The John Cleves Symmes post got a good response, and so I thought I might devote some words to another idea at the fringe that time has discarded, as well as an interesting piece of forgotten Americana.
What was the Shaver Mystery? Oh brother, where to even begin…it was a mass movement that was one of the great controversies in the early days of science fiction fandom.
William Shaver was an indigent construction worker with what today looks like a clear-cut case of late-onset paranoid schizophrenia. While at a construction site he claimed the magnetic coil of a drill caused him to experience a vivid hallucination of a torture session at the center of the earth, and periodically he received hidden telepathic messages and even claimed that other mentalities, including one from 24,000 years ago, took control of his body periodically.
The jist of what Shaver came up with was that, thousands of years ago, the Titans, a superhuman race of giants, came to earth and created humans as a ro-race, “ro” meaning designed for work. Because of contamination from our sun, which causes aging and death, the Titans left the earth, leaving behind both their human creations and their wondrous cavern civilizations filled with machinery. The beings that remained in the caverns, the dero (short for destructive robots) took control of the Titans’ machinery because the solar poisons in their brains made them insane, and then used them to destroy all other life. Because of machines like telaugs and telepathy spy-rays, they periodically observe our thoughts from their secret caverns and place in us evil compulsions and aberrant behavior. They also spoke a hidden language called Mantong, evidence of which can be found everywhere as a root language spoken at the dawn of time.
Right here with William Shaver, we have almost all the elements of classic, almost textbook-precise schizophrenia:
- Irrational terror of poisons and contamination, especially in food and water;
- Themes of paranoia about hidden evil and conspiracy;
- Vivid hallucinations;
- Enemies that can observe a person’s thoughts and place evil compulsions;
- An obsession with identification of patterns;
- Figures that periodically take over a person’s body.
Because he had a little more panache than the average schizophrenic, apparently Ray Palmer, for reasons we can never understand, published “I Remember Lemuria!” in Astounding after rewriting Shaver’s crazed, energetic prose.
Read “I Remember Lemuria!” here. Now here’s where it gets really weird.
Apparently, the publication of this story in 1940 started a wave of mass-hysteria, where dozens wrote in to confirm elements of Shaver’s story and to say they had similar experiences! What. The. Hell.
As a Psychology masters student, I took a special course exclusively on the identification and treatment of schizophrenia. One of the things we’re taught to identify are “ray” delusions. In many neighborhoods there is usually a person that has the typical profile of being isolated and elderly who experiences the delusion that someone, usually a neighbor, is observing their activities with a spy beam and hitting them with a ray that causes hair and teeth to fall out, food to be poisoned, milk to sour and meat to rot. No wonder something like the Shaver Mystery would really resonate.
Shaver Mystery clubs started to spring up all over the country, and Ray Palmer devoted much of Amazing Stories just to Shaver Mystery content. In other words, the Shaver Mystery became a mass hysteria that would eventually only be eclipsed by the UFO phenomenon, for which the Shaver Mystery paved the way. Worse, because Mystery-related stories were profitable, everybody was pushing Shaver for more Mystery content, especially his publisher, Ray Palmer.
Of all the people involved in the Shaver Mystery, Ray Palmer comes off as the least sympathetic. Harlan Ellison once backed Ray Palmer into a corner and got the editor to admit that he personally never believed a lick of it but it sold magazines. Palmer wanted Shaver to continually revisit his hallucinations so his magazine could make money, an “enabler” that exploited a crazy person and prevented him from getting healthy. Worse, there were all these fervent cultists of the Shaver Mystery that defend him unto death. Because of that, Shaver never had anyone in his life that told him how things really were, and there’s something sad about that.
In the meantime you get prose that’s just awkward and sloppy, like this…
They understood concept, and I came to realize that concept had become a frozen thing on Mu by comparison. The Nortans used the truth, for it was the right conceptual attack. Evil has no concept; it is a mad robot to detrimental force. When Evil has power and men must obey or die, then only is it to be feared. But sometimes men fight for Evil unknowingly.I read the book, and I still have no idea what this means.
Or, looks obviously repetitive and insane to the point of meaninglessness, like this…
The direct need for a greater future for man is strengthening of the general mind by T forces, the growth of a better brain. No progress is truly progress unless man grows a better brain to grow a better brain. That is the pattern of progress—to grow a growth to grow, etc.…and that’s just what we could read after Palmer edited them extensively!
In fact, I remember reading that Palmer cut out particularly weird and sexually deviant elements from Shaver’s manuscripts, like the obvious S&M of the Dero slave lairs, not to mention uncomfortable, weird stuff like (supposedly) the life machines that cause a woman’s pubic hair to grow three feet long. Palmer once had to excise a 50-page sex scene!
Not only that, but Shaver might have been one of history’s first recorded furries, in the pre-Don Bluth era. The hero’s girlfriend, “Jane” to his “Tarzan,” is a half-human girl with hooves and a luxurious tail that Shaver’s hero thinks is the sexiest feature on earth.
To his credit, however, Shaver was an apt pupil under Palmer with a sincere desire to improve, and the later Shaver Mystery stories were considerably more polished and professional. He did get better, but brother, this stuff was bad.
Having actually read the Shaver Mystery stories, the thing that jumps at me immediately is that they seem like perfectly serviceable, space opera stories where, like many other works of science fiction in the period, you can identify the geneology of its ideas (for instance the race of blonde telepathic giants and cave civilizations with secret knowledge comes from Bulwer-Lytton). Claiming that they’re true or once happened is as laughable as slapping “BASED ON A TRUE STORY” tag on the Star Wars movies.
There’s nothing in there that wouldn’t be able to be produced by someone working in the pulp magazines of the 1940s. It’s almost like reading the always-wrong Immanuel Velikovsky: there’s nowhere I can point to something and say, “a-ha, he anticipated something that someone from that era shouldn’t have been able to predict.”
Besides, this stuff is all too “fifties” to be a real look at an actual culture of the distant past. I mean, God help me…every time I pictured the characters, I imagined them dressed very much like Zap Brannigan from
Futurama. The worst is the villain Lord Sathanas, who is too much of a cackling cartoon character, too much of a low-rent Ming the Merciless, to ever make anyone entertain the notion he ever really lived. Ultimately, I think that’s what ended the Shaver Mystery and its various clubs: it was far too "fifties" to be taken seriously, and crank theories are required to keep up with the times. Eventually, it was eclipsed by the UFO phenomenon that ironically, the Shaver Mystery played a role in creating.
Incidentally, Richard Shaver is often given credit for being the “inventor” of the UFO, just like Raymond L. Wallace is the creator of Bigfoot. I simply don’t see it. Much ado has been made of the “rollats” used as travel in the cave world as the prototype flying saucer, but my reading of the story shows them as nothing more than a glorified future space-car of the sort the Jetsons use; to compare vehicles of this sort to "flying saucers" is like calling Chinese "dragons" after their Western brethren: despite the nonexistent similarities, they're both called by the same name erroneously. In fact, in
I Remember Lemuria! the actual means for interplanetary travel are the usual forties Flash Gordon-esque penisrockets.
