Underground Worlds: Myth, Science, and Stories

Soil is strange. We use it to bury our dead, then we use it to grow our crops. Thanks to gravity, we’re always connected to it—though we try to rid ourselves of it by washing it off our hands, our clothes, and other unwanted places. We walk upon the ground, becoming familiar with the surface. But what about what lies underneath it all?

If you’ve ever wondered about what goes on beneath our feet, you’re far from the first person to do so. In fact, history tells us that humans have been thinking about the underground for thousands of years—and that shouldn’t really come as a surprise. Like I said, soil is strange. Even today, with all our technology and understanding of science, there’s something mystifying about the shrouded underground.

As a writer, I love exploring these ideas. The myths, the science, and the countless ideas of contemporary authors all provide a deep well of creative inspiration to draw from. Subterranean worlds are the perfect breeding ground for raw mystery. No light means no knowledge of what lies ahead.

The Mythic Underworld

With so much mystery surrounding the underground comes a wide variety of myths and legends around the globe. Many stories, like in Greek mythology, paint the underground as a dark place where souls go to reside after death. Others tell of it as a place full of ancient and past civilizations.

Underground Worlds of Death

• Greek—Hades: Though not always the case, many stories of Greek mythology point to the realm of Hades as being a dark place deep beneath the earth. According to Hesiod, it’s even so deep that if you dropped an anvil from Olympus, the realm of the Gods, it would take ten days to reach the earth and another nine to fall into the underworld.
  
  Sources that shed light on the Greek underworld differ greatly. Some get specific by naming areas, activities, and geography. Others are more strictly uniform and plain. Most, however, depict it as a place where the souls of the dead continue to exist after their mortal lives.
• Egyptian—Duat: In ancient Egyptian mythology, people believed that the dead would travel through a dangerous underground landscape known as the Duat. Instead of a simple ending point for the soul, death marked the beginning of a difficult journey. Only those who could pass each test of the soul could make it to a favorable destination. 
• Norse—Helheim: Hel, also sometimes called Helheim, was another world beneath the ground where souls went to continue their existence after death. Like many versions of the realm of Hades, Hel wasn’t a place of punishment, so much as a resting place for the majority of the deceased. 
  
  While some sources say that it’s the place for those who don’t die in battle glory, deeper research reveals that we don’t actually have that much detail about what Norse mythology said about the afterlife—only adding more mystique to their version of the underworld. 

Underground Civilizations and Other Worlds

• Celtic—The Otherworlds: My personal favorite version of underground myths comes from ancient Ireland and the Celts. (I like it so much, it inspired my Echo Island series.) Strictly speaking, not all the otherworlds were found below the ground. Some were found beneath the ocean waves, and others were islands, and many surrounded ancient burial mounds and caves. Instead of being a place for the dead, the otherworlds were places where the Sidhe resided—ancient immortal spirit people.
• Mayan (mesoamerican)—Xibalba: Also called “the place of fear,” Xibalba is a fascinating realm of darkness, trials, and danger. Ruled by various gods, it’s depicted as a place that few escape from. Like many ancient mesoamerican pyramids, Xibalba has nine distinct levels, each with its own monsters, gods, and hazards.

Myths like these are hardly rare. I’ve touched on a few here, but even those barely begin to scratch the surface. Regardless, it’s clear that there’s something about the underground that people find innately fascinating. For thousands of years, it’s been a source of inspiration for long-persisting stories.

The Scientific Underground

Myths are fascinating, but they’re also fictional, or at least not backed up by evidence. Fortunately, we live in a high-tech world where we no longer have to wonder what goes on under the ground. The cool part is that it hasn’t gotten any less interesting. Modern geology has allowed us to make educated guesses about the Earth’s makeup. Robots and complex equipment have allowed us to explore deeper than ever before, and archeology has revealed some staggering historical finds.

The Geological Underground

When I was at university, I needed a science credit and ended up enrolling in  a geology class. I’d learned the basics in high school, but my introductory college course still blew my mind. Using large amounts of data, geologists are able to make educated guesses about even the most unreachable places. For instance, we’ve never been to the Earth’s core, but we can form some good theories about it by analyzing data collected from seismic waves (earthquakes)—and in case you were wondering, the Earth’s core is made of iron and nickel.

Exploring the Depths

Near Carletonville, South Africa, there’s a gold mine that reaches nearly 2.5 miles into the ground—the deepest a human being has ever gone underground. In Russia, there’s a borehole that reaches 7.6 miles deep—the deepest point humans have ever touched indirectly. In other words, we’ve come a long way from the days of ancient mythology. We don’t have to spend time guessing what secrets lie beneath us, because we can now discover them for ourselves.

Real Underground Cities

• Modern: Today, most cities couldn’t function without some amount of subterranean construction. Sewers, tunnels, basements—they’re all around us. But some cities have taken it a step further. Take Montreal, Canada, for example. It has a network of tunnels that connects over 40 city blocks.
  
  And Montreal isn’t alone.
  
  Subterranean cities exist all over the world. China, Germany, Italy, and Mexico boast some of the most famous, but look close enough in nearly every big city and you’ll find some form of underground element.
• Ancient: Interestingly, the idea of underground cities isn’t something new. We may have them in larger scales than ever before, but in Turkey, there’s a complex network of carved-out tunnels called Derinkuyu that could house up to 20,000 people.

Just because it’s real doesn’t mean it can’t be as captivating as a work of fiction. Ancient underground cities, modern tunnels, and deep mines are full of their own unique sort of fantasy. Each one generates questions that lead to greater explorations—pieces of the ever deepening mysteries that remind us of human ingenuity.

The Subterranean in Storytelling

Now that you have all the background, we can finally get to the meat of it all—how it plays into writing. If it isn’t abundantly clear by now, I’ll just go ahead and say it outright: the underground world is an incredible source of inspiration for writers. After all, if an idea is spread the world over, and it continues for thousands of years, there must be something to it—something worth studying and exploring.

Fortunately, many modern authors have done just that:

Journey to the Center of the Earth: Jules Verne’s novel blends science with fiction as it follows a professor as he attempts to find an entrance into the Earth’s core. Since the book was written in the 1800’s, Verne didn’t have the understanding of the planet’s core that we do today. Still, he created a hidden underground world that has captivated minds for hundreds of years.

The City of Ember: Jeanne DuPrau published her underground story in 2003. It tells the story of what life might look like if people tried to use modern technology to move underground. When resources start to dwindle, challenges arise, and readers get hooked.

Subterrania: In my own Subterrania series, the underground is a well-established civilization that’s been thriving for over 700 years after a surface cataclysm. The story follows Quin, a 16-year-old girl, who learns of a terrible threat to the underground world. Step by step, she uncovers mysteries that shape her world and future.

Tolkien’s Dwarven Realms: You can’t talk about fictional underground realms without bringing up Tolkien and his cavern-dwelling dwarves. First introducing them in “The Hobbit,” he drew inspiration from fairy tales and mythology to create an entire civilization of people with unique systems, language, bodies, and everything else you could think of.

Why We Keep Going Down

So, why are we continually drawn to the underground—whether in myth, science, or fiction? Part of it is simple curiosity. Humans have always wondered what lies beneath the surface, what secrets the soil hides, and how that world might look if we could descend into it.

But there’s more to it than curiosity. The underground challenges us. It tests our ingenuity, courage, and resourcefulness. Myth gives us moral and spiritual trials. Science gives us technical challenges to overcome. Fiction gives us psychological and emotional exploration. In every case, traveling below the ground becomes a way of confronting the unknown.

That raw, unfiltered mystery of the underground has always held a particular fascination for me personally. It’s a place where you can encounter history, danger, and wonder all at once. And maybe that’s why stories of subterranean worlds continue to captivate us—they let us live out that journey safely, through imagination.

Conclusion

We began with soil—something as ordinary as the ground beneath our feet. And yet, beneath that surface lies an amazing world: mythology, science, and stories of the underground that ignite our imagination.

The underground reminds us that there is always more to discover, if we’re willing to look deeper. Whether you explore it through reading myths, venturing into real caves, studying geology, or losing yourself in fictional subterranean worlds, there’s a richness beneath the surface that is waiting to be uncovered.

If that idea excites you like it does me, consider using the form below to sign up for weekly updates. I post blogs like this one every Wednesday, and I’m always happy to welcome more intrepid explorers along for the journey.