Introduction
The Shaver Mythos is one madman's story of how our world came to be.
It is a downright crazy sci-fi rollercoaster unlike anything you've ever seen before. It makes scientology look boring (okay it is boring but just bear with me OK)
It is Flash Gordon crossed with All Tomorrows crossed with David Icke crossed with Scientology with a little bit more Monster Musume than you'd expect. From the perspective of any reader accustomed to an internet full of conspiracy theories, pseudoscientific nonsense and fetish art, the Shaver Mythos is truly ahead of its time.
On top of all that, the author believed he wasn't writing fiction. He was genuinely convinced everything he wrote about in his stories actually happened.
The problem is his writing was garbage. Worse than mine. So to make it easier for you i'll wade through the turgid, clunky prose and hopefully I might churn out a readable summary.
It's been almost a hundred years between its publication and today and nobody's done it, so I might as well step up to the task.
No, seriously. What even is the Shaver Mystery?
It's a loosely-linked collection of short stories that were serialized in pulp magazines in the 1940s and 50s that take place in a prehistoric age millions of years in the past. If you want to read all the stories along with a mini-encyclopedia of the setting, click here, but here i'll try to put it in my own words. Ready?
According to the Shaver Mystery, Planet Earth was once known as Lemuria, or Mother Mu. Human beings are descended from three aliens known as the elder races. These are the Atlans, the Nortans, and the Titans. The fourth "race" of Mu are Variforms, who are Titans and Atlans hybridized with various interplanetary beings.
They lived for centuries in a technologically perfect utopia before the sun ran out of fossil fuels and had to start burning heavy elements. Mother Mu became uninhabitable which forced them to migrate to other planets. Those left behind lived underground where they split into the evil, sadistic Deros and the benevolent, peaceful Teros. The rest became our ancestors.
The Shaver Mystery could be interpreted as a mythic past explainings why human beings experience things like ageing, death, or insanity, much like the Book of Genesis. It could also be interpreted as a rip roarin' fun raygun gothic space opera.
It has a bunch more fun stuff such as:
Silly Pseudoscience
In the Mystery there are two kinds of energy. There's detrimental energy, or de, which makes you old, pissed, and evil. It turned Atlans into deros, which stands for detrimental robots.
There's also integrative energy, or te, but the most repeated term you'll find for it is EXD which stands for Ex-Disintegrance. EXD is the origin of all matter. Anything exposed to it becomes young, healthy, strong, and good. And really big.
It can also make you a furry. At this point you can probably guess what the author was all about.
These two forms of energy were emitted by burning matter, which is why they're both referred to as "energy ash" in I Remember Lemuria!
Everything in Shaver's cosmology is combustible. Heavy elements such as lead or uranium emit de when burned, while carbon flames emit EXD.
Universal Languages
Shaver believed every language was descended from a single universal tongue called Mantong. Spell any word with the alphabet above and it'll tell you what it really means.
Disturbing Implications
If you look into it, these stories are indicative of Shaver's lack of faith in free will. As mentioned earlier, our behaviour is seldom ever up to us as individuals but rather dictated by the forces that surround us, whether good or evil. The protagonist, Mutan Mion, is a ro, which is a being that is directly controlled by other forces. This isn't portrayed as anything existentially frightening but rather brushed off as a fact of life.
Who wrote it?
Richard Sharpe Shaver was a real kooky character if there ever was one. He's perhaps the least obscure as far as outsider artists go. In fact he's talked about on all sorts of websites, but what irks me is that they don't cover his Mystery in any detail. (Save for that Jackalope podcast because they did it better than I ever could. If you wanna read about the man himself click that link I just dropped.)
Well, I don't remember much about him but I know he...
- Went to art school. More specifically he went to the Wicker School of Fine Arts. His art sucked.
- Was a communist agitator from the John Reed Club.
- Believed he could use his welding gun as a telephone. Shaver used it to talk to a Tero named Nydia.
Stuff I don't know
While we know next to nothing about the Mystery, it was incredibly popular back in the fifties before the UFO craze took over. The information we have now is scattered all over, but the most concerted effort to compile everything is in a series of books i'm two broke to buy which compiles the Shavertron fanzine by some fella called Richard Toronto, who also wrote War Over Lemuria. Toronto's the best Shaverania expert there is, but I've never read his work since I can't afford to shell out so much on books so i'll just leave those links here.
Previous magazines include Ray Palmer's Shaver Mystery Magazine, Secret World and Fate, which had all puttered out by the sixties.
Fun fact: this picture and the first image on this page was by Max Fyfield, who drew for Shavertron and the Hollow Earth Insider. Funner fact: He drew this famous depiction of a hollow earth. Not-so-fun-fact: I can't find that guy anywhere. I'd put him on the buried dreams page had he been active thirty years later.
Okay, Now on to the Shaver Mystery!
Once you're done with that check out the Jenniverse...