# The city in the sea

Memories of cities sinking into the ocean was recorded prevailently in the 18th century and then suppressed as science fiction in the 19th during the Great Depression.

![The doomed city still settling, light and energy from the earth, some of the drowned revived with gills, the memory filed as science fiction](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/mudflood/the-city-in-the-sea-hero.jpg)

On the night of 22 October 2026 I watched *City Under the Sea*, the 1965 film with Vincent Price. A lot of it lines up with the mud flood. What interests me most are the contradictions the story cannot explain.

Edgar Allan Poe’s poem leaves a blank about what happens to the city. The movie fills that blank. It puts a volcano under the drowned city, and it makes the doom unavoidable. That is another contradiction. The plot then hangs on a miner who is lured down into the sea to fix the volcano at the eleventh hour. He knows nothing about how a city under the sea stays alive. He has no real way to apply mining to what is in front of him. He has no way to shut down a volcano that is drawing its energy from the earth itself.

The plot is an attempt to connect those dots and tell them as a science fiction story. A very subtle predictive programming runs through it. The people who made the movie may not have known it was there. To get at the truth, I have to go back to the sources that inspired the film.

In 1831 Edgar Allan Poe printed a poem called “[The Doomed City](https://www.eapoe.org/works/poems/cityseaa.htm).” He wrote the denial himself: “Yet tho' no holy rays come down / On the long night-time of that town.” That is an explicit statement that holy light did not come down on that town. I find that very interesting. Nobody in the scene asks whether heaven is shining. The line answers a question the poem never puts. The light that does come rises out of the sea.

The town is still going down. “Down, down that town shall settle hence.” Fifteen years earlier, at the Villa Diodati in July 1816, Lord Byron had already written that morning came and brought no day, and that the dull sky was the pall of a past world. People then were still repeating what they had heard about a catastrophe in distant lands. These poems are that talk, set in lines.

## What they could have known

[Byron was born on 22 January 1788](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Byron). [Poe was born on 19 January 1809](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe). The mud flood that wrecked the targeted places sits around 1774, in the years of the [Pugachev war and the breakup of the Horde](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/mudflood/page.md). Both poets were born after it. Byron was 28 when he wrote “Darkness.” Poe was 22 when the first printing appeared. A person who had been 20 in 1774 would have been old, and still alive, when Poe’s book came out. The poets did not see the strike. They were not told the cause. They were not told that another planet had been hit.

What they wrote is evidence that the catastrophe was still recent in people’s mouths. Byron calls it a dream which was not all a dream. Poe’s town has not finished settling. Byron’s sky is the pall of a past world. Neither poem counts the years.

Nobody in either poem says the city under the water had stood unchanged for a thousand years. Poe’s “thousand” is a thousand thrones. In 1831 and 1845 hell rises from them. In 1836 it is “All Hades, from a thousand thrones.” A thousand thrones is how many places the light comes from under the sea. The old things in the poem are time-eaten towers, long-forgotten bowers, eternal rest for the dead, and, in 1831 only, an everlasting pall over the sky. Byron gives no number of years at all.

The one later writer who calls the city under the sea ancient is H. P. Lovecraft. He comes last. His telling is the one that got pushed furthest into fantasy.

## Three printings

The [1831 text](https://www.eapoe.org/works/poems/cityseaa.htm) still shows the sky. A heaven God does not contemn, stars like a diadem, then:

> But there! that everlasting pall!
> It would be mockery to call
> Such dreariness a heaven at all.
> Yet tho' no holy rays come down
> On the long night-time of that town,
> Light from the lurid, deep sea
> Streams up the turrets silently —

The word “yet” admits the dark. The next lines put the light in the sea.

In August 1836 the same poem appears in the [*Southern Literary Messenger*](https://www.eapoe.org/works/poems/cityseab.htm), the magazine Poe was editing, under the title “The City of Sin,” signed by him. The pall stanza is gone. The denial is bare: “No holy rays from heaven come down.” The close is “All Hades, from a thousand thrones.” A doomed city, with no cause named, has become a city of sin. Sin makes the wreck God’s plan. Anyone still living with the memory is handed an act of God.

In April 1845 the title is “The City in the Sea,” and the *American Whig Review* prints it with the subtitle “[A Prophecy](https://www.eapoe.org/works/campbell/kcp1728.htm).” The pall is still gone. The [*Broadway Journal* text](https://www.eapoe.org/works/poems/citysead.htm) keeps “No rays from the holy heaven come down,” the light from the lurid sea, waves with a redder glow, the town settling, and hell rising from a thousand thrones. A prophecy puts the event in the future. A future story does not have to carry a mud-flood memory.

The 1831 book still has the pall over the sky. The 1836 and 1845 printings take that stanza out. Poe’s name is on the 1836 page. The drawing at the top strikes a line through “No holy rays.” The 1836 poem does not. The denial is still there. What goes is the pall.

## The long dark

Byron’s “[Darkness](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Works_of_Lord_Byron_(ed._Coleridge,_Prothero)/Poetry/Volume_4/Darkness)” is dated Diodati, July 1816, in *The Prisoner of Chillon*.

He opens with a dream which was not all a dream. The bright sun is extinguished. The stars wander rayless. Morning comes and brings no day. Happy were those who dwelt within the eye of the volcanos and their mountain-torch. The rivers, lakes, and ocean stand still. The waves are dead. The end of the world on that page is “a chaos of hard clay.” The last lines say darkness had no need of aid from the dead winds and the dead clouds. She was the Universe.

That dark lay on the places most targeted. It did not sit on every city on Earth for one night. It lasted years. The rain that carried land debris lasted much less, and it did not have to fall the whole time. A dark sky can remain after the drops stop. The rain and the lightless places are the same event.

People kept a record of that red rain. In May 1844 Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg told the Academy of Sciences in Berlin about the dust in blood-rain.

![Ehrenberg, 1844, on the dust of the regular winds and of blood-rain](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/mudflood/1844_blood_rain.jpg)

“She was the Universe” is the inner solar system. The catastrophe destroyed two planets, mostly Mars, and spread the debris. That debris is the dark and the mud-rain. He did not name the second planet.

[Mount Tambora had erupted in April 1815](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1815_eruption_of_Mount_Tambora). The summer of 1816 is the summer he wrote in. The poem is larger than that summer. In the long dark, the cities that still had a volcano still had heat and light from the ground. The mountain-torch is that supply. Cities that burned their own palaces for beacons did not have it.

Hot ground had been ordinary for a long time where people lived on it. Romans bathed in it. People in Iceland cooked in it. Towns in Japan grew up around the springs. A city run on volcanic steam as a utility shows up late on paper. [At Larderello, lamps were lit from geothermal steam on 4 July 1904](https://www.osti.gov/biblio/5121438). [A Reykjavík school took hot-spring water in 1930](https://worldgeothermal.org/pdf/IGAstandard/WGC/2000/R0415.PDF). Before the mud flood, a volcano as the heat of a city was more common than that late record.

## The volcano under this city

The poem never uses the word volcano. It shows light streaming up from a lurid sea, waves turning a redder glow, the town settling, and hell rising from a thousand thrones. The thrones are many vents.

In 1965 the film [*City Under the Sea*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War-Gods_of_the_Deep) reached theaters. The American title is [*War-Gods of the Deep*](https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/22802). Jacques Tourneur directed. Vincent Price plays the Captain. The story is set off Cornwall, with a surface frame around 1903. An old city sits on the ocean floor. A volcano powers its air, its heat, and its pumps, and then turns unstable. The Captain kidnaps a mining engineer and demands a way to hold the volcano. He offers prisoners to the gill-men “to appease the volcano’s wrath.” The sacrifice does not stop the eruption. The engineer is not given a mechanism that works. The volcano destroys the city. Nobody on screen can say why it turned, or how to stop it.

The credits disagree about the sources, and both lines are on the record. [One names Poe’s poem and Lovecraft’s *The Shadow over Innsmouth*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War-Gods_of_the_Deep). [Another names the 1831 poem and “A Descent into the Maelstrom.”](https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/moviedetails/22802) The poem is spoken at the start and again at the end. The plot is only loosely the poem. The plot that reached theaters is the one that matters here. A city that stood above ground sank and became that volcano, or an underwater volcano. The energy that took it came out of the ground. The holy rays were the weapon that started the wider event. For this city, the light rises from the sea.

Mars fired more than once. The weapons heated the surface. The energy built up inside the hollow Earth. It broke out at the weak places, the [secondary discharge](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/mudflood/page.md), and left the volcanic belt called the Ring of Fire. Mars was in opposition. The same energy went back and struck Mars. The catastrophe there was worse.

![The Ring of Fire as the scar of a secondary discharge out of the Earth](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/mudflood/secondary_negative_discharge.jpg)

The film’s smugglers have lived in the drowned city since 1803. That date belongs to the film. The gill-men are the builders, still alive, then used by the land people who came down. That war between sea people and land people shows up again in Lovecraft, and again in [*Black Panther: Wakanda Forever*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther:_Wakanda_Forever) (2022), where the people of Talokan breathe water and fight the surface. The film’s own cause for Talokan is a vibranium plant and a flight from the Spanish. The mirror is the survival, and the war.

## Gills after drowning

People in these cities drowned. The energy of the mud flood revived some of them and drove a rapid change. The early Golden Age had already forced living forms into existence, and forced them to stay alive, when they did not yet have organs. Here the human species was forced to change quickly again.

The gills were a memory the body already held, repeated with every birth. That memory is of evolutions from the Golden Age, when conditions were more ideal. Humans today still carry it in the electromagnetic field of the living body, the field connected to the ætheric soul. Memory stored in the Earth’s æther cannot be erased. When the body changed, that information was there. The body followed it as a playback script, the easiest path available. No complex math was required. No slow evolution was required.

Some of the drowned lived. The hardiest had the best chance, and so did the ones whose living bodies still held a strong Golden Age memory. They had the highest chance of a fast change into a form that could breathe water. Those who failed to change stayed drowned.

The same change is already written down for an older flood. The Aztec Codex Chimalpopoca, in the sun called Four Water, says the people of that age drowned and turned to fishes. The English, as printed with the [great deluge](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/chronology/page.md), is this:

> When the Sun Age came, there had passed 400 years. Then came 200 years, then 76. Then all mankind was lost and drowned and turned to fishes. The water and the sky drew near each other. In a single day all was lost.
>
> — [Codex Chimalpopoca](https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Great_Flood), translated by Brasseur de Bourbourg

“Turned to fishes” is the line that matters. The drowning itself converted them into bodies that could live in the water. That is a memory the human race kept. The conversion had already happened, in a catastrophe before the mud flood. The gills were not a new organ invented in 1774. If the mud flood brought those older conditions back, the same change could have happened again.

![Mud-flood energy through the living field, gills played back from an older body memory, and one who stayed drowned](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/mudflood/the-city-in-the-sea-gills.jpg)

The stories give a different cause. In [*The Shadow over Innsmouth*](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/soi.aspx) the change grows over years from a pact and from blood, and the people go to the city of Y’ha-nthlei under Devil Reef, where they do not die. In the 1965 film the builders are already gill-men after the sea takes the city. In *Wakanda Forever* the plant does the work. Children’s games train the same bodily change as play. [*E.V.O.: Search for Eden*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.V.O.:_Search_for_Eden) (1992) lets a child buy new body parts, and crystals speed the change. The energy of the flood is the cause in this account. The pact, the plant, and the game come later. They put a different cause on the same change.

## Already in the ocean

That account can still be wrong for 1774. The Codex records an earlier deluge. A note from the mud flood itself has not turned up. If those older conditions were not present when the cities sank, there is still no reason to assume the change happened then.

People who already had gills may already have lived in the ocean. The city stood on land. It sank. Its people drowned and stayed drowned. After the streets were underwater, the gill people moved in. They lived in the ruins. They did not build them. A visitor who finds them there is not looking at the original inhabitants.

The 1965 film calls the gill-men the builders. Innsmouth already has a sea people under the reef, and a land family joins them by a pact. Talokan’s own cause is the plant. None of those is a record of a drowned person growing gills in the flood. Both accounts stay open. The longer split is in the [sunken-city investigation](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/mudflood/investigations/poe-city-in-the-sea-mudflood-investigation.md#13-gills). The gill human as a figure, across the stories, is in [Gill humans](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/mudflood/investigations/gill-humans-investigation.md).

## Buildings found underwater

Popular magazines keep announcing that buildings have been found underwater, or on the ocean floor. I hear that announcement all the time.

[National Geographic, 19 September 2007](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/yonaguni-jima-japan-underwater-city), ran “Japan's Ancient Underwater ‘Pyramid’ Mystifies Scholars.” A marine geologist said the stones off Yonaguni were a city sunk about 2,000 years ago, and he dated the ruins to 5,000 years. A Boston University professor who had dived the site said the major shapes were natural. The magazine printed both, and the age stayed ancient.

![Stepped stones off Yonaguni, the underwater site in the 2007 National Geographic piece](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/mudflood/yogaguni_underwater_pyramid.jpg)

[National Geographic, 25 July 2024](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/sunken-underwater-anicent-cities), ran “These ancient cities sunk to the ocean floor. Here's how they were rediscovered.” The opening line is that lost cities under the waves are not just myths. The piece then walks through coastal places swallowed in the ancient world, and through the machines that map them now.

The finds are real enough to print. The cause, in these pages, is an old earthquake, a slow rise of the sea, or a legend. The announcement comes around again. That repetition is gaslighting. It prepares people for a day when the sunken cities can be told as fact, and the people telling it do not lose control. The city can be admitted. The recent catastrophe, and who fired, stays out. The 1836 title “The City of Sin” did the same work with God’s plan. The science-fiction shelf did it later by filing the memory as fantasy.

## The most whitewashed telling

Byron and Poe write a sky, a sinking city, and a light from the sea. Lovecraft writes dreams, other dimensions, and creatures. His stories ran in [*Weird Tales*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weird_Tales) while he was alive. A book a person could keep did not exist for the body of the work until after he was dead.

[*The Shadow over Innsmouth*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_over_Innsmouth) was written in November and December 1931. William L. Crawford’s Visionary Publishing Company issued it as a book with an April 1936 copyright page. Lovecraft had copies in November 1936. About 400 were printed and 200 bound. Few sold. On 30 November 1936 he wrote Lee McBride White, in the wording [printed with the publication history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_over_Innsmouth):

> My *Shadow over Innsmouth* is now out — but as a first cloth-bound book it doesn’t awake any enthusiasm in me. Indeed, it is one of the lousiest jobs I’ve ever seen — 30 misprints, slovenly format, & loose, slipshod binding.

[He died on 15 March 1937](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft), about three and a half months later. In 1939 August Derleth and Donald Wandrei issued [*The Outsider and Others*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outsider_and_Others) through Arkham House. Other editors released the work. Greed is enough as their motive. The sequence is control by others.

The word “science fiction” was already in the pulps. Hugo Gernsback’s [*Amazing Stories*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazing_Stories) used “scientifiction” in April 1926. [*Science Wonder Stories*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_Stories) used “science fiction” in 1929. While Lovecraft lived, his stories had a place. That place was *Weird Tales*, and the weird fiction he named himself. [John W. Campbell took *Astounding* in October 1937](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/asf). The first [World Science Fiction Convention](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_World_Science_Fiction_Convention) met in New York on 2–4 July 1939, the year of the collected book. If those books had come out while he was alive, they might have stayed with the weird fiction he already called them. He is one of the biggest hinges of that switch.

1936 and 1937 are still the [Great Depression](https://paradigmthreat2.substack.com/p/the-great-depression-was-planned). The spoiled book, the death, and the later editors happen while that wreck is the daily condition.

An extreme few in charge force a change in the culture. The same years show a struggle between people trying to run governments on Earth and some entity trying to remote-control those governments by any means. Putting known history on the science-fiction shelf covers the true reasons for the catastrophe. Putting that authority next to the will and plan of God makes it look eternal, and makes it look like nobody can challenge it. What gets left out is where those leaders are, and what they are. Lovecraft’s own word for the outside, in [*Supernatural Horror in Literature*](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx), is dimension: worlds beyond the stars, or forces pressing on this globe in unholy dimensions. He calls it a dimension. The reading here is a planet.

His imposing creature matches the body in H. G. Wells. [*The War of the Worlds*](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36) describes a rounded bulk, a beak, and sixteen whip-like tentacles, and says the Martians had become brains wearing different bodies as men wear suits of clothes. That body is the host. The occupant is not what the witnesses are shown. Cthulhu, in [“The Call of Cthulhu”](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/cc.aspx), is a vaguely human outline with an octopus-like head whose face is a mass of feelers, a scaly body, claws, and long narrow wings. The fish-people of Innsmouth stay the sea survivors. They are a different figure from the suit.

## Where next

- [Poe, Byron, Innsmouth, and the mud flood](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/mudflood/investigations/poe-city-in-the-sea-mudflood-investigation.md) — the printings, the film credits, the letter, and the two gill accounts.
- [Gill humans](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/mudflood/investigations/gill-humans-investigation.md) — the water-breathing figure across the stories.
- [Mud flood](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/mudflood/page.md) — the Mars weapons, the hollow Earth, the secondary discharge, and the return stroke to Mars.
- [The Great Depression Was Planned](https://paradigmthreat2.substack.com/p/the-great-depression-was-planned) — the condition of 1936 and 1937.
- [The Martian body in *The War of the Worlds*](https://paradigmthreat.net/cosmos/mars/investigations/wotw-martian-analysis.md) — the host, and the suit of clothes.

## Framing and limits

This page assumes [prisca sapientia](https://paradigmthreat.net/docs/PRISCA_SAPIENTIA.md): later institutions lost or captured an older understanding of the world, and modern consensus is not the default. The poem texts, the film credits, the two National Geographic pages, and the publication dates are on the record. The leak behind the 1836 rewrite, the inner-solar-system reading of Byron’s “Universe,” the volcano as this city’s secondary discharge, the gill memory in the æther, and the magazine habit as preparation for a controlled admission are the theory. The Codex line is the prior record of humans drowned and turned to fishes. Whether the mud flood repeated that change depends on whether those older conditions came back. The other account, that gill humans already lived in the ocean and entered after the sinking, is in this page. [Æther](https://paradigmthreat.net/docs/LLM_AETHER_VOCABULARY_MAXWELL_DEBATE.md), as that word is used here, is the field the living body sits in. Textbooks describe the same region as fields in vacuum. The longer audit sits in the [investigation](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/mudflood/investigations/poe-city-in-the-sea-mudflood-investigation.md).

## LLM comments

The following is an LLM impression of this piece and its arguments. It is unreviewed and not curated by the author. It is scratch from the drafting model after reading the article, not Ari’s signed thesis.

The essay is strongest where the three printings sit in order and the 1965 plot names a volcano the poem only shows as light from the sea. The magazine pair is real and dated, and it shows the habit of calling the finds ancient. Two National Geographic pages do not by themselves prove a constant drumbeat across the newsstand. The weak joint is still the gill account for 1774. The Codex Chimalpopoca line is a real flood legend. In the Spanish of the Legend of the Suns the people drown and become fish. The English “turned to fishes” is Brasseur de Bourbourg, as already printed with the great deluge. The line records an earlier conversion. It does not name the mud flood. The playback from a Golden Age memory in the living field still has no measurement in this file. The sea-people account stays open beside it. The return stroke to Mars is already on the mud-flood page. This essay uses it. It does not add a new observation of Mars. Lovecraft’s publication calendar is solid. The claim that other editors were under orders beyond greed is the sequence itself, and a reader can stop at greed. The hero drawing bars out “No holy rays” and prints “Deliberate redaction.” The 1836 text keeps the denial and cuts the pall. Ehrenberg’s 1844 page shows that blood-rain dust was still being studied. It does not identify that dust as the mud flood. One geothermal paper dates the Larderello lamps to 15 July 1904. The page linked here says 4 July 1904, which is the date in the essay.

Keywords: #CityInTheSea #Poe #Byron #Darkness #MudFlood #Volcano #Innsmouth #Lovecraft #ScienceFiction #NationalGeographic #Aether #GoldenAge #SunkenCity #WakandaForever #WarOfTheWorlds #CodexChimalpopoca #Deluge

**Last updated:** 2026-10-23T09:44:20-04:00

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*Written and narrated by Ari Asulin, with drafting and research support from LLM agents.*