The Occult Sciences in Atlantis

I read Lewis Spence’s The Occult Sciences in Atlantis for the claims a later writer can set beside Plato, Donnelly, and Spence’s own earlier books. The copy in front of me is a Brigham Young University library scan. The shelf mark on the title page reads 133.09 over Sp36o. The title page names Lewis Spence and Rider & Co., 47 Princes Gate, London, S.W.7. It prints no year. I do not put a year in the title of this review. The verso carries the Book Production War Economy Standard, and it says the book was printed in Great Britain at the Anchor Press, Tiptree, Essex. On page 16 he treats 9400 B.C. as 11,342 years ago, which places the writing of that sentence about 1942. The book is still in copyright. The quotes below are short consecutive excerpts. Page numbers are the printed numbers.

The dedication is to Charles Richard Cammell and Iona Cammell. Under it he prints a metrical paraphrase of Proverbs iii, 13-17, and I leave that poem alone. The preface thanks Dr. C. A. Malcolm of the Signet Library, Edinburgh, Dr. Sharp of Edinburgh University Library, and Mrs. J. Gillie, who typed the book. It is signed L. S.

A facing leaf of other works names The Problem of Atlantis, The History of Atlantis, Atlantis in America, Will Europe Follow Atlantis?, The Problem of Lemuria, and The Occult Causes of the Present War, among others. This review stays inside the present book. The site and the migrations of the 1925 text stay in The Problem of Atlantis. The 1926 figures stay in The History of Atlantis. He cites both of those books in the references here. He does not, in this volume, redraw Dolphin’s Ridge or give a population.

For Plato’s own text, see Timaeus & Critias. For Donnelly, see Atlantis: The Antediluvian World.

He prints Crô-Magnon with the circumflex. I keep it. On one page he writes twelve kings and ten bulls and says the numbers are not consistent. I leave both. He also writes ten children of Poseidon and Cleito in the religion chapter, and nine sons in the witchcraft chapter. Those stand as two statements.

The book at a glance

• Title: The Occult Sciences in Atlantis.
• Copy I read: Rider & Co., 47 Princes Gate, London, S.W.7. The title page prints no year. Printed at the Anchor Press, Tiptree, Essex, under the Book Production War Economy Standard. Brigham Young University library stamp.
• Length: a preface on pages 5 and 6, then twelve chapters. Chapter I starts on page 11. The conclusions start on page 130. The references start on page 134.
• What he claims: the occult arts began in Atlantis, in a primitive or vestigial form, and passed to Europe, North Africa, Egypt, and parts of America with the survivors. Atlantis and the Antediluvian world are, for him, one place. The gods of Atlantis are the Titans, the Sons of God, and, in later books, the Fallen Angels. His three working sources are Plato, the classical writers (above all Diodorus Siculus), and a body of fraternity manuscripts he calls the Arcane Tradition, which he has memorised and will not locate.

Findings worth setting beside other writers

These are the claims I would take to the 1925 Problem, the 1926 History, to Plato, and to the biblical and classical pages he uses. The chapter notes give the pages.

• Disappearance, as he states it on page 16. The island-continent finally disappeared at some time about 9400 B.C., or, to be precise, 11,342 years ago.
• The same event, as he states it on page 17. Plato fixed the disappearance at about 9000 years before his own time. Spence says Plato was born in 427 B.C., and he turns that into about 9400 years B.C., or some 11,300 years ago, more or less. I do not collapse “9400 B.C.” into “9400 years B.C.”, or 11,342 into 11,300.
• How far back he will go. Aurignacian occult practice in Western Europe is, he says, at least 14,000 years before the Christian era, and the earliest date generally accepted is not later than about 14,000 B.C. Speaking of 15,000 years B.C., he infers a primitive level. He will not place Atlantean civilisation, or Occult Science, much further back than the sixteenth millennium before the age of Christ. If the art needed about 5,000 years, as he says Egyptian and Chaldean magic did, the beginnings fall at, say, 14,300 B.C., and the higher spiritual phase falls in the tenth millennium before Christ. He also says the occult sciences could not have become the basis of later European practice until about a thousand years before the final catastrophe (pp. 16 to 17).
• A second date for the catastrophe. In the alchemy chapter the catastrophe took place somewhere about the year 9600 B.C. Copper was not worked in the non-Atlantean world until the Middle Predynastic period in Egypt, about 3700 B.C. Gold was worked there only shortly before. He calls the gap nearly 6,000 years (p. 78). On page 40 the same 9600 B.C. is the date at which brass, copper, and tin were familiar, while he still says Atlantis was in the Stone Age at its destruction.
• Bull-cult and the Cogul painting. The bull-cult began in Spain and France probably 20,000 years ago and spread to Crete, Greece, Egypt, and Babylonia (p. 131). The witch-dance of Cogul is, on page 98, twelve thousand years ago at the least computation, and on page 131 a relic at least fourteen thousand years old. I keep both ages.
• Castes. The Arcane Tradition is his only source for the grades. He prefers a Spanish list, Initiates, Adepts, and Magi, over a French list, Adept, Magus, and Archimagus. Magi proper are almost exclusively of the blood royal. Separate officials are Astrologers, Alchemists, Prophets, Necromancers, Diviners, and “the servants of the holy Mysteries” (pp. 33 to 36).
• Atlantis and Eden. He treats the Antediluvian world, the Garden of Eden, and Atlantis as one place. A Coptic script in the Arcane Tradition, as he reports it, sets the rivers of Atlantis in circles, where Genesis sets four rivers that a later Hebrew account places in the Middle East (chapter IV).
• What he refuses. Several hundred spirit scripts of “the Atlantean dead” did not agree with one another on language, history, or customs. He will not use them. He also refuses to name two popular occult accounts. One, he says, is disastrous. The other is Platonic statement mixed with invention.

Preface

He says the plan of the book is already set out in the first chapter, and that only unusual circumstances let him undertake the recovery of the occult history. He believes he has reached the heart of the Atlantean occult philosophy.

I believe I have been able to prove that Atlantis was indeed the original source of those sciences known as occult.

Lewis Spence, The Occult Sciences in Atlantis, p. 5

He has discarded what seemed hopelessly grotesque. He attacks writers who, as he puts it, do not regard their empirical pretensions as subject to ordinary criticism, and who lack history, archaeology, anthropology, comparative religion, and the history of myth. Where he keeps a tradition he thinks comparatively worthless, he says he has noted the deficiency.

Chapter I. Introductory

No tolerable account of the arcane sciences of Atlantis has, he says, yet appeared, though the history, geology, and folk-lore have been worked as hard as the unearthing of Troy or Babylon. He writes because unorthodox books, lectures, and articles threaten what he calls legitimate Atlantean research. He claims personal access to a body of arcane record which, so far as he understands, no other British traditionalist of his generation has approached.

The occult arts, on his theory, had their inception in the Atlantean sub-continent. Had there been no Atlantis, occult science would have had to invent such a region. He paraphrases Voltaire’s remark about a Deity. Magic of an elementary kind is already visible, he says, in the Aurignacian cave-shrines of the Dordogne and in Aurignacian and Azilian graves, ages before Egypt was a cultural force. That is his argument that the arts did not begin on the Nile. Diodorus Siculus, writing under Julius Caesar and Augustus, supplies the astrology. The Hesperides and the Elysian Fields are, as in his former books, traditionally associated with Atlantis. Will Europe Follow Atlantis? is the recent book in which he has already outlined the Antediluvian races, and he says that tradition cannot be separated from the classical idea of Atlantis.

The third source is the Arcane Tradition, the records of occult fraternities. The manuscripts run from the seventh century A.D. to about the middle of the seventeenth. They are shown at initiation and then almost wholly withdrawn. The initiate is expected to memorise them. He will not say in whose keeping they are. The names of the societies, three, or as he believes four, are secret. Much of the Atlantis matter from the fourteenth century to the end of the seventeenth is, he says, utterly worthless. He memorised the substance. Precise memory of the texts has always been difficult for him. Oral training in folk-lore made the substance easier to keep than the wording. Obscurity in the English of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and in the French, and still more in the older German, is poverty of language, not a deliberate veil. Much of the older matter seems to him allegorical invention.

He rejects spirit communications about Atlantis. For twenty years or more, people have sent him scripts.

In the first place, out of several hundred scripts based upon matter professedly communicated by spirits of the Atlantean dead, I found that not a single one of these agreed in its circumstances with another.

Lewis Spence, The Occult Sciences in Atlantis, p. 15

Some are wild invention. Some are ignorance of Atlantean tradition. None of the few rational ones, he says, meets ordinary criticism. He contrasts that failure with Chinese spiritist records, which exacting criticism has not broken down. The gulf of time makes Atlantean mediumship improbable. He leaves the door open for later communications that look genuine.

He will not name the two occult accounts he thinks disingenuous. One comes from a centre popular with less critical students, and its results he can only describe as disastrous in the extreme. The other purports to rest on a Secret Tradition. He says it did not come from any Secret Tradition of genuine and official status.

the conclusions it draws are an admixture of Platonic statement with an inventive capacity which either Jules Verne or Mr. H. G. Wells might well have envied.

Lewis Spence, The Occult Sciences in Atlantis, p. 16

Then the chronology. I quote the two formulations separately.

the island-continent must finally have disappeared into the depths of ocean at some time about 9400 B.C., or, to be precise, 11,342 years ago.

Lewis Spence, The Occult Sciences in Atlantis, p. 16

Aurignacian or occult practice was known in Western Europe at least 14,000 years before the Christian era, and probably long before. In The Problem of Atlantis he has argued that this folk were emigrants or refugees of the lower castes, leaving after one of the severer cataclysms. The magical art in Atlantis must therefore be older than that European date. The earliest date of occult practice in Western Europe is, he says, generally accepted as falling not later than about 14,000 B.C. He cannot place Atlantean civilisation or Occult Science much further back than the sixteenth millennium before the age of Christ. He also cannot credit that the culture, or the occult sciences, reached the heights Plato’s dialogues seem to confer, until a much later period.

Plato fixed the general date of the disappearance of Atlantis at about 9000 years before his time, or, as he was born in 427 B.C., about 9400 years B.C., or some 11,300 years ago, more or less.

Lewis Spence, The Occult Sciences in Atlantis, p. 17

If the science required, say, some 5,000 years, as Egyptian and Chaldean magic did, the beginnings go back to, say, 14,300 B.C., and the higher phase belongs to some time in the tenth millennium before Christ. Aurignacian magic, he adds, can only have been of a “Colonial” character, not the higher official code. The Aurignacian or Crô-Magnon race represented a migration of the lower elements. When he speaks of 15,000 years B.C. he infers a condition as primitive as the earliest strivings of the most barbarous races. The occult sciences could not have developed far enough to become the basis of later European arcane belief until about a thousand years before the final catastrophe.

Chapter II. Religion and Myth in Atlantis

He says the sources are six. Plato. Diodorus Siculus. The Hesperides, or Fortunate Isles. Scriptural and Oriental accounts of the Antediluvian world, which he says was one and the same with Atlantis. The Cabiri. Compared with similar beliefs elsewhere, these should give a reasonably complete picture. Atlantis has been under the ocean for more than eleven thousand years, so the picture will be less complete than a reader might expect. That “eleven thousand” sits beside the 11,342 and the 11,300 of the previous pages. I do not fold them into one figure.

In Plato, Zeus, “the god above the gods”, stands above Poseidon and judges Atlantis at the end. “Poseidon” and “Zeus” are Hellenic titles. Plato and Solon turned Atlantean or Egyptian names into Greek equivalents. When the earth was divided, Atlantis went to Poseidon, son of Saturn, who married Cleito, a mortal woman, one of the aborigines.

The ceremony comes once every six years. The twelve kings or rulers gather, consider the laws, and deliver justice. Ordinances are engraved on a pillar of orichalcum. Before the assize they bring ten bulls into the sacred enclosure. Each king vows to offer one of these bulls. Spence writes that the number of kings and bulls is not consistent. No iron is used. The animals are sacrificed before the pillar. The kings pass the limbs through a fire and drench the column with blood. The carcass is consumed. What is left of the blood goes into small golden vases, is splashed on the fire, and some of it is drunk by each ruler. The vases are consecrated to Poseidon. Each king, in a rich blue robe, sits in council in the temple all night, until sunrise (p. 18).

He takes the bull through Macedonia, the cave paintings of Altamira and the Dordogne, the Egyptian Serapeum as an architectural elaboration of those cave-shrines, then along the Mediterranean to Crete, Egypt, Greece, Italy, and Palestine. Samson, the man of bull-like strength, is for him another Minotaur, bound and baited by the Philistines. The bull is a symbol of Poseidon as the tempestuous sea.

Bailly, Lettres sur l’Atlantide de Platon, page 70, is his citation for the claim that the gods and chiefs of Atlantis have been recovered in Sanchoniathon. The Carthaginian writer, turned into Greek, gives the names in Hellenic forms, as Diodorus does.

Atlas, the eldest, is among the Titans, son of Iapetus, whom the Hebrews call Japhet, and brother of Prometheus and Epimetheus. Perseus shows him the head of Medusa. Atlas becomes the mountain in Mauritania that holds up the heavens. From that heavenly station he becomes the father of astrology. Eusebius identifies him with Enoch and calls him the inventor of astrology. Michael Scot says he brought the art to Spain. Roger Bacon names him among the originators of magic. His daughters are Basilea and Rhea, or Pandora.

The war of gods and Titans is, for him, a memory of strife between Mediterranean and Atlantic races, of the kind Plato outlines, and also a memory of the lower caste rebelling inside Atlantis. Hesiod’s Zeus convenes the gods and declares that a deluge will be sent upon the giants. Spence sets that beside the unfinished end of the Critias, where the gods assemble over the wickedness of the Atlanteans. Josephus saw the Titans and the giants of Genesis as alike. The Titans at one time regained heaven and were then banished. The rebel angels, in the later telling, are cast out once and for all. Spence’s own reading is that “angels” cannot be pictured marrying mortal women or teaching the hidden arts. The stories are allegories of one event: sons of Seth against sons of Cain, the higher Atlantean race against the aboriginal race. Poseidon, though a Titan, stood with Jupiter against the Titans.

Poseidon’s feud with Pallas Athena began in a rivalry for the patronage of Athens. The Panathenaea was founded at least a century and a quarter before Plato, so the war tradition is at least four generations older than Plato. Spence says that disposes of deliberate manufacture. Plato says nothing of the peplum. He does say the Atlantis story is fit entertainment for the festival of Pallas Athena, which Spence takes as proof that Plato knew the Atlantean associations of the Panathenaea.

Cleito is the aboriginal spouse. The twelve statues in the Temple of Poseidon are, for Spence, the sequel of a great stone circle, like the Blue Stones of Stonehenge, dedicated to the great dead. He compares the circle with the Round Table, whose knights he derives from Celtic gods. The pantheon is Titanic, like the British giants. Atlas is grouped with the British giant-god Albion and the Irish Titan Iberius. Stonehenge has been called “the Giant’s Dance”. The Rollright Stones were believed to dance. Gog and Magog, in Geoffrey of Monmouth, are the British pair.

Basilea marries her brother Hyperion, that is Lucifer, and bears Helio and Selene, later the gods of sun and moon. On their death she goes mad, hair disordered, barbarous ornaments, playing the cymbals. The West is the land of the dead. He suggests that “went West” began in the classical idea that the Occident was the bourne of the departed. The descent to that place was steep, and the entrance was guarded by religious taboos.

The biblical Deluge, so far as record goes, is at least three centuries older than Plato’s tale. He still says the two stories are one in origin, so Plato’s account cannot be called an invention unless Genesis is branded a fabrication with it. The Phoenicians and Punic people had settlements in north-west Africa, met the Atlas-country tradition, and carried it back to Tyre and Sidon. He quotes Goldziher on the missing Phoenician deluge link, and says the Atlantis story is the link Goldziher did not consider. A Babylonian flood element in the Hebrew narrative, he says, tells nothing of the Antediluvian races, whereas the Atlantean story does. The Hebrews may also have received the fall of Atlantis in Egypt. His fuller discussion is in Will Europe Follow Atlantis? Sanchoniathon calls the allies of Cronus, the Titans, “Elohim”.

Enoch, the same as Atlas in this traditional sense, is the author of the Antediluvian books. The Book of Enoch as we have it is synthetic, fragments of several ancient books. Its angelology names Raphael, Gabriel, Phanuel, and others. Certain of them taught astrology and thereby betrayed the secrets of heaven, so that men came to know the secrets of the angels, the violence of the Satans, sorcery, and witchcraft. Spence reads that as the betrayal, in Atlantis, of a high caste’s secrets to a lower order. The stars are “Sinners”, which he connects with the Fallen Angels. Irish peasants, and others in Europe, associate those angels with the fairies, a link he says the early mediaeval Church fostered. Grievous sin interferes with the crops. That belief, he says, is still held among barbarous peoples and is remembered in this book.

Kenealey, in a volume Spence treats as outmoded but still interesting, says Enoch, whom the Arabs call Edris, became chief pontiff of Atlantis and founded the Mysteries. Kircher, as Kenealey reports him, saw a manuscript at the College of Neophytes in Rome in which Hermes is called Edris, the Arabic and the Welsh name for Enoch, “the barbaric Hermes”. An early alchemical treatise, edited by Morienus Romanus, a hermit of Jerusalem, for Calid, King of the Egyptians, was translated into Latin by Robert of Chester. I do not give a year for that translation. The figure in this copy is not one I will print from a broken line. In the preface Robert speaks of three Hermeses: Enoch, Noah, and the king who ruled in Egypt after the Deluge, called Hermes Triplex, that is Hermes Trismegistus. That Hermes collected the Antediluvian sciences in The Book of the Composition of Alchemy. William Postel calls the Book of Enoch “The Genesis of Enoch”.

The Cabiri are identified by older mythologists with the heavenly twins, Castor and Pollux, or with the Corybantes and the Telchini. The Rabbins took them for bisexual angels. Kenrick took them for Pelasgian gods. Strabo took them for ministers of Hecate, which would make them predecessors of the witch familiars. Sanchoniathon, the oldest writer Spence cites on them, says they were Carthaginian or North African, and that their cult was associated with Osiris. Thoth ordained that the Cabiri, the seven sons of Sydyk, should set down their records and deliver them to Osiris.

The Ras Shamra tablets, which he takes from Sir Charles Marston, The Bible is True, date from about 1350 B.C. They call the Cabiri Agrazim, “islanders” and “Sons of the Sea”. Ras Shamra is not more than 120 miles (193 kilometers) from Beirut, where the cult is said to have been founded in Phoenicia. The same tablets name Adam and Eve as Aion and Hawwa, at least six and a half centuries before the composition of Genesis. Pliny says the Romans did not preserve the writings of their hereditary foes. Of the volumes found at the destruction of Carthage in 146 B.C., only one, a treatise on agriculture, was translated. Spence identifies that treatise as Sanchoniathon’s. I leave the identification as his. North-west Africa, he says, still holds the traditions.

His summary of the chapter is categorical. The gods of Atlantis are the Titans, who are the Sons of God, who are the Fallen Angels of later Christian literature. The legend is the lapse of some of the higher caste, who married aboriginals and taught them the arcane secrets, which were debased into sorcery. The Sons of God are the sons of Seth, distinguished from the sons of Cain. The legend of Mount Alconuz puts the children of Seth on the summit and the progeny of Cain below. The word “angels” does not appear until the Book of Enoch and Josephus, who identifies those angels with the Titans. Their identity with the sky came from their fame as astrologers.

Chapter III. Occult Castes and Conditions in Atlantis

The Arcane Tradition is, he says, the only source for the castes. He believes the records passed through many hands, from Egyptian priestly chronicle, with a Coptic tone, into the form in which he found them. The Spanish notes may have come through a Moorish or Arabic source from a Coptic or North African original, itself a survival of something Egyptian or Carthaginian. The three accounts do not always agree. He says he will mark the disagreements.

The old French account names the grades Adept, Magus, and Archimagus. He says the words are so mediaeval that they must be a free translation of Oriental equivalents, which may themselves translate Egyptian or Atlantean terms, the same kind of substitution Plato made. A second Spanish account renders the grades as Initiates, Adepts, and Magi, and has little more to say. The French manuscript implies that the offices did not apply consistently to every department.

The Magi proper, those closest to the Magic Art, were almost exclusively sons or descendants of the blood royal. He compares the early Egyptian dynasties, when the Mysteries were the preserve of royalty, and the Pharaoh was the source of the mystical power that turned the forces of nature into cereal growth. Plato’s kings, sole hierophants at the stated ritual, are his Atlantean parallel.

The French description of the training is so close to Caesar on the Druids that he once thought it was copied from Caesar. He then decided it was not. Caesar’s Britain, he says, is now regarded as dubious. Druidism was confined to parts of the island, and much of the membership may have been refugees from Gaul. Elsewhere in the same French manuscript the account of British Druidism is so at variance with Caesar, and with what is otherwise known, that the same writer is unlikely to have used Caesar as the basis of an Atlantean invention. The two accounts are similar and not identical.

From the French scribe, the three stages were conferred after twenty, thirty, and forty years. Spence says that is almost certainly inaccurate. Degrees are not reached by the passage of years. Archimagus, or Arch-Magician, can be one office only, like an abbot, not a degree many men hold after forty years. His preference is for the second Spanish account. The French passage impresses him as erroneous, if not entirely dubious, worked over by a scribe ignorant of Atlantean research. He compares the spirit of it to portions of Geoffrey of Monmouth. He still holds that the training passage does not come from Caesar.

What Caesar does say, as Spence reports it: the Druids were honoured as teachers, they memorised a great number of mystical verses over at least twenty years, they used Greek letters, and they were versed in astronomy. The French account speaks of the honour of the Atlantean Magi, their astrology, and their memory. It adds that they wore blue robes, like Plato’s kings, and used a writing they had invented, different from the civil script. They did not take wives. Spence says that was certainly not true of the kings, who constituted the hierarchical caste. They were not paid. Only the blood royal could enter. He thinks that last clause shows an Egyptian source.

The Spanish degrees Initiate, Adept, and Magus are, for him, the likelier set. Neither passage describes the practice. That comes from other writings in the Arcane Tradition.

Separate officials, from the first Spanish account: Astrologers, Alchemists, Prophets, Necromancers, Diviners, and “the servants of the holy Mysteries”. Alchemical practitioners were Apprentices and Adepts. Prophecy was in the hands of Seers and Expounders, one class for the vision and one for the explanation. Necromancers were “Rulers of the Spirits” and “the Sleepers”, whom he reads as mediums or persons capable of hypnotic trance. Diviners were “Dreamers” and “Augurs”.

Against these official classes stood Black Magic in the lower caste. Later it is found in France, Spain, and north-western Africa, and on islands on either side of the Atlantic that must, before the fall, have been in close cultural association with Atlantis. Genesis 6, the Sons of God and the daughters of men, is his scriptural witness that the higher race intermarried with a lower aboriginal type. He quotes Plato on the higher castes: the blood of the gods was gradually diluted with the mortal admixture, and they became degenerate. Rabbinical writings, he says, take “the daughters of men” as the female offspring of Cain, segregated from the other descendants of Adam, who are sometimes called the Sons of Seth.

The Hesperides carry an Atlantean connotation. Amazons inhabited the island Hesperia. The Gorgons appear in the African country of Mount Atlas. Of the Lamiae, who were also Gorgons, he cites Andrew Tooke: they lured men to their dens and tore them to pieces. These female forms are, for him, memories of enchantresses in the Antediluvian insular group.

The lower aboriginal race may have been migrants from Africa, not necessarily negroid, resembling in features and build the Arab, the Guanche, or the Iberian, with a possible admixture of negro blood, and given over to the lower sorcery from the earliest times. Black Magic in Atlantis conforms, he says, to Negro Voodoo, or Obeah, closely enough to fortify that assumption.

The official nucleus was the Temple of Poseidon, in the middle and most inaccessible part of the citadel. Two fanes: one to Poseidon and Cleito, one to Poseidon alone. About 600 feet (182 meters) long, covering three acres, height proportionate to length and breadth. Facade ornamented with silver, pinnacles with gold, interior roofed with ivory, gold, silver, and native orichalcum. A great golden Poseidon stands in a chariot, reins of winged steeds, nereids and tritons on dolphins. Sculptures of the princes and princesses, his ten sons and their consorts, stand at intervals (p. 38). The “ten sons” here sits beside the ten children of the religion chapter and the nine sons of the witchcraft chapter.

A Latin account in the Arcane Tradition, one of the few dated scripts, is dated 1542 and signed by an initiate whose name is evidently Spanish. It is on vellum, damaged by damp. It calls the building “the Temple of Neptunus”. The description of the temple proper almost certainly follows Plato. The rest, he believes, comes from another source. It gives the purlieus of the astrologers, alchemists, diviners, and necromancers.

He allows Maya and Peruvian observatories as an analogy, though those peoples were still in the Stone Age. The Maya solar calendar and the computation of Venus show centuries of astronomy without optical instruments. He sees no good reason to deny Atlantean achievement of that kind. Antediluvian accounts say Enoch was among the first astrologers, and that Cham, the son of Noah, was taught astrology and magic by “the demons”, meaning the angels who intermarried with the daughters of men. Cham taught Canaan, who wrote no less than thirty books and passed the knowledge to his son Nemroth, or Nimrod, an astrologer of note, who composed a work for his son Ionicon. Atlas brought astrology to Spain before Moses received the tables of the Ten Commandments, and passed it to wise men in Gaul. Spence reads this as a Moorish tradition of Atlantis conveyed to Spain.

On page 40 he says he has already stressed, in former books, that Atlantis was still in the Stone Age at its destruction. Alchemy’s earliest tenets, he says, grew out of looking at oxides, colours of molten metal, and alloys. An alloy of two metals became the “marriage” of two deities. The arcane records confine the alchemical employment of metals almost entirely to gold, silver, tin, copper, brass, and native orichalcum. They do not mention bronze or iron, although both are in Plato. This can only imply, he writes, that brass, copper, and tin were familiar to the Atlanteans in 9600 B.C. Copper was not worked elsewhere until the Middle Predynastic period in Egypt, about 3700 B.C. Gold in Egypt only shortly before. In Britain the transition to bronze took at least three centuries, 2000 to 1700 B.C., and stone tools remained in greater use. Stone implements were still used in remoter parts of Britain well into the historical period. He surmises that metal-working, vestigial in Atlantis, lapsed for several thousand years after the disappearance, and he returns to that in the alchemy chapter. I do not reconcile the Stone Age claim with the 9600 B.C. metal claim. He states both.

Chapter IV. Magical Science in Atlantis

Magic had its inception in Atlantis and spread with the survivors. The inner shrine has several names in the material he is using: the Castle Invisible, the Heart of the World, the Earthly Paradise, the Temple of the Inner Shrine. The higher form is Theurgia, magic derived from angelic sources.

He sets the modern definitions beside that claim, and he does not adopt them as a description of Atlantis. Tylor distinguishes a spiritistic magic from a natural one. Lehmann treats magic as occult latent power. Mana is the arcane force he has already used for the moon in a later chapter’s terms, a reservoir of magical or spiritual force. Frazer takes magic as proto-science, like producing like. Lord Raglan, in Folk-Lore, volume 50, has the magician performing rites blindly, and Spence records the opposition. Ennemoser, Avicenna, Plotinus, and Paracelsus (will, imagination, faith) are the older definitions he gathers. Porphyry and Iamblichus do not use the word Magic. Iamblichus calls the higher form Theurgy. White and Black are an early division. Synesius and Hypatia, and Philo-Judaeus, appear in his sketch of how late antiquity handled the split.

Atlas is founder of the mysteries and inventor of astrology, on Eusebius in the third century A.D., and is again Enoch and Hermes. Roger Bacon calls Atlas a magician. Michael Scot, in this chapter’s telling, is tutor to a king of Sicily who later became Emperor Frederick I, then at Toledo, and Dante knows the name. I keep Frederick I as Spence prints the identification.

The Telchines are sons of Poseidon. Strabo calls them evil magicians. Suidas calls them sorcerers and demons. Diodorus has them poison animals with Stygian water. Spence’s point is that Atlantean tradition is a recension of the biblical fall. Cham taught by demons means, for him, the sons of Seth.

Iamblichus gives a hierarchy: celestial gods, archangels, angels, archons. Union with the gods is exceedingly rare. A. E. Waite is his modern witness on Theourgia. A Michael Scot manuscript, possibly passing through Carthaginian, North African, Arabic, and Latin hands, includes a translation of Alpetragius dated 1217 at Toledo, in a Paris manuscript. The will of the gods is conveyed by symbols through angelic entities. Spence refuses to divulge the signs. He calls the refusal hierophantic bigotry, and he accepts it. Lost tongues of Atlantis or Lemuria appear here only as a figure for that silence. This book is not a history of Lemuria.

The magical books he names are those of Adam, Enoch, and others. Genesis 5, “And Enoch walked with God”, is the verse he leans on. Eliphas Lévi says the Book of Enoch fell to Solomon in two volumes, one hieroglyphic and one allegorical. Kessaeus says the Sabians had books of Seth, Enoch, and Adam, and that Abraham, after expulsion by Nimrod, found the chest of Adam. Lower Magia was practised by all occult officials and is distinct, in his scheme, from Black Magic. Fairies are confused, in later belief, with elementary spirits. Imagination emits rays for many leagues. As Theurgia waned, the Magi abased it and mixed in the darker occultism of the lower races.

Magical images: armed men for war, and disease demons transferred to images. Jupiter, King of Atlantis, had a model of the world “in all respects complete”. Zeus struck the facsimile with a thunderbolt.

The rite he gives in detail is the Rite of the Earth-fires. Sacrifices of animals and gifts of produce were offered almost continuously at temples near the greater volcanic heights. At least four times a year the great ceremony was undertaken at the capital. He then says the rite appears to have been held on Midsummer Day, beginning at dawn and lasting until nightfall. I keep both statements. Diodorus, he says, called the city Cercenes, “the circular Place”, which matches Plato’s circular plan. Spence suggests the plan descends from a stone circle later superseded by the Temple of Poseidon.

Six stone images, one for each of the six great volcanoes, were wheeled on rollers into the space before the temple and bound with leathern ropes, with repeated incantations. Two monstrous stone creatures, representing earthquake, were “slain”, or rather bereft of one of the thousand lives they were said to possess, so that they might be ineffectual for the ensuing year. The slightest error would leave the land exposed for a twelvemonth. The twelve kings or chiefs presided in azure robes, seated on thrones, and concentrated spiritual power on the images for more than an hour. The Chief King, or Pontiff, uttered threats in the name of the gods. A model of Atlantis, in porous stone, showing the salient features, was set on stone pillars over a bed of charcoal. Combustibles, explosives, nitre, and substances he compares to Greek fire were cast in. Flames came from the mimic volcanoes. At the height of the mock outburst the lesser Magi opened the sluices of a tank of water. Steam rose. The shapes of the demons were beheld fleeing. Horns and drums hastened them. The kings then entered the temple and offered thanks and sacrifices to Poseidon. He notes a similar ceremony connected with the sea, on which the translator he is using does not enlarge. The sea was regarded with suspicion, as an element that sometimes assisted the seismic demons, and also, on the whole, as kindly.

The azure robe, the symbolic garb of Poseidon, belonged to the kings or chief Magi alone. A robe of bulls’ hides was worn on certain occasions and also symbolised the god. He compares the Highland wizards’ Taighairm, the evocation of spirits near a waterfall, certain Greek cults, and the buffalo robe of American Indian sachems at the buffalo rite. Cloaks cut and painted as wolves, bats, birds, and spiders were used in the lower ranks, as shape-shifting rather than as concealment.

Black Magic, apart from the witchcraft chapter, rests on one Spanish manuscript in the Arcane Tradition, written in England by a Spanish brother in 1563. Its English title is The Tale of the Barcelona Shipper. It purports to be the adventures of Pedro Cardia, a supercargo of Barcelona, told to that brother in 1547. Cardia reached Algiers, “the ancient Carthago”, in the spring of 1541, in a ship licensed to trade with the ports of the Dey. He went ashore, his ship sailed without him, he was tried for espionage, and he was sold as a slave. The merchant who bought him made him overseer of the warehouse staff. A native store-keeper, Muley Said, or so the name is given, came from the interior, taught him Arabic, and described the hinterland.

Cardia mentioned skirting the weed-infested Sargasso, “beneath which lies the drowned isle of Atlantis”. Muley said the tales of that country were well known among the people of his home in the interior. The cause of the fall was evil-doing. The people blasphemed Allah and practised the dark sciences. Allah overthrew them. Survivors settled in the Atlas Mountains and carried on their sorceries there. “The Franks and Romans” drove them eastward. Some settled in the “Jewish” parts of Africa, and Spence adds a query, Carthage. Others went to Egypt. They were devil-worshippers, did not mingle with the native population, kept evil spirits in their houses, sometimes intermarried with them, and were probably the children of Eblis. They changed into serpents, cats, and wild animals, flew, cast wasting or sudden death, and made the mirages of the desert. Tribes had levied war on them without exterminating them. Muley said members of this caste still existed in the hinterland, and that he had seen the mirages and met small bodies of them before he himself was captured. Cardia was later ransomed by one of the societies in Spain and Italy that bought Christian prisoners out of Algiers and Morocco, and he was brought to Cadiz, where he met the writer, probably an ecclesiastic.

Spence says much less survives on the Black Art than on the exalted side. He presents the shipper’s tale as a manuscript of 1563, not as a record he has controlled.

Chapter V. Necromancy and Evocation

Necromancy, as he defines it, is evoking the dead in order to question them about future events. Magic seeks assistance, not counsel. Spiritualism, as he distinguishes it, is the dead attracted to the medium or to a control. Egyptian magicians were averse to the dead and preferred the gods. In Greece the practice is pre-Homeric and later a lower cult. In Chaldea the unfed dead are malignant. He uses the name Kassaptu. Among the Hebrews, Saul and the witch of Endor, the “ob” as a familiar or control, and Isaiah viii, 19, “wizards that chirp and mutter”, which he reads as medium speech rather than the direct voice.

If chapter II is right, Atlantean religion was a cult of the dead. Heroes, kings, giants, and Titans were deified, as in Babylonia and in primitive Britain, and a class of priests consulted them. Humbler dead were consulted at times of personal stress.

The Arcane proof, he warns, exists in a comparatively modern hand only, dated August 1746, and purports to be a copy or adaptation of an English translation of an Arabic writing made “in the time of the first Henry”, the early twelfth century. The transmission is wretched. He is inclined to accept it because Henry I’s reign was fertile in English translations from the Arabic, and because the account seems straightforward. He confesses that the strictest criticism might have dispensed with it. The passage says necromancy was among the chief prepossessions of the “Magi of Atlantis”. It does not describe the methods. It says the priests called up the spirits of the dead and “the spirits of the woods and wild places” at standing stones. Evocation at the stones, hypnotic mediumship, and self-induced trance are the practices he then discusses. A. E. Waite on Thomas Vaughan supplies the phrase he wants for an arcane elevation of hypnotism, pneuma joined to psyche. Lévi treats self-induced magnetism as the perfection of the magical art.

The second Spanish account says many of “the Sleepers” throw themselves into trance. Results, in that account, were accurate in practically every instance. The trance was not used for divination or prophecy of public events. It was used for family and domestic wishes.

On the theory of spirits he sets Animism against Mana, and low spirits against high. Applied to Atlantis, Iamblichus’s archangels and angels in the Antediluvian records are distinct from the Fallen Angels and the Titans. Vaughan speaks of a particular spirit united to the universal. The Telchines appear in the oral tradition only as “demons of the deep, the servants of the sorcerers”. The Gorgons may have been subjects of evocation by black magicians, and possibly elementary.

A recent translation says the Cherubim were those most frequently consulted by the higher sages for the second part of what Jewish adepts call Kischuph, the more exalted magical influence, divided into elementary and spiritual grades. Voltaire said the Hebrew word cherub means an ox. Spence joins that to the winged bulls of Assyria. Lévi gives the angel the head of a bull and a flaming sword, and calls the cherub the angel or the soul of the earth, represented in the mysteries as a bull. Spence asks whether this is also the angel at the gates of Paradise after the Fall, the secret garden of God, one and the same with the Hesperides and with a certain part of Atlantis.

Sylphs, undines, gnomes, and salamanders, in the later scheme he is reporting, were the offspring of the dreams of Adam while Adam was still in primal innocence. For their evocation the Atlantean Magi used what later ages called the Major Circle. Four spiritual kings, from the four quarters, appear with their hosts and give counsel. The circle is drawn in an apartment dedicated to magical operations, or in an unfrequented place. The Arcane text is in Hebrew and states an Atlantean origin. Spence thinks it certainly draws from Arabic or Moorish sources. It calls the spirits Schedim, spirits not regarded as evil, from an era when good and evil entities were not yet distinguished. He says that fact may plead for a Jewish provenance. The symbols stand at equidistant points outside the circle. The necromancer wears a robe on which the symbols are sewn or painted in their appropriate colours.

“Rulers of the Spirits” evoke spirits other than human. Spirits of water and fire may have been known to the black magicians. Spirits of air and earth belonged more to the official Magi. Belief in the tutelary dead, and hypnotic influence used to reach them, closes the chapter.

Chapter VI. Astrology in Atlantis

If any one occult science is more closely associated with Atlantis than another, it is astrology. He means a primitive stellar divination, not the mathematical art of later times.

Michael Scot, in the Introduction to Astronomy, states that the arts of divination began with Cham (that is, Shem), the son of Noah, who was trained in “the schools of the demons”, a mediaeval allusion, Spence says, to the Sons of God or children of Seth. I print the parenthesis as his. When Canaan was slain in fight his books were destroyed, and astrology languished. A volume was composed for the son Ionicon, sometimes confused with Ionitus, the fourth son of Noah, whom some celebrate as the founder of astrology. Scot says the art was brought to Spain “before the time of Moses”. The manuscript pictures Atlas and Nimrod together, one bestriding the Pyrenees and supporting the heavens, the other standing on “the mount of the Amorites” in the same attitude. Spence takes the picture as fortifying a very ancient tradition of Atlantis in the Atlantic.

The moon’s link with the tides identified her with Mana. Conjunctions and oppositions of the planets were auspicious or the reverse. A stationary point in the pole star gave an imaginary line southward, crossed by a line due east and west. Basilea, “the Great Queen”, is associated with the moon. Proclus, on the Timaeus, says the moon “is the self-conspicuous image of fontal nature”. The account Spence is using calls her “the queen of nature”, “the light of heaven in darkness”, “the mother of all”. Through her aid Atlas gained his stellar lore. Her “madness” is the myth of the moon’s mental influence.

The pantheon is tied to the constellations. Hesperus, son of Atlas, became the morning star. His daughters the Atlantides became the Pleiades. Ovid gives Atlas, by Pleione, seven daughters: Electra, Halcyone, Caeleno, Maia, Asterope, Taygete, and Merope. Aratus gives him, by Aethra, seven others, the Hyades: Ambrosia, Endora, Pasitheo, Coronis, Plexaris, Pytho, and Tyche. The myth of Hesperus is, for Spence, not unlike the tale of Enoch, who ascended to heaven. Atlas frequently ascended his mountain to observe the stars. Each person had a star of his own, by which the astrologer knew him.

Chaldean astrology observed “As above, so below”. Spence has no space for a full treatment. He classes it as prophetic omen-finding, inspiration, of a kind with sibylline utterance, poetry, and music, rather than as juridical computation. The Greeks inferred the same status. The science begins to take a fixed shape, he says, with the post-Christian Greek astronomers. Ptolemy, in the Tetrabiblos, placed the art above criticism. The geographer he has just mentioned, responsible for fixing many towns in Britain, laid down the outlines of what might be called mediaeval astrology. I do not attach Ptolemy’s name to the British place-list. The sentence in this copy is about the man who fixed British positions, and the Tetrabiblos sentence is about Ptolemy. They are neighbours on the page. I leave the British cartographer unnamed rather than guess which clause owns him.

Plotinus (205 to 262), the greatest of the Neo-Platonists in Spence’s phrase, was more critical. Influence of the stars is the law of correspondences. The figures of the constellations possess a potency beyond the stars that compose them, a “hieroglyphic” side. Evil inherent in matter, not a malign influence in the planets, brings personal or national disaster. Thomas Vaughan said Agrippa knew it was bootless to look for fatal events in the planets, for such are written in the superior tables of predestination, not in nature. Those tables are not found in the works of nature, nor within arcane sodalities.

Astrology decayed, he says, when it was confounded with astronomical science and became a business of mathematical poise. Nostradamus: astrology must be governed by divine inspiration, for the understanding created by the intellect cannot see occultly save by the voice from beyond. Until the Ruggieri, astrologers to the Borgias, the more august readers still used the inspirational method. Restoration depends on a return to that method by those psychically fitted to read the hieroglyphs of heaven.

Diodorus has much to say on the astrological genius of Uranus, the first king of Atlantis. Pliny believed Atlas the inventor of astronomy and of the sphere.

The Atlantean time-count took on the complexion of an astrological book of fate, because its symbols were connected with the starry heavens. Day-symbols became ominous of good or evil according to the gods they pictured. The sense of balance, which he calls the real essence of later astrology, was first conceived by weighing influences according to their nearness to the deity and planet who presided over the hour. So far as he can follow an Arcane passage which he thinks owes little to Egyptian or mediaeval influence, fifteen of the gods presided over the hours of the day, and nine over the hours of the night.

The Morning Star, Hesperus, connected with Lucifer, was associated with magical influence of the darker kind and was considered malign. Venus was in some manner associated with witchcraft, and the effects of its rays were dreaded at certain times of the year.

He cannot find sufficient evidence that the Zodiac began in Atlantis, though certain writers believe it did. The Book of Enoch places the signs of the Zodiac in “the second heaven”. So far as that Antediluvian evidence goes, it may indicate an Atlantean origin. He states the possibility and he states the lack of sufficient evidence. I do not turn either sentence into the other.

Chapter VII. The Beginnings of Alchemy

This chapter is origins only. He asks the reader not to drag in the mediaeval history except where it bears on the beginning. Alchemy has been defined as the infant stage of chemistry. Spiritual alchemy is a later mystical treatment of an earlier practical effort to turn baser metal into precious metal.

An Arcane archive that mentions alchemy in Atlantis speaks of furnaces and apparatus for sublimation. He says that apparatus was unknown in Atlantis, and that the passage is written in the manner of the century that penned it. From the first he has held that Atlantean culture never surpassed the Neolithic or New Stone Age, a very advanced Stone Age like those of ancient Mexico and Peru, developing almost every department of material civilisation except the use of metals. He then asks how one can speak of the transmutation of metals in such a period. His answer is that the art arose out of primitive experiments with metals that were known, and looked at, long before they were tools.

He cannot conceive that Atlantean civilisation had yet approached the use of iron at the downfall. Iron scarcely enters the alchemical conception. In Egypt, he says, it took twenty centuries to extract iron properly from its ores. Plato’s ceremony of the twelve kings, every six years, alludes to iron as a metal which must not be used for the sacrifice of the bulls, which would seem to imply that iron was in use for less sacred purposes. Spence believes Plato’s ideas were coloured by earlier Greek ritual, and that the iron is an anachronism. So far as his researches carry him, the alchemical, and not necessarily the handicraft, use of metals in Atlantis was confined to gold, silver, tin, and brass, and to the indigenous metal orichalcum. The experimental stage preceded practical application and then ran beside it.

That catastrophe took place somewhere about the year 9600 B.C., yet copper was not worked anywhere in the non-Atlantean world until the Middle Predynastic period in Egypt, that is about 3700 B.C., while gold was worked there only shortly before that period.

Lewis Spence, The Occult Sciences in Atlantis, p. 78

The gap is nearly 6,000 years. He offers Hero of Alexandria, whose steam toy of the first century B.C. was lost for seventeen centuries until, in 1629, Bianca contrived a plan for working mills by steam. The secrets of early metallurgy were, in his opinion, partially alienated. Memory of them survived as allegory, and was revived in Egypt and elsewhere. He summarises: in the New Stone Age most of the metals were known. Man experimented for centuries before practical use in tools and weapons. Out of the experiments arose a mythology of the metals. That tradition developed into mediaeval alchemy.

Vincent de Beauvais argues that the Antediluvians possessed alchemy, and refers to Noah as acquainted with the Elixir of Life. Lenglet du Fresnoy, in his history of the Hermetic philosophy, says the art descended from Shem, or Chem, the son of Noah, and that the words chemistry and alchemy come from his name. Spence calls the derivation as ingenious as it is absurd.

The Book of Enoch, as he reads it, alludes to a mountain of iron, one of gold, one of copper, and others of silver and “soft metal”. Lead and tin flow from a fountain guarded by an angel. Robert of Chester identifies Enoch with Hermes and calls him the author of The Book of the Composition of Alchemy, later discovered by Adfad of Alexandria and revealed to Marienus of Rome, who explained it to Prince Calid of Egypt.

In Egypt, a twelfth-dynasty scribe, about 2000 B.C., recommends to his son a work entitled Chemt. Greek writers, as he reports them, say the Egyptians used quicksilver to separate gold and silver from the ore. The detritus formed a black powder, supposed to contain the individualities of the metals that had gone into it. That powder was identified with the body Osiris was thought to assume in the Underworld. Both had magical qualities and were sources of life. Sir Wallis Budge is his authority for the growth, beside ordinary metal-working, of a belief in magical powers in fluxes and alloys. The art and the knowledge were called Khemeta, which Budge glosses as the preparation of the black ore, regarded as the active principle in the transmutation (p. 80). The powder of projection, he says, began in the powder of Osiris. The worship of Osiris arrived in early dynastic Egypt from western North Africa with the Cabiri, whose ancestors had been refugees from Atlantis. Budge, as Spence quotes him, says everything in the texts shows Osiris an indigenous god of north-east Africa, his home and origin possibly Libyan. Horus, son of Osiris, was associated with the Mesniu, or coppersmiths, and was Lord of Edfu, “the city of the Forge”.

Plutarch, in Isis and Osiris, paragraphs 33 and 36: the more learned among the priests call the Nile Osiris. Gold was “the flesh of the gods”, drawn from the sun. Zosimus of Panopolis, in the third century, says alchemy was the divine and sacred art of the priests and kings of Egypt, who kept it secret. Suidas, in the Chemeia, says Diocletian burnt the Egyptian books on alchemy to punish revolts. Zosimus on the instruction of Democritus by Ostanes supplies the link Spence wants between the Nile, the Elixir, and the Philosopher’s Stone. He believes this is a Byzantine record of an Alexandrian tradition that the secrets were the privilege of the gods and of royalty alone. The Arcane Tradition preserves the theory, which later alchemists also held, that the formation of the world was a work of divine alchemy. The image of the Creator as the Great Alchemist is, he says, a basic acceptance of at least one arcane society, and so far as he is aware it is common to several. He says this is not a betrayal, because the Masonic analogue is known to all.

The same source associates the metals with the planets. He gives two dispositions and says they disagree. In one account Mercury is iron and Mars is mixed metal. In the other the assignments of iron and mixed metal are reversed, and tin moves as well. I do not print a table he has already called a disagreement. The citadel walls in Plato, plated with gold, and the outer walls with copper and the inner with tin, are his allegorical reference to the art in Atlantis. Deities resembling sun and moon stand at the gates in the symbolic reading.

No land, he says, was so well fitted to parent alchemy as Atlantis, with its continual seismic change. He quotes writers who treat the crater as decomposition, and who personify three stages of chemical action in the Cyclopes Brontes, Steropes, and Arges. They identify those spirits, one and the same with the Cabiri, with a ternary group of carbon compounds. The Telchines used earth as a laboratory for unholy and too-rapid transformations. Every word of that chemical reading, Spence says, fortifies the conclusion that the art began in Atlantis, the first home of the Telchines.

Orichalcum, he thinks, resembled the jewellers’ gold of his great-grandfathers’ time, except that the later metal was definitely an alloy, while orichalcum would seem to have been the artificial product of a partial alchemical change.

The passage from material alchemy to spiritual alchemy took place in Atlantis, according to Arcane passages which he says may neither be quoted nor more particularly specified. They are associated with an angelic source. The higher knowledge was derived from above, which chimes with alchemy as the terrestrial form of the science of the Creator, the Great Alchemist. He quotes the verse on wisdom, more precious than rubies, and he will not treat it as a recipe. The sages of Atlantis, he says, knew of the true Philosopher’s Stone and its attributes. The knowledge is conveyed by symbols or through initiation. It was revealed to the patriarchs and handed down in the Arcane Tradition.

The Elixir of Life, the mystical water that prolonged existence, originated in Atlantis. There is, he believes, no doubt of that. The same tale is told of Quetzalcoatl, who periodically visited the Place of Shining Sand and returned as a boy after a magic draught. The Fountain of Youth is associated with Paradise and the Antediluvian world. Paracelsus, commenting on an alleged Revelation of Hermes, calls the elixir an indestructible essence, a perfect equation of the elements, revealed from above to Adam, by which Adam and the patriarchs preserved life and health to an extreme age. It is the water of Life. Thomas Vaughan, in the Magical Writings, page 68, says God discovered this thing to the first man, to confirm his hopes of three supernatural mysteries, the Incarnation, Regeneration, and Resurrection.

American Indian myths often place the Fountain of Youth to the east, the direction of Atlantis. Quetzalcoatl, in need of refreshment, went to Tlapallan, “to the east”, on a raft of serpents. His festival was associated with the sign of earthquake. He was said to have disappeared in the Red Sea. The name means Bird-serpent. Spence says he is one and the same with the Egyptian Thoth, or Hermes Trismegistus, and, since Thoth has already been equated with Atlas and Enoch, Quetzalcoatl is one and the same with that god or patriarch.

The Grail, in its pagan aspect, is a cauldron or fountain of plenty in the Celtic Underworld, holding the elements of all sustenance, physical and spiritual. Jessie Weston and Professor Heinzel declare the story redolent of a very early nature-cult, such as the myth of Osiris. The contents of the Grail, like the water of the Nile, are red as blood. The maimed king has been equated with Osiris. A similar source was discovered by King Arthur, who Spence says cannot be dissociated from Osiris, at Caer Pedryvan. Professor Rhys called that source a prototype of the Grail. Miss Weston has identified several of the place-names with localities in Egypt. This Grail material is the close of the alchemy chapter. The contents page puts prophecy next, at page 83.

Chapter VIII. Prophecy and Divination

Prophecy, the noble and divine science, cannot but have had its origin in the Antediluvian age, when man’s close association with his Creator produced communications that could be turned to prophetic account. The means were understood by degrees and were never altogether forgotten. Before the Atlantean practice he sets the marks of a true prophet in the Old Testament. A prophet was known by the truth of his deliverances. His prophecies should agree with those of other prophets. The voice that teaches what is to be done is of divine origin when it contains anything prophetic, and is not to be confounded with ordinary sleep. Natural prophecy, at its first unaided effort, is a receptive process, favoured by seclusion and purity.

Robert Fludd says prophecy is not necessarily the possession of priests and diviners. Some had the gift immediately from God. Others, the mediati, receive it in vigils or in sleep. Verbena and angelica confer the power, and so do the stones selenites and hyaeniae. In later times, when the pure light waxed dim, recourse was had to drugs, vapours, and other depressants or excitants. Spence says the ancient art never envisaged that condition. The dream-state of poets and prophets makes the object and the sense one and the same. Nature is a collection of symbols. Freudian explanation, he says, has no bearing on prophetic dream. It refers only to dreams of the most material kind.

In Atlantis the naturally gifted were few, so few that men and women with the gift were sought through the archipelago. The prophetic caste was among the most highly respected. It dwelt apart in the most retired portion of the Temple of Poseidon. No difference of status appears between Seers and Expounders. No drugs or vapours kept the agent unconscious, though hypnotism was occasionally used in urgent cases. The class was left to itself unless a political immediacy required it. The final catastrophe, he says, had been utterly unforeseen almost until the end, and was communicated to the governing caste by one of the lesser official prophets only a few days before it occurred.

He then gives a narrative he has not used in former books, because he wished to use only proofs capable of critical control. It should not be implied, he says, that he gives it absolute credence. A ruler of Atlantis levied war on the Mediterranean lands, invaded Africa, conquered Libya as far as Egypt, and attacked Greece, besieging Athens. The Athenians drove him out, pursued him westward, freed the tributary regions, and landed on Atlantis itself.

He described how he had envisaged the course of a terrific terrestrial upheaval, commencing with an eruption of the volcano which overshadowed the city of Cercenes, which belched its lava streams upon the community below.

Lewis Spence, The Occult Sciences in Atlantis, p. 93

The Chief Seer, name not divulged, sought audience with “the King” while the Hellenic forces were still marching on Cercenes. A subsidiary adept had dreamed the eruption, a storm in the ocean such as no memory in the island recorded, then fissures that split provinces and engulfed the canals, the city, and the villages. On the third day of the vision nothing remained but a waste of waters, with the litter of the world’s earliest civilisation afloat. King Jupiter, and Spence says he must continue to call him by that name, though none is vouchsafed in the account, mocked the seer in the spirit of an earlier Belshazzar. Visitations had come before, and Atlantis had survived. Perhaps the vision portended the fate of the Greek invaders. The seer had embroidered his tale. Jupiter dismissed the prophets, ordered immediate sacrifices on a vast scale, including Greek prisoners taken in the skirmishes outside the city, and ordered a banquet of such profusion that it was evident he had partially taken leave of his senses.

The other kind of divination in the chapter does not come from direct prophecy. Judging from the Arcane Tradition, it consisted chiefly in portents from the flight and behaviour of birds, and from “the speech of animals”. Animals possessed a language of their own, capable of being acquired by close study. He leaves open whether this was actual speech, of the kind some modern students claim for apes, or the arcane speech tradition gives the animals in the Garden of Eden. The Atlantean sages comprehended it as the Roman augurs did, and drew prophesyings from it. He is not informed, as Pliny informs us for Rome, precisely how they construed the speech or the movements. The flight of birds was the chief source, according as the birds winged their way to the dexter or the sinister side of natural objects.

Chapter IX. Witchcraft and Sorcery

He has already outlined the lower castes. A brief Latin account of the laws of Atlantis, in the Arcane Tradition, he does not treat as more than qualified evidence. Genesis 6 and the Rabbinical reading of “the daughters of men” as the female offspring of Cain are the stronger witness. Both Scripture and the Rabbins say that some time after the expulsion from Eden the earth was visited by the Sons of God, whom Hebrews, Rabbins, and many mediaeval writers regarded as the Fallen Angels. The Book of Enoch, part of it preserved by Georgius Syncellus in the Chronography, and in Ethiopic and Slavonic versions, says the Fallen Angels instructed the Antediluvians in charms, enchantments, and astrology.

He says this patriarchal myth is practically duplicated in Plato. Poseidon, or Neptune, marries Cleito, an aboriginal woman, and has by her nine sons, all of them giants or Titans. That “nine sons” is the statement of this chapter. I do not alter the ten children, or the ten sons and their consorts, of the earlier pages.

A passage on the moon, which he is quoting, says that because of Adam’s misdemeanour the moon became so sealed that she could not dispense her milk to inferiors as heretofore. Communion between God and man was not altogether broken. Enoch and other patriarchs walked with God. The women of the lower race were, he scarcely questions, practitioners in black magic of a debased kind.

Diodorus distinguishes the Amazons of Africa from those of Asia Minor. The African Amazons inhabited an island called Hesperia, the Hesperides, lying to the west, near the morass of Tritonides, under Mount Atlas in Morocco, which extends to the ocean. They founded a great city and subdued neighbouring tribes. Later, when the Atlanteans were threatened by the Gorgons, the Amazons came to their assistance and defeated the Gorgons with immense slaughter. Both were subsequently conquered by Perseus and Hercules. An earthquake opened the tract toward the ocean and swallowed the whole morass of Triton. Spence says Diodorus’s history of the Atlanteans is not material about the Moroccan mountain. It is a North African tradition of an invasion of Atlantis by a female caste of warriors. He cites Babcock for the view that the traditions could not have been invented in their entirety by a trained collector, and must refer to something dimly and distantly historic.

The Gorgons had heads covered with vipers instead of hair. The sight turned beholders to stone. Other Gorgons were the Lamiae, faces of women and a human form to the middle, then scales and the tails of serpents. An old author says they tempted men to discourse, flew in their faces, and strangled them. Circe, of the race of the Titans, transformed the companions of Ulysses into beasts and was the consort of Glaucus. Islands inhabited entirely by women, in the old Irish sagas, are remains of similar myths. Calypso, daughter of Atlas, kept Ulysses for seven years in the grotto on Ogygia, an island with a great mountain in its midst, like Atlantis. Roderick O’Flaherty identified Ogygia with Ireland. Spence says there is very little doubt it was Atlantis itself, or one of its dependent islands.

An Arcane tale has the women, as the old account dubs them, stealing back to the mainland and debauching the people. While King Atlas slept, his daughter removed the key of the gates of the great basin that received the ocean at high tide, opened the sluice-gates, and drowned the community. Spence says the old writer mingled two traditions, or borrowed from a manuscript that did so. He links Calypso with a figure in Breton lore associated with cataclysm by water. On St. Cecilia’s Day a statue between the towers of the cathedral, the bringer of the vine to Brittany, is the subject of strange rites. Pomponius Mela’s sorceresses of the Isle of Sena, not far from Brest, an oracle of nine virgin priestesses, raised winds and seas, transformed themselves into animals, cured wounds, and predicted the future. Strabo calls them devotees of Bacchus, meaning the rites were orgiastic. Spence says Kendrick and others have practically disposed of the theory that Pomponius and Strabo were garbling a myth, though they say nothing of an Atlantic provenance. A similar female cult flourished among the Guanches of the Canary Islands.

The regions he lists as holding the proof are Spain, France, Britain, Ireland, and the Canary Islands on one side, and the West Indies and Mexico on the other. Witchcraft of this female kind is not found to any great extent in Asia, which he takes as pointing to a sunken Atlantic locality. For the American extension he refers the reader to his Atlantis in America.

The Cogul painting is the European date he wants.

One of these depicts a number of women wearing skirts and peaked hats, precisely like the witches of later times, dancing round a male idol or priest, who is painted black.

Lewis Spence, The Occult Sciences in Atlantis, p. 98

The rock-shelter is on a hillside at Cogul, near Lerida, in the old province of Aragon, in north-eastern Spain. The scene might have been read as a sabbath of the fifteenth or sixteenth century. It reveals, he says, that the cult was practised by the Aurignacians at an age immensely remote, twelve thousand years ago at the least computation. In Mexico the priests and friars of the early sixteenth century found witches who haunted cross-roads, inflicted maladies on children, and were supposed to fly on broomsticks. They used the thunder-stone, or elf-bolt, to wound or slay. They danced naked to a black man playing the pipe. Some of them were Amazons, said to have made war upon Mexico and conquered it in very early times, sacrificing a large number of people to their patron goddess.

The Latin Arcane passage on this head merely alludes to a law which forbade sorcery. It fails him as evidence. He turns to the Gorgons Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa, daughters of Phorcys and Ceto. Phorcys was the son of Poseidon. In a quarrel with Atlas he was drowned, and was afterwards invested with the honours of a god. The Messrs. Fitz Simon, in The Gods of Old, read the three Gorgons as allegories of terrestrial forces, terrestrial contraction, internal pressure, and radiation of light and heat. The name signifies the works or agencies of earth, chiefly volcanic action. Volcanic outburst shows that the central fires are rising and that Euryale is still alive. Every earthquake suggests that the rocks have snapped and that Stheno is immortal. Spence joins the Gorgon women to the seismic powers that wrought the downfall, a catastrophe brought about, as he has said in many places, by the profligacy of the inhabitants. Flagitious behaviour offends the genius of the earth. In a secondary sense the myth shows a cult of sorceresses, the daughters of Phorcys, the enemy of Atlas. The severed head of Medusa, in the hands of Perseus, turned Atlas into a mountain of stone. The proof, he says, is complete that the myth is an allegory of the destruction and of the seismic and demonic forces that precipitated it.

Calypso he has already placed. The Titans he returns to. Diodorus removes the whole Titanic revolt to Atlantis. Hercules, Poseidon, Albion, and Iberius belong to one group of patron deities. The revolt against the gods so closely resembles the war in heaven between Jehovah and the rebel angels that both, he says, spring from one original source. Witchcraft in its essence is not, for him, the survival of a religion. The earliest European cults, Mediterranean, Teutonic, and Celtic, show animal disguise, agrarian festivals, human or animal sacrifice, dancing out a rite, a rude leechcraft, and a bargain with unseen natural powers, not yet of the rank of gods, whose office was the growth of crops and the fecundity of flocks. Those powers were fortified by sacrifice at seasonal occasions. That generalised belief, surviving, is what Europe later called witchcraft.

Chapter X. The Mysteries of Atlantis

In their earliest phase the mysteries are the magical medium by which the divine Pharaoh, and he alone, might periodically journey in spirit to the land of the gods, to take counsel with his divine kindred or to refresh himself so that he could fructify the land. By about 50 B.C., when the Romans arrived in Egypt, the native mysteries were an elaborate wisdom-religion, with stage-managed representations of bliss and punishment, theatrical lighting, and machinery. An imaginary death was rehearsed, so that when the Pharaoh actually died he would know the way to the fields of Aalu. The places of the rite were in a part of the temple difficult or forbidden to the public, not in the pyramids. Stretched on a couch, he was rendered unconscious by a drug or by hypnotic power. Certain bas-reliefs show priests making passes over his head. He then progressed through Amenti, the Place of the Dead, to Aalu, and came face to face with Osiris and Isis.

Two phases: the initiatory Mysteries of Isis, and the loftier Mysteries of Osiris, whose secrets it was death to divulge. The lesson of the Osirian phase was that the body was sustained by Osiris, and the soul likewise. Daily bread, wheat, was supplemented by a spiritual bread, symbolised by the ear of wheat held up before the initiate. Progress through the spheres was done with scenery and light. Of ancient descriptions, only The Golden Ass of Apuleius, a Latin philosopher of the second century A.D., describes the process with any freedom. The worship of Osiris, or Serapis, reached Roman Britain. The crypt of York Cathedral is believed to have been a temple of Serapis. Isis was worshipped in Roman London.

The grisly path, haunted by malignant demons, prompted the Egyptians to seek a remedy. If the soul could make the passage while still connected with the body, it could not fail after death. Spence thinks the process in the Book of the Dead was originally somewhat different from the seasonal translation of the Pharaoh, which was modelled on the rite by which Osiris returned periodically to Aalu for refreshment and for the fortification of his fructifying powers.

The root, in his opinion, is that kings, priests, or prophets, while still alive, enjoyed communion with divinity in its own place. The withdrawal of the divine Roman emperors for consultation with the gods is a vestige. Prometheus, Enoch, and Elijah partake of the privilege. Witch-doctors visit the abodes of the dead to receive magic, or potent medicine. Thomas the Rhymer’s visit to the Queen of Faerie is a late survival. The original root is divine descent. The ruler was a son of the gods and could visit his kindred.

The Arcane Tradition inscribes a legend that at certain seasons the kings of Atlantis were translated to dwell with Poseidon, their ancestor, in his earthly paradise on the summit of the mountain at the centre of the mainland. Spence says this alleged quotation from Diodorus can refer to nothing but a mystery cult. Kenealey says Enoch became chief pontiff of Atlantis and founded the Mysteries. The authority is not given. Spence suspects Bailly’s history of ancient astronomy, and after searching its pages he cannot find the reference. He has never heard it said, in the occult societies, that Enoch occupied the position of grand pontiff, whatever Kenealey intended by the title. A definite tradition in some of the societies does associate Enoch with the Atlantean Mysteries. Genesis 4:26, Enoch began to call upon the name of the Lord, is for Spence the use of the divine name in evoking celestial spirits. Guillaume Postel alludes to the Book of Thoth, written by Enoch, that is Hermes Trismegistus. Spence has already described that book. The Book of Enoch and the Book of Thoth were one and the same originally. He does not mean they remained the same in their later developments.

An encyclopaedia in nine large volumes, the first of which lies open before him, traces Thoth into the peak of Teneriffe, “the ancient Atlantis”, called Teithe after the Nilotic deity. He reports the statement. He does not adopt the peak as his own site for the continent.

Arcane works of the Antediluvian mysteries existed, a persistent tradition says, in copied fragments until comparatively recent times. The Zohar gives Adam a book received from the angel Raziel. He was warned to conceal it. When he fell into sin he bore it from the Garden of Eden. It was supernaturally removed, and later restored by the angel Raphael. That book afterwards came to be known as the Book of Enoch. At his apotheosis Enoch became the angel Metatron, the librarian of Heaven. An Arabic tradition gives Adam a cloth, bestowed by the Lord, stamped with the likenesses of all the prophets who were to be sent, and with other prophetic knowledge. Achmet, who wrote an astrological treatise in Greek in the ninth century, says he compiled it from books some of which dated from the time of Adam. Rabbinical lore says Adam bequeathed many mystical writings, composed with the help of twenty books which fell from heaven.

Spence is convinced, from the spirit of one such contribution, that it was founded on a sufficiently authentic reference. He recalls that the Atlantean laws, and the account of the war with Greece which Plato says Solon saw in Egypt, were engraved upon pillars. Princess Olive’s reference, as he reads it, is probably to the twin pillars Josephus attributes to Seth, still standing in Josephus’s day. Michael Scot also mentions them. These are traditional elaborations on a possible core: that writings of the pre-Deluge arcane knowledge had been handed down.

In Atlantean record the Mysteries are fellowship with the gods, Poseidon and his kindred, and the restoration of man to his primal blessedness. The theatre was a great subterranean labyrinth in the neighbourhood of Cercenes. He compares it with the Egyptian labyrinth that formerly stood near the Pyramid of Hawara, in the Fayyoum, whose measurements are given as nearly 1,300 feet (396 meters) in length and about 900 feet (274 meters) in breadth. Those figures belong to the Egyptian building, as he gives them, not to a measurement of the Atlantean one. At intervals, great doors bound and bossed with orichalcum cut off the way. Official doorkeepers required the countersigns. After preparation the candidate entered the Hall of Illumination, encircled by twelve shrines, each dedicated to one of the kings or gods of Atlantis. Close by, the great statue of Poseidon in his bull form reared what the writer calls a spectacle of hideous and shaggy terror.

The principles unveiled there are the secrets of the angelic life, restoring the ecstasy lost by the error of the first parents. A London magazine, The Straggling Astrologer, in 1825, printed an extract signed “Philadelphus Hieroglyphica Propheticus Cosmopolita”, described as from a manuscript of the late Richard Cosway. Spence also uses a volume of Jacob Behmen’s works, translated by William Law. The true Eden, in the generally accepted opinion he cites, belongs to the noumenal world. It was symbolised in the Pharaoh’s return to Aalu, in journeys to the forefathers’ land, and in the Attic, Eleusinian, and Orphic rites. The arcane processes are those of rebirth.

Later beliefs, the refreshed return, the seasonal visit of the kingly representative so that he can regenerate growth, are corollaries of that recognition. The Mysteries of Atlantis, the earliest of all, reveal it explicitly. During one phase the celebrants performed symbolical acts over the body, as though re-creating its members, anointing it, and touching each organ with magical instruments. A goddess of the starry sky, her skin spotted like the vault, receives the new soul into the new body, in a manner he says is by no means clear, but similar to the Egyptian rebirth of the initiate as Osiris. In another phase the neophyte takes the place of the first parent and re-lives the early experiences in the Garden of Eden. The climate of Atlantis, subtropical, was genial. The initiate who had passed the first ordeal dwelt in a beautiful enclosure without a roof or the other accompaniments of civilisation. Reclining beneath a tree he beholds a woman of surpassing loveliness. If, at her prompting, he eats of the fruit, he is cast forth, unworthy of the sages, probably to end his days among the aboriginal folk who ministered to the darker powers. The trees are those of the knowledge of Good and Evil.

The last phase is the reclamation of the knowledge forfeited at the Fall, which certain of the patriarchs, among them Enoch and Noah, seem to have possessed. The Cabiri carried the Mysteries to Asia Minor. Sanchoniathon says the son of Thabion, the first hierophant, brought them to the Phoenicians, and that they were handed down from initiate to initiate. One of those initiates was Isiris, inventor of letters and brother of Chna, called the first of the Phoenicians in the clause Spence is using. The Book of the Dead represents, in his opinion, a portion of this last phase, the journey of the soul and the Pharaonic visit to Aalu, confused with the Pharaoh’s personal reinvigoration in the region where the forces of magical growth were thought to originate. The Egyptian mysteries are an adaptation of those of Atlantis. That is the claim the contents page gives this chapter as its close.

Chapter XI. The Atlantean Cult in Britain

He extends the British association he outlined in chapter II. Twelve statues in the Temple of Poseidon are the number frequently found in megalithic circles, and the number of seats at the Round Table, whose occupants have been identified with Celtic gods. Circles are still called “false men” by the peasantry, which he reads as an old belief that the stones were statues of heroes or gods. Some are entitled “knights”. The Titanic pantheon resembles the gigantic pantheon of Britain. Poseidon is grouped with the British giant-god Albion and with a Titan of the British isles. The British word for a giant, Etin, may be equated with Titan and with the Norse Jotunn. The war of gods and Titans appears in Ireland as the strife of the Tuatha De Danann and the Fomorians, and in Britain as the conflicts of Arthur and his knights with the giants.

He believes a great Atlantic religious and mystical system had its nucleus in the island-continent or archipelago, and spread over the contiguous islands and the coasts of Africa, Spain, Portugal, France, Britain, and Ireland.

The Blue Stones of the inner circle at Stonehenge could not, because of their geological formation, have been brought from any site nearer than the Prescelly Hills in Wales. He believes a migratory tribe conveyed them as the statues or sepulchral figures of its dead ancestors. Cromm Cruach, and the monolith St. Patrick is said to have overthrown, the stone representing the pagan god himself, ended a barbarous tribute. People in some of the Western Isles of Scotland still swear by Cromm Cruach. The later peasant belief that circles were people turned to stone for dancing on a Sunday remembers the name Giant’s Dance, given to the great Stonehenge of Ireland, and the dancing stones elsewhere.

In the primitive mind the dead who live beneath the earth have a magical association with crops. That belief develops into an agricultural cult in which the spirits of the tribal heroes are the agencies of growth. Stonehenge was the centre of such a cult. It is, he says, assuredly a temple built after the manner of the temple of Poseidon at Cercenes.

The bull was recognised in Britain in the figure of Hu Gadarn, who took the form of a bull, or was symbolised by one, as Osiris assumed the form of the Apis bull and the Gaulish Esus was regarded as a human semblance of it. The earth was Buarth Beirdd, the Bardic ox-byre. Fertility was a white cow. The generating sun was a white bull. Both dwelt in the earth, regarded as a sacred cattle-pen. Bulls or kine were offered annually at Belteinn, kept up in a modified form in Scotland and Ireland until a comparatively late period, the sacrifice by fire mimicked by driving the animals through the smoke of a bonfire.

The records of the Presbytery of Dingwall show bulls sacrificed in the parish of Gairloch, in Ross-shire, from 1649 to 1678, and oblations of milk poured on the hills. In 1649 the General Assembly appointed a commission of its own number to examine the Druidical customs then prevalent in the North at the old places of worship, and to put them down. About a century earlier, in 1538, an idol of the bull-cult was burned at Smithfield. He calls that proof that the cult was not quite extinct in the Wales of the sixteenth century, and that it lingered in Scotland as late as the middle of the seventeenth. At Bury St. Edmunds, under the date 4 June 1487, Master John Swarsham, sacrist, with the consent of the prior, let the manor of Habryden, in Bury, on condition that the tenant find a white bull every year, so often as any gentlewoman, from devotion or vows, should visit the tomb of St. Edmund. At the monastery gates the bull was sent back. Spence reads a very ancient ceremony in which the animal was sacrificed. Bull-baiting in England was, in all probability, an extension of the sacrifice to Hu Gadarn, lord of the oak and the sun. Sacrifices of bulls also took place at Clynnog in Carnarvonshire, in 1589, in the grounds of “St. Beyno”, where there seems to have been a grove of sacred trees. Reginald of Durham, in his Book of the Miracles of St. Cuthbert, relates that St. Aelred of Rievaulx, travelling in Scotland in 1164, witnessed a bull-sacrifice at Kirkcudbright. The animal was bound with cords and dragged to the church as an offering to St. Cuthbert. The clerks of the church, the Scolofthas, opposed the ceremony and proposed to bait the bull. Spence takes that as a hint of how bull-baiting in Britain began. Professor J. Y. Simpson, of Edinburgh, in a work published in the middle of the last century, mentions that a cow was sacrificed as a safeguard against murrain by a relative of his own, within twenty miles of Edinburgh, not many years before he wrote. The ancient festival of Beltane, at which the cattle were passed between two fires, was for Spence merely a relic of a former rite in which the cattle were actually consumed by fire (p. 123).

On the cult of the dead and the fairy belief he cites Professor A. H. Krappe, The Science of Folk-lore. Krappe gives three theories of Teutonic dwarfs and Celtic elves and fairies. According to one they are the dead. According to another they are elementary spirits. According to the third they are reminiscences of former inhabitants, crowded out by newcomers and compelled to retire to the mountains or the sea-shore. Spence says a good many story-types accord with the first theory. Wimberley, in Folk-lore of the English and Scottish Ballads, finds striking resemblances between the ballad ghost and the ballad fairy. Dalyell tells of a witch of Orkney who beheld the fairies rise out of the kirkyard of Hildiswick. In the witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Scottish witches met dead friends and relations in Fairyland. Ministers of 1660 to 1690 believed the souls of their predecessors dwelt in the fairy hills. Irish collectors, a mystic and a poet working together, found that most of the people they examined believed Fairyland was a region to which the souls of the living might be spirited while the bodies remained on earth. The Tuatha De Danann, displaced by the Milesian Celts, were accorded palaces beneath the hills and came to be known as the Aes Sidhe, the People of the Hills, and later as fairies. He would be rash, he says, to claim that every one of these beliefs proceeded from Atlantis. The bull sacrifice and the cult of the dead are the salient elements he does claim for both.

The Fomorians were giants of huge and deformed appearance, with the heads of goats, horses, or bulls, the Children of the Sea, coming from a land sunk beneath the ocean. At the battle of Moytura the Tuatha De defeated them and drove them back to that submarine land, which was probably a memory of Atlantis. A text of about 1100, speaking of the Fomorians, says they were the sons of Ham, accursed by Noah. D’Arbois de Jubainville calls the Irish story a Celtic version of the war of Zeus against Cronus and the Titans, and the Fomors the Irish group corresponding to the Greek Titans. Arthurian strife between the Celtic deities of light and darkness may be a modern version of a much older tale. The strife was brought about by sorcery and social licence, as clear in the Arthurian circumstances as in those of Atlantis. Scottish giant lore, especially in the West Highlands, shows monsters that cannot be distinguished from the Titans. Merlin, the sky-god, is his British equivalent of Cronus, identified in kind with the Grecian analogue by the writer he is following. Uranus, the first king of Atlantis in Diodorus, has a British equivalent in the Urianus to whom Geoffrey of Monmouth alludes, in the nineteenth chapter of his third book, as a king of Britain who reigned centuries before Arthur. Later Celtic literature alludes to the Fallen Angels, whom Spence equates with the evil Atlanteans on one hand and the Titans on the other. A passage associated with Columba describes the spaces of the air crowded with a disordered crew of rebel satellites, held invisible lest man be infected by their example. He allows that piety may have sought to give the myth a Satanic colouring for its own purposes.

If Atlantis had never existed, he repeats, the student of tradition would have had to invent such a region. In none of the lands of Western Europe does he find a nucleus old enough to be the centre from which the adjacent countries received their earliest ideas of religion, myth, and magic.

Chapter XII. Conclusions

The occult sciences, in their early phases, were practised in Atlantis, and they had their inception there. If a school of thought still says arcane belief originated in the East, he asks whether the Crô-Magnon or Aurignacian magical images on the walls of the caverns of the Dordogne, drawn from fourteen to twenty thousand years ago, were the result of Eastern influence. Was the magic of Crete, that island of mysterious cults, of Eastern origin? Was the magic of the Canary Isles, the cult of the Effenecs, Oriental in its origin? The Effenecs are his name for that Canarian cult. I do not supply another.

the bull-cult, which had its commencement in Spain and France probably 20,000 years ago, and which spread thence to Crete, Greece, Egypt and Babylonia.

Lewis Spence, The Occult Sciences in Atlantis, p. 131

the painting of the witch-dance of Cogul, a relic at least fourteen thousand years old

Lewis Spence, The Occult Sciences in Atlantis, p. 131

The second sentence is the age he gives the same painting on this page. Page 98 said twelve thousand years at the least. Both remain.

He turns on what has been described as “the Brains Trust”, and on the ignorance it has revealed in the face of public opinion. It will not examine the evidence. In the Encyclopaedia Britannica Atlantis is described as “a legendary island in the Atlantic Ocean”. A legendary island, he says, is not capable of existing in the Atlantic or any other ocean. The memory of Atlantis will persist when even that tradition has become legendary.

The germ of the occult sciences is in Atlantis, in a vestigial state. Readers who wanted men with bodies of flame, and the other fabulous absurdities of certain works on the alleged civilisation, will not find them. He has not the glib certainty of drawing-room lecturers, who remain anonymous. He has admitted passages of dubious mark, and he has said so when he did. Such proofs as the tradition affords cannot relate to anything but a primitive type. The sages were groping toward the philosophy that later blossomed in Plato and Aristotle, and in the subsidiary writings of the Neo-Platonists, Porphyry, and Iamblichus.

One circumstance stands out. The Antediluvian age, with which the circumstances of Atlantis are inalienably associated, regarded as its pre-eminent problem the return to the blessedness man enjoyed before the Fall. He believes this divine wisdom was re-stated by the Saviour to the apostles as an arcane creed, a probability suggested in numerous passages of the New Testament. It was never reduced to writing. It was lost because later disciples could not comprehend it. Theurgia is thus the true and only Magic in the actual sense of the word. Magic in the popular sense, and in the sense many occultists give it, refers only to the subsidiary wonders that cluster around the memory of a former state, when the apparently miraculous was everyday because of man’s proximity to the divine.

When fellowship with the Creator was broken, the atmosphere of that relationship could not be recaptured by trying to fashion the Creator’s powers. In that mistaken belief Magic, as commonly conceived, had its origin. It omitted the chief principle that alone could have made it successful. The higher Magic is of God alone. Man’s connection with it is secondary. The darker powers, seeing the dismay, placed destructive forces at his disposal. Black Magic came into being. It was not destroyed when Atlantis was overwhelmed. It escaped the wreck as the immortal spirit rises from the outworn body. The fall does not represent a backsliding of the sages, the good leaven. It symbolises the perplexities of the divinely inspired agents in their struggle with ignorance and folly. Atlantis, like the cities of the plain, fell under the divine vengeance because of the flagitious behaviour of the majority of its inhabitants. The higher caste, he says, had great difficulty with a large aboriginal population.

References

The references begin on page 134. They send the reader back to his own History of Atlantis and to The Problem of Atlantis, and they list the classical, biblical, and modern authors the chapters have already named. I do not copy the list. Where a page number in another book matters, it is already in the chapter that uses it. Bailly is page 70 of the Lettres. Marston’s Ras Shamra date is about 1350 B.C. The Arcane manuscripts he will not locate remain unlocated.