Cotton Mather (1663-1728), a New England Puritan clergyman famous for inciting the Salem Witchcraft mania (1692-93), repeated Edmond Halley’s hypothesis about an inner world. Mather also believed that the inner earth’s inhabitants created a way to fashion light.
Halley suggested that the Earth might consist of concentric spheres, with each layer potentially habitable. Halley’s theory was rooted in attempts to explain anomalies in magnetic fields and other natural phenomena, rather than religious doctrine.
Further Reading
Cotton Mather, The Christian Philosopher (1721), free resource
A good article about Mather’s idea by Peter W. Sinnema, “10 April 1818: John Cleves Symmes’s No. 1 Circular.”
A good article, The Theory of Concentric Spheres: Edmund Halley, Cotton Mather, & John Cleves Symmes (1947)
Author: mountshastamyths
Lurking around here with more questions than answers