SEVEN
The Britons
IN EVERY NATION in which occult interests have flourished, those interests have had their own flavors and biases. Britain has a reputation as a place where eccentrics are tolerated, even admired, and as such it has already been a fertile field for our study. One purpose of the selections in this chapter is to illustrate the variety of methods by which occult information arrives. We have instances of a self-trained trance medium (Dion Fortune, Margaret Lumley Brown); dictation by an inner voice (H. C. Randall-Stevens); vision of the past induced by meditating at an ancient site (Paul Brunton); open-eyed vision on site by a medium (Olive Pixley) whose report is written down by another (F. C. Tyler, Foster Forbes); the study of manuscripts made available during initiation into an arcane order (Lewis Spence); a discarnate entity who takes the subject on a tour of Atlantis (Daphne Vigers); the appearance of a well-known nineteenth-century control (Mandasoran); another medium (Anthony Neate) who acts as mouthpiece for his controlling entity; a person who has a single flash of inspired vision (Katharine Maltwood) from which she develops a system; an enthusiast for outlandish theories (Brinsley le Poer Trench) who constructs his own eclectic model; and another (John Michell) whose enthusiasms lead to a geometric revelation of his own. The variety of methods is matched by the variety of Atlantises thus received. The alert reader will notice repetitions, echoes, and leitmotifs running through the entirety of our material, and also stark contradictions that are equally instructive.
ATLANTIS IN THE INNER LIGHT
As told in chapter 3, the proclamation of Krishnamurti as the coming World Teacher shattered the already shaky unity of the Theosophical Society, but it did not shatter Theosophy. The preceding chapters are evidence for the staying-power of the Theosophical myth of prehistory, and much more will appear before our survey is done. Rudolf Steiner accepted it; so did Alice Bailey, to mention two of the most influential vehicles for the Theosophical current outside the parent society. A third was Dion Fortune, the initiatic name of Violet Mary Firth (1890–1946),1 whose Society of the Inner Light combined Theosophical doctrines with the magical current of the Golden Dawn.
Born to a solicitor’s family with progressive ideas, Dion Fortune qualified as a psychotherapist before gravitating to occult and magical circles. Unlike many of our subjects, who were unprepared when voices or visions suddenly broke in on them, she had been psychic since childhood and deliberately cultivated trance mediumship as a way of access to inner worlds. Later she found that she could obtain images in the waking state and no longer required an amanuensis. Medium she may have been, but she was anything but passive. Her early training and appreciation of Carl Jung gave her esoteric writing a psychological dimension rare in the genre. In short, she is a force to be reckoned with.
In her early book The Esoteric Orders and Their Work (1928), Fortune sketches a prehistory that is basically Blavatskian, but with an emphasis on the Seven Rays that brings her closer to her contemporaries Besant, Leadbeater, and Bailey. She tells of three great emigrations of those who foresaw the three great cataclysms of Atlantis and links these with three later occult schools. The first of these moved across Europe and Asia “until it finally contacted the remains of the Lemurian culture in the Pacific, from which it derived some of those elements which render it to-day a dangerous and polluted current.”2 The second crossed central Europe and reached the Himalayas; the third, leaving just before the final cataclysm, founded the Egyptian civilization, which became the parent of the Western esoteric tradition, including its Greek, Hebrew, and Gnostic strains.3 This being Fortune’s own tradition, she pays little attention to the other two currents. She advised her students and readers that the magical methods of the first emigration, being on the Ray of Power and working from physical operations upward, were too dangerous. Those of the second, being on the Ray of Wisdom and working with the higher mind alone, were too abstracted. Westerners should renew their link with the third emigration, which, being on the Ray of Love and Devotion, “had brotherhood and compassion for its ideals and socialisation for its task.”4
Fortune’s psychic experiences convinced her that she had lived before as a priestess in Atlantis. These inspired her novel, The Sea Priestess (1938), which is about modern people reliving their past lives in Atlantis’s final days. It is no surprise to discover a City of the Golden Gates on the island of Ruta, that Atlantis fell through black magic, or that the Azores are its last remnants. But there is an original touch. While most of our sources consider only the solar cult and compete in florid descriptions of the Sun Temple, Dion Fortune’s heroine had been a priestess of the Sea Temple, dedicated to a cult more ancient still: “They hailed the sea as the oldest of created things, older even than the hills, and the mother of all living. But they bade the sea remember that the moon is the giver of magnetic life, and that it was from the moonlight on the sea that living forms arose.”5
What is fictionalized in The Sea Priestess had been directly given through Dion Fortune’s mediumship, as was evident when the transcripts were finally published.6 One of the most powerful ideas in the novel was that the legends of King Arthur, Merlin, and the Knights of the Round Table record characters and events from the end of Atlantean civilization. King Arthur’s mother was a sea-princess of Atlantis and Merlin a priest who accompanied the Atlantean tin merchants to Britain;7 the whole action, in fact, took place thousands of years before Christ. The various characters and events in the Camelot saga represent momentous events in the evolution of consciousness, connected with the transition from the fourth to the fifth root race.8
Upon Dion Fortune’s unexpected death, the leadership of her initiatic society passed to Margaret Lumley Brown, who was if anything a more gifted medium for “inner plane communications.”9 Already as a young woman she had corresponded with Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett (1867–1925?) about Glastonbury, Atlantis, and the occult hierarchy.10 In dream, she had been shown “elaborately drawn maps of what one might call the esoteric geography of England in which were marked various centres which had held the Atlantean descent of power first introduced by colonisers from Atlantis and from them, handed down through the Druids.”11 Upon taking up Ouija board sessions, she received enough Atlantean material to fill a large volume of notes. Her communicators were apparently a teaching fraternity on the astral plane quite distinct from the Theosophical masters and Christian rather than Eastern. They told her of the customs, magic rituals, and way of life that she had lived in her Atlantean incarnation.
One would think that religious differences dissolve in the afterworld, but Brown’s sources were a brotherhood dedicated to the Twelve Apostles and the Virgin Mary. All the more surprising, then, that the Atlantis they showed her was standard issue. It had advanced understanding of nuclear physics, a lighting system that we have not yet discovered, a science of genetics that started out well but “became a means of some of the blackest magic ever known,” and clairvoyant contact with far-off planes exceeding anything possessed by psychics today.12 The Atlanteans also had a mastery of sound and its applications that we cannot imagine. They had instruments played not by the hand but by electric mechanism, and they also had different vocal cords from ours, which enabled them to produce more efficacious vibrations.13 This appealed to Brown, who as a poet and mistress of ritual had a special interest in the qualities of words and their mantric and magical power.
In her Atlantis there was the familiar City of the Golden Gates on the Island of Ruta, with its Sun Temple. This was only the exoteric face of Atlantean religion; the esoteric side was cultivated by high initiates in the Sea Temple, also called the Withdrawn Temple.14 Brown’s sea cult seems to have been broader visioned than Fortune’s lunar cult, for it linked humanity “not only to the Solar Logos as does the Sun but to the Worlds beyond, to the other Solar systems—to the great Cosmic whole.”15 On a homelier scale there were connections with the places that Brown loved. Cornwall, Wales, Brittany had all been Atlantean outposts with strong sea cults, whose aura is still detectable to the sensitive. In Brown’s mythic world the Atlantean mythology merged into that of faërie, Avalon, and the Holy Grail.
Both Dion Fortune and Margaret Lumley Brown made their own clairvoyant investigations into Atlantean realms, and these produced the material that circulated within the Society of the Inner Light as “Atlantean Scripts.”16 There it remained until the appearance of a novel by Peter Valentine Timlett, The Seedbearers (1974).17 We have the witness of Gareth Knight, the authority on Dion Fortune and her movement, that Timlett passed through the society.18 Even without knowing that, every page (except the ones given over to sex and violence) is redolent of the occult Atlantis traditions. Leadbeater’s black Rmoahals, yellow Akkadians, and red Toltecs are crammed in uneasy coexistence on the small island of Ruta as the kingdom approaches its end. The Sun Temple and its priesthood have degenerated into political cat’s-paws, but the Withdrawn Temple still keeps its integrity. There the heroes plan the last-minute exodus of the “seedbearers,” destined to make a new start in Egypt. Occasionally the action flags so that the reader can get a crash course in Theosophical cosmogenesis, root races, and so on.19 As in Dion Fortune’s own cosmos, Theosophical doctrines are blended with ceremonial magic, and Timlett describes the rituals with a sense of occasion and psychology that suggests experience. When the “Atlantean Scripts” were published, Timlett’s debt became apparent, but so did the novelistic quality of the revelations themselves, with details of Atlantean waterworks, mating habits, garbage disposal, and so forth.20
Colonel Fawcett, briefly mentioned above, returns to this web in a curious manner. In 1925, soon after writing to Margaret Lumley Brown, he left for an expedition in the Brazilian jungle from which he never returned. Over the following decades, several mediums claimed to have received messages from him. They were unclear about whether he was still alive, suspended in a coma, or already dead, but it hardly mattered as he was so communicative. In 1948, through the automatic writing of Geraldine Cummins, he spoke of how he had discovered ruins that dated back to Atlantean days. Near the lost cities there were white towers, relics of the Atlantean technology for drawing electricity out of the atmosphere and storing it in underground reservoirs. The Atlanteans used this electricity for cooking, heating, lighting, cleaning, lifting weights, healing—and waging war. That, said Fawcett, was their undoing, for they overfilled their reservoirs. The “chambers of compressed electricity” exploded and brought on a vast cataclysm.21
Everyone consulted agreed that this had to be Fawcett himself communicating. Perhaps encouraged by his eager audience, in 1949 he dictated a yarn worthy of Fortune’s or Timlett’s fiction. Dramatic and filled with punchy dialogue, it told about his life with the Indian tribes and adventures in the jungle. He met not only anacondas but also a “Pythoness” or virgin oracle, with whom he was invited to father the future guardian of her tribe.22 (He says he declined.) On the whole, the ex-Fawcett was of one mind with the Fortune circle, but he differed on one significant point. Instead of Avalon and Glastonbury, which he had commended in his letters to Margaret Brown, he now held that it was Ireland that was a colony of the lost continent. That, he explained, is why the Irish have never become integrated into Britain. “It is not from hatred of England, it is from the fundamental aristocratic feeling of the Atlanteans, from their sense of innate superiority as regards other races that this feeling springs. The magic ray of the distant Atlantean past stretches across the gulf of time and kindles, in the deeper sense of this little people, the old pride of the Atlanteans—a terrible cold pride that led to their downfall.”23
THE REVELATIONS OF A NORMAL LAD
Unlike Dion Fortune and Margaret Brown, attuned to the psychic world from childhood, Hugh Clayton Randall-Stevens (1896–?) assures us that he started out as a “normal lad.” He began studying medicine, then was presumably called up, for he served with the RAF in both world wars. In between he worked in the West End theatrical world, where his wife was a “well-known musical star.”24 In February 1925 he was surprised, as several of our subjects have been, by a Voice. It told him first to write, then two days later to draw, though he had had no training in either. In short order he completed The Book of Truth, or The Voice of Osiris, together with sixty-eight pencil drawings of Egyptian-style heads and objects. The book was published, like many occultist works, by Rider of London, and was followed three years later by The Chronicles of Osiris. Instead of the author’s name, the title pages proclaim the books as “Set down in the House of El Eros-El Erua, they being male-female, born according to the laws governing the Dhuman-Adamic race, this being their fourth incarnation.”
The Book of Truth opens with a kind of Gnostic theology. There is a trinity of a Father-Mother God, plus God the Son, which emanated a series of demiurgic powers, beginning with El Daoud. All dual-sexed like the Godhead, these took on the task of creation. From them came the Dhuman-Adamic race, also known as ray-children, a superior humanity who at first dwelled in immaterial bodies. They were responsible for developing the Yevahic race of potential humans, by integrating divine sparks into material bodies. Reproduction was nonsexual and took place only with divine consent.25
Besides the Gnostic creation myth, with its Demiurge and hierarchy of creative powers in pairs, the existence of two human types, one radically superior to the other, echoes the Ariosophists. The voluntary migration of the divine sparks into subhuman bodies, mentioned in the next episode, occurs in the Theosophical system, as does the nonsexual reproduction of earlier stages of humanity.
As Osiris’s narrative continued, the evolutionary scheme was upset by a divine being first known as Eranus, later as Satanaku. His ambition was to create material beings independently of the divine plan, who could reproduce without permission of the Godhead. The result was a population of monsters, on an Earth that was cut off from communication with other spheres.26 In time, Satanaku succeeded in getting the divine sparks to incarnate in his creations, where they practiced “the most terrible sex depravities.”27 This was the situation on the continent of Sarkon (better known as Lemuria), which came to be such a sink of iniquity that El Daoud intervened and destroyed it by condensing its atmosphere.28
The Chronicles of Osiris, dictated in 1926, takes up the story from this point. Just before the end of Lemuria, one of the Adamics named Ptah gathered a select group to escape and make a fresh start in Sardegon (Atlantis), where the Yevahic race could develop in conformity with its divine sparks. Ptah built twenty-four temples whose symbol of divinity was the sun disk, the mediator between humanity and the triple God.29 For thousands of years the Atlanteans lived as vegetarians in a simple, mainly outdoor life, divided into twenty-four clans each ruled by initiate ray-children. Trouble began when a priest called Itheboleth founded a secret sect called Initiates of the Lowlands. Falling under the will of Satanaku, Itheboleth built sanctuaries of initiation and underground chambers. He led his devotees to perform animal and human sacrifices under the belief that they would gain occult powers thereby. When his sect had grown sufficiently strong, he made war on Ptah’s people and plundered their temples. Ptah, “standing between the paws of the great Sphinx of the Highlands, cried unto the Cosmos.” The earth trembled and split, fires leaped forth, and thousands were swallowed up.30
The insurrection of Itheboleth had resulted in his death and that of many of the initiates. Osiris’s son, Horus, was left to reorganize Atlantis with the help of an Adamic called El Erosuphu or El Eros, whose significance will become apparent. El Erosuphu acted as judge and lawgiver to the entire continent, aided by his twin and wife El Erosuphua. Another long period of peace ensued, during which Atlanteans colonized the shores of the Sahara Sea and Central and South America. But eventually there was again a demand from the unqualified for knowledge of the Mysteries. The cult of Itheboleth revived, and Satanaku threw all his energies behind it. With genocidal intention he demanded especially the elite Adamic children for human sacrifice.31
To cut a now familiar story short, the capital of Atlantis, the Golden City of Chekon, was destroyed, though not before another Adamic group, led by Horehetop, had escaped to Egypt. This was around 15,000 BCE. Most of them traveled by boat, but some initiates left in their immortal bodies, one of them carrying tablets of stone that were dematerialized for the trip, then rematerialized on arrival. The wicked Atlanteans could not escape, as the sea became a mass of molten lava.32
In Egypt, Horehetop and his people worked intermittently over a period of 1,050 years to build the Sphinx, the pyramids, and an underground complex of passages and chambers. But this was not all. Osiris says: “The Pyramids never formed the Inner Circle of the divine Initiation, they being only stones of remembrance to keep the people in the knowledge of the Cosmos until such times as the sacred House of my Father should be ready, which was not till about the year 10,000 BC.”33 The true House of Initiation was constructed at an undisclosed location in Upper Egypt by a group led by the second incarnation of El Erosuphu.34 The Book of Truth describes it in minute detail,35 and many of the drawings in that book illustrate its furnishings and sacred objects. There are floors of mother-of-pearl; gold and silver tapestries; heptangular columns of crystal; self-opening doors; a theater; a fountain of alabaster; and towers, pylons, and pyramids bearing signs, symbols, and inscriptions. Osiris assures us that it will all be rediscovered at the appointed time.36
For a long period Upper and Lower Egypt were ruled by kings, always chosen from among the Adamic race, rather than from the subservient Yehavic people. There was social mobility, however, thanks to reincarnation, so that an evolved Yehavic man or woman could be born to Adamic parents.37 Meanwhile, in the colonies of Atlantis, Satanaku and his entities from the astral planes were at work perverting the people. To make them distinguishable from the people of Khemu, “the Cosmos had spoken unto Eil Daudu [El Daoud] and had commanded him to cause them to have coloured skins; so that those of Central America had reddish skins, whilst those of Africa and the East had some bronze skins and some black. The black and lowest race have survived to-day as the negroes of South Africa.”38 Then came the inevitable miscegenation of the higher with the lower races. In 7600 BCE the people of Nubia invaded the two kingdoms of Egypt, initiating a state of war that continued for about a thousand years. Finally around 6600 BCE the two lands were united under Mentos, wearer of the double crown.39
There is no need to continue with Osiris’s history of Egypt, except to say that much weight is given to the reformer Pharaoh Akhnaton, who was the third incarnation of El Erosuphu. Osiris calls his rule disastrous because “firstly, the material side of life was forgotten, and religious ideas were forced upon the people to a fanatical degree.”40 He then addresses his scribe directly:
They, the figures in that ancient tragedy are incarnate again, and must work out their Kharmic debts afresh. The circumstances are familiar to thee, twain El Erosuphu-El Erosuphua—therefore, I say unto thee, go forward and, knowing the past, strive to bring the future to a successful conclusion.41
This explains the cryptic mention of a “fourth incarnation” in the subtitles of The Book of Truth and The Chronicles of Osiris. Randall-Stevens had to accept that he was Akhnaton reborn, though he purported to be none too happy about it.42
After World War II, Randall-Stevens returned to print with Atlantis to the Latter Days, “inspirationally dictated to H. C. Randall-Stevens (El Eros) by the Masters Oneferu and Adolemy of the Osirian Group.” The book sported a frontispiece photograph and offered the scraps of biography given above. Later editions appeared under the imprint “Order of the Knights Templars of Aquarius,” based in London and the Channel Island of Jersey, which still awaits its chronicler.
Besides repeating much of the material from the earlier books, Atlantis to the Latter Days gives a revelation from 1927 about the initiations that took place in the Temple of the Sphinx, that is, the Great Pyramid. These are remarkably similar to the account of Paul Brunton, the traveler and philosopher, who wrote of his own experiences during a night spent in the King’s Chamber.43 In both cases the subject leaves his body and sees it lying there, then follows a guide and passes through various ordeals or illuminations. He is warned that our civilization, if it continues on its present path, will suffer the same fate as Atlantis; then he reenters his body.44 While The Book of Truth had an apocalyptic tone, with frequent mention of the coming “great day of Aquarius,” Atlantis to the Latter Days continues with material on time cycles and current Earth changes, and a long moralizing conclusion. This elaborates on the theme announced at the beginning of the book: “The ‘Latter Days’ are come, the days of the Co-Adamics and Gentile Divine Sparks, when they must choose between light and darkness—God and Anti-God.”45
I have treated Randall-Stevens’s work at some length because of its multiple correspondences with other accounts of Atlantis and Egypt, with Gnostic theology, and with Theosophical prehistory. One naturally wonders whether these were actual influences on it, or whether some other explanation has to be found. The Book of Truth carries an introduction by one Peter Miles, whose address at 4, Upper Wimpole St., London, suggests that he may have been a medical man of repute. Miles had often watched Randall-Stevens producing the “so-called inspirational writings and automatic drawings,” and noted the speed and lack of erasures on them. His careful inquiry into Randall-Stevens’s life showed that he had no previous talent or interest in such matters. Miles concludes:
Having regard to the complete ignorance of the writer, at the time of writing the following pages, of Egyptian history and Egyptology generally, it does not appear to me that the writings and the book as a whole can adequately be accounted for as the product of what is commonly termed the subconscious mind, as understood by psychologists. A more tenable hypothesis is that the work is that of a Superior Intelligence coming from beyond and using the writer as a medium.46
While the scene of initiation in the Great Pyramid could have been plagiarized from Brunton’s work of 1936, and predated to 1927, an author who practiced that sort of fabrication could have done much more to enhance his work. There is a naivety to Randall-Stevens’s revelations, as well as to his drawings, that inclines me to the same conclusion as Peter Miles, though “superior” is not the word I would use.
Having mentioned Paul Brunton (1898–1981), I here include his small contribution to the Atlantis myth. Brunton was a professional journalist before he became a bestselling author of books on travel, meditation, oriental philosophy, and the conduct of life. A Search in Secret Egypt contains vivid firsthand accounts of his meetings with fakirs, magicians, spiritual masters, and tricksters. More to the point, he also writes of visions that arose before his inner eye while meditating in places where the genius loci was strong.
Sitting in meditation by the Sphinx, Brunton had a vision of its makers, scurrying to and fro with baskets, climbing up flimsy ladders, chipping away at the rock. “The faces of all these men were long and hard, the skins tinted reddish brown, or greyish yellow, and the upper lips, also, were noticeably long.” Once their work was complete, there was the gigantic human head set on a lion’s body, with a disk of solid gold above its headdress. Then the vision continued with a wall of water overwhelming the monument, as the Deluge struck. The waters ebbed away, leaving the yellow desert in their place.47 Brunton comments: “It was a tremendous and astonishing thought that the Sphinx provided a solid, visible and enduring link between the people of today and the people of a lost world, the unknown Atlanteans.” As his musings continue, it becomes plain to him that the Temple of the Sphinx is nothing other than the Great Pyramid, so that both were built in Atlantean times.48 He mentions the well-known date of 2170 BCE that Sir John Herschel, the astronomer, proposed for the Great Pyramid, based on the orientation of its main passage to the former pole star Alpha Draconis, and makes a point that the pyramid’s date might as well be a whole precessional cycle earlier. H. P. Blavatsky had already suggested this, with a date of 28,868 BCE.49 Brunton’s date, based on a different precessional figure, is 27,997 BCE; we can add these to the many dates that have been affixed to these monuments, keeping in mind that they are only as good as Herschel’s proposal. The Egyptian builders may have had entirely different criteria for the angle of the ascending passage.
The warning that our civilization is heading for imminent doom is a favorite refrain of Atlantologists. To a certain cast of mind, often shared by Superior Intelligences, it always seems that the present day is on the brink of catastrophe, because everyone is so wicked (except of course the writer and his or her readers). Nonetheless, there are times when a general crisis—physical, moral, or spiritual—affects virtually everyone. One of these was the Second World War.
PSYCHOMETRY ON THE BRINK OF WAR
Lieutenant Colonel John Foster Forbes (1889–1958) came from a similar background to that of William Scott-Elliot: the minor Scottish aristocracy.50 He attended Cambridge University, served as intelligence officer in World War I and as British vice-consul in Munich, then spent some years schoolmastering. A severe illness interrupted his career, from which he emerged a changed man. He joined the Order of the Cross, a Christian pacifist and vegetarian movement founded by John Todd Ferrier, and by the 1930s was involved in what we would call psychic archeology. This did not impair his standing in respectable quarters, for in 1936 he became a fellow both of the Royal Anthropological Institute and of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.
As Forbes relates in his book The Unchronicled Past, he set himself the task of filling in the gap between the earliest traces of humans in Europe (which to him were the Aurignacians, around 20,000–25,000 BCE) and the intrusion from the West around 10,000 BCE, possibly from an Atlantic continent.51 He called his method psychometry, and his collaborator was Olive Pixley, a noted “conscious medium.” It sounds as though she had talents similar to those of Leadbeater or Steiner, in that she could see past events while still conscious of the present, but preferring it to be focused by an object or a place.
In her unpublished work on psychometry, Pixley records that in 1930 she and Forbes visited Glastonbury Tor, a steep oval hill just outside the historic Somerset town. She saw that on top of the Tor there had once been a stone circle, and that winding upward to it was a host of people performing a dawn ritual, which she knew to derive from Atlantean traditions. Singing and drumming as they went, they created a serpentine path of etheric energy. As the sun rose, “the raised spiral of serpent power fused with the sun’s light through the agency of the stone circle. The resultant energy then shot outwards through the ‘alignments’ over the land. This was for the benefit of the plant and butterfly realms. The key to the ritual, Pixley thought, was the vibration of sound and light.”52
John Michell’s View over Atlantis was the first postwar book to draw attention to this group of researchers into ancient mysteries that included Pixley, Forbes, and Major F. C. Tyler. Tyler was the secretary of the Straight Track Club (the original ley-hunters), founded by Alfred Watkins.53 He worked with Pixley and recorded her psychometric impressions, then made them available to Forbes. Out of these came The Unchronicled Past, in which Forbes interprets the psychically obtained material in his own way.
The book strikes a Masonic tone from the beginning, as Forbes writes: “Psychometry has revealed that the whole of Britain at these early ages was controlled most perfectly by the masters and past masters of ancient Masonry, which is the science of the cosmos and the one-time science of the world.”54 An unorthodox attitude to the famed secrets of Freemasonry emerges when he discusses the huge menhirs of Brittany. Whether or not he had read Sinnett or Leadbeater, Forbes was sure that there had been no need for physical force to raise them, because the priests of the time “were adepts in the science of sound and rhythm to which the elements in the hand of a master mason become responsive”(22).*4 Other relics of those ancient times were the seven Tors of Dartmoor, massive piles of granite generally thought to be natural formations. Pixley, on the contrary, saw them as the remains of gigantic walls, adding a statement reminiscent of her vision on Glastonbury Tor: “They used the forces of Nature as one, for the Combination of Sound and Light is the Essence of Creation!”(39).
From here, the road to Atlantis was plain. Forbes wrote: “In Atlantean times and even before that not only was the element of which stone was composed responsive to the law even of sound when properly applied, but that in conditions long prior to an age of fixity or earth conditions, the substance now called stone was malleable, or even pliable”(46).
Other information on the Atlanteans follows, though it is impossible to tell what came directly from Olive Pixley’s clairvoyance, and what was Foster Forbes’s conjecture as he filled in the gap of his original question. It is certainly he who concurs with Theosophists that the Atlanteans had trekked East and West long before the final subsidence in 9650 BCE. The Azilians may have been their last wave, meeting an earlier one of Cro-Magnons coming West again (64–65). Then two great cultures started in Egypt and Babylon. The Great Pyramid was built prior to 10,000 BCE by a highly advanced people and later found there by the proto-Egyptians. The builders then came West via the Mediterranean and made the dolmens and other megalithic monuments (68–69).
These early settlers in southwestern Britain were worshippers of sun and stars, their rituals labyrinthine and spiral, without sacrifice. Here Forbes adds another allusion to Freemasonry, which he evidently saw as spiritually linked to the old religion. He says that it is the worship of God, of whom the sun is the symbol, and that there is no Christian doctrine in it—one needs only to believe in God; and geometry forms the basis of its creed (45). In contrast to this ancient pure religion and its modern counterpart is the epoch embracing most of dynastic Egypt, Greece, and Rome. All of that, Forbes says, belongs to the “occult age” when wrong forces were set in motion for base ends. But, he adds, there really was a Golden Age, and it can still be sensed in Britain (49).
This was 1938, and the storm clouds were gathering. Forbes took comfort from his studies.
I feel that England has been awaiting this hour [of revelation of the truth]. Despite the infinite tragedy and sorrow that has marked the ages; despite the efforts of all her enemies to mar and scar the face of this truly magic land, that the true worth has been preserved not only in the heart of the country, but in the hearts of her wonderful people. Here twenty thousand years ago or even more, who can tell? men and women of great spiritual might have trod her green hills and valleys and wherever they went they left the indelible impress of an influence that has never been dispersed, that has withstood all things, and is as strong today as ever it was, for surely that which is of good and of God belongs to the imperishable elements that stand altogether outside the range of the powers of destruction. [28–29]
LEWIS SPENCE’S OCCULT TRILOGY
The powers of destruction were soon unleashed on Britain as never before. The elderly Lewis Spence, whom we last met in chapter 1, was certain that Germany had been taken over by satanic forces. Spence had always been hovering on the threshold of occultism as a fascinated but uncommitted observer. Now he crossed it, with The Occult Causes of the Present War (1940), Will Europe Follow Atlantis? (1942), and The Occult Sciences in Atlantis (1943), all published by Rider. The first of these was mainly based on anecdotes about Hitler, on Alfred Rosenberg’s Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts, which had been published in English,55 and on the “Deutsche Glaubensgemeinschaft,” an attempt to create a “German Faith-Community” with allegiance to the Nazi state rather than to Christian leaders. With the outbreak of war the movement was moribund, while, as mentioned in chapter 5, Rosenberg was no longer a force to be reckoned with. Spence lacked the rich material that a study of the Ariosophists could have provided. Instead, he cataloged all the atrocities committed on German soil over the centuries, to prove that the Germans have always had satanic tendencies.
Will Europe Follow Atlantis? is a more substantial book. It covers the literary and traditional evidence for the destruction of Atlantis and surveys the mass of Atlantological literature that had appeared in the fifteen years since Spence had last addressed the subject. Otherwise it is a moving testimony to the spirit of Britain in the darkest days of the war.
Spence’s opinion of the Germans was not improved by what he had learned about the Weimar Republic, when “Berlin became the centre of excesses so outrageous and so depraved that the whole chronicle of Roman and Byzantine beastliness could scarcely have suggested new avenues of unnatural experiment to its abandoned devotees.”56 If the Nazis purged that Sodom and Gomorrah, it was only to replace them with homicide, terror, torture, and the rule of the grotesque Adolf Hitler: “not so much the leader of Germany as the spiritual projection of her evil desire and intention, a furious emanation directed against the last community in Europe which bears aloft the torch of righteousness”57—that is, Britain, blamed by Germany for its defeat in the First World War.
Spence looks back into the myths and legends with which his mind was so well stocked and finds evidence that whenever humans become excessively wicked, God intervenes, or to put it another way, nature reacts. Writing in the summer of 1941, he finds not only Germany but much of Europe nearing the moral breaking point. Few countries are spared his censure of their morals and their abandonment of Christian principles and belief, but still he does not envisage a total destruction of the continent. In the chapter “How Europe May Follow Atlantis,” he speculates on what might occur, and settles on a local subsidence of the earth’s crust as the most likely or desirable outcome. The prospect excites him:
Down the Valley of the Rhine will pour the relentless fury of the North Sea, the most terrific earthquake the world has seen will convulse Western Germany, the proud and beautiful land of the New Prussia. From Hanover to Karlsruhe the agitated crust of the earth will rock, will sink into the pit of the magma, and ocean will submerge for ever the broad lands between Cologne and Cassel, and from Emden to Baden. . . . All that is presently industrial Germany will be eternally lost in a waste of waters. France will forever be cut off from her ancient foe by an inland sea half as great as the Black Sea, broader than the Adriatic.58
And so on, with the wretched survivors left to reenact on each other the horrors of the Thirty Years War. Britain, untouched by the catastrophe, will lead the New Europe and, with the aid of her Commonwealth, will “pursue her illustrious destiny as the standard-bearer of world-freedom and justice. . . . The altruism which has always been implicit in the genius of our people will at last come to its full flower, and the nations savour the perfume thereof to the enduring good of the whole earth.”59 But this will only happen under a renewal of the Christian faith in the spirit of the Grail tradition, assisted with study of the mystics and the wisdom religions of all nations. Spence names Freemasonry, Theosophy, and the Rosicrucians among those who will be called upon to help form a new Christian religion without schisms or sects. Thus humanity may discover the “great secret of co-operation with God.”60
The third of Spence’s wartime works was The Occult Sciences in Atlantis, a title that raises expectations of bizarre scenes in the style of Steiner or Leadbeater. Quite the contrary: Spence dismisses the Theosophical, clairvoyant, and spiritualist revelations at a stroke. His distance from them can be judged by how he treats the famous myth of the rebel angels and their mating with human women: it merely concerned “the rebellion of the lower caste in Atlantis against its more civil inhabitants.”61 Having one hand, as it were, tied behind his back, Spence struggles to squeeze out sufficient material from classical authors, antediluvian legends, and folklore. However, he has another source: “a very considerable body of traditional matter [that] exists in the records of occult fraternities, known generally as ‘The Arcane Tradition’, which deals with occult history in its entirety. This is partly written, partly communicated by word of mouth”(13).*5 It takes the form of manuscripts shown at the time of initiation, then withdrawn, so that initiates have thereafter to rely entirely on memory. Spence finds this an annoying situation, but he will not name the one society he has had contact with. Its manuscripts date from the late Middle Ages through the mid-seventeenth century and are written in English, Latin, French, or Spanish. Some are damp-stained and barely legible, others overconcerned with occult grades, and many evidently derived at third or fourth hand from the original source (33–36). A typical example is called The Tale of the Barcelona Shipper, which tells stories that a Spanish sailor heard in Algeria while he was enslaved there in the 1540s. Some of these describe the black magic practiced in Africa by devil worshippers from Atlantis, after Allah had overthrown their land (58). In later manuscripts Spence detects an overhaul of the tradition in the spirit of the Enlightenment, and even detects the influence of Jean-Sylvain Bailly (110). All in all, it is a very unsatisfactory situation both for the writer and the reader.
Far from regarding the Atlanteans as great wielders of occult powers now lost to humanity, Spence thinks that they were quite primitive in their beliefs, and that their occult sciences were in a vestigial state (131). One exception was the Mysteries practiced by the elite, in which the initiate was hypnotized and led through the experience of death and rebirth into immaterial realms (114). Here at last Spence reveals his own conviction that the whole goal of the occult sciences is to recapture the prelapsarian state—and that it is futile. “For the one manner of perfecting it is to seek piously that fellowship and at-one-ment with God, of which divine marvel and supernatural vision are merely the concomitants and ancillary effects, or background, and not the reality” (133).
In this rejection of occultism (whose existence is not denied) for mysticism, there is more than a suspicion of A. E. Waite, and not just in the prose style. In Will Europe Follow Atlantis? and The Occult Sciences in Atlantis, the only contemporary spiritual authority quoted with approval is Waite, the twentieth century’s most prolific writer on the Holy Grail, the Rosicrucians, alchemy, the Tarot, magic, Christian mysticism, and so forth. Waite belonged to numerous secret and occult orders, beginning with the Golden Dawn, and founded more than one of them himself. This may be the place to look for the Arcane Tradition that initiated Spence, as he admits, only into a lowly degree, and was so miserly in giving him access to its precious manuscripts.
THE MESSAGES OF HELIO-ARKAN/ARCANOPHUS
Since Lewis Spence, in the end, disappointed his readers, it was left to a more obscure figure, Daphne Vigers, to make a direct connection between the present crisis and the distant past. Her publisher was Andrew Dakers, who had already published the works of the American Theosophist and architect Claude Bragdon, as well as Vera Brittain’s controversial pacifist books. Dakers himself introduced Atlantis Rising with the words: “The author asks us to believe that she has gone back into the remote past on many occasions, and that she has witnessed the scenes and met the people described in these pages.”62 He adds that when he read the material, he thought it beyond the competence of a girl of twenty-six to invent. He consulted an author of several books on the astral who had the same gift of “backseeing” (possibly Vera Stanley Alder, whom Dakers also published). She told him that much of what she had seen was identical to what Vigers’s manuscript described, and on these grounds Atlantis Rising got its imprimatur.
The point of the book is that Britons are the good Atlanteans reborn, and, in Dakers’s words, that “the future of civilization depended in 1940 uniquely upon the spiritual strength of the British people.”63 Vigers situates Atlantis between 10°–50°N and 17°–40°W, with the Azores as the remains of its highest peaks. The scenes of an earthly paradise with children romping with lions, chariots of ebony and ivory, and so forth recall Edmund Dulac’s or Maxfield Parrish’s book illustrations. Atlantean religion occupies a large part of the work. We are given a tour of the Temple of the Sun in the holy city of Khekon, reached by crystal steps through a golden archway. Helio-Arkan, the chief priest, is white with dark eyes, short hair, a white robe with purple trimming, and bare feet, his eyes gentle but firm. He has a pet leopard.64 The religion is a worship of Life and Light (though there are others who worship Darkness); the winged sun is their symbol, as well as a seven-rayed eye. From the temple we proceed to the Sanctuary of Healing, where mead and sweet cakes are served, and learn about artificial limbs, etheric sciences, herbs, and sound vibrations. Then in the Place of Science the narrator’s guide ushers her into Nezhualtyl, the Room of Discoveries.
First there was the compass very delicately and precisely made. Then there were rock cutters and levitating machines which lifted the great blocks of stone by magnetism, both driven by direct solar power. The copper thought-form recorder made me ask Nezhualtyl many questions. Then there were rainfall regulators, astro-gravitational power deflectors. Crystals that “caught” and recorded the music of the spheres. Flying chariots with birds’ wings of thin metal, also driven by direct solar power. Vibro-engines that picked up the psycho-magnetic energy of the person who wished to work them, making them able to drive a chariot without horses.
Cotton, linen, and wool spinners and tiny mechanisms on which silk was woven from the cocoons.
Nezhualtyl picked up a disc of crystal which was actually a powerful lens. “We use this to look upon other worlds,” he smiled.65
But all this came to an end, in a not-unfamiliar way: “Those whom we call the Thokhartens, the ones who are fully developed psychically, but not counterbalanced intellectually, have been allowed to exercise their powers unlimited for the benefit of the priests who believe material gain is a better prize than spiritual attainments.”66 This evil priesthood persecuted and tortured the good Atlanteans, labeling them heretics. Some escaped before the final destruction, and so their tradition was preserved in the Puranas and by the Egyptians, Mexicans, and Persians.67
Helio-Arkan now gives his guest a vision of Atlantis arisen as a future Utopia, in which our lives will be our religion and cruelty the only sin. The sun will provide the power; machines will do all the work. First, however, there is a war to be won over the so-called Aryans, whose qualities Vigers, or her source, tabulates as follows:
| Characteristics of Atlanteans | Characteristics of So-Called Aryans |
| 1. Magnetic power projection | 1. Dominating power lust |
| 2. Positive courage in achieving a sane objective | 2. Sadistic brutality arising from loss-of-power fear |
| 3. Use of so-called supernatural powers | 3. Fear of so-called supernatural powers |
| 4. Power of individual action | 4. Innate desire for regimentation |
| 5. Power of leadership in each individual | 5. Lack of individual initiative |
| 6. Sharply discriminating intellect | 6. Easily influenced by a flow of words |
The book ends on what I suppose was intended as an optimistic and patriotic note, though it reads now as a manifesto for genocide:
The Atlantean race type, the highest psychic development, is in every way, physical, mental, spiritual, superior to the so-called “Aryan” sub-race type, and is destined to establish Atlantean rule throughout the world, beginning in the isles of Britain; the so-called “Aryans” being eliminated by psycho-cetric [sic] powers known only to the Atlanteans.68
The name of Daphne Vigers’s informant, Helio-Arkan, is suspiciously like Helio-Arcanophus, who has been sending messages since 1955 through the mediumship of Anthony Neate. Mr. Neate was already practicing psychometry but was unaware of Daphne Vigers’s obscure work when the voice of Helio-Arcanophus came to him.69 Since then Neate and “H-A” have been a fixture of the British New Age scene with lectures, workshops, retreats, and a healing center. Here we will concentrate on Atlantis Past, and to Come (1959), an early booklet produced by Neate’s group of “Atlanteans,” into which Helio-Arcanophus packed his prehistoric scenario.
The first inhabited landmass, he tells us, was Mu or the Motherland, called “Lemuria” in the nineteenth century. It stretched from the Mideast to China and much of the Pacific Ocean and flourished for thousands of years, leaving remains in South Asia to this day. China, Tibet, predynastic Egypt, and Easter Island were all “Mu-an” lands. Then the axis of the earth tilted, with reversion of the poles and equator, and the first Ice Age began.70
Shortly before the destruction of Mu, where a large gap had arisen between evolved and bestial human types, some more highly evolved spirits from Venus incarnated and made their way to a new continent of Atlantis. At first this was a cold and damp region; then another planet passed close to the earth and upset its orbital balance, leaving Atlantis warm and sunny. It became a Garden of Eden, a home to monotheistic sun-worshippers. The winged disk was their symbol, referring to the priests’ ability of astral projection. The high priest was also the ruler of the state, but not as our priesthood is, for the Atlantean clergy was selected under occult guidance. There was no army. The capital city, in the Central Zone, was called Chalidocean, and there, besides the government, were art galleries and colleges of science and occultism.71
In Atlantean society no one lived in want. The diet included fish and fowl, but no red meat. Messages were sent telepathically, and many of the priests could levitate. Tarsias, horselike animals, were used for riding. The houses were built with the help of sonic gongs, so that huge stone blocks could be raised without machinery or human effort. All the power came from the sun. Lions were kept as pets, for felines are good for psychic work and “protection against the lower astral.” When a person died, the body was “disintegrated by the occultist priests by the use of certain cosmic forces.”72
Helio-Arcanophus was the ruler of Atlantis from the year 1134 after the beginning of Atlantean civilization, which began around 14,697 BCE. His people were a fair race, many with black hair and violet eyes. Evolved spirits from other planets (Venus, Uranus) were drawn to incarnate there. Women were equal in status to men. Children were judged at the age of three for their future professions. The main fault of the Atlanteans was that they were too philosophical and unworldly. When immigrants came from less evolved lands they became interested in the Atlanteans’ psychic powers and learned occult secrets. They conjured evil spirits from the lower astral and did terrible things. Black magic spread, and the people became debauched.73
Then Lucifer, brightest of the planets, moved nearer the earth. There was general panic, and small bands of the good people left. Lucifer, now known as Luna, was captured by the earth’s gravitational field. The earth’s axis tilted, putting the poles where the equator had been, and lands sank while others rose. Atlantean civilization had lasted about 9,840 years “in today’s years: they were shorter before the capture of the Moon.”74 The deva of Lucifer now has control of the earth.
Before the fateful day, though, the high priest “called together all the powers which were used by the Priests of Righteousness on the Atlantean Occult Vibration. By the use of a certain Ritual, he concealed and sealed these rays so that none could call upon them until the time came when there would be people on a similar evolutionary vibration as the Sealer. The key to this Seal he placed in a certain country in the world—the land you call England. Its symbol is the sword of St. Michael, or the Excalibur of Arthur, and its withdrawal signifies the birth of the new Atlantean race.”75
Helio-Arcanophus concludes with a prophecy. He says that the planet Uranus will soon leave its orbit and restore the axis of the earth to where it was in Atlantean times. The seasons will go haywire, volcanoes and earthquakes will rend the world, and Atlantis will rise again. It will be up to the survivors to make a fresh start there, once the influence of Lucifer is removed and Michael resumes his position as ruling deva.76
When one compares the details of Helio-Arcanophus’s account with those of Helio-Arkan, there are several coincidences, such as the communicator’s name and status, the friendly lions, the winged disc, solar power, the levitation of stones, the white-skinned and dark-eyed race, the influx of black magicians, and the special destiny of Britain as heir to Atlantis. Mr. Neate claims to have been the first person to channel the High Priest Helio-Arcanophus, but now simply calls him (or it) a “source of higher consciousness.”77 This may reflect a weariness, even on the part of believers, with high-flown claims, and a more philosophical attitude on the part of channelers in general. A couple of other points stand out. The date that Helio-Arcanophus gives for Atlantis’s destruction, 4,857 BCE, is unique in the literature and unusually recent (discounting the Thera hypothesis and the counting of Plato’s 9,000 years as months). Unusual, too, is the cause given for the catastrophe: the capture of the moon. It is the leitmotif of Hans Hörbiger’s Welteislehre, which Hans Schindler Bellamy and Denis Saurat were promoting at this very time (see chapter 1). Moreover, the radical tilting of the earth’s axis was what Imanuel Velikovsky had claimed in Worlds in Collision (1950), as a result of Venus and Mars passing close to the earth. Let us say at least that such notions were in the air in the 1950s. Astronomers, geologists, and paleoclimatologists would have severe objections to make to them, but Neate’s group is unswayed: the capture of the moon and the toppling of the earth were still part of their teaching in 2008.78
THE RETURN OF STAINTON MOSES
There must have been many back-parlor channelers between the wars, each attracting a handful of believers. One of these published some pamphlets and booklets between 1946 and 1954 under the imprint of the Golden Triangle Fellowship. Showing no influence whatever from Theosophy or the magical tradition, it connects itself to the Spiritualist movement of the previous century.
The Leader today who has traveled up through the ages, who has taught in many lands, felt the Guiding Hand in 1921 and obeyed the Call. Teachers from Jupiter came to instruct always following the plan of the Guiding Hand. Through the early stages many gifts were offered and calmly accepted.
The great doors of the Spirit world were first opened by Imperator, our King in Them [name of the holy city in Atlantis], Mancept. The fine teachings he brought by the hand of Stainton Moses, “Spirit Teachings” in 1870 is a book of true wisdom and brought the first knowledge of the Spirit world into the opening door which has led to the foundation of the Fellowship today.79
William Stainton Moses (1839–1892) was an ordained clergyman and schoolmaster who published his spirit communications under the pseudonym of M. A., Oxon. His method was automatic writing, which he could do while thinking and even talking of something else. His chief control, first contacted in 1873, signed itself as Imperator +. Moses was well connected socially and friendly with the early London Theosophists, but Blavatsky’s hostility to Spiritualism and Christianity alienated him. His Spirit Teachings are not concerned with prehistory, but with a broadly Christian spiritualist philosophy.80
According to “Diana,” founder of the fellowship, the Guiding Hand had by 1954 given well over 1,200 “little pictures of life.”81 What method was used by Mandasoran the Recorder is not told, but the description is an apt one for the scenes and anecdotes of Atlantis. At the start it is announced that the “great message” to be communicated is reincarnation (contrarily to the Spiritualist wing to which Stainton Moses belonged), and that the Atlanteans had atomic energy for peaceful use, airplanes, wireless, and other “gifts from the mechanical country of Mars.”82
The narrator goes in spirit to the Holy City of Them in the province of Eclata (which is the Golden Triangle), and there to the Palace of Mancept, “known to you today as Imperator.” Mancept himself is seven feet tall, dressed in a long cream-colored robe with an embroidered robe of purple over it, and gold sandals. He has a noble face with a high forehead, blue eyes, and gold shoulder-length hair and beard. His queen is Estarnyamo, an Egyptian.83 We are shown the Hall of Agriculture, the schools, and the Colony of the Manus. These Manus were trained and sent out to South America, Egypt, and Tibet, where their handiwork can still be seen. “You don’t know,” says the guide in an aside, “that the Master Jesus traveled to India, Egypt, and Tibet between the ages of 12 and 30.” The tour continues around facilities for healing, gardens, and temples, in which reverence is paid to the sun as symbol of the Tao, the divine source of life.84 Temple maidens sing hymns to the rising sun, and at sunset a single male server sends out a farewell. The Temple of Tao has a domed roof, reflecting the rays from the planets, and a Bowl of the Luos upheld on the wings of three figures, filled with fluid supplied from spirit. Much description of its worship, festivals, and the high morality of the people follows.
More unusually, we learn that the Jews are Atlanteans who still carry their badge of the double triangle.85 Jesus, whose real name was Suyamo, was sent from the Dhuman Spheres to carry the first teaching to Earth, and he has never ceased through the ages. Many of those who once lived in Them are coming into the fellowship. Also, “John Wesley took the early training and began his writing in 1922. . . . With John’s wise writing was next added music coupled with inspired lyrics. John Keeble [sic] gave some beautiful songs later to be joined by Mendelssohn.”86 The fellowship acquired a duplicator in 1936 and was able to start a magazine, which continued through the war. It now has 84 Triangles with three flowers to each, many of them overseas.87
As always, this summary may misrepresent the depth, breadth, and earnestness of the original, for it is always a temptation to choose the most striking or absurd incidents, as well as the most telling ones that give clues about their sources. When one reads about a Manu called Merrifumanptah from the Temple of Ptysis,88 one wonders who is teasing whom. Worse, from the last quotation I suspect that members of the Golden Triangle Fellowship believed themselves to be reincarnations of noted figures from the past. There was John Wesley, the founder of Methodism; John Keble, whose ritualistic Oxford Movement was Methodism’s polar opposite; and the composer Felix Mendelssohn. One shudders to think of the poetry and music that now passed under their names.
Mandasoran the Recorder, whoever he or she was, is of a piece with Randall-Stevens, Daphne Vigers, and Anthony Neate. Like Stainton Moses, all four were chosen, more or less to their own surprise, as vehicles for a named entity, and—which is the sticking point—they all believed what they were told. Their communications about Atlantis differed from those of the Theosophists, sometimes radically. Certainly there is a Leadbeateresque feel to much of the scenery, to say nothing of the clichés of Atlantean fiction—the sun temples, the white-robed sages, the high technology. But Randall-Stevens’s Satan-figure, Vigers’s evil Aryans, or Neate’s Lucifer-moon plainly contradict the Theosophical or Anthroposophical system. Someone or something, whether internal or external to the channel, was making a deliberate effort to put across a certain version of prehistory, and one can only wonder why.
Olive Pixley and Paul Brunton, who was briefly mentioned above, are of an entirely different type. They were not so much passive receivers as active users of their psychic powers, stimulated by the spirit of place. But this does not eliminate contamination from their own fund of knowledge and belief, nor in Pixley’s case from benevolent editing by Foster Forbes. Brunton was a Theosophist, in fact if not in name, before he went to Egypt. What he saw there in the inner clarity of meditation was probably what he expected to see, only in more fascinating detail.
THE SKY PEOPLE AND THE AVALONIANS
A year before Olive Pixley saw a ritual procession winding up Glastonbury Tor, the first intimations of the “Somerset Zodiac” saw the light. The seer responsible for these was Katharine Maltwood (1878–1961), a sculptor and painter in the Symbolist style.89 In 1929 she was drawing a map of the Glastonbury area for the Everyman edition of The High History of the Holy Grail, a translation of a medieval French romance.90 She superimposed the legendary locations (Isle of the Elephants, Hermitage of the Fountain, etc.) on a modern map and, as a hint, added two intersecting circles six miles in diameter marked “equator” and “ecliptic,” together with a shaded figure marked “Leo” that somewhat resembles a lion. The edition gave no explanation of this curious detail. Maltwood later wrote: “I shall never forget my utter amazement when the truth dawned on me that the outline of a lion was drawn by the curves of the Cary river below the old capital town of Somerset. So that was the origin of the legendary lion that I had been questing! A nature effigy and a god of sunworshippers! Leo of the Zodiac. . . . Obviously, if the lion was a nature effigy then the dragon, griffon and the giants and so on, must be likewise; perhaps this was the most thrilling moment of my discovery.”91
It remained for Maltwood’s own Guide to Glastonbury’s Temple of the Stars to show how the hedges, ditches, fields, and paths outlined Orion, Phoenix, and the signs of the zodiac, though with strange variants from the modern version.92 Having ample financial means through her husband, John (managing director of Oxo, Ltd.), she commissioned aerial photographs to confirm her intuitions.
Skeptics may regard the Glastonbury Zodiac as a kind of Rorschach blot, like the giant faces seen in the Externsteine (see chapter 5) or the Lemurians in Richard Shaver’s agates (see chapter 10). They may doubt, for example, that prehistoric landscape artists would have outlined Virgo as a frumpy figure in a crinoline, wielding a broom or fan; they are rightly suspicious of the excuses made for the strange variants and missing constellations.93 But rational objections cannot impair the power of an archetype. Maltwood’s revelation was perfectly attuned to the loosely connected group already mentioned, which shared a mystical enthusiasm for Glastonbury, the Grail, and the legendary Avalon, and believed that these marked a special destiny for Britain.94 Besides Dion Fortune’s circle, they included the architect Frederick Bligh Bond, who discovered through automatic writing the lost chapels at Glastonbury Abbey (and was promptly sacked by the church commissioners).
Another Avalonian was Major Wellesley Tudor Pole (1884–1968), who had been involved with spiritualism and the Bah’ai World Faith before being drawn to Glastonbury as the spiritual center of Britain. When World War II broke out, he persuaded the BBC to institute a “silent minute” every evening after Big Ben struck at 9:00 p.m., in which all listeners would focus their thoughts or prayers. There is a legend that a German officer, under interrogation, admitted that the Nazis suspected some secret weapon connected with the chimes of Big Ben but never found out what it was.95 In 1959 Tudor Pole founded the Chalice Well Trust to preserve the sacred sites of Glastonbury, under whose Chalice Hill he and many others believed that Joseph of Arimathea had buried the cup used at Jesus’s Last Supper. Soon afterward he wrote:
I believe that the Cup or Chalice is destined to become the symbol for the new age now dawning, and it is my hope that Chalice Well may once more fulfil the inspiring mission of acting as a gateway through which revelation for coming times may flow, radiating from there across Britain and the world.
It is my conviction that the people of our island will be given the opportunity once more to lead humanity out of the present darkness into the Light.96
This statement appeared in an afterword to Men Among Mankind (1962) by Brinsley le Poer Trench (1911–1995). The same book carries a foreword by Leslie Otley, who was the secretary of the Tyneside UFO Society and editor of its journal, Orbit, and the two contributions neatly frame Trench’s interests. In between is a curious and sometimes breathless mixture of historical speculation, British patriotism, Avalonian ideals, and Atlantean lore.
Trench was a friend of Desmond Leslie (see chapter 10), who collaborated on the first book by the UFO contactee George Adamski. Between them they launched the “alien intervention” or “ancient astronaut” theory of human prehistory. Trench published his version in 1960 as The Sky People, in the same year as Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwel’s Le Matin des magiciens (see chapter 2) and eight years before Eric von Däniken’s Erinnerungen an die Zukunft (Chariots of the Gods?). Trench later inherited the Irish title of Eighth Earl of Clancarty, which gave him a seat in the House of Lords. Careless of mockery, he urged his peers to a serious consideration of the UFO phenomenon and succeeded in 1979 with a full-scale debate that was recorded verbatim in the parliamentary proceedings.97
Here, extracted from Men Among Mankind, is Trench’s historic scenario in its main outlines: The Atlanteans were a highly developed people, possessing spaceships, communicating with other planets, and commanding forces even more destructive than nuclear weapons. It is said that between about 30,000 and 25,000 BCE there was a terrible conflict among them (75–76),*6 ending with a tremendous seismic upheaval of the earth’s surface and the destruction of most of Atlantis. A second cataclysmic period began around 13,000 BCE when Luna, the third planet outward from the sun, approached the earth. This caused the uplifting of the great mountain ranges and further catastrophic events lasting until 9500 BCE, when Luna was finally captured and the earth settled into its present form. At that time the remaining island of Poseid was destroyed, and the length of the year increased from 360 days to its present value (29–30). However, “One part of Atlantis had not gone under. The lands now known as the British Isles—the Fortunate Isles—remained high and dry, and it was from there that the world was once more to receive civilization”(31).
Britain was sacred even in Atlantean times. It was there that the Glastonbury Zodiac was created as a landmark for the Sky People, who have always had a concern for the human race and a role in its evolution, education, and care. There is no suggestion of their being aliens, but rather Atlanteans who had left before the catastrophe of 25,000 BCE and taken refuge on other planets, where they fared better than their fellows left on earth (66). Thereafter they were regular visitors and the originals of many myths of gods and demigods. After the event of 9564 BCE, which reduced the human race to a Stone Age struggle for mere survival, they stopped coming openly to earth (53). About 4,000 years later, stirred by ancestral memories of Atlantis, they returned to see if any humans were fit to receive their assistance in restarting civilization. As we can guess, they spied the Glastonbury Zodiac and knew that Britain was the place to start (58–59). They remained until civilization was set on a safe path of development, then around 4700 BCE they gradually withdrew, leaving the priesthood to take on its role as lawgivers and instructors (79).
In the fifth millennium BCE, Britain was still the chief center of initiatic knowledge. Egyptian priests had journeyed there to learn its secrets at a time when the seas were 400 feet lower and England was joined to the continent of Europe (98). Their civilization, too, was developed with the help of the Sky People, who left them the Great Pyramid as a parting gift about 3434 BCE (105). The other pyramids were built later in imitation of it, much as the Egyptologists maintain, but the Sphinx is much earlier. It originally had a female face and probably dates from the Age of Virgo around 15,000 BCE (107).
Besides acknowledging Blavatsky and Hörbiger by name, Trench often refers to Freemasonry and uses its coded language. Perhaps there was a group of British Freemasons who shared these ideas and dated the birth of their Craft not just to Solomon’s Temple but to prehistoric times. Trench also hints at a cult of the Archangel Michael, who figured in Tudor Pole’s mythology and plays a vital role in Trithemius’s system of time cycles (see chapter 11).
“St Michael is a most interesting figure,” remarks John Michell (1933–2009) in his first book, The Flying Saucer Vision (1967), and continues:
He is the leader of the host of angels who received Enoch on his journey to the heaven and told him of the ‘word’ by which the universe was created. It is he who Daniel says will appear at that time of chaos preceding the Millenium. In Christian hagiology Michael seems to be the descendent of some former revered being, associated with high places and with the killing of a dragon. The number of churches dedicated to St Michael which stand on hilltops and pre-Christian mounds is remarkable. Evidently all their sites were once associated with the memory of a being from the sky and of the dragon disc.98
Michell’s book, too, belongs to the ancient astronaut genre, though it is a highly sophisticated example, drawing on Jungian archetypal psychology as well as on an encyclopedic knowledge of “Fortean” or anomalous phenomena. Michell mentions the many locations that have been suggested for Atlantis and allows that there may have been a mid-Atlantic continent engulfed by the sea. But that is of little moment to him. “It was not from some lost continent that civilization reached America and elsewhere, but from somewhere outside the earth, the land from which Quetzalcoatl, travelling on the serpent raft or flying disc, brought the vision of the gods to men.”99
Near the end of the book, Michell makes the connection between high hills, places dedicated to St. Michael, and the gods from space. One of the most famous is the ruined tower of a former St. Michael’s Church on the top of Glastonbury Tor. Katharine Maltwood’s vision of the Glastonbury Zodiac is mentioned approvingly, but it was in Michell’s next and more famous book, The View over Atlantis (1969), that this theme came to fruition. Atlantis barely appears beyond the title, but we would classify the book as one of those that place the lost land “everywhere.” It is an accumulation of evidence for a prehistoric worldwide civilization whose accomplishments included the accurate measurement of the earth’s dimensions and its distance from the sun and the moon; the establishment of a system of measures based on these; the knowledge of subterranean energies that could be channeled, or that moved, in straight lines across the landscape, perhaps supporting flight and moving megaliths; and the persistence of these traditions in megalithic and Gothic architecture, Chinese geomantic science, and Greek sacred writings, especially the New Testament. Most influential was Michell’s revival of Alfred Watkins’s work on the “old straight track” and the resultant “ley lines,” still detectable in ancient trackways and by connecting the dots of prehistoric monuments (stones, tumps, barrows, dolmens) and churches dedicated to St. Michael.
The View over Atlantis created a new generation of Avalonians. In the 1970s it sent them traipsing around the English countryside, Ordnance Survey maps in hand, looking for alignments and communing with the spirits of place and of the past. When the energy faded from that activity, it was renewed by the phenomenon of crop circles. Southwestern England was again the main theater, and Michell again a prominent commentator. He kept the Avalonian spirit alive with such works as New Light on the Ancient Mystery of Glastonbury (1990) and The Measure of Albion (with Robin Heath, 2004), ever more certain that an ancient canon of knowledge was reemerging in our time. “The instrument of all human enlightenment is an educated mind illuminated by revelation,”100 he had written on the first page of The View over Atlantis, and in all humility he admitted to being a case in point. His own revelation came in the difficult form of a numerical and geometrical canon, without history and without occult baggage, but with the promise that the problems besetting us would solve themselves if we were again to order our lives according to it.101 Such a thing is hardly imaginable in the present state of the world, but for those responsive to his work, Michell brought to life a tradition infused in the very soil and stones of Britain by ancestors, who might as well be called Atlanteans as anything else.