” This is also what he calls, from time to time, the “Great Valley ” and it is here where the “Night Land” proper is located where the action of most of the story takes place. If there were actually some literally direct subconscious memory of the pyramids on Mars, we would have to be looking for pyramids in the bottom of the famed Valles Marineris. We are not looking for pyramids in “mighty valleys” as we are only suggesting the dream-like mimicking of a lost world. Of course, there might very well be pyramids in Valles Marineris, but is there…?

Yes.

Here is a noteworthy one, discovered originally by Keith Laney and dubbed the “Candor Tetrahedron“. It’s smaller than the “D & M” and it resides down in a canyon branching off of Valles Marineris! A good candidate for an eerie sympathy to the “Lesser Redoubt” (The smaller companion arcology from The Night Land story)! That is if we were actively trying to find direct correlations to the narrative of The Night Land…

But, I am not arguing for direct correspondences. After all The Night Land is a story of the future and takes place on Earth not Mars. Indeed, the fact that there is a dreamlike connection and not a direct one is far more conducive to the subconscious archetypal possibilities. The overall impact is that there is a strange sort of subjective impressionistic impulse as a creative directive in the overall narrative of the landscape (not the style of the writing itself)that Hodgson writes about. It’s the subconscious Martian-like imagery sublimating up in Hodgson’s mind and which “surfaces” above the metaphorical “Atlantean” “waters” of oblivion that are of greatest interest and inquiry…

Remember, as we have noted previously, it’s not just Hodgson’s arcology concept we are dealing with here. It is the overall typologically connected sympathy with other aspects of Mars itself.

In part 3 we mentioned the “Watchers” at the five points of an inverted pentacle (which was probably the first time that such a pentagonal connection to the Watchers in The Night Land had been made) and in part 4 we discussed further the mystery of these five “Watchers” and the literary connections to Hodgson’s other works—especially the Carnaki stories and their “Monstrosities”.

Are there any resemblances to the mountain-sized “Watchers” in The Night Land and Mars?

In a way, yes.

There are several massifs in the general area of the “D & M” pyramid in the Cydonia area, that have strange morphologies about them. However, given the nature of the controversies surrounding the nature of being able to see “faces”, we could simply discuss the one main mountain-sized bi-furcated sphinx-like massif on Mars.

The famous “Face on Mars“:

Again, as with the “D & M” pyramid discussed above, this article is not an argument for the artificiality of the “Face on Mars”. However, observations of its potential artificiality have been noted for decades, predictions were made with only two examples of imagery of the massif, confirmations of predictions resulted and the subsequent pictures in the years that followed essentially speak for themselves. ¹³⁾We will examine the artificiality hypothesis and various imagery in support of it elsewhere at this website.

“And now to continue my telling concerning the Night Land. The Watcher of the South was, as I have set to make known, a monster differing from those other Watching Things, of which I have spoken, and of which there were in all four. One to the North-West, and one to the South-East, and of these I have told; and the other twain lay brooding, one to the South-West, and the other to the North-East; and thus the four watchers kept ward through the darkness, upon the Pyramid, and moved not, neither gave they out any sound. Yet did we know them to be mountains of living watchfulness and hideous and steadfast intelligence.”

The “Lesser Redoubt” apparently had it own “Watchers” lurking near:

“And sudden, I saw, as it did seem, a monstrous head within the glowing; for the glowing did seem at whiles as that it swept to and fore, as should a shining smoke that went obedient to a quiet wind: and so to hide and again to uncover. And in a moment I lost the great face, and was all unsure that ever I had seen aught.”

And lo! in a little minute, I did see it again; but whether it did be the shape of some utter monster of eternity—even as the Watchers about the Mighty Pyramid—or whether it did be no more than a carven mountain of rock, shaped unto the dire picturing of a Monster, I did have no knowing.”

***

“…the Fixed Giants did be within the borders of The Shine, and all hid in the light thereof, save when the burning mist did roll this way or that. And I took a great heed of this thing, and did guess that these Fixed Giants were somewhat even as the Great Watchers that were about the Mighty Pyramid, as you do know. And immediately I minded me of that utter monstrous face that I did see amid the bright smoke of The Shine, when that I came first into the Land; and surely this had been one of the Fixed Giants…”

Even if there were a subconscious connection to Mars or Cydonia this is not meant to imply that the “Watchers” creeping in The Night Land are accurately describing the nature or being; the ontology of what the massifs on Mars at Cydonia in their artistry are conveying—even if those massifs were artificially constructed. And even in a memory context, you could not say that the monstrous “Watchers” of The Night Land were exactly what the massifs on Mars were designed for. That’s not the point. The imagery in The Night Land is not exactly the same. The two landscapes of Mars and The Night Land are strangely contextualized in an almost “memory-dream” like way (to use the idiom from The Night Land itself).

Often, when we dream of things that we actually encountered in our “awakened” state in a previous day, they do appear in our dreams but in altered strange contexts and odd misplaced subconsciously created simulacra not literally recreating a record from the mind but ephemeral and elusive palimpsest like visions of events and things overlapping one another out of time and out of space. Similarly, in The Night Land, the “Cydonia-like” images would not have a resonance in our awakened “real” world until we sent spacecraft to Mars and discovered landscape’s eerily familiar to the one buried and forgotten in an old, strange, novel published in 1912. Now it seems the dream has preceded the reality instead of the other way around. Perhaps it’s only coincidental and there is nothing more to the matter. But what emerges as “coincidences” is the way a dream preceding a reality might manifest itself if it were some sort of ancient cryptic memory now arising.

We already mentioned the Olympus-Mons-like- volcano in The Night Land, but what about that “mighty valley” mentioned therein as we have hinted above? The “Mighty Valley that cut the World in twain“… sometimes called the “Mighty Chasm”. It has an immediate and inescapable resonance with Valles Marineris:

“…. And the Valley had come, as you shall mind, when the earth did split; and this thing was, in truth, like to be thought that same Ending of the World, which all Nations have been taught to believe shall come. For in verity, when the world did split and burst, and the oceans rushed downward into the earth, and there was fire, and storms, and a mighty chaos, surely it was proper to think that the End had come. Yet was it, in truth, but the beginning of hope of a new Eternity of Life; so that out of the End came the Beginning, and Life out of Death, and Good out of that which did seem a dire matter. And so is it always.”

***

“And concerning the air of the Night Land, you shall know that there was in all that Land no flying thing, because that the air was grown very thin; yet, as the Records did show, there had once been monstrous flying-brutes, that went over the Land in mighty bounds; but this was in a long gone age; and we could but suppose that the Records gave truth.”

***

“…there had been some foolish and well-intended talk among them that I take a small flying-ship, that was in the Great Museum beside the models of the Great Ships. For, truly, this machine was yet sound to go; for it was made of the grey metal of the Mighty Pyramid, that did seem to have no power to cease. Yet, in verity, I had no skill to manage this, neither had it flown, through an hundred thousand years; so that none did know the mastership of that art, which did be learned but by a constant practice, and oft made uneasy by fallings that did wreck the machine, as I did know from the Book of Flying. And, moreover, as I have told, the air of the Night Land was grown over-weak to uphold such a thing; which, I doubt not, had made the Peoples of the Pyramid to cease from flyings, quite so much as that they did fear the Forces of Evil in the night.”

***

“Now there doth a wonder come to me why that the Road Makers, who were of that far-off Age which was before the Age of the Mighty Pyramid, did not fly downward from the upper world into the deep of the monstrous valley; but did instead build a road.”

***

“Yet it may be that the air of the upper world had grown thin a great age, so that they had truly forgot that once man did have power to fly. But even if that they did have proper machines to this purpose, surely it were a wondrous and fearful thing to fly downward an hundred great miles; for they surely to have a dread that they never to rise again through so huge a deep.”

***

“Yet doth this go past my first wonder, which did concern the wherefore that they made not to descend in Things of Flight. Yet, maybe, shall my reasons stand to show why this was not.”

***

“And again, mayhap it did chance that some were wild adventurers, and did leap over the edge of the upper world, having to ease their flight certain contrivings, like to parachutes. And these you shall picture, as that you watched them to leap; and so shall you see them go downward into the gloom; and you shall see them for maybe ten miles, and maybe for twenty miles; and afterward shall they be lost utterly in that Great Deep, and seen no more of any man for ever.”

***

“But when the Nations became Road-Makers, and came downward slowly to the monstrous Deep of the Mighty Valley that did split the World, then were they come there by millions, and with power sufficient to fight against the Beasts; and afterward to grow back again to an ancient Civilizing; and so to the building of the great airships that were yet shown in the Great Museum of the Pyramid.”

Again, as with the “Great Redoubt”, the scale correspondence is greater in The Night Land narrative than with that we meet with on Mars. Valles Marineris is some 15 miles deep, and the “Mighty Valley” is over 100 miles deep!¹⁴⁾Perhaps actually 200 miles! Hodgson says at one point “…the dead starkness of the world, where did be—mayhap two hundred great miles above us—snow and the eternal desolation of a lost world, that did once be the lovely world of the olden days…” See page 172 The Night Land, Vol 2, Ballantine edition, (1972).

All this seems to manifest more unconscious associated imagery conjured “mysteriously” in the mind of William Hope Hodgson.

Even if we dismiss the “intelligently designed” arcologies on Mars, as merely an imaginative coincidence to the Greater and Lesser Redoubts of The Night Land, what about the more “mundane” connections?  You will note the discussions at the aforementioned Night Speech forum, attempting to conceptualize the cartography of The Night Land, also includes topics of  Valles Marineris and Olympus Mons, not just rationalizations of the vast arcology of the “Great Redoubt” and all the weird face-like mountains and bizarre buildings that surround it.

If all this “outlandish” speculation (and I do mean outlandish) is evidence of a strange unconscious memory of Mars, it seems to be a constellation of things that includes only the most impressive things, subjects, or events and objects that had the greatest impression upon the consciousness which now struggles to form a correct recreative pattern disconnected from it’s source. For, after all, large pyramids (of which there appear to be multiple examples of on Mars) are now “remembered” as the consolidation of one or two (Greater and Lesser Redoubts).

Even if possible, how could this possibly be remembered? Are there any events of supreme terror or trauma that act as catalyzing agents for a remembrance of this? Is this as Manly Hall suggests, some sort of a memory of an “Atlantean catastrophe” in ourselves? ¹⁵⁾We will consider this in our next installment.

The answer to this is certainly not easy or perhaps even desirable for many, but the mystery of some sort of “reincarnation memory model” has been, not answered, but explored before.

In February of 2006, at the now-closed Enterprise Mission Conference, I authored what ultimately became a 50+ page thread entitled “The Face on Mars in a 1958 comic book”. Dedicated to the idea of platonic anamnesis and the remembering (or perhaps “re-sourcing”) of things that we imagine have only been recently known, the thread explored many motifs and ideas in literature, channelling, the possibility of physical records and other weird stuff concerning the potential Platonic/Jungian remembering model in the context of Cydonia, Mars, the Exploded Planet Hypothesis, etc. As was evident from all the exploration in that thread, The Night Land was not the only example of strange remembering echoes of a lost solar system that once was…¹⁶⁾The “Face on Mars in a 1958 comic book” thread also the first time that an internet discussion of the “Face on Mars comic book” had been initiated. This discussion subsequently prompted Robert Harrison (one of the contributing members of The Enterprise Mission conference) to publish this posting at his Cydonia Quest website.

In addition to posting many thoughts concerning The Night Land, I also presented many examples of other instances in the literature that had for their narratives various ideas associated with martian ruins, lunar ruins, exploded planets etc. and the discussion included examples from articles written by Richard C. Hoagland, such as the Tom Corbett, Space Cadet article published in the year 2000 and also a later article written by him, the “Forbidden Planet…Mars” article published shortly after I began the “Face on Mars in 1958 comic book” thread.

Although this is not the place to get into all the related literature (as we are focussing on The Night Land) an example or two will be indicative of the general trend of ideas. ¹⁷⁾We will explore the relevant motifs that occur in various works of literature in further detail in the “fall of lucifer” article series here at Suburbs of Heaven.

Keith Woodcott (pen name of John Brunner) published a 1965 novel entitled The Martian Sphinx:

On page 57 of this work an interesting set of words is written:

“Before we get at the truth of this, we’re going to have to answer questions about ourselves which have been left aside for thousands of years because we’re too sensitive to tackle them. And here’s this damned thing, buried in the Martian desert the same way the Egyptian sphinx was buried, and we stumble across it and it says, ‘what are you’? “

Seems provocatively similar to the “Face on Mars” at Cydonia—well at least in words. The actual sphinx on Mars in the story was a women oracle-like figure. “The damned thing” mentioned above was a 2001: A Space Odyessy monolithic object on the surface of Mars. I spent considerable time at “The Enterprise Mission Conference” detailing the similarities in Woodcott’s The Martian Sphinx to subject matter related to the alternative research of Richard Hoagland.

Another example is a story entitled  “The Rape of the Solar System” which was originally published in  Amazing Stories, December 1934 issue. Therein we encounter another example of a huge canyon being gouged into the side of Mars during an interplanetary war millions of years in the Earth’s past which resulted in an exploded planet. ¹⁸⁾Again, the motif of an exploded planet in an interplanetary war is not new even with this. There are several earlier examples in literature—going back into the 1800’s, that we will explore in our Fall of Lucifer series of articles.

Science fiction writers have enough individual intellectual creative acumen to make up stories of huge ruins, antigravity etc. such as are in The Night Land or any other work that they may happen to write. People come up with original, seminal ideas that seem isolated, at least, at first glance, on the “surface”. But writers must cull and procure IDEAS while gathering new ways to present archetypal motifs for the concepts of their literature’s imagery. It all begs the question though, where do ideas come from? ¹⁹⁾ See part 3 where we explore the idea model behind The Night Land.

Myth is the great reservoir of human inspiration. Mythology is the memory of the race. ALL Mythology. Though like dreams, they are not always to be interpreted literally. But it is here where most of us have found our ideas whether we realized it or not.

But what about other “ideas” that are not directly related to literature?

Certain scientific proofs and discoveries have some predictable consequences which will inform the literature that will use those scientific ideas, but if the images in certain original literature seems to stem from this type of “remembrance model” we are presently entertaining, then so do our scientific discoveries, engineering, architectures and the very process of building or rather re-building of civilization itself.

Now back to that “Atlantean catastrophe” question above…

In the “Face on Mars in a 1958 comic book” thread I said the following:

For one thing, imagining what it must have been like after an apocalyptic catastrophe on Mars and what the survivors of the cataclysm go through while the rest got away to Earth (or somewhere else). In fact, what devolution in the face of vast technological architecture would be like. Imagine the feelings that it would have on the knowing inhabitants?

Is some of the eschatological angst of today the background of a memory of something that already happened? Could the “D & M” pyramid on Mars (or many other pyramids on Mars) have been as a last “Redoubt” against the impending cataclysmic events?

To use words from The Night Land itself:

“…the earth did split; and this thing was, in truth, like to be thought that same Ending of the World, which all Nations have been taught to believe shall come. For in verity, when the world did split and burst, and the oceans rushed downward into the earth, and there was fire, and storms, and a mighty chaos, surely it was proper to think that the End had come.”

If Valles Marineris, for example, was created as a result of a cataclysmic disruption of Mars due to an exploded planet, intentionally destroyed ²⁰⁾As hinted at by Carl Sagan long ago in the 1960’s in Intelligent Life In the Universe and also explored by Graham Hancock in his “Executed Mars” model in the chapter “The Janus Planet” from his book The Mars Mystery published by Crown Books in 1998 and which became the premise for Hoagland and Bara’s “Bi-modal Model” of Mars, then any pyramids we find in Valles Marineris would have been built after the creation of the canyon. That is if they are of the same antiquity as the “D & M” or Cydonia. Or, as I think, there was an already existing canyon there, that had pyramids perhaps, (such as the “Candor Tetrahedron” mentioned above) and the cataclysm made an already existing fault in the martian crust more pronounced and the flood ensued as a result. This would preserve the antiquity of the pyramidal features in the canyon and also lend itself to the more obvious models of subsequent destruction of the Martian civilization.

But, if that could ever be proven true, there is a corollary hidden in all this…

As I discussed many years ago at “The Enterprise Mission Conference”, we are observing evidence of multiple cycles of creation and destruction, building and re-building, and even various ancient excavations of the ruins that precede various cycles of civilization on Mars that we are finding.²¹⁾ I also included the moon in those concepts I initially proposed at “The Enterprise Mission Conference” If that were true, the most advanced architectures would be the oldest and the least advanced the youngest. A sort of platonic, cyclic, fertility and sterility model.

Funny how Plato keeps getting invoked here isn’t it?²²⁾It was with Plato, that for the occidental world’s “open” literature, real “disclosure” first began…Atlantis, waters, cave, remembering, ideal state, etc.

So Mars could have had civilizational cycles as it passed into the utter oblivion of time—struggling all the while to retain a foothold. Regardless, if the arcologies on Mars had contingencies to survive and pressurize from the floods, it would be obvious that there would be a general and serious collapse of any indigent civilization. The merciful thing would be that they all died quickly.

I really don’t know if the atmospheric pressure “millions of ages” ago at the bottom of Valles Marineris would even allow for the kind of human survival idea presented in The Night Land, especially if a planet was just detonated nearby. If the whole planet was de-pressurized, water would boil out or permafrost. It’s possible that a re-terraforming of the planet after the exploding planet event occurred, but that would have to soon fail also to get what we see at Mars presently. Re-terraforming of Mars after the exploded planet might have allowed a foothold to survive for a few hundreds of thousands of years maybe, but the idea we are a direct descendant species or generation from an interplanetary war is probably wrong for a variety of reasons that are outside the present scope of this article. It appears that if anyone did survive a “Cosmic War” (to use Dr. Joseph P. Farrell’s idiom here) they died out—even if they “survived”. Otherwise, they would of had regained technological hold long ago due to the antiquity of the ruins we are finding.  Had they survived, which is plausible, then they also had additional wars and cycles of cosmic cataclysmic interlude, to arrive at the present situation in the solar system we observe today. This ultimately would indicate we are in a cyclic solar system, cyclic cosmos, cyclic incarnation model rather than a whole host of linear closed system models. ²³⁾The flip side of this model is that The Night Land might be rather a memory of the days that led up to an awful catastrophe.

However, there are still strange stories we encounter.

William Francis Brinsley Le Poer Trench, 8th Earl of Clancarty, 7th Marquess of Heusden who “claimed that he could trace his descent from 63,000 B.C., when beings from other planets had landed on Earth in spaceships” ²⁴⁾ See Curing Hiccups with Small Fires: A Delightful Miscellany of Great British Eccentrics, Karl Shaw, 2009, p. 105 wrote a couple of interesting books including The Sky People and Forgotten Heritage.

In the book The Sky People (originally published by Neville Spearman in 1961)he said the following :

“the flood of the First Noah took place on Mars. The garden (of Eden) was located in the Northern Hemisphere not far from the polar regions…The waters rushed down into the conduits and drowned all the original Adam-II people there.”

It should be mentioned that the good Mr. Trench also thought that Venus was a hospitable place.

So, is he merely playing another facet of this memory model we are exploring? There are interesting correspondences to our present knowledge of Mars in his works, but other things like what he speaks about Venus and other solar system related subjects are off the mark.

But, it looks like Richard Hoagland was not the first to propose the Garden of Eden was on Mars…

But if there was a searing destruction on Mars (and that’s another point to remember as there would be an incredible “flash” heat from an exploding planet) how profound a hopelessness in the witnesses could such a destruction be?  Profound enough to imprint the “medium” of consciousness itself for future transmission (if even such “transmission” were possible)?

To use the words of Hodgson himself from The Night Land “ruptures in the Aether”…shatterings..and “Doorways in the Night”?

Are our memories of this like metaphorical doorways in the “Night”? The Oblivion? The cave? Underworld?

“All learning is a remembering…..”? Memories struggling to “come forth by day“? (Here we get back to pyramids because of the Egyptian connection and ultimately the Saitic heritage of “Chariot” of Phaeton, Atlantis and Plato and…and…and…)

All of this more suggestively might form what Dr. Joseph P. Farrell has been implying for some years now in his “topological metaphor” construct of the “information creating medium” (which he suggests is a resonating with and not a remembrance of) re-creating information. Or re-accessing it.

Conversely, is it rather memories of what each individual personality experience imprints upon the “Oversoul” or Atmic sheath and which itself preserves all incarnational information, information that can only be “downloaded” in subsequent incarnations by brief flashes and moments of illuminative interlude …?  Illumination perhaps catalyzed by the encountering of a source of that ancient “shock” once again in the physical world and triggering an initiatory experience of sorts or something similar?

Indeed, if, as certain initiatory traditions themselves assert, events traumatic enough to form a “reservoir” of information to be tapped into at later significant time periods? ²⁵⁾We will explore speculations on this in the next part. For when a planet is destroyed, a deep structure physics temple is rent; a vast and ancient receptacle of evolutions far more than just something physically seen. Because physical records are memesis and initiatory experience is anamnesis.

Let’s read a few words from The Night Land to convey this point:

“Always, it seemed to me when I awaked into the Future, into the Everlasting Night that lapped this world, that I saw near to me, and girdling me all about, a blurred greyness. And presently this, the greyness, would clear and fade from about me, even as a dusky cloud, and I would look out upon a world of darkness, lit here and there with strange sights. And with my waking into that Future, I waked not to ignorance; but to a full knowledge of those things which lit the Night Land; even as a man wakes from sleep each morning, and knows immediately he wakes, the names and knowledge of the Time which has bred him, and in which he lives. And the same while, a knowledge I had, as it were sub-conscious, of this Present–this early life, which now I live so utterly alone.”

“In my earliest knowledge of that place, I was a youth, seventeen years grown, and my memory tells me that when first I waked, or came, as it might be said, to myself, in that Future, I stood in one of the embrasures of the Last Redoubt–that great Pyramid of grey metal which held the last millions of this world from the Powers of the Slayers.”

“I must set out to you in the short pages of this my life there, a sufficiency of the life that had been, and the life that was, both within and without that mighty Pyramid, to make clear to those who may read, the truth of that which I would tell; and the histories of that great Redoubt dealt not with odd thousands of years; but with very millions; aye, away back into what they of that Age conceived to be the early days of the earth, when the sun, maybe, still gloomed dully in the night sky of the world. But of all that went before, nothing, save as myths, and matters to be taken most cautiously, and believed not by men of sanity and proved wisdom.”

“And, later, through hundreds and thousands of years, there grew up in the Outer Lands, beyond those which lay under the guard of the Redoubt, mighty and lost races of terrible creatures, half men and half beast, and evil and dreadful; and these made war upon the Redoubt; but were beaten off from that grim, metal mountain, with a vast slaughter. Yet, must there have been many such attacks, until the electric circle was put about the Pyramid, and lit from the Earth-Current. And the lowest half-mile of the Pyramid was sealed; and so at last there was a peace, and the beginnings of that Eternity of quiet watching for the day when the Earth-Current shall become exhausted.”

What I am suggesting by “anamnesic imagination” will be the focus of the next installment of this series wherein we will examine in some detail and, from a most unconventional view, how mythic archetypes of the collective human unconscious might arise.

For those of us who have followed the Cydonia controversy all these years, it becomes evident that the subject matter of the fictional “Night Land” forms the nexus of a strange set of “common surfaces” involving a whole range of issues. ²⁶⁾”Common surfaces” is used here deliberately and is essentially a shorthand for what is called the “Topological Metaphor“.  See Dr. Joseph P. Farrell’s various works including Transhumanism: A Grimoire of Alchemical Agendas (with Dr. Scott D. de Hart), Feral House, page 60 et seq.,  Financial Vipers of Venice: Alchemical Money, Magical Physics, and Banking in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Feral House, pages 46-48 where the discussion of Bruno’s “vast astral memory machine” is central to the topic. Cf.  also The Giza Death Star Destroyed, Adventures Unlimited Press, 2005 pages 196-245 et seq.  From, Karma and reincarnation, morphogenetic resonance, remembering the past, pyramidal archologies, faces, telepathy, remembering the deep past and looking to a potential deep and dismal future (echoing, perhaps, something that has already happened or will happen…)

If we take away some of the literary problems of the work; it’s weird sexism (which some have argued was on purpose) cumbersome diction and victorian sentiment (which is not all that bad necessarily) and look rather to the “deeper” resonances of its evocative and  haunting elements reminiscent of Cydonia and other landscapes on Mars, The Night Land  appears to have a barrier-breaking connection and insight into the root and ground of imagination with its connection to platonic anamnesis, and the collective mythological human archetypal unconscious.

The suggestive connections of The Night Land with Mars, if they were rooted in some true reality, could open a gate of memory so profound and sublime that it would transform our awareness of the solar system environment that we live in and stop nothing short of invoking a sense of deep and lingering awe.

It could open the “Gate” of a locked alchemical palace of memory…

Imagine what it would be like to open that Gate of “memory-dreams”, and to go inside…

“That which hath Watched from the Beginning, and until the opening of the Gateway of Eternity” came into my thoughts, as I looked through the glass …  I looked deep down into my being, and saw, as dreams are seen, the sunlight and splendour…”