# 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 out the cause of the sunken city. The movie puts a volcano under the drowned city and makes the ending unavoidable. A miner is lured down to fix the volcano. He cannot shut down a volcano that draws its energy from the earth. A very subtle predictive programming runs through it. The people who made the movie probably believed the story was pure fiction. The sources are the poems.

## 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). I place the mud flood in 1774–5. That date is my hypothesis. I have never heard anyone else give it. Everything lines up with those two years, and with no other date. Those years are 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 or 1775 would have been old, and still alive, when Poe’s book came out. The poems leave out what some of those people could still have remembered from their own lives. Those readers accept the story as real. The next generation takes it for science fiction or fantasy.

The catastrophe was recent. Byron wrote in 1816, about forty years after 1774–5, and Poe printed the poem in 1831, about fifty-seven years after. In that poem the town has not finished sinking: “Down, down that town shall settle hence.” Byron says the dream was not all a dream. Neither poem puts the catastrophe in a distant past.

When Poe writes “a thousand,” he is not counting years. He is counting thrones, and those thrones are volcanoes. The one later writer who calls the underwater city ancient is H. P. Lovecraft.

## Three printings

The [1831 text](https://www.eapoe.org/works/poems/cityseaa.htm) still describes the sky. It names a heaven God does not reject, and stars set like a crown, and 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 lines after the pall put the light in the sea, not in the sky.

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 sentence that remains is “No holy rays from heaven come down.” The close is still “All Hades, from a thousand thrones.” The new title makes that volcanic hell God’s plan. A person who still remembered the event is told the sinking was an act of God. The drawing at the top strikes a line through “No holy rays.” The 1836 poem does not.

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 [*Broadway Journal* text](https://www.eapoe.org/works/poems/citysead.htm) is that printing. Calling it a prophecy puts the event in the future, so the printing does not have to carry a mud-flood memory.

## 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*.

The find is in that poem. Byron does not say mud flood, and these poems do not either. He ends the world as “a chaos of hard clay,” which is the mud flood, the ground after the mud dried. In the same poem the only people who still have light are living in the eye of the volcanoes, at their mountain-torch, so the dried mud and that volcanic light are the same event, with the volcanoes letting the energy out.

The sun has gone out, the stars give no light, and morning comes without bringing day. He calls the dull sky the pall of a past world. The rivers, lakes, and ocean stand still, and he calls the waves dead. The last lines say the darkness did not need the dead winds or the dead clouds, because “She was the Universe.”

That dark was on the places most targeted, and it lasted for years. It was not on every city on Earth for one night. The rain that carried land debris lasted much less, and it did not have to fall the whole time.

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)

When he writes “She was the Universe,” he is talking about the inner solar system. The catastrophe destroyed two planets, mostly Mars, and spread the debris, which 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 describes more than that summer. During the long dark, a city 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

Poe never uses the word volcano. The thousand thrones are as close as he comes, and the film is the version that says the word.

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. A volcano powers the city’s air, its heat, and its pumps, and then turns unstable. The film cannot explain the gill-men. At the start a gill-man captures one of the protagonists, and the picture never says what that capture is given in exchange for. The only trade it later names is drowned men, handed to the gill-men. The Captain calls those bodies a way “to appease the volcano’s wrath.” A drowned man does not hold a volcano, and the sacrifice does not stop the eruption.

The credits disagree about the sources. [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. On screen, a city that stood above ground sank and became that volcano. The holy rays were the weapon that started the wider event. The energy that took this city came out of the ground.

Mars fired more than once. The weapons heated the surface, and the energy built up inside the hollow Earth. Inside the continents that heat converted into volcanic energy and broke out there. All of the mud-flood energy had to be released, and volcanoes were the natural pressure valve. That release is the [secondary discharge](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/mudflood/page.md), and it left the volcanic belt called the Ring of Fire. Mars was in opposition, so the same energy went back and struck Mars, and 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 called the builders. Lovecraft and [*Black Panther: Wakanda Forever*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther:_Wakanda_Forever) (2022) use a war between sea people and land people. A gill-man is also a commonly known science-fiction stand-in, which is why [*Zombies Ate My Neighbors*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombies_Ate_My_Neighbors) (LucasArts, 1993) includes one among its monsters. The survey is in [Gill humans](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/mudflood/investigations/gill-humans-investigation.md).

## Gills after drowning

People in these cities drowned. The energy of the mud flood revived some of them. The gills were a body memory from the Golden Age, when conditions were more ideal, carried in the electromagnetic field of the living body and in the Earth’s æther, the field connected to the ætheric soul. The body followed that memory. The hardiest, and those who still held a strong memory, had the best chance of a form that could breathe water. Those who failed 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” means the drowning converted them into bodies that could live in the water. That conversion is recorded for a catastrophe before the mud flood. 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. In *Wakanda Forever* a vibranium plant does the work, and the people of Talokan are fleeing the Spanish. [*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. The energy of the flood is the cause in this account, and those later stories are not.

## Already in the ocean

That account can still be wrong for 1774–5. The Codex records an earlier deluge. What is under study is the pattern, and the way the poems, the film, and the later stories handle it. A memorandum from the mud flood that named the gills is not part of that study. A paper of that kind, for an operation on this scale, is destroyed or stays classified. If those older conditions were not present when the cities sank, people who already had gills may have lived in the ocean and moved into the ruins afterward. They would not be the original inhabitants. The city’s own people stayed drowned. 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.

Those two pages are not the count. The same announcement is a regular news item. [BBC Two aired *Pavlopetri: The City Beneath the Waves* on 9 October 2011](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b015yh6f). [Smithsonian mapped Dunwich, called Britain’s Atlantis, on 13 May 2013](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-map-britains-most-famous-underwater-city-59705371/). [BBC Travel ran “China’s Atlantis of the East” on 11 July 2014](https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20140711-chinas-atlantis-of-the-east) and [“Japan’s mysterious underwater ‘city’” on 11 March 2021](https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210311-japans-mysterious-underwater-city). [CNN carried Reuters on Thonis-Heracleion on 20 July 2021](https://edition.cnn.com/travel/amp/thonis-heracleion-sunken-city-greece-egypt/index.html). [CBS showed artifacts pulled from a sunken city off Egypt on 22 August 2025](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/photos-egypt-artifacts-sunken-city-mediterranean-sea/). [Live Science ran a drowned Silk Road city in Lake Issyk-Kul on 18 November 2025](https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/sunken-city-discovered-in-kyrgyzstan-lake-was-a-medieval-hotspot-on-the-silk-road-until-an-earthquake-wiped-it-out). In 2021 the BBC and CNN each had one. In 2025 CBS and Live Science each had one. This is what a search returned. It is not every story a person hears in a year.

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 same announcement comes around again. That repetition is gaslighting. It prepares people to hear the sunken cities stated as fact later, while the recent catastrophe, and who fired, stays out of the piece. Again, the next generation has no reason to think these stories are fiction. A time may come when they are accepted as fact - severing the older generations who were desperately trying to sort truth from fiction, trusting the libraries - reading everything they can about everything, and being spectacularly wrong in the end - about everything.

## The pulps printed Lovecraft’s ‘weird’ stories

Of Byron, Poe, and Lovecraft, Lovecraft was the most redacted and the most contained. His stories could run in [*Weird Tales*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weird_Tales) while he was alive, and he still could not publish them as books.

[*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.

The letter names the misprints and the binding. The lack of enthusiasm is the story as well. It never says why the city is underwater, or why the fish-men exist, so there was nothing further for him to write.

[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 a sufficient motive, and the sequence is still control by other people.

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. [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. Treating that authority as the will and plan of God makes it look permanent, and makes it look as if 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 also files the same material as dream. The reading here does not follow either word.

[*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 reader is not shown who is inside it. 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. Edward Guimont argued that Wells’s novel influenced that story. The [Wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Call_of_Cthulhu) reports his case as physical similarities between Cthulhu and the Martians, and a ship that rams the creature and does not finish it. The paper is “At the Mountains of Mars,” in *Lovecraftian Proceedings* No. 3 (Hippocampus Press, 2019), pages 61–63, as cited on the [Martian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_(The_War_of_the_Worlds)) page. A [2019 Oxford note](https://diseasesofmodernlife.web.ox.ac.uk/article/requiem-for-a-cliche) puts Wells’s Martians, a brain with tentacles that a witness compares to an octopus, in the same line of bodies as Lovecraft’s cephalopod monsters. The fish-people of Innsmouth stay the sea survivors. They are not the host.

The comparison puts an occupant in that host whom the stories never show. That occupant is the one trying to assault and control the Earth by any means. Byron, Poe, the 1965 film, and Lovecraft trace back to Mars, and only to Mars. The longer account of the suit is in the [Martian analysis](https://paradigmthreat.net/cosmos/mars/investigations/wotw-martian-analysis.md).

A poem can also be the only public copy. On 24 October 2026 the family-name reading put poet on that job. The word is the office of a house that held a large influence over what people were allowed to know. The instrument did not have to be verse. Edgar Allan Poe still used a poem. He had the sinking city and the dark sky, and the short text is still the first form many readers meet. The name, the pride, and the handbook line that poet is a Greek word for maker are in the [eponym file](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/chronology/investigations/eponym-words-forgotten-people-investigation.md).

## Where next

- [Family names and the word poet](https://paradigmthreat.net/history/chronology/investigations/eponym-words-forgotten-people-investigation.md) — the surname, the office of influence, and the list of names that became words.
- [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 dated underwater-city headlines, and the publication dates are on the record. The find is Byron’s “a chaos of hard clay,” in the same poem as the volcanic light. That phrase is the mud flood, the ground after the mud dried, and no one in the poems uses the later name. The date 1774–5 is my hypothesis, stated above. It is not a date 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 underwater-city headlines in the essay are a sample from 2007 through 2025, across National Geographic, the BBC, Smithsonian, CNN, CBS, and Live Science. They show the habit of calling the finds ancient. They are not a count of every story on the newsstand. The weak joint is still the gill account for 1774–5. The year is the author’s hypothesis, not a date taken from another writer. 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 sentence that no holy rays come down, and it cuts the pall. The cause of the sinking is still left out. 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

**Substack:** [The city in the sea](https://paradigmthreat2.substack.com/p/the-city-in-the-sea)

**Last updated:** 2026-10-26

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