Recently I spent some time watching the Star Trek "chain reaction" marathon on the SCIFI Channel. A rare treat was presented: the original, uncut pilot for the series, called "The Cage." Later this was broken into two parts and called "The Menagerie," but originally it stood alone. The original pilot contains much material that the later Menagerie version does not, and I was moved to make some observations which I've been thinking about for years, in regard to this original episode and the SCIFI source material upon which it is based.

Briefly put, the USS Enterprise, under the command of Capt. Christopher Pike, answers a distress call which emanates from the remote planet of Talos IV. As a result of investigating this supposed "crash site" and survivors, Capt. Pike is taken prisoner by a group of super-advanced subterranean humanoids, called "Talosians." The Talosians, due to their physical frailty, can no longer exist on the surface of their hostile planet, which was ravaged by war in the distant past. They exist in a world of illusion, augmented and initialized by the power of their own huge brains, and apparently enabled by unseen ancient machinery which magnifies the power and seeming reality of the illusion. This latter point is made clear by "Vina," the captive, shipwrecked human woman whom the Talosians have as captive, and whom they wish to "breed" with Capt. Pike. Vina makes the statement that the "Talosians" are too physically frail to survive on the surface, and exist by means of machinery which they themselves cannot understand or create, but which perpetuates them.

Of course this is all familiar, and greatly predates the Star Trek pilot "The Cage." Richard Shaver postulated an identical scenario, with his "dero," "tero," and their subterranean existence. The dero and tero have their "mech," one type of which is used to generate physically-real, solid, 3D holograms or illusions. The "Talosians" seem to be a mixture of the dero (occasional torturers and sexual fantasy voyeurs) and tero (Terosians? Not a far leap), being more like the tero in the end, with an interest in "helping" humanity whether we like it or not, through the breeding of a human race to repopulate their own ravaged world.

This concept is also echoed in some of Shaver's fiction concerning the Atlans and Titans. "The Cage" also mirrors other subterranean lore, stretching back for centuries, with the interest in human reproduction, sexual fantasies, manipulation, and so on. Also predating the first Star Trek pilot is the esoteric belief that a subterranean city of hidden "Lemurians" exists beneath Mt. Shasta in Northern California, in a city called "Telos." These Lemurian descendants are called, of course, "Telosians." This "Telos" of Mt. Shasta, probably a fictional creation of "Doreal," is more or less based on both the Shaver Mystery material and on the writings of James Churchward and Helena Blavatsky. This myth was later propagated as truth by the publishing arm of the Rosicrucians, through a variety of volumes and authors.

Although it would in all likelihood be denied, it is evident that Gene Roddenberry based the material for his first Star Trek venture on the pulp and folk elements of the Shaver Mystery and the Telosian-Shasta mythology of Doreal and others. It would appear that one of the greatest science-fiction forces of the twentieth century and one of the most powerful scifi popular culture icons of our time, the Star Trek phenomenon, owes its genesis and existence to the pulp-fiction and pseudo-mystical "truth" writers of earlier years, particularly to the most reviled and ridiculed of them all, Richard S. Shaver.

As Spock might say, "Interesting...."