NINE

Channeling in the New World

WE HAVE ALREADY met a number of people who attribute their information on prehistoric times to some source outside themselves. Before the term channeling was coined, there was the classic example of Alice Bailey taking dictation from “The Tibetan.” By her own admission, this was different from someone like Leadbeater or Steiner, who developed a capacity to read the Akashic Records; or from Swedenborg, who was shown the heavens but reported on them in his own words. Channeling, in the broadest sense, includes many different methods and at least two clear divisions: conscious and trance. The first type, conscious channeling, includes methods like automatic writing, typing, drawing, and using an Ouija board. It also includes speaking under direct inspiration, either immediately or after an inner voice has spoken. Some channels are also psychically gifted, in which case the boundaries with clairvoyance and visionary experience become very hazy.

In the second type, trance channeling, the entranced, hypnotized, or sleeping channel is not conscious of what he or she is saying and requires an amanuensis or recording device to capture it. On returning to normal consciousness, the channel usually does not know what has come through him or her. But the possibility of interference from the person’s subconscious mind or telepathic influences from others present complicates the situation. Beyond this, and setting aside the whole question of fraud or self-deception, there is the vexed question of how the communicating entities, who may claim to be angels, Atlanteans, Venusians, and so on, can do so in the vernacular. Perhaps they borrow the channel’s linguistic equipment, but that also opens the door to contamination. In short, there is no absolutely pure, egoless channel. That is why skeptics can make a good case that the phenomenon is phony from beginning to end, and even sympathetic critics reduce it to the channel’s subconscious mind.

Evaluating channeled material can be a delicate matter, for one person’s channeling is another person’s scripture. On the one hand are modern works that define the genre, such as Jakob Lorber’s Great Gospel of John, Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon, John Ballou Newbrough’s Oahspe, the anonymously channeled Urantia Book, Jane Roberts’s Seth Material, and Helen Schuchman’s Course in Miracles. On the other are sacred books, notably the Bhagavad-Gita (purporting to be the words of Krishna), the Mosaic Law (words of Yahweh), the Asclepius (words of Hermes Trismegistus), the Chaldean Oracles (attributed to Zoroaster), the Book of Revelation (channeled by John the Divine), and, last but not least, the Quran (words of Allah, via Muhammad). All these came through men or women who sincerely believed themselves to be mouthpieces for an exterior and superior entity; and none of them agrees with any of the others. Traditionalists will say, “By their fruits ye shall know them,” to which the cynic in me observes that at least the first group have not yet caused any inquisitions, persecutions, or wars of religion.

Leaving others to argue their respective and rival claims, I do notice that in modern times, channeling has become a specialty of the English-speaking world, and more particularly of the United States. France and Germany have a history of mesmeric mediumship and Christian mystics whose effusions border on channeling, and France was once a hotbed of Spiritualism, but it is rare to find a straightforward modern case there. The only one that comes to mind is Oskar Schlag, channel for Atman, whose séances in the 1930s were attended by Carl Jung.1 The French and Germans that we have met in previous chapters tend either to use clairvoyance of some kind (e.g., Guido von List’s ancestral memory, Saint-Yves d’Alveydre’s astral travel), or to speak ex cathedra without revealing their sources and methods (e.g., Fabre d’Olivet, Peryt Shou). The obvious reason for this is the openness of America to new religious movements of every kind. It was no chance that Mormonism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, Adventism, Christian Science, and New Thought all began there before spreading worldwide. If for a moment we accept the channels’ belief that they have been chosen to give a message to the world, perhaps their controllers are sensible to use English. But we are still left with the problem that supposedly wise, even omniscient entities cannot agree with one another. They all go on about the “Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man,” the God Within, and the empowerment of the individual, but the devil is in the details. Our investigation of what the channels have to say about human origins, lost lands and races, cataclysms, and prehistoric high civilizations reveals a glaring lack of consensus. It also uncovers some of the entangled roots that feed these exotic growths.

We will begin in that fertile period of the 1880s, in which Spiritualism, hitherto the dominant alternative religion, felt its foundations sapped by Theosophy and occultism.

OAHSPE: A KOSMON BIBLE

This famous work was published in 1882.2 There is no mystery about its origin, which was explained the following year in a letter to the Spiritualist journal The Banner of Light. John Ballou Newbrough (1828–1891) was a dentist in New York City, an educated man, who gives a clear and self-aware account of his experience:

Briefly, then, Oahspe was mechanically written through my hands by some other intelligence than my own. Many spiritualists are acquainted with this automatic movement of the hands, independent of one’s volition. There are thousands and thousands of persons who have this quality. It can also be educated, or rather, the susceptibility to external power can be increased. In my own case I discovered, many years ago, in sitting in circles to obtain spiritual manifestations, that my hands could not lie on the table without flying off into these “tantrums.” Often they would write messages, left or right, backward or forward, nor could I control them in any other way than by withdrawing from the table. Sometimes the power thus baffled would attack my tongue, or my eyes, or my ears, and I talked and saw and heard differently from my normal state.3

Like Emanuel Swedenborg, who was peremptorily ordered to “Eat less food!” before the heavenly arcana were opened to him, Newbrough made a complete reform of his habits. He gave up all stimulants, became a vegan, rose early, bathed in cold water, and after six years of this regime had lost seventy pounds.

Then a new condition of control came upon my hands; instead of the angels holding my hands as formerly, they held their hands over my head (and they were clothed with sufficient materiality for me to see them) and a light fell upon my hands as they lay on the table. In the meantime I had attained to hear audible angel voices near me. I was directed to get a typewriter, which writes by keys, like a piano. This I did, and I applied myself industriously to learn it, but with only indifferent success.

It took him two more years to master the typewriter. Then in 1880–1881, over fifty weeks of daily dictation (not affecting his dental practice), the Oahspe book came through. Newbrough was forbidden to read any of it until it was finished. Was he surprised to discover that he had written hundreds of pages in the following vein?

Hear My voice, O ye H’monkensoughts, of millions of years standing, and managers of corporeal worlds! I have proclaimed the uz and hiss of the red star in her pride and glory. Send word abroad in the high way of Plumf’goe to the great high Gods, Miantaf in the etherean vortices of Bain, and to Rome and to Nesh’outoza and Du’ji.4

No one, to my knowledge, has made an objective study of Oahspe, though it has sold consistently and even given rise to a small cult, the Faithists.5 The first books (it is divided into “books,” like the Bible) are mostly in an exultant tone as they tell of precosmic happenings among the gods and angelic hosts. There is much coming and going in “ships of fire,” glorious pageants that seem less like anything in Western literature than like Hindu theophanies, with their crores of gods and goddesses, multicolored radiances, heavenly orchestras of gandharvas, and so on. Whatever generated this material had a powerful imagination and an incapacity for boredom. Some chapters are filled with names and numbers that make the “ship catalog” of Homer’s Iliad seem succinct.

In Oahspe’s cosmogony, as in Lurianic Kabbalah, there have been multiple creations, some of them failures. In conformity with Spiritualism, the purpose of life on earth is to generate mortal beings worthy of progressing to the heavenly spheres, and at each epoch the god or goddess in charge of the earth tallies up the “harvest of souls.” The universe is run like a bureaucracy, with hierarchies of administrators and incessant council meetings. God even wields a gavel to call them to order!6 Beneath the gods are orders of spirits, good and evil, who fasten onto mortals. The whole system is coherent according to its own rules, and this coherence extends to its scientific theories that deny gravity and magnetism in favor of “vortices.”

Among the gems worth extracting from the dross is this verse, rightly singled out in the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics:

And Jehovih caused the earth, and the family of the sun to travel in an orbit, the circuit of which requireth of them four million seven hundred thousand years. And he placed in the line of the orbit, at distances of three thousand years, etherean lights, the which places, as the earth passeth through, angels from the second heaven come into its corporeal presence. As Embassadors they come, in companies of hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands, and these are called the etherean hosts of the Most High.7

We can make two associations, one scientific, the other not, that would not have occurred to earlier readers. That the sun has its own orbit accords with the later discovery of its revolution, and consequently that of the solar system, around the galactic center. Secondly, those familiar with the “alien intervention” or “ancient astronaut” theory will recall that in the books of Zecharia Sitchin, the Twelfth Planet comes close to Earth every 3,600 years, and thereupon the Nefilim descend to intervene in human affairs.8 These are the sort of coincidences that occur in studying channeled works, and I have no idea of how significant they are.

Other details that correlate with the lingua franca of Atlantology are a theory of races, less color-based than most of those we have seen. Oahspe is closer to the present-day theory that there have been multiple species of hominids, of which one eventually became dominant.9 There is, naturally, an Atlantis episode, but it is placed on an island occupying most of the western Pacific, called Pan or Whaga. The map supplied does not resemble Leadbeater’s and Scott-Elliot’s Lemuria, but rather anticipates Churchward’s Mu. Oahspe tells us little about the ways of the Whagans for good or ill, only that they had become degenerate.

Now it had come to pass on earth that the time of a generation of mortals had risen from twelve years to eighty years. And there were many who lived to be three hundred years old. And they had become very large; twice the size of men of this day. But they were without judgment and of little sense. Hardly knew they their own species. And they mingled together, relatives as well as others; so that idiocy and disease were the general fate of the tribes of men; and they were large and strong and prolific.10

From the point of view of the celestial bureaucracy, there was only one solution. Like Zeus in Plato’s story, Jehovih called a council of the gods and lodged his complaint before them.

How can ye bequeath the administration of the earth and her heaven to the earth-born, till she is made suitable as a gift from My hand? Now hear Me, O My sons and daughters: Five great divisions [continents] of the earth have I made, and they have all been inhabited over and tilled by mortals. Yea, on all the divisions of the earth have there been great cities and nations, and men and women of great learning. And as oft as they are raised up in light, so are they again cast down in darkness, because of the great desire of the spirits of the dead to return back to the earth. These druj [spirits uninterested in progress, who stay on earth] return to mortals and fasten upon them as fetals [unborn children?] or as familiars, and inspire them to evil. Go now to the earth, O My beloved, and find the division of the earth where most of these druj congregate, for I will uproot their stronghold; I will break them from their haunts and they shall no longer carry My people down to destruction.

And now the council deliberated, and after a while caused the records of the earth and her atmospherea to be examined, and they discovered that the heaven of the land of Whaga (Pan) was beyond redemption because of the great numbers of the spirits of the cannibals and of the multitude of fetals. It was as if a disease in the flesh be healed over externally, leaving the root of the disease within. So was Whaga and her heaven; the redemption of the cycles remained not with her, but evil broke out forever in a new way.

So Jehovih said: Now will I prune the earth and her heaven. Behold, the division of Whaga shall be hewn off and cast beneath the waters of the ocean. Her heaven shall be no longer tenable by the spirits of destruction, for I will rend the foundation thereof and scatter them in the winds of heaven. Go ye, therefore, down to the earth and provide nets and vanchas [not defined] for receiving the spirits of darkness, and for receiving the spirits of mortals who shall perish in the waters. And provide ye a place in My exalted heavens suitable for them; and ye shall wall them about in heaven that they cannot escape, but that they may be weaned from evil. And when ye are come to the earth and its heavens, acquaint My God and his Lords with My decree. And say to them: Thus saith Jehovih: Behold, behold, I will sink the land of Whaga beneath the waters of the ocean, and her heaven will I carry away to a place in My firmament, where she shall no longer engulf My people in darkness. And Jehovih saith: Go thou, O God of heaven, and thou, O Lord of Whaga, down to My chosen, the I’hins [the superior race], and say to them: Thus saith the Great Spirit: Behold, behold, I will sink the lands of the earth beneath the ocean, because of the evil of the spirits of darkness. Hear Me, O My chosen, and heed My commandments: Fall to, all hands, and build ships in all places, even in the valleys and on the mountains, and let My faithful gather together within the ships, for My hand is surely stretched over the earth.11

The heavy work was entrusted to Aph, son of Jehovih. He assembled a fleet of 250,000 etherean fire-ships in a line from Chinvat (near the moon) down to Earth. Then “every ship was contracted ten thousand fold, which was the force required to break the crust of the earth and sink a continent.”12 Beforehand he had constructed a special tube to allow the 24,400 million souls thus released to rise to the etherean regions. With a humanitarian concern that I have seen nowhere else in the literature, care was taken that women with babies who died in the cataclysm should be reunited and given a new home.13 For all that the book borrows from the Old Testament, Oahspe’s gods are touchingly benevolent: Universalists, perhaps, if not Unitarians. For example, on another occasion evil spirits, fairies living in caves and waterfalls, and “lusters” that haunt battlefields and old castles were troubling the earth, and it needed to be purged of them. The solution was to ship them off to another planet, where they could have their own kingdom and god and be educated to become better cosmic citizens.14

Two years before the cataclysm, angels had warned the few “faithists” of Pan and told them to build boats. This was not just Noah’s Ark: 12,420 escaped. Some landed in Ja-pan (the only part of Pan remaining), others on the other continents, from which they peopled the world.

The rest of this fascinating book does not concern us, except for a single detail occurring much later, where it is said, “Every portion of the earth hath been to the east, to the west, to the north and to the south. Which is proven in the rocks, and boulders, and mountains of the earth.”15 This seems to refer to the wandering of the poles, or alternatively to the changing angle of the axis of rotation, which several of our authors have proposed as agents of epochal change. We will hear William Colville’s “inspirational lecture” touch on it, but before continuing with our theme, a word needs to be said about the channeled work that most resembles Oahspe: The Urantia Book.16

The origins of Urantia are less clear-cut, but the source was probably a trance medium called William Custer Kellogg, whose information, given out in the 1920s, was edited for publication by William Sadler, a physician.17 It was not published until 1955, but it belongs with the rash of channeled works from the period between the two world wars. The themes shared with our other sources include a celestial bureaucracy that oversees events throughout the universe; an explanation of the origins of humans and apes (from mutations in opposite directions) and of the differently colored races (here including green, indigo, and blue); the evolution of consciousness and language; Noah’s Flood (just a river overflow); the origins of Egyptian civilization and of the Nordic race (both very much played down). The Urantia Book has a strong contribution from early twentieth-century science and a 700-page biography of Jesus, but nothing about Atlantis, Lemuria, Hyperborea, Mu, or even Whaga.

PHYLOS THE TIBETAN

A year or two after Oahspe’s publication, a seventeen-year-old Californian, Frederick S. Oliver (1866–1899), found himself in a similar predicament to that of Dr. Newbrough. A mysterious preceptor began instructing him through “mental talks,” which in the course of a year became so overwhelming that he told his parents about them. Far from reacting as most parents would today, they formed a circle in which Oliver would repeat what his preceptor said to him. He also wrote it down, edited it under his preceptor’s guidance, and by 1886 had produced the manuscript that would be posthumously published as A Dweller on Two Planets, by “Phylos the Tibetan.”18 In his preface, Oliver wrote:

In these days of doubt, materialism, and even rank atheism, it requires all the courage I possess to assert, in clear unequivocal terms, that the following book, A Dweller on Two Planets, is absolute revelation; that I do not believe myself its Author—but that one of those mysterious persons, if my readers choose to so consider him, an adept of the arcane and occult in the universe, better understood from reading this book, is the Author. Such is the fact. The book was revealed to me, a boy, and a boy, too, whose parents were mistakenly lenient to such a degree that he was allowed to do as he chose in most things. Not lacking in inclination to study, but very lacking in will-power, continuity and energy, I gained little in educational triumphs, and was pointedly criticised by my teacher as “lackadaisical, even lazy.” Hence, when a little past seventeen years of age, “Phylos, the Esoterist,” took me actively in charge, designing to make me his instrument to the world, that profound adept showed what seems to me a rare faith, for I was without any solid education, as generally so considered, was minus any special religious trend, and for my sole commendation, had willingness, love of the remarkable, and an uncolored mind.19

Phylos’s story is set in 11,160 BCE (92) in a well-governed, socialistic society under an elected emperor. We presume that it is in the Atlantic Ocean, and later editions confirm this with maps. The architecture is stupendous, and we are assured that it was built without slave labor. Instead of the gold commonly lavished on the Atlantean cityscape, this one uses the wonderful metal aluminum, which is made out of clay by an advanced technical process (85). Atlantean technology uses the “Night-Side forces” of gravitation, the sun, and light (48). Public transport includes electroodic trains and airships for hire (50). There is wireless transmission of sound, images, and heat (66).*10

On the cultural front, higher education is open to all irrespective of race, color, or sex at the institution called the Great Xioquithlon (28). Criminals are cured through mesmerism, or in extreme cases by magnetic applications to phrenological points (98). The Atlanteans’ religion is “virtually Essenianism” (90), with an explicit division between exoteric and esoteric. There is a kind of nonidolatrous solar cult.

Lemuria is merely one of many colonies founded by the Atlanteans. Part of it remains as Australia, the rest having perished in the same cataclysm as Atlantis (84). The native Lemurians are an uncivilized, brutish folk (408). On the other hand there are civilizations contemporary with Atlantis called Suern and Necropan that lack high technology but possess superior occult powers. The Atlanteans would never dare attack them, because physical weaponry is no match for the thought-power of the Suernian adepts (107–8). Later Atlantis followed them in some respects but not in others: ”One by one the scholars found that those things which had always been possible only through mechanical contrivance were more easily accomplished by purely psychic means; they learned it was possible to divest themselves of the flesh, and in astral body go whither they would and appear, instant as the electric current, at any distance” (411–12). This led to a neglect of the technology that had sustained Atlantean civilization and to a widening rift between the “scholars” and the masses. Left without guidance, the latter degenerated into superstition and sacrifice of animals and eventually humans, along with every other vice (404). A Noah’s Ark story follows, in which one man is warned of the coming cataclysm, builds a ship, loads it with animals, and joins up with pockets of survivors whom he finds in other lands. The book ends with the usual warning as the author issues a final call to America, the new Atlantis: “Will it meet similar woe?” (417).

All through A Dweller on Two Planets are references to events such as the War of Secession, the discovery of Pompeii, even to Cornell University (notable at the time for coeducation). There is a strong sense of the American landscape and its geology, many quotations from the English poets, and a substratum of Spiritualist and Theosophical ideas. In accordance with these, the individual is a compound of physical, psychic, and spiritual elements, of which the “I Am” or ego is the highest (224). Evolution (89) and reincarnation (72) are taken for granted, and there is even mention of the Theosophical system of Rounds (349). A long section is set in the state between rebirths, called the Summerland (in Spiritualist terminology) or Devachan (in Theosophy). All this is enclosed within an esoteric Christianity whose principle is expressed as follows: “Will is the sole Way to esoteric, or occult Christian knowledge. Whosoever will, shall have Eternal Life. But the will to overcome must replace our will of desire, as the fresh air replaces the exhalations of our lung” (189).

The other planet of the title is Venus, which Phylos visits in his spiritual body. He goes there after induction into an esoteric society that lives inside Mount Shasta, which was about thirty miles southeast of the home of the Olivers in Yreka. This excerpt gives a flavor of the whole:

What secrets perchance are about us? We do not know as we lie there, our bodies resting, our souls filled with peace, nor do we know until many years are passed out through the back door of time that that tall basalt cliff conceals a doorway. We do not suspect this, nor that a long tunnel stretches away, far into the interior of majestic Shasta. Wholly unthought is it that there lie at the tunnel’s far end vast apartments, the home of a mystic brotherhood, whose occult arts hollowed that tunnel and mysterious dwelling: “Sach” the name is. Are you incredulous as to these things? Go there, or suffer yourself to be taken as I was, once! See, as I saw, not with the vision of flesh, the walls, polished as by jewelers, though excavated as by giants; floors carpeted with long, fleecy gray fabric that looked like fur, but was a mineral product; ledges intersected by the builders, and in their wonderful polish exhibiting veinings of gold, of silver, of green copper ores, and maculations of precious stones. [248]

I can accept Oliver’s account of how his channeling began, but the waters are muddied by the long interval between revelation in 1883–86 and publication in 1905. A Dweller on Two Planets is written in the heavy style of a didactic novel, reaching its nadir in a long romantic episode. This, together with all the topical references, suggests input from the more conscious levels of someone’s mind. The fact that at the time of writing, Frederick was surveying the boundaries of the mining claim of the Olivers,20 and that the first thing the hero of the novel does is to strike gold, is rather telling.

In 1899, the year of Oliver’s early death, the work was framed with an “Amanuensis’ Preface” and a “Note by the Author.” In the first, Oliver describes the manner of writing, which involved many drafts, rewritings, and rearrangements of the text. He assures us that the manuscript was finished in 1886, though he does admit that it was (afterward?) “thoroughly edited by a literary expert.” He is keen to establish priority in describing, as Atlantean technology, things as yet unknown such as X-rays and the application of electricity to the telescope, which by the time of publication had become fact. Oliver was apparently still in contact with Phylos, for the source appears at the end to announce that publication of the book has deliberately been delayed so that prophecy can be fulfilled, and to issue his warning to America, now at the end of the Sixth Cycle: “Stand from under! Get into the shelter of that Cross” (420). One wonders at Phylos’s popping up again after thirteen years’ silence. The book was finally published under the care of Oliver’s mother, and unless the manuscript is discovered, there is no telling what she may have done to it.

None of this matters much to our studies, but I have set out the facts because of the book’s influence on later channeled material. Four points to note are the importance of America at this point of cyclical history; Mount Shasta as its spiritual center; travel by spaceship; and inhabitants of Venus concerned with earthly affairs. While Lemuria is mentioned, there is no sign of the mysterious Theosophical teachings about ethereal androgynes, the Lunar Pitris, the division into sexes, and so on. Phylos’s Lemurians and Atlanteans, like his Venusians, resemble ourselves, only cleverer, or more brutish, as the case may be.

AN INSPIRATIONAL LECTURE

Another example from the same year is utterly different in style and content, though its manner of delivery—inspired speech—may have been similar to that of Frederick Oliver in his family circle. The channel here is William Juvenal Colville (1862–1917), who, early in his career as a prolific Spiritualist medium and writer, gave an inspirational lecture on The Lost Continent of Atlantis (1884). Of him Emma Harding Britten wrote: “Petite in person, and with no special educational or natural advantages, this young gentleman when on the rostrum and under control of his Spirit friends, is capable of dealing with, and mastering any point of science, metaphysics, or history, that may be spontaneously presented to him.”21 Emma herself was noted for this talent.

According to Colville, the end of Atlantis was due to a fact in the history of the earth, described as

a change in the polar axis, gradually brought about through long periods of time, and reaching a culmination at the close of every grand cycle of over 25,000 years. These vast periods of time, during which mighty changes and upheavals are outwrought, were computed by the Ancients with the same accuracy as that which attends your determining the solar year, which you know to be between 365 and 366 days. The grand year of the Pleiades occupies nearly 26,000 years of earthly time, during which the Sun accomplishes its journey through the twelve zodiacal signs. . . . During half the cycle, the south pole advances and the north pole retreats; during the other half, the south pole retreats and the north pole advances. At the present time the North Pole is slowly, but surely, creeping toward you, while the South Pole is retreating. The equator is travelling southward, and therefore, in northern latitudes the climate is steadily becoming more and more inhospitable. Certain scientists deny this.22

Colville, or his inspirer, says that there are strong reasons to believe Donnelly. He cites Allan Kardec, Volney, and Plato, and suggests that Bulwer-Lytton’s futuristic novel The Coming Race can be read as a picture of the past. Colville’s Atlanteans had aerial navigation, had outgrown warfare, and worshiped the All-Good. They knew no poverty or disease, but when the time came they were prepared to quit the earth and for their spirits to be transported to another planet. Their land sank somewhat over 11,000 years ago, whereupon some survivors came to Egypt.

Most of this is standard stuff, requiring only familiarity with half a dozen books such as Isis Unveiled. We could give Colville the benefit of the doubt and say that it came from his unconscious. The one originality is the matter of cycles. Obviously the 25,000- or 26,000-year cycle is the precessional one, and Colville gives a date of 11,000 years ago for its last culmination. He then calculates in epochs of 2,150 years, pointing out that we are at the dawn of the sixth epoch of the present cycle. Thereupon “the world will attain to a civilization matchless in its importance and results” and give to the northern hemisphere a power and supremacy unknown to the Ancients.23 (Compare Phylos and Oahspe’s prophecies.) However, Colville or his inspirer sees the precessional cycle as accompanied by a slippage of the earth’s surface relative to its axis of rotation. If this is what is meant, the equator cannot just “travel southward.” If it moves to the south on one side of the globe, it must move north on the opposite side. Likewise, the retreating and advancing of poles is a relative matter: if the North Pole is moving toward England, it will be moving away from Japan, and no generalizations can be made about the Northern Hemisphere. Eventually the movement would deliver Colville’s audience (whether English or American) to the North Pole itself, not a propitious place for civilization. In short, his inspirers have not thought the matter through, and neither has he, on allowing it to be printed! But whether inspired, invented, or regurgitated by the unconscious mind, his lecture points to an interest in astrological ages and their connection with geophysical cycles. It was also timely. The year 1884 was also the year in which the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor began its public work, which included readings on exactly this topic.

The early 1880s are a fascinating period for students of modern occultism. A number of different groups had looked forward to 1881 as marking the end of the world, or, after the event, as beginning a new era (see chapter 12). In 1882, Donnelly’s book on Atlantis drew the public mind to our subject as never before, and as though in response, information poured forth. Beside the examples of Oahspe and Phylos, these were the years of the Mahatma Letters (see chapter 3) and A. P. Sinnett’s books based on them. I would not be surprised if our next example also dated from this decade, though its publication was somewhat later.

RĬN-GÄ’-SĔ NŬD Sï-ï-KĔL’ZĒ

Meaning “links and cycles,” this is one of over 3,000 terms of prehistoric and nonhistoric nomenclature revealed by Alem Prolex, one of four Atlantean spirits who provided data for J. Ben Leslie’s book, Submerged Atlantis Restored, or Rĭn-gä’-sĕ nŭd Sï-ï-kĕl’zē. Links and Cycles: A Short Treatise on the Over-Spirit as the Cycle Supreme (1911). The spirits communicated through clairvoyant and clairaudient methods, giving two-thirds of this material at private séances through Mrs. C. C. Van-Duzee. The remainder was received directly by Mr. Leslie from a Phoenician spirit named Kū-lī-ú’thüs.24

Thus Leslie sets the scene for a book monstrous not so much in size (for our field contains even longer works, alas) as in the old sense of something unnatural or malformed. Its 805 pages, peppered with these outrageous terms, must have been a compositor’s nightmare. There are maps, alphabets, Atlantean musical notation, and, not least, photographs of the recipients. Mr. Leslie looks like a normal businessman, while the rather older Mrs. Van-Duzee (b. 1828) is typecast for the role of Mrs. Grundy, her sour expression framed in lace and bombazine. Some of her material came in long, unrhymed lines, like Walt Whitman at his worst. I cannot imagine how she dictated the 3,000 terms, peppered with diacritics, or how anyone could have taken the thing seriously.

The work begins in Swedenborgian style with a matter-of-fact account of the principles of the universe, the qualities of the planets, and the spirits’ progress thereon. Then it moves to Atlantis. We learn that 22,000 years ago, a large portion of it, called Lost Lontidri, was submerged. Then 3,125 years later there began a series of ten mighty convulsions that changed the land and sea, but the main portion of Atlantis lasted until it was washed away in the final convulsion, 16,500 years ago.25

The rest of the book is filled with information on every aspect of Atlantis. First come its ceremonies, plants, trees, animals, and birds, and there are few surprises there. Then come its alphabet and punctuation (suspiciously like English), its calendar and architecture. Here the spirits insert some information about Egypt, whose greatest glory was from 12,000 B.C.E. to 10,000 BCE. The building of pyramids started when that civilization was already in decline; the Step Pyramid of Saqqara was begun after 6000 BCE, the Pyramid of Cheops in 4000 BCE.26 (This, incidentally, reverses the usual occult order, which prefers to put the Great Pyramid or the three Giza pyramids first, built by Atlanteans, then the rest of them built by the Egyptians as poor imitations.) The spirits, or the author, did not stop at that. They go on for pages, telling the entire history of architecture from the Egyptians up to the present day. Then they move on to printing, which the Atlanteans invented a few years before the last convulsion. They even had metal type, made by electrically driven machines.27 This leads into a potted history of world literature up to the present day; then we move on to Atlantean music. Curiously enough, their notation was just like ours, only with different signs for the note values, clefs, accidentals, and so on. The Atlanteans had a great music factory that turned out many odd types of instruments, which deserve more attention than I can give them here.28 A history of music follows, culminating with Franz Liszt, then it is the turn of painting, sculpture, flags, religions, social structure, costume, ethnology, migrations, and a general course in geography. After treating China, the rest of Asia, North America, and Mexico, the exhausted author apologizes: he has had to leave out South America because the book is already too long. And there it ends.

Having no independent information on J. Ben Leslie, I suspect that he was a Rochester businessman who, on the one hand, could finance this expensive project (published by the specialist house of the Rev. Benjamin Fish Austin), and on the other was so culturally ignorant as to fill it up with extracts from popular encyclopedias. He somewhat resembles his contemporary Cyrus Teed, owner of mop-making factories in nearby Syracuse and Utica, who founded the religion of Koreshanity on the belief that the earth is a concave sphere. Another parallel is with Oahspe. Without attributing any veracity to either book, I do see a patent difference in quality. Some channeled works, like Leslie’s, are obviously rubbish; others may still be rubbish, but are works of art. However boring, displeasing, or absurd (like some works of art I could name), they have style, consistency, and form. There is an intelligence behind them. The question is whose intelligence it is, whether that of the channel or partly or wholly external to him or her. The latter possibility is intolerable to the skeptic, while the religious fundamentalist knows that it’s the devil’s work!

EDGAR CAYCE

The gentle Edgar Cayce (1877–1945) was a fundamentalist Christian when he began his trance channeling in 1901, and for a time he wrestled with doubts over what was speaking through him. He was more disconcerted still when the “Source” started talking about people’s past lives, a concept repugnant to Christian orthodoxy, but with the Source’s help he was able to reconcile even this with biblical authority. Reincarnation also turned out to be his road to Atlantis.

When people consulted Cayce for readings, the Source often mentioned former incarnations that were responsible for, or at least explained, their present difficulties. Beginning in 1923, Cayce gave the first of around 2,500 life readings, “whose single purpose was to define and describe a person’s present incarnation in relation to previous lives.”29 Over the next twenty years, no fewer than 700 of these mentioned a former life in Atlantis. Nor were these vague references. Cayce’s son Edgar Evans, who was the subject of the first life reading, tabulates them according to whether the person lived at the period of the first, second, or third destruction.30

Another path to Atlantis lay through Cayce’s lesser-known work for patrons who used his readings for stock market investment, treasure hunting, and oil prospecting.31 In 1927 he himself went to Bimini on a hunt for buried gold, and a reading from that period identified the island as the location of a temple of the “Poseidians,” that is, Atlanteans.

Finally, in 1932, to satisfy the curiosity of his son and others, Cayce consented to give a series of thirteen readings specifically on the past. It is not helpful to quote directly from these because the Source employs a tangled syntax, full of archaisms and circumlocutions. We begin by summarizing its version of anthropogenesis:32

 The first ancestors of humanity were sexless spiritual entities, with the ability to project forms into the physical world.

 The physical world had already evolved as far as the animal kingdom. The spiritual entities, curious to experience physical life, projected physical forms that were monstrosities. This resulted in evolutionary chaos and alienation from God for the spiritual entities caught within those bodies.

 A being called Amilius (later identified as the Christ Consciousness) took matters in hand and projected a more suitable vehicle for spiritual entities to inhabit: the human one.

 Humans appeared on earth in five places simultaneously: the Yellow race in the Gobi, the White in the Carpathians, the Red in the Atlantean and American lands, the Brown in the Andes, and the Black in Africa. This occurred more than 10,500,000 years ago.

One of the most impressive things about Cayce’s Atlantean dicta is their consistency. It enables his followers and scholars to collate readings from years apart and reconstruct a coherent history from them. Drawing on these, we continue:

 The five races were the “Sons of God” mentioned in the Bible. The “Daughters of Men” with whom they made the mistake of mating were the monstrous forms left from the early projections. The result was a race of hybrids.

 Early on in Atlantean civilization, a difference arose concerning these hybrids. One group, “Children of the Law of One,” wanted to keep the human race pure but help the hybrids regain their position as creatures of God. The other group, “Sons of Belial,” believed in sensual gratification alone and treated the hybrids as “things” or slaves.33

 Atlantis became a great civilization with high technology, some of it in advance of our own. This included airships that could also become submarines, a “firestone” that gathered cosmic energy, and a crystal that used both solar and geothermal power.34

 Lemuria, also called Mu, was a continent in the Pacific Ocean whose westernmost portion was the coast of South America. It disappeared before Atlantis in a series of cataclysms lasting 200,000 years.35

 Atlantis itself disappeared in three separate cataclysms around 50,000 BCE, 28,000 BCE, and 10,000 BCE.

 The first of these followed the use of advanced technology for destructive purposes, to exterminate the enormous carnivorous animals that were overrunning the earth. These were the result of creation by the “sons of men,” who had lost control over them.36 God changed the poles, and the animals were destroyed, along with part of Atlantis.37

 The second destruction was preceded by struggles between the two factions. Followers of the Law of One emigrated to Peru, the Yucatan, Nevada, Colorado, the Pyrenees, and Egypt. The cataclysm of 28,000 BCE was caused by misuse of the firestone by turning its power up too high. It was probably accompanied, again, by a pole shift and a change in climate.38

 During the last period of Atlantis, Egypt reached a high level of civilization. The pyramids and Sphinx were built around 10,500 BCE by Ra Ta (a past incarnation of Cayce), levitating the stones through the application of occult laws.39

 Ra Ta also built two temples, the Temple of Sacrifice and the Temple of Beauty. The latter was devoted to the arts and crafts, and the Temple of Sacrifice to genetic improvement by removing the animal components from those who still had them. “These bodies gradually lost, then, feathers from their legs. . . . Many began to lose their tails, or protuberances in various forms. Many paws or claws were changed to hand and foot.”40

 On Poseidia, the last remaining island, the two factions continued in strife, and the Sons of Belial instituted oppressive government. Some of the followers of the Law of One, seeing the coming cataclysm, escaped, making the first transatlantic flights as well as sailing to various safe lands.41

 As its end approached, Atlantis was a morass of violence and depravity. Crystal power was used for coercion and torture. There was human sacrifice, and [reading between the lines] the hybrids were used for sexual purposes. The third and final destruction took place through gigantic land upheavals and was complete by 9500 BCE.42

Not many people were aware of Cayce’s Atlantean readings until the 1960s, when a wave of interest in alternative spiritualities drew attention to him. In 1940 his Source had said: “Poseidia will be among the first portions of Atlantis to rise again—expect it in ’68 and ’69—not so far away!”43 The discovery in 1968 of the “Bimini Road” seemed to fulfil the prophecy, and controversy continues over whether the underwater row of giant stone blocks is natural or man-made.44 Predictably, those studying Cayce’s readings divided into the debunkers and the true believers. Only with the publications of Sidney Kirkpatrick and Paul Johnson (see endnotes 29 and 34) did a middle ground appear, allowing for possibilities beyond those of materialism but not making a religion out of the readings.

From Cayce’s point of view, the readings on the past were a minor distraction from his life’s calling of helping people with problems of body, mind, and soul. Besides his own altruism, wearing himself out in response to overwhelming demand for readings, the Source deserves respect. Much of its medical and psychological advice was ahead of its time, in a good sense. As Paul Johnson writes, “Edgar Cayce played a pivotal role in the transition from New Thought healing to the New Age holistic health movement.”45

This makes it all the more problematic when the Source’s history of the past is transparently borrowed from contemporary Atlantology.

Cayce was not an intellectual or much of a reader—though, significantly, he had read A Dweller on Two Planets46—but once his extraordinary gift was known, he was consulted by many an educated Theosophist and New Thought type. Paul Johnson draws some conclusions from this that might apply to some of our other subjects.

This range of plausibility indicates that whatever genuine information might have come through Cayce was heavily contaminated with materials from unreliable sources. Chief among these seems to be Madame Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, with its scheme of root-races and great Lemurian and Atlantean civilizations. Cayce appears to have adopted much of the anthropogenesis of Blavatsky without having read her work, which seems most likely to have occurred due to the belief of many of the readings’ recipients in Theosophy or its derivatives. Through conversation and correspondence if not through telepathy, Cayce acquired a striking amount of Blavatskianism. Like her, he asserts that human souls descended into bodies that had been gradually evolved for that purpose, and that after this occurrence humans mated with animals, producing viable but monstrous offspring.47

While the “monstrous offspring” and the activities of the Temple of Sacrifice are discreetly ignored, Cayce’s other revelations about ancient Egypt have had a considerable impact. The Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E., the foundation that carries on Cayce’s work) has funded archaeological projects in Egypt and helped the careers of the Egyptologists Mark Lehner and Zahi Hawass.48 Cayce devotees are close followers of the New Archaeology and still hope for a payback in the promised discovery of the Hall of Records beneath the Sphinx of Giza.

MOUNT SHASTA AGAIN

Phylos’s myth of Mount Shasta was tailor-made for cult leaders working the West Coast.49 We have already mentioned Edgar Lucien Larkin (1847–1924), an astronomer with mystical inclinations (see chapter 8). In 1913 he published an editorial in The San Francisco Examiner that asserted the truth of Atlantis and paraphrased Oliver’s account of Mount Shasta.50 In the year after the astronomer’s death, Harvey Spencer Lewis (writing as “Selvius”) published an article in the magazine of his Rosicrucian order (AMORC).51 The bibliography compiled by the nearby College of the Siskiyous calls this “the single most important document in the establishment of the modern Mt. Shasta-Lemuria myth” and quotes the following passage from Lewis: “Even no less a careful investigator and scientist than Prof. Edgar Luci[e]n Larkin, for many years director of Mt. Lowe Observatory, said in newspaper and magazine articles that he had seen, on many occasions, the great temple of this mystic village, while gazing through a long-distance telescope. He finally learned enough facts to warrant his announcement that it was the last vestige of the works of the Lemurians.” The bibliographer adds that no such statement by Larkin exists. Lewis repeated most of the article in the book already treated in chapter 8, Lemuria: The Lost Continent. After that there was no going back.

The rumor of Mount Shasta as an active spiritual center surviving from Lemurian times was thus circulating in esoteric and Rosicrucian circles by the time the mining engineer Guy Warren Ballard (1878–1939) was hiking on its slopes in 1930. In his book Unveiled Mysteries,52 authored under the symbolic pseudonym Godfré Ray King, he writes of his unexpected encounter there with the “ascended master” Comte de Saint-Germain, who takes his spiritual education in hand. Ballard is shown his past lives and scenes from history. He journeys in “projected consciousness” to the Sahara, and to a series of locations in the Americas including the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, the land of the Incas, buried cities of the Amazon, and a secret valley in Arizona. In the most baroque scene of all, a group of handsome Venusians is entertained in an underground complex beneath Royal Teton Mountain. Everywhere the narrator goes, transcendent experiences are joined with moral lessons and messages to the human race.53

As such works go, Unveiled Mysteries is among the more readable and intriguing. The influences that stand out are those of Theosophy, Oahspe, A Dweller on Two Planets, Phelon, Churchward, and Cervé’s Lemuria. There is also Masonic symbolism and a possible Rosicrucian subtext (evoking the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz). The motivation behind it was the same as caused Spencer Lewis to write a book on Lemuria, a seemingly incongruous subject for a Rosicrucian. It was to create an esoteric order that would appeal to Americans: one whose sacred sites and living masters were not in Egypt, Tibet, or even in Europe, but in America itself.

Here is the account of Atlantis, which Ballard witnesses in a sort of cinema where the Akashic Records can be projected on a screen (an updated version of Phylos’s “blackboard”). The punctuation, if little else, is original.

The first scenes portrayed the continent of “Mu”—the activity and accomplishment of its people, and the height to which that civilization attained. This covered a period of thousands of years. Then came events that surely must have been—a reign of terror—to the inhabitants of that land. A cataclysm occurred which tore the surface of the earth—until all collapsed within itself. The ancient land of Mu sank beneath the waves—of what is now the Pacific Ocean. . . . Next, came the growth to beauty, wisdom, and power of Atlantis, a great continent covering a large part of what is now the Atlantic Ocean. At that time, there existed solid land between Central America and what today is Europe. The things accomplished in that age—were tremendous—but again the people’s misuse—of the Mighty God Energy—overwhelmed them and, as things were thrown more and more out of balance—the tearing apart of the earth’s surface by cataclysmic action was re-experienced.

It left but a small remnant of Atlantis—merely an island in midocean—cut off from close contact with the rest of the civilized world. The east and west portions of the land had sunk beneath the Atlantic Ocean—leaving only the island called Poseidonis. It had been the heart of the then known civilized world, and preparation was made—to protect and preserve—its most important activities—as a central focus—to carry forward certain unfinished work. In that period very great attainment was reached both—spiritually and materially.

The mechanical development of this cycle reached a very high state of achievement, and one of its most remarkable expressions was the perfection of their aerial navigation. The air-transportation of our modern life is—as yet—very crude and primitive—compared to what was then on Atlantis. . . . A large portion of these people became aware of the—Great Inner God Power—within the individual but as before—the human side of their nature or outer activities again usurped—the Great Energy. Selfishness and misuse of this transcendent wisdom and power gained the ascendency to even greater height than before. The Masters of the Ancient Wisdom—saw the people were building another destructive momentum—and that a third cataclysm was threatening. They warned the inhabit-ants—again and again as previously—but only those who served the “Light” gave heed.

Great buildings were constructed—of imperishable material—where records were placed—that have been preserved through the centuries. These remain in a state of perfect preservation—now—on the bed of the Atlantic Ocean—hermetically sealed. They will be brought to the light of day—by the Great Ones—who directed their preparation—and control their protection.

In them are recorded humanity’s advance and accomplishment of that period, so there has been no permanent loss to mankind of the activities of the Atlantean civilization. . . . As time goes on indisputable proof—of its existence and the height of its attainment—will be revealed by oceanography, geology, and other scientific data.54

After this, Ballard declared himself to be the Messenger of the Great White Brotherhood for the Seventh Golden Age. Returning to his base in Chicago, he and his wife, Edna, founded the I AM Religious Activity, which began public work in 1934 with a ten-day class in which Ballard channeled messages from the Ascended Masters.55 The movement was an immediate success. Many ex-Theosophists were hungry for such contact, which had ceased within their splintered movement. With I AM, the thrilling early days of Theosophy seemed to have returned, with the masters again actively involved.

The most communicative of them, Saint-Germain and the Master Jesus, had been dormant in the old days of Blavatsky and the Mahatma Letters. It was Charles Leadbeater, followed by Alice Bailey, who had included them in what they called the Great White Brotherhood or, more masonically, the Great White Lodge. Early Theosophical writings had mentioned, in passing, a Hungarian Master,56 whom Leadbeater identified with the Comte de Saint-Germain: a real if enigmatic person who died in 1784 and may have descended from the Hungarian princely house of Rakoczy. As with the other masters, Leadbeater supplied him with a reincarnational genealogy. It began with St. Alban and continued with Proclus, Roger Bacon, Christian Rosenkreuz, Hunyadi Janos (Hungarian leader), a monk called Robertus, and Francis Bacon, before the final and deathless incarnation as Saint-Germain/Prince Rakoczy.57 All this the Ballards took on board as I AM doctrine and published at least twenty volumes of teachings under Saint-Germain’s name. The Ascended Masters became the cornerstone of several later movements, notably the Church Universal and Triumphant of Mark and Elizabeth Clare Prophet, which acknowledges its roots in the work of the Ballards.

While the term I AM stems from the words of Yahweh to Moses (Exod. 3:14), Phylos the Tibetan had used it to mean the highest element of the human individual. The I AM philosophy resembles the Hindu doctrine, beloved of the Theosophists, of the identity of Atman (the soul) with Brahman (the Absolute). In variously simplified forms, it would become a slogan of the New Age. Concerning the latter, Ballard’s Seventh Golden Age implies that the turn-of-the-century crisis (Phylos’s Sixth Age) is now past. America has heeded the order to “get into the shelter of that Cross!” and now, under the guidance of the Master Jesus and his brethren, is ready to become the new Atlantis.

WE ARE ALL STAR GUESTS

Later scholarship identifies another and darker influence on the I AM cult: that of William Dudley Pelley (1890–1965). The self-educated son of a clergyman, Pelley had multiple careers as a journalist, fiction and screenplay writer, and newspaper owner. He was always prone to conspiracy theories and to blaming the world’s evils on the Jews. In 1933, in a petty imitation of the fascist movements of Europe, he founded a militant group called the Silver Shirts. After the war in Europe began, Pelley’s opposition to America’s entry and his abuse of President Roosevelt passed the limits of free speech and brought a conviction for sedition. He was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment, of which he served eight, from 1942 until his release on parole in 1950.

Like many extreme right-wingers, Pelley also had a mystical side. It seems to have begun in May 1928, when he was taken unawares by a classic out-of-the-body experience. He published an account of it in the popular American Magazine under the title “Seven Minutes in Eternity.” According to Pelley’s biographer, Scott Beekman, the magazine had over 2 million subscribers, and with further circulation in pamphlet form the article became “one of the most widely read accounts of paranormal activity in American history.”58 The second crucial experience came a few months later, when Pelley and the magazine’s fiction editor started automatic writing, she holding a pencil and he lightly holding her hand. He soon graduated from this clumsy method, on finding that he was “adept in what is known as Clairaudience.” Consequently, as he says, “I had only to speak the words orally that I saw mentally, and have a stenographer take them in shorthand.”

Like other channelers, Pelley found the process addictive, and by his own account produced well over a million words of revelation.59 Beekman admits that his “writings and lectures from this period represent a formidable, albeit flawed, theology. He read widely in metaphysics, and his Liberation Doctrine possesses a clear spiritualist undergirding. Upon this foundation Pelley added layers of Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, pyramid-ism, Jainism, and harmonialism, all topped with a peculiar Christocentric millenarianism.”60 For a while he attracted subscribers, first to a magazine, then to a mail-order course in mysticism and a pseudocollege. But after 1933 many followers, alienated by his praise of Hitler and increasingly grating anti-Semitism, defected to Ballard’s I AM.61 It was not until Pelley’s release from jail in 1950 that he resumed the mantle of spiritual master, purging his works of their more offensive content.

In 1950 Pelley published his key work, Star Guests. It tells a dual story: of how he became a medium in 1928–29, and the history of the human race as it was then revealed to him. The main theme is that all humans are “Star Guests on this planet who find ourselves encased in bodies of primates in order to learn something spiritually ennobling.”62 This came about as follows. Through natural evolution, much as science has explained it, the earth had developed the animal kingdom up to the level of the cat and ape families. Then, as Pelley explains,

somewhere back in the Eocene or Oligocene periods, fifty to thirty million years ago, there came a great migration of alien spirits to this planet from some other world in interstellar space, who settled down here and began to cohabit with the animal forms it discovered developing here, producing a hybrid race of beings, half-celestial and half-bestial that gave us the unspeakable Sodomic period described in the Bible.63

Elsewhere, Pelley writes that these spirits came from the system of Sirius.64 The “Great Avatar Himself,” in the stilted prose favored by higher beings, describes the hybrid of feline and bird forms and the peculiar reproductive system of these monsters.

Head was first bird-like, as I have disclosed to you. His hands were like claws, conceived for destruction. Feet were reversible, making him able to locomote forwards or backwards. Conception was twofold: by physical contact yet lacking organs of generation externally. Also he did create by thought, clothing his thought in etheric covering and calling it Material. Contact creation was made cell by cell, male and female embracing and leaving on the ground excretions which when developed became new life. Understand ye this?65

Clearly, the educational project had gone so badly wrong that intervention was called for. In compassionate response to the earth’s need, the Spirit of Christ came with another host of spirits to cleanse the planet, separate the animal from the human streams, and set their respective evolutions on track.66 With Christ came about 144,000 Christ People, elsewhere called the Goodly Company, Radiant Beings, or Sons of Light.67 Mankind was forever separated in evolution from the animal kingdom, but it continued in its beastly ways, with the result that “the physical world wobbled, and it wobbles today.”68 (This presumably refers to the axial tilt.) For almost a million years the good and bad forces were held in balance, until the Master of the Host (presumably Christ) decreed that earth had to be purged anew. This time it was achieved through melting the ice caps. Good and bad perished alike in the deluge, but “physical death meant nothing to Sons of Light.”69 They would return voluntarily incarnated in fresh bodies to help the human race in its more laborious task of regaining its spiritual nature.

As with many of the works treated in the present book, my summary has oversimplified the complexities and overclarified the muddle of Star Guests to bring out the parallels with other channeled teachings. The correspondences with Theosophy are too obvious to need underlining. Pelley’s description of the depraved hybrids as “Sodomitic” makes one wonder if his Nazi sympathies had brought him into contact with the theories of Lanz von Liebenfels (see chapter 5). A study of his unsanitized prewar writings might reveal evidence of such a link.

The most striking parallel is with Edgar Cayce, whose Atlantean readings, as explained above, emerged piecemeal during the period 1923–32. Pelley’s information on prehistory was given in 1928 and the years following. Both came to general notice only after World War II, when it turned out that Cayce and Pelley had channeled almost identical stories of spiritual beings creating clawed monstrosities through the power of thought, then becoming trapped within them. Cayce’s source reveals much more than Pelley’s about the Atlantean period, but the earth responds to human depravity in the same way: in Cayce’s terms, with a pole shift, in Pelley’s, with a wobble.70 Both men felt the need to reconcile their channeled information with the Bible and with some form of Christianity. In both narratives, Christ is a cosmic being who came to earth to sort things out and redeem the unfortunate hybrids. He continues as a perpetual companion to humanity, and his more dramatic return is expected soon. Finally, both Cayce and Pelley humbly (?) accepted that in past lives they had been companions of Christ, when he lived as Jesus of Nazareth.71 I can think of only one idea more unlikely than this, and it is that identical fantasies arose simultaneously out of the unconscious minds of such utterly different personalities.

TIBETAN PRETENSIONS

In the same year as the movement of the Ballards began (1934), the Los Angeles Times announced the foundation of a grandly styled Royal Order of Tibet.72 Its leader was the resourceful George Adamski (1891–1965), at the time a lecturer, broadcaster, and mail-order guru.73 A contemporary notice says that he also peddled oil consecrated by the Masters of Tibet to remove facial blemishes, raise the dead, and so forth, and that his followers were largely “disgruntled Besantists.”74 That he claimed his order had been a front for a Prohibition-evading manufactory of “sacramental” wine is beside the point.75 We have one production from this period of his work: “Satan, Man of the Hour,” first issued as a brochure in 1937, then reprinted with minor changes in Flying Saucers, Farewell (1961).76 It is a pessimistic allegory of the modern era, which, like all previous ones, shows how successful Satan has been in perverting the human race. Besides the expected reproaches (that religion has become a symbol of oppression, science knowledge without wisdom), it tells briefly of the lost lands.

There were races of highly intelligent men upon this planet at one time. In fact, the first perversion of cosmic principle took place in Lemuria, that great land that existed in the Pacific Ocean, connected with what is now the western coast of the United States. It was an Edenic garden where the inhabitants walked the flowery paths of life in a state of perpetual youth. . . . Then gradually Satan began to insinuate strange ideas into the consciousness of those children that had never known any guidance but that of the Great Spirit. . . . They engaged in the work of creating objects to please the senses—likes and dislikes were born. They became self-conscious.77

A teacher was sent to recall the Lemurians to virtue, but they spurned him, and their land was destroyed by earthquakes and tidal waves. Then there was Atlantea. “Whereas Lemuria had turned to the selfish worship of beauty and art, Atlantea became a worshipper of commercialism. Competition was born, and individual enterprises divided men in thought and action.”78 Atlantea too was destroyed, as was Egypt, and Rome. The essay leaves us with a picture of modern humans repeating the mistakes of the past, ignoring the call to a life of wisdom and kindness.

This jejune variation on the Atlantis theme belongs with the body of fiction that only Sprague de Camp and Henry Eichner have taken pleasure in reading.79 But in view of its authorship, it is worth a moment’s attention. It is amusing to see the Lemurians, usually painted as monstrous and brutish, punished for being Wildean aesthetes. Far from being Theosophical or the least bit Tibetan, Adamski’s Lemuria reflects the West Coast paradise of Phylos and the Ballards, throwing in the Indians’ Great Spirit for good measure. Lemuria’s glory in its harmony with nature; the urban splendors and high technology of Atlantis, to which other authors have dedicated their purplest passages, get no praise here. Understandably, this son of poor Polish immigrants wished for a more friendly and socialistic America. In the next chapter, we will see him transported to lands beyond his wildest dreams.

Tibet and Mount Shasta came together in the mythology of another American cult leader of the 1930s, Maurice Doreal (died 1963). He was born at an unknown date as Claude Doggins and in 1929 founded the Brotherhood of the White Temple in Denver, Colorado.80 Doreal claimed to have spent eight years in Tibet and to be in contact with the Great White Lodge. Beside a large quantity of spiritual teachings that were distributed to members, Doreal published a periodical that took the name of a famous Theosophical work, Light on the Path (itself channeled by Mabel Collins in 1884). He was basically a neo-Theosophist who accepted the existence of the Masters but, like Alice Bailey, claimed independent contact with them and found it more advantageous to run his own movement.

Walter Kafton-Minkel, in his delightful and erudite book Subterranean Worlds, tells us that Doreal also claimed to have visited the secret city inside Mount Shasta, but in his version it was Atlantean, not Lemurian. Doreal’s Lemurians are an evil group of priest-kings and nobles imprisoned in huge underground cities that they had built beneath the Caroline Islands (north of New Guinea). Their crime had been to discover a destructive force far worse than the atomic bomb, and the Atlanteans of Mount Shasta act as their jailers, shuttling to and fro by spaceship, to prevent this dreadful weapon from being used.

Doreal had also traveled in his astral body to “Shamballa,” which he places under the Himalayas. Earlier we have heard about the confusion between Shambhala and Agarttha (see chapter 2) and between underground, surface, and spiritual locations. Doreal had an ingenious explanation of why Shambhala is now underground: when the Himalayas were raised in the last great cataclysm, they simply piled up over it. Just like Phylos’s and Ballard’s secret cities, Doreal’s Shambhala contains libraries storing all knowledge through technology that seems to be a struggling attempt to describe cyberspace, computers, and holographic projection.

Since most of Doreal’s writings date from the 1940s or 1950s, they cannot be considered more than a hodgepodge of existing themes. For example, he too has a pole-shift mythology, a race of Serpent People in Antarctica, a white race in the Gobi Desert, and Sons of God who are always trying to keep the evil races under control. Equally derivative is the story he tells about his best-known work, The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean.81 According to the preface, Thoth was an Atlantean priest-king who had achieved immortality, taking and leaving the physical body only when he chose. The fifteen Tablets are in a saga-style metrical prose, more powerful in effect than most channeled works. In the beginning, the Children of Light look down on the poor Children of Men and decide to create humanlike bodies for themselves and help raise them “from the Earth to the Sun” (Tablet II). They make themselves a dwelling inside the earth, beneath Atlantis, and teach humans. Over the millennia a great civilization evolves, but eventually some of its elite became corrupt:

Proud they became because of their knowledge, proud were they of their place among men.

Deep delved they into the forbidden, opened the gateway that led to below.

Sought they to gain ever more knowledge but seeking to bring it up from below. [Tablet V]

These are presumably the same as the Lemurians mentioned in Doreal’s other writings. The Dweller who lived in etheric form, watching over the civilization, decided that Atlantis must be destroyed: “Called he then on the powers the Seven Lords wielded; changed the Earth’s balance. Down sank Atlantis beneath the dark waves” (Tablet V). But before the destruction was complete, Thoth was ordered to gather the “sons of Atlantis” and all his records and magical instruments, load them onto a spaceship, and take them to Egypt.

The Translator’s Preface adds some dates and continues the history. The exodus from Atlantis happened around 50,000 BCE, and Thoth ruled in Egypt until 36,000 BCE. Before leaving, he constructed the Great Pyramid as a temple of initiation and a repository for his records, and the Sphinx. We fast-forward to 1300 BCE, when a group of Egyptian priests brought the tablets to the Mayan lands, placing them beneath a solar temple in Yucatan. The story then gets exciting:

The writer (who has a connection with the Great White Lodge which also works through the pyramid priesthood) was instructed to recover and return to the Great Pyramid the ancient tablets. This, after adventures, which need not be detailed here, was accomplished. Before returning them, he was given permission to translate and retain a copy of the wisdom engraved on the tablets. This was done in 1925 and only now [1939?] has permission been given for part to be published. It is expected that many will scoff. Yet the true student will read between the lines and gain wisdom.

He is right. I scoff at Doreal’s pyramid adventures, but the Emerald Tablets of Thoth seem to me better than their scribe. They contain some quite occult ideas concerning ceremonial magic, and also strange resonances with the Shaver Mystery, which will be our next port of call.