MOST ANTHROPOLOGISTS share with orthodox Christians the belief that the races of mankind originally came from a single parent stock. If this is true, the question of where this stock flourished becomes an intriguing one, and a volume could be written about the off-trail answers of pseudo-anthropologists and religious cranks. Russian ethnologists recently announced that the human race made its first appearance in Russia. A number of Oriental anthropologists, however, have long favored the Orient. Scarcely a spot on the globe has escaped being defended by at least one writer as the cradle of the human species.
The more unlikely the region, the more attractive it is to a certain type of thinker. It would be hard to imagine an area less likely than the North Pole, yet William F. Warren, a Methodist minister who was president of Boston University for thirty years, was firmly convinced that the Pole was the site of ancient Eden. His book Paradise Found, 1885, is a scholarly work running to more than 500 pages. In it, Warren draws on the sciences of geology, climatology, botany, zoology, anthropology, and mythology to prove that the climate at the North Pole was once exceedingly warm and pleasant. Here Adam and Eve were created. Later, the Deluge of Noah submerged the land on which Eden was situated, and changed the climate to its present frigidity.
A much more ingenious theory, however, had been published in America three years before Warren’s book. It was written by Ignatius Donnelly, the Minnesota reformer whom we encountered in Chapter Three as a predecessor of Velikovsky. His book, Atlantis, had an enormous vogue when it was published by Harper & Brothers in 1882. Subsequently it was translated into all major languages, and only a few years ago, issued in newly-annotated American and British editions. No book on the topic has surpassed it in popularity and influence.
Donnelly’s thesis, in essence, is that the Biblical Paradise was on a vast continent which at one time existed in the Atlantic Ocean. It was there mankind arose from barbarism, after the Glacial Epoch, and developed the world’s first civilization. The culture was a superior one, with a religion of sun worship, and advanced scientific knowledge. Colonizers from Atlantis spread in all directions. They were the first to populate the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Kings and queens and heroes of Atlantis became the gods and goddesses of the ancient religions. About 13,000 years ago a volcanic cataclysm shook the earth and the entire continent of Atlantis was submerged. Flood legends, like the story of Noah, are memories of this great catastrophe.
To support these contentions, Donnelly marshals a great mass of questionable geological, archeological, and legendary material—chiefly evidence of similarities between ancient Egypt and the Mexican-Indian cultures of early South America. In both regions, for example, one finds a knowledge of embalming, use of a 365-day calendar, the building of pyramids, myths of a flood, and so on. To provide a connecting bridge between the Mediterranean world and South America, Donnelly argues, one must assume the existence of an earlier culture on a continent situated between the two areas. Few writers on the subject have excelled Donnelly in reasoning, as one critic has put it, “from a molehill of fact to a mountain of surmise.”
Actually, Donnelly’s book is no more than an elaborate modern defense of the ancient Greek myth of Atlantis, first recorded by Plato. Plato described Atlantis as a barbarian culture, full of pomp and luxury, which at one time existed near the mouth of the Mediterranean. The gods became displeased with the island’s decadence. As punishment they sent a great earthquake which caused Atlantis to sink in a single day and night. Perhaps it was a half-submerged Atlantean city that Poe described in his City in the Sea.
No rays from the Holy Heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrents silently—
Up domes—up spires—up kingly halls—
Up fanes—up Babylon-like walls—
The existence of Atlantis was widely accepted by the scholars of the Middle Ages. There are many references to it in medieval writings, but nothing of importance was added to Plato’s story. Throughout the Renaissance there was much speculation about the myth, and in the nineteenth century a few individual works were devoted exclusively to it. However, it was not until Donnelly wrote his book that anyone succeeded in giving the Platonic legend a coherent, scholarly, and seemingly scientific defense. A no less eminent person than William Gladstone, Prime Minister of England, was so impressed by Donnelly’s book that he asked the Cabinet to approve funds for sending a ship into the Atlantic to trace the outlines of the sunken continent. (Gladstone was something of a pseudo-scientist in his own right, having written a book about Homer in which he argued that the ancient Greeks were color-blind because of the paucity of color-words in the Iliad and Odyssey.)
Since Donnelly’s book, an unbelievable number of similar works have appeared, though none has yet surpassed Donnelly’s in ingenuity and eloquence. It would be a conservative guess that a list of all the titles on Atlantis, in all languages, which have been published in the present century would run to several thousand.1 Most of them, of course, are the disordered products of eccentrics, without even literary merit to recommend them. The more colorful ones are the works of occultists, of one variety or another, who have access to secret sources of information not available to materialists. In the theosophical, Rosicrucian, and anthroposophical cults, the writers on Atlantis draw on knowledge possessed by initiates to whom it has been handed down through the ages from former initiates. In many cases, the authors have direct clairvoyant insight into matters Atlantean. A few books—such as Joseph B. Leslie’s 807-page Submerged Atlantis Restored, published in Rochester, New York, 1911—were obtained entirely from departed Atlantean souls through the agencies of spirit mediums. Such writers are naturally in position to obtain a vast, intimate knowledge of all the details of life in ancient Atlantis, and although their books are somewhat afield from what might be called pseudo-science, nevertheless many of them are amusing enough to deserve mention.
The sanest of the occult Atlantis scholars is a Scottish Presbyterian named Lewis Spence.2 He is the author of forty learned books on folklore, more than half a dozen of which deal with Atlantis. Unlike other occultists, Spence relies almost entirely on geology, biology, mythology, and archeology for his views, though heavily salted of course with his imagination. He accepts Plato’s story as substantially true. He thinks the Atlanteans were a composite race, with large brains, and that their first emigrants into Europe were of the race anthropologists call Cro-Magnon. “If a patriotic Scotsman may be pardoned the boast,” he writes in The Problem of Atlantis, 1924, “I may say that I devoutly believe that Scotland’s admitted superiority in the mental and spiritual spheres springs almost entirely from the preponderant degree of Cro-Magnon blood which certainly runs in the veins of her people. . . .”
Ten years ago, when World War II was beginning, Spence became obsessed with what he thought was a parallel between the decadence of ancient Atlantis and the decadence of modern Europe. In a book called Will Europe Follow Atlantis?, 1942, he argues that all of Europe, Germany in particular, is suffering from great moral decay. Just as occult arts, such as astrology (in which Spence is a firm believer), were corrupted by the ancient Atlanteans, so the Nazis have transformed the occult arts into a Satanic form of “black magic.” Spence is specially irritated by the view of Rosenberg and other German writers that the Nordic race had its origin in Atlantis, since the evidence clearly shows the Anglo-Saxons to be the true descendants. Just as surely as Atlantis met with divine wrath, so will Germany suffer a great cataclysm—and all Europe likewise—unless she repents and returns to true Christianity. “Will that punishment take the selfsame form as the awful doom meted out to the people of Atlantis?” he asks. “That is not for man born of woman to say.” Spence’s earlier books on Atlantis had a great influence on German Atlantean speculations, but there is no evidence that the Nazis were impressed by this suggestion that Germany might lose the war by being suddenly submerged. In 1944, Spence’s The Occult Causes of the Present War went into even greater details about the Satanic origin of German occultism and the impending German doom.
Theosophists have always taken Atlantis for granted, and to the myth have added a second one—the myth of Lemuria. This name was originally proposed by a nineteenth-century zoologist for a land mass he thought must have existed in the Indian Ocean, and which would account for the geographical distribution of the lemur. Madame Blavatsky, the high priestess of theosophy, adopted the name and wrote in some detail about the “Third Root Race” that she believed flourished on the island.
According to Blavatsky, five root races have so far appeared on the planet, with two more yet to come. Each root race has seven “sub-races,” and each sub-race has seven “branch races.” (Seven is a mystic number for theosophists.) The first root race, which lived somewhere around the North Pole, was a race of “fire mist” people—ethereal and invisible. The Second Root Race inhabited northern Asia. They had astral bodies on the borderline of visibility. At first, they propagated by a kind of fission, but eventually this evolved into sexual reproduction after passing through a stage in which both sexes were united in each individual. The Third Root Race lived on Lemuria. They were ape-like giants with corporeal bodies that slowly developed into forms much like modern man. Lemuria was submerged in a great convulsion, but not before a sub-race had migrated to Atlantis to begin the Fourth Root Race.
The Fifth Root Race, the Aryan, sprang from the fifth sub-race of the Atlanteans. At the present time, according to theosophists, the Sixth Root Race is slowly emerging from the sixth sub-race of Aryans. This is happening in Southern California where, in Annie Besant’s words, the “climate approaches most nearly to our ideal of Paradise.” Eventually, the American Continent will sink, and Lemuria will rise from the Pacific to be the home of the Sixth Root Race. After the Seventh Root Race (which will develop from the seventh sub-race of the sixth root race) has risen and fallen, the earth cycle will have ended and a new one will start on the planet Mercury.
Later occultists have accepted the leads of Blavatsky, Besant, and other early theosophical leaders and expanded them in fascinating detail. A theosophical work by W. Scott-Elliott, The Story of Atlantis, 1914, is the richest source of information about the seven sub-races which succeeded each other on the Atlantean isle. The first sub-race, coming originally from Lemuria, was the Rmoahal. Members were ten to twelve feet high with mahogany black skin. The second sub-race, the Tlavatli, were copper-colored and worshipped their ancestors. Then came the Toltec, the highest culture of Atlantis, which lasted some 10,000 years. They were even more copper-colored, tall, and with Grecian features. Their science was very advanced. There were Toltec airships which operated by a cosmic force unknown today. Sometimes the Toltecs drank the hot blood of animals. (Annie Besant had written earlier that the Toltecs were twenty-seven feet high, with bodies so hard that “one of our knives would not cut their flesh, any more than it would cut a piece of present-day rock.”)
After the Toltecs came the Turanians—irresponsible individualists but great colonizers. Then the Semites appeared, with a highly developed ability to reason and an inner conscience. They were a turbulent, discontented race, always warring with their neighbors. The sixth sub-race, the Akkadian, were the first legislators. Finally, the Mongolians. They immigrated to Asia and were the first Atlanteans to develop their culture off the island.
The late Rudolf Steiner, founder of the Anthroposophical Society, the fastest growing cult in post-war Germany, accepted all of Scott-Elliott, then added new details of his own from a source he said he was not permitted to place on record. In his Atlantis and Lemuria, 1913, he reveals that the Lemurians were unable to reason or calculate, living chiefly by instinct. They had no speech, but communicated with each other by telepathy. They lived in caves, and possessed a highly developed will power which enabled them to lift enormous weights. The atmosphere was denser then than it is now, the water was more fluid, and the earth was in a plastic, unconsolidated state.
The most indefatigable publicist for Lemuria, or “Mu” as he called it, was Colonel James Churchward, a Britisher who served in India with the Bengal Lancers. As a young officer assigned to famine relief, he formed a close friendship with the high priest of a temple-school monastery in India. According to the Colonel, the priest permitted him to see a collection of tablets written in ancient Mu script, and with the priest’s aid, the tablets were finally deciphered. At the age of seventy, living as a retired officer in Mount Vernon, N.Y., Churchward began his series of Mu books, based on the monastery’s tablets. The Lost Continent of Mu, 1926, was followed by The Children of Mu, 1931; The Sacred Symbols of Mu, 1933; and Cosmic Forces as They Were Taught in Mu, 1934. The Colonel died in 1936, at the age of 86.
Mu (pronounced “moo”) was, according to Churchward, the original Eden where man was created 200 million years ago. It was a special creation, not the product of evolution. The Lemurians reached an advanced civilized state with a science far surpassing ours. Among other things, they had mastered “cosmic force” which enabled them to nullify gravity, a fact which should interest the Babson Gravity Research Foundation. It was the same force Jesus used when He walked on the water. In fact, Jesus studied the sacred religion of Mu from sages in India and Tibet, so his teachings are all Mu-derived. About 12,000 years ago a subterranean gas belt near the equator exploded. In the convulsion which followed, the entire continent of Mu sank beneath the sea and its 64 million inhabitants perished. The Pacific islands are the remaining “pathetic fingers of that great land.” It was the same watery fate which later engulfed the continent of Atlantis.
The Colonel accepts all the apparatus of occultism—reincarnation, telepathy, spirit photography, astral bodies, and so on. One of his Mu books closes with the story of how a Rishi—the same high priest in India who showed him the Mu tablets—put him into a trance and the two of them visited the scene of their previous incarnations. The Rishi had continually called Churchward “my son.” In this visit to the past, the author sees himself as a dead soldier, and beside him the weeping Rishi crying, “My only son and fallen in battle!”
The Mu books are uniformly crude in writing, and such a mish-mash of geological and archeological errors that they are widely regarded, even by other Atlantean and Mu scholars, as a deliberate hoax. It is significant that no one ever saw the tablets which were the chief source of the Colonel’s knowledge, nor did he anywhere identify the monastery where he found them.
A refreshingly new angle on the sinking of Atlantis has been provided by Hans S. Bellamy, whom we discussed in an early chapter as England’s chief publicist for the Hörbiger cosmic-ice theory. In his book, The Atlantis Myth, 1948, Bellamy argues that the sinking of Atlantis was caused by the quakes which attended the earth’s capture of its present moon. Bellamy’s American competitor, Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky, disagrees. In Worlds in Collision the doctor informs us that Plato made a slight error when he set the date for the island’s submergence as 9,000 years before the time of Solon. “There is one zero too many here,” Velikovsky writes, and blandly adds, “The most probable date of the sinking of Atlantis would be . . . 900 years before Solon.” This coincides, of course, with the convulsions produced by the first visit of Velikovsky’s erratic comet.
How is one to explain the fascination which the myths of sunken continents have exercised over the minds of so many recent scholars? Although geologists agree that in remote ages the arrangements of land and sea were quite different from what they are now, there is unanimous agreement that no great continental sinkings have occurred within the relatively brief time man has been on the scene. There is, in fact, not a shred of reliable evidence, geological or archeological, to support the twin myths of Atlantis and Lemuria. Yet the literature continues to proliferate. Since 1900, dozens of little periodicals in various nations have been devoted to Atlantean research. For a time, Spence edited such a magazine in England, and at the moment, Bellamy is on the staff of a similar British publication. Innumerable Atlantis societies have been formed. Twenty years ago, a Danish group actually printed Atlantean stamps and currency, and designed an Atlantean flag. In Chicago, in 1936, a Lemurian Fellowship was organized to promote the ancient wisdom of the Motherland and usher in the new Lemurian order. Its literature was written by a reincarnated Lemurian and published by the Lemurian Book Industries in Milwaukee. The group had plans for building “super cities” somewhere in Southern California, but apparently their Lemurian wisdom failed to provide them with sufficient funds for this project.
The psychological factors behind all this are not hard to understand. There is, of course, an obvious element of escape in dreaming about a vast, mythical land of wonder—like the Land of Oz—but it is more than this. There is a strong element of being one of the chosen —one who is rich in Atlantean blood, or a reincarnation of an Atlantean, or at least a person initiated into great mysteries hidden from the eyes of the common multitude. H. G. Wells, in his novel Christina Alberta’s Father, penned a shrewd portrait of the lonely, imaginative, neurotic type of personality—a Mr. Preemby—who finds the Atlantis myth so compelling. One hears the voice of Preemby in these words of Bellamy:
There is magic in names . . . and the mightiest among these words of magic is Atlantis. When we have pronounced this word, nothing definite is revealed, but it is as if a sudden shaft of sunlight smote through the darkness of the past, allowing us a glimpse of cloud-capped towers, and gorgeous palaces, and solemn temples; and it is as if this vision of a lost culture touched the most hidden part of our soul.
Fantasy and science fiction have not escaped the magic spell. In Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Captain Nemo’s submarine visits the ruined towers of Atlantis. In another science-fiction story, The Maracot Deep by Conan Doyle, a group of scientists descend to Atlantis in a steel sphere and find there a flourishing city, covered with a watertight roof, manufacturing its own air, lit by fluorescent lights, and populated by a happy people. An Atlantean scientist, foreseeing the coming doom, had managed to save a portion of a city. The citizens have mastered atomic energy, and can project their thoughts on screens. In the chapter on flying saucers we mentioned the Great Shaver Mystery which ran in Amazing Stories. The evil deros, who figure in the Shaver tales, came originally from the lost Lemuria.
It is safe to say that speculations about Atlantis and the older Motherland of Mu will occupy the minds of pseudo-archeologists for many decades to come. Until the last square mile of the oceans’ depths is fully explored, those who are so inclined may continue to believe, in the words of John Masefield, that:
In some green island of the sea,
Where now the shadowy coral grows
In pride and pomp and empery
The courts of old Atlantis rose.