The Life & Times of Allison Jane

"Intervention, or 'Man, you've really let yourself go..."
All work done in Photoshop

About a year ago I had surgery to remove my right ovary and the 18.5 centimeter complex cystic structure that had grown from it. Nobody really knows how long it was growing in there, and I only discovered it when it grew big enough to cause pain and make me think I had appendicitis. I played around with the idea that before the surgical intervention my other organs held an intervention of there own for the problem ovary.

I'm really not as crazy as that description sounds.

Pencil sketch scanned right out of my sketchbook

Oh, where should I start in regard to Cyrus Teed? Cyrus was a bit of an oddball. After a bad electrical shock he changed his name to "Koresh" (the Hebrew word for Cyrus) and began to reject the idea that the Earth revolved around the sun. Instead, he began to promote his own special hollow earth theory called Cellular Cosmogony. He believed that humans lived on the inside of the earth, that centrifugal force held us down (not gravity), the sun was a giant invisible electromagnetic battery thing, and the stars and moon were simply refractions of the sun's light.

He called his ideas "Koreshanity" and actually gained quite a few followers (They should not be confused with David Koresh and the Branch Davidians. Teed and his Koreshans were pretty nutty, but not at all violent.) Teed took his peeps down to the small town of Estero, Florida to create his "New Jerusalem" in 1894. At its peak New Jerusalem had over 250 residents. Koresh died in 1908. Following his death, his followers propped him up in a bath tub instead of burying him, believing he would be resurrected. After a couple weeks, health officials stepped in and forced a burial.

Anyway, in reading about the Koreshans and their beliefs I read someone's theory that Teed's belief in an inner universe was really some weird Freudian manifestation of his desire to be safe, back in his mother's womb. I really don't know if their is anything to this idea (I just think he was nuts), but the image stuck in my head and I ended up sketching this. I plan on turning this into a painting sometime this fall.

( references and links )