Name: Lloyd's Etidorhpa
Author: John Uri Lloyd

Accompanying facsimile letter signed by author. Full work can be found: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/37775/pg37775-images.html

Among the novel’s most striking paratexts is its diagrammatic map of the narrator’s descent. Rather than a conventional topographical chart, it is styled like a schematic cross-section, tracing the ‘route of the strange journey’ from the earth’s surface through successive strata into the planet’s hollow heart. Caverns, abysses, and inland seas are carefully labelled, giving the narrative a pseudo-scientific framework. For contemporary readers enthralled by polar expeditions and underground fantasies, the map lent an air of plausibility to Lloyd’s extraordinary tale, making the descent appear not merely visionary but charted and navigable. Today it stands as a classic instance of imaginative cartography, mapping not geographic space but a speculative cosmology.

Ex Carta

John Uri Lloyd’s occult novel Etidorhpa includes a cross-sectional map tracing the narrator’s descent through the Earth’s strata. This diagram converts the mystical journey into a pseudo-scientific itinerary, mapping the visionary and spiritual as a subterranean geography.

A weird hybrid of occult romance, speculative science, and visionary allegory, 

 (its title ‘Aphrodite’ spelled backwards) reflects the late nineteenth century’s fascination with hollow-earth theory, spiritualism, and esoteric knowledge.

John Uri Lloyd (1849–1936), a Cincinnati pharmacologist and eccentric thinker, devised this work as both a novel and an initiation text. Its unnamed narrator is abducted by a mysterious, eyeless guide and led through subterranean realms beneath Kentucky into the Earth’s hollow interior. Along the way he encounters caverns, abysses, and subterranean seas, while absorbing discourses on alchemy, geology, and metaphysics. J. Augustus Knapp’s illustrations amplify the phantasmagoric atmosphere, blending the scientific with the mystical. Critics such as John Clute have noted how closely the geography of 

 follows the hollow-earth speculations of John Cleves Symmes, already well known in American visionary circles (Clute, 2025).

Although eccentric, the book was influential, circulating widely among occultists, Theosophists, and early science-fiction readers. Its mixture of scientific language, allegorical narrative, and mystical revelation placed it firmly within the tradition of ‘parascientific’ literature of the fin de siècle.