Our Story of Atlantis (1903)

I read W. P. Phelon’s Our Story of Atlantis for the claims a later writer can set beside Plato, Donnelly, Le Plongeon, and the Mu books. The copy in front of me is the Internet Archive scan of the 1903 book. The title page gives San Francisco, Hermetic Book Concern, 1903, and names him W. P. Phelon, M.D., author of Three Sevens, Healing, Causes and Effect, and Love, Sex, Immortality. The copyright page enters the book in 1903 in his name. It is out of copyright. The quotes below are his sentences, or sentences he pastes from a clipping. Page numbers are the printed numbers in the running head. In this scan that number is the file page minus twelve. The contents list puts chapter XIII at page 154. The heading stands on page 151. I cite the heading.

Three layers sit in the book, and I keep them apart. The foreword says he may write from another’s experience, and chapter I says the writers of the record made him their mouthpiece. Chapters I and II, and the close of chapter XXI, are clippings: Le Plongeon, Donnelly, Daniel Wilson, a St. Louis retelling of Plato, and reports of hidden cities. Chapters III to V are the voyage he offers as experience, New York to a tower in the West Indian Archipelago, sailed 15 June 1872. From chapter VI the voice is Tlana, scribe of the Mighty Three, with the date about 29,000 B.C. printed in the invocation. The voyage and the manuscript rest on the word of that account, and on a Boston volume he does not name.

He spells the people Atlantian, not Atlantean. He spells the older land Lamuria in his own forecast, and Lemuria when he is quoting the Boston volume. He prints both Posidonis and Poseidonis. I keep his spellings.

The book at a glance

• Title: Our Story of Atlantis. The catalogue title on the scan adds that it was written down for the Hermetic Brotherhood.
• Author: W. P. Phelon, M.D.
• Edition I read: San Francisco: Hermetic Book Concern. 1903. The copyright notice is dated 1903. The body runs from page 1 to page 217, and ends with the word FINIS.
• What he claims: A real Atlantic continent over the West Indian Archipelago, home of the Fifth Race, about 1,000 miles (1609 kilometers) broad and 3,000 miles (4828 kilometers) long, with its city northeast of the center. A papyrus from the temple tower had not seen the light for over 29,000 years. The scribe dates the history about 29,000 B.C. A clipping he adopts puts the land of Mu, which that clipping calls Plato’s Atlantis, under the sea with 64,000,000 people about 11,500 years ago. He expects the land above the waves within a hundred years of his own writing, and the old continent of Lamuria inhabited again within 500 years.

Findings worth setting beside other writers

• Where he puts the land. Over the great West Indian Archipelago (p. 3). In the voyage, the ship lies in about 30 degrees North latitude and 42 degrees West longitude, and the tower is about a couple of miles to the westward (p. 62). He later says the continent covered in part the Caribbean Archipelago, that a peak six miles high would make two inland seas where the Gulf of Mexico is, and that the Amazon lies on the line of drainage from that inland sea (pp. 93 to 94).
• Size, in the manuscript. About 1,000 miles (1609 kilometers) broad at its widest point, and 3,000 miles (4828 kilometers) long. Mountains to the west, north, and east. One river, diverted through an artificial canal and locks, forms the port of the City of Atlantis, northeast of the central portion (p. 82).
• His own dates, against the dates in the clippings. Atlantian writing perfected about 25,000 years before the Christian era (p. 56). The papyrus sealed for over 29,000 years (p. 79). The scribe’s “now” is about 29,000 B.C. (p. 82). The Boston volume puts about 700,000 years between the Lemurian and Atlantean catastrophes, and shrinks Plato’s continent to the last island, Poseidonis, about as large as Ireland (pp. 59 to 61). The Le Plongeon clipping he prints in chapter I puts Mu, called there Plato’s Atlantis, at about 11,500 years ago, with 64,000,000 people (p. 5). The Troano clipping in chapter XXI puts the same land of Mu at eight thousand years before the writing of that book, again with sixty-four millions (pp. 214 to 215). I leave all four figures.
• Rising again. Within a hundred years, and possibly a much shorter time, Atlantis will be above the waves (p. 39). Within 500 years the bulk of population will be south of the equator, and the old continent of Lamuria will once more sustain its millions (p. 40). The Boston volume says both lost continents slumber until the appointed time to reappear (p. 60).
• Mu. He does not argue a separate Pacific continent. The clipping he adopts calls the land of Mu Plato’s Atlantis, and he prints Le Plongeon’s Troano rendering under the heading of the destruction of Atlantis (pp. 5, 214).
• People and metals he names. Fifth Race. Orichalcum, the color and ductility of copper and the strength of iron, mines only in Atlantis. A yellow metal the Magi expect will become a calamity, called in the city “the tears of the sun.” Flag: a winged globe in blue on a yellow ground. Highest northern summit: Alyhlo. God of the temple: OM, the ONE. Scribe: Tlana. Degrees: the Three, the Five, the Seven, the Fifteen, the Forty-five. A whispered call-word he gives as an example: Myld.
• Customs I would carry into a comparison. No private ownership of land, only of improvements. A horoscope fixes the number of rooms in a new house. Eight years infancy, eight years boyhood, eight years young manhood, one thousand years to the invisible. Equality of the sexes held as doctrine. Sickness unknown. Monogamy. Not flesh-eaters. Galleys moved by “etheric impulse born of thought,” not by sail, oar, or elemental force. New Year on 21 March, seven days, no animal or human sacrifice. Thought transference in the latter days. Mental healing ordinary.

For Plato’s own text, see Timaeus & Critias. For Donnelly’s Atlantic America, which Phelon cites and which Daniel Wilson both supports and corrects, see Atlantis: The Antediluvian World and The Destruction of Atlantis. For a 1926 site and a final sinking near 9600 BC, set beside these 29,000 B.C. and 11,500-year figures, see The History of Atlantis (1926). For a later writer who keeps Mu as its own land, see James Churchward’s Mu.

Foreword

He says an author need not always write of his own knowledge. He may write from another’s experience. That is the case with this book. For six years he has had the manuscript almost ready for the printer. The Hermetic Brotherhood bids him let it go forth.

May it be a help to the ONCE ATLANTIAN BORN, wherever they may be.

W. P. Phelon, Our Story of Atlantis (1903), Foreword

He signs W. P. Phelon, M.D. The foreword has no printed page number. It is the leaf after the copyright notice.

Chapter I. The lost Atlantis

A poem, “Lost Atlantis,” opens the chapter. The question he sets himself is why the book is written. He says the historical period would hardly fill a magazine article, and then he puts the land over the West Indian Archipelago, on the same kind of reading by which the shape of North America tells of an inland sea that broke out at the Thousand Islands and left the Mississippi valley.

The first authority is a magazine. A late issue of Mind carries “A Monument to Atlantis.” Phelon prints it as a discovery by Augustus Le Plongeon. The edifice is the Pyramid of Xochicalo. I keep that spelling. It stands 5,396 feet (1644 meters) above the sea, south-southwest of Cuernavaca, 60 miles (96.56 kilometers) from the City of Mexico. Humboldt visited it. Le Plongeon’s alphabetic key to the Maya hieroglyphs, compared with the Egyptian hieratic alphabet, is dated in the clipping to 1886. The signs on Xochicalo are both Maya and Egyptian.

the pyramid was a monumental structure erected to commemorate the submergence and destruction of the great Land of Mu (Plato's Atlantis), together with its population of 64,000,000 of human beings, about 11,500 years ago.

W. P. Phelon, Our Story of Atlantis (1903), p. 5, quoting Mind, "A Monument to Atlantis"

Le Plongeon’s Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx is said to give four Maya accounts of the same cataclysm. Xochicalo is the fifth, and in Le Plongeon’s opinion the most important Maya record of the event behind the deluge in the sacred books of the Jews, the Christians, and the Mohammedans. Phelon adds that Aztec tradition confirms it, and he asks where the people of South America came from, and who built the forest-covered cities of Yucatan and Central America. He writes Yucatan as Yucatain. He ties the mummy-case to the coffin, and the trinity to stone tablets Le Plongeon and his wife unearthed among the Mayas and Quiches. He spells the name La Plongeon in that sentence.

He then argues from reincarnation. If the doctrine is true, advanced Egos would want the race raised before they return. There have never been, since the fall of Atlantis, so many reincarnated Atlantians on earth at once. That, he says, is why the public is ready for mental healing, Spiritualism, Theosophy, and occultism. He does not doubt the authenticity of his information. The people who gave it made the writer their mouthpiece in this recollection of ancient memories.

Ignatius Donnelly, in this chapter, finds a supporter in Sir Daniel Wilson, president of the University of Toronto. Wilson declares the lost Atlantis was not a myth, but really a part of the continent of America. Donnelly’s theory, as Phelon states it, was submergence by a great volcanic upheaval, with the deluge tradition carried by refugees to Europe and Asia. Wilson rejects that. There are no traces of such volcanic action on the continent or on the ocean bed. Wilson’s own account is that the ancient Egyptians discovered the continent, and that in the decline of their learning and power it was lost, and existed when our knowledge of Egypt begins only as a shadowy tradition. Traces of those Egyptians are to be sought in the ruined cities of Central America.

The St. Louis Republic is the next clipping. Atlantis lay in the Atlantic, over against the Pillars of Hercules, and sank in a cataclysm of which history gives no record. Plato is the first to give an account, from Egyptian priests. The clipping says Atlantis was a continent larger than Asia and Africa put together, with islands at its western extremity that afforded passage to a large continent lying still beyond, now supposed to be South America. Nine thousand years before Plato it was powerful and thickly settled, and it extended over Africa and the major portion of Europe, even as far as the Tyrrhenian Sea. Athenians and other Greeks checked the invasion. Then an earthquake shook Atlantis. Outlying islands sank, then areas of the mainland, and on the second day the entire continent was engulfed. Phelon does not correct this two-day telling against Plato’s single day and night. He pastes it.

The rest of the chapter is what he calls whirling straws.

A United States citizen is reported to have found a long-forgotten city in the mountains of the Mexican state of Sinaloa. Adjoining it on the south is Jallisco, his spelling, with Guadalajara as capital. In the mountains of Jallisco live the unconquered Yaquis, a brown-haired people with light eyes and almost fair complexions. Local belief puts rich silver mines and the lost city of the Aztec race in their fastnesses. A few renegade Apaches are the only outsiders admitted. Phelon says the Aztecs are the lineal descendants of the mighty nation who sought to know beyond the law governing the created.

A Philadelphia mining engineer, speaking to an Inquirer reporter, reports an enormous city in the interior, never visited by white men, peopled by a race similar to the ancient Aztecs, sun worshipers who offer human sacrifices, with huge structures on broad paved streets.

Prospectors from Yuma, searching the Colorado desert for the Pegleg mine, found a prehistoric city. The wind had laid bare walls 420 feet (128 meters) long by 260 feet (79 meters) wide. Pillars carved as dragons’ heads and rattlesnakes still stood, supporting granite slabs. The frieze resembled Egyptian sculpture. A later sand storm drove the party back. Phelon says a storm has always warded off efforts to reach these remains. When men seek knowledge and not treasure, the keys will be given.

From the City of Mexico, L. P. Leroyal, a French engineer, reports a cave in the state of Guerrero, larger than the cavern of Cacahuamilpa, south of Cuernavaca. The clipping prints Guernavaca. After hours he found an ancient cemetery of at least 400 petrified bodies, idols, and a spring. He traveled at least twenty-one and one-half leagues and was underground upward of twenty-four hours. The natives believe a great white city, with treasure, stands near the southwestern coast, never entered by a stranger.

The chapter’s answer to its own question is that the book is a beginning, a collection of what is known about Atlantis the Mighty. The poem “Atlantian Memories” closes the chapter, on pages 23 and 24: lotus, vestal, Isis veiled, worship of the sun, and the waves that became graves. The contents list places that poem at the head of chapter II. In the body it stands at the end of chapter I.

Chapter II. Cities still hidden, and a rising land

Two further reports of a city no white man has entered, known before the Spanish conquest.

Juan Alvarez, back from the southwestern part of the republic, found an old Aztec city in almost inaccessible mountains. From a plateau he saw it through a glass: stone houses, yards with flowers and shrubs, not less than four thousand inhabitants, a large central building in the shape of the ancient teocalli. The only approach is a narrow defile from the Pacific side. Indians refused him, held him, blindfolded him, and after three days on a mule left him on the borders of the Pacific. Phelon says this city is described in full in Future Rulers of America, and has been visited by persons in the body who were permitted to do so.

C. W. Pantion, of Philadelphia, leader of American archaeologists in the Sierra Madre, tells of a second hidden city five Spanish leagues north of the first. The two were twin capitals of a wealthy district long before the Aztecs. Underground passages hewn in solid rock connect them. The second lies in a deep basin with no exit except the tunnel.

From there Phelon leaves the clippings and adds what he calls testimony from the Astral Records. Similarity of religion, custom, and language west of the great city, with no commerce possible for centuries, proves a common origin. All that distinguishes the savage from civilization was known to the wise men of Atlantis. Whenever enough Atlantians incarnate to control a nation, that nation grows. The last such national control, in his history, was the last Egyptian splendor, the school of the Greeks and Romans. The evidence he names is the pyramids, the Temple of Karnac, and the ruins of the Nile and the Euphrates. He spells Karnac in this chapter, and Karnac’s hall as Hypnostyle in chapter XXI.

When the Anglo-Saxon speaking races developed out of savagery, Atlantians began reappearing, paving the way by conquest and discovery for reoccupation of what belonged to them. The next claim is his, and I set it down as he prints it, on page 34.

Much sympathy has been wasted on the red son of the forest. He has but obeyed the law: Who cannot dominate the resources of the environment must yield title to him who can.

W. P. Phelon, Our Story of Atlantis (1903), p. 34

The sentence that leads into that one calls them the red-skinned usurpers, who had neither claim nor strength to maintain title to the land they had entered by accident during the temporary absence of the real owners. He contrasts the American Indian with the Anglo-Saxon-Atlantian. Colonies drawn off from the city of Atlantis centered on the belt where Atlantis itself lay, across the western continent.

A gap between the last Egyptian civilization and the concealment of the world’s records is filled, in his reading, by later incarnations of the less advanced nations: Goths and Vandals against Rome, Huns overrunning Europe, Tartars. Undone duty of the old Atlantians made that trouble. English power, begun on an island, and the American nation it founded, have drawn more Atlantians than have been incarnated at one time since the fall of the city. Their inventions are a demand, from the Silence, for what they deposited in the Astral records. He warns that the original investigators on one line of force met a limit, and that anyone who advances that way needs body, soul, and mind purified.

The close of the chapter is a forecast, not a clipping.

That within a hundred years, and possibly a much shorter time, Atlantis will be above the waves. Whatever her monuments contain, or whatever may be in her ruined temple can then be investigated.

W. P. Phelon, Our Story of Atlantis (1903), p. 39

Within 500 years the bulk of population will be south of the equator; that which is now sea, will become dry land, and the old continent of Lamuria will once more sustain its millions of inhabitants.

W. P. Phelon, Our Story of Atlantis (1903), p. 40

Only the Council of the Seven Great Builders knows the outcome of the present period. Cities whose selfish thought becomes inharmonious with the ground, on what he calls the natural plane of Liquidity, may suffer. Under the sea, he says, is a thousand-fold more gold, silver, and coal than has been mined.

Chapter III. The voyage and the black-letter book

In the early seventies a physician ordered a sea voyage. A friend in New York who owned vessels offered the narrator the place of supercargo on a ship about to sail for San Francisco around the Horn. They sailed out of New York Harbor on the 15th of June, 1872. The ship carried freight and one passenger, in the one spare cabin, by favor of the owner.

The passenger is tall, almost perfectly proportioned, black eyes, white hair and beard worn a little long. Phelon prints the line “such a face as children love and scoundrels hate.” Acquaintance becomes friendship the same night. The passenger speaks of the past as if it were his own experience. Four or five days out, asked whether Atlantis existed, he answers “Most certainly.” Troy, the pyramids, the strata of cities in the Nile valley, the Mound Builders, Palmyra, Babylon, and the cities of the Euphrates are his examples of places the world forgets. He adds that within forty years there may be another lesson in the opportunity for denying the past.

He fetches a small black-letter volume, written after the style of the Far East, on parchment, from right to left, and translates. The extract is a paraphrase of Plato. An island facing the Pillars of Hercules, larger than Africa and Europe together. Smaller islands, easy passage to the further continent. A federation of kings. Africa within the Straits as far as Egypt, Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. Attica leads the states inside the Pillars and secures their liberty. Both races destroyed by cataclysms in a single day and night. The Atlantic island sank bodily. A plain in the center. Nearly six miles from its confines, a low range of hills, home of the race of Atlan, from whom island and sea were named. Succession to the eldest sons. Younger sons into the priesthood. Wealth from trade and from the only known mines of orichalcum, a metal then second only to gold. Timber, pasturage, vast numbers of elephants, spices, gums, flowers, fruit. Canals about the royal palace, bridged, and an immense canal from the sea. Docks cut from solid rock for triremes. Stone of three colors, white, black, and red. Walls covered with brass, used like plaster, tin, and orichalcum. The great temple northeast of the center of the continent. Interior covered with silver, pediments and pinnacles lined with gold, roof a mosaic of gold, ivory, and orichalcum. Hot and cold springs, aqueducts, baths, irrigation. A plain oblong, lying north and south, surrounded by a canal or dike.

They surrounded this plain with an enormous canal or dike, 101 feet (30 meters) deep, 606 feet (184 meters) broad and 1,250 miles (2011 kilometers) in length.

W. P. Phelon, Our Story of Atlantis (1903), p. 54

Two crops a year. Kings in autocracy, priesthood as council, until the power passed to the priesthood. Virtue above riches, then degeneration when mortal nature overrode the Divine, blighting the fairest of their possessions.

The passenger’s warrant for the extract is not an Egyptian priest. It was handed down from father to son in the ancient Atlantian writing, which was perfected about 25,000 years before the Christian era commenced. He tells the supercargo that the time is close when the desire for information will be more fully gratified.

Chapter IV. The Boston volume and the tower

A day or two later the passenger is busy with an ancient map and cabalistic diagrams. The narrator recognizes the simpler rules of the Cabala and cannot follow the rest. Meanwhile he takes from his locker an odd volume bought at a second-hand stall in Boston. He does not name it. The paragraphs he copies are these.

The fourth continent, agreed to be called Atlantis, was formed by the coalescence of many islands and peninsulas, and became the home of the Atlantians, developed from a nucleus of Northern Lemurians, toward a point of land in what is now the mid-Atlantic. Greek writers confuse the great continent with the last small island. He prints Posidonis, then Poseidonis. Plato condensed several millions of years onto the island of Poseidonis, about as large as Ireland. The priests spoke of a continent as large as Europe and Africa together. Homer speaks of the Atlantes and their island. Mythic Atlantes and Atlantides rest on historical ones. Atlas personifies the combined continents of Lemuria and Atlantis. Both were instructed by divine masters, and both were transferred to the bottom of the seas, where they slumber until the appointed time to reappear. Lemuria was destroyed by submarine fires. Atlantis was submerged by the waves. Atlas left the surface to join his father Iapetus in Tartarus.

Atlas is a continent in the West, said to support heaven and earth. The feet of the giants tread the earth. The shoulders support the sky. That is an allusion to Mount Atlas and the Teneriffe Peak, relics of the two lost continents, thrice as lofty in the day of Lemuria and twice as high in that of Atlantis. Atlas was an inaccessible island peak in the days of Lemuria, when Africa had not yet been raised. Lemuria should no more be confounded with the Atlantis continent than Europe with America. Between the two catastrophes a period of about 700,000 years elapsed. Geologists who have found the Eocene under explored continents may yet find older continents in the ocean beds.

The winds then fail in the West Indian Archipelago. On the third day the moon fulls at noon.

we were lying in about 30 degrees North latitude and 42 degrees West longitude

W. P. Phelon, Our Story of Atlantis (1903), p. 62

The passenger asks to visit a peculiar island about a couple of miles to the westward. The captain lends the yawl and offers a crew. The passenger declines. The boat moves faster than the oars explain. The island is the summit of an obelisk or pillar, a little raised above the waves, about 150 feet (45 meters) in circumference. On the far side the rock is broken and they climb. The top is cup-shaped, dry, and built of masonry, with a flagged floor.

The passenger stands in the center, face to the north, with a small compass and a square of parchment. He turns 15 degrees to the east and steps one pace, and repeats until he faces due east. A disc of stone revolves. They descend. A light comes from nowhere. Five stone seats, each with a little pile of dust. He makes a sign of Power toward the east. A door opens into a lower chamber with seven seats and seven piles of dust. A sound like an Aeolian harp shakes the tower. From a niche in the eastern wall he takes a little stone box. He seals every avenue behind him. At the disc, unseen helpers put a roll of pigment in his hand. A character traced on the joint burns silvery and leaves a blood-red mark.

No word passes between them until they are on the water again. The narrator feels the chambers as part of himself, and sees the five seats and the seven seats filled with faces he can name. The passenger calls him brother, says the first charter of the Great Brotherhood was issued by the Atlantian Kings, and greets him as Ancient Wise One.

Before they reach the ship he explains. The visit was to the tower of the Great Temple of Atlantis, where the living members of the Brotherhood gathered during the last cataclysm. The narrator entered the chambers of the three, the five, and the seven. The continent is slowly rising. The top of the tower was 100 feet (30.48 meters) in diameter at the base, and 210 feet (64 meters) high, and has again reached the upper air. The transparent dome over the chamber of the three has been destroyed by the waves. Below the last chamber they entered was the chamber of the fifteen, and below that the chamber of the forty-five. He did not enter those, for fear the water pressing from below would wipe the tower out. The three, the five, and the seven could not be released until the bounds were destroyed or someone with authority gave the signal. He gave it. The members below the seven were set free shortly after the cataclysm, because the conditions above had failed.

The voyage was planned for this. The records could not be obtained without the narrator’s actual presence in the flesh. The vessel has been lying over the entrance to the great port, at the mouth that drained the continent. They could not work until near the full moon, so the calm lasted. At sunset a breeze will rise.

On deck the crew look at the casket and agree it is a nice bit of rock, a trifle water-worn. The contents list shortens that to “looks a little water-worn though.”

Chapter V. The casket

At sunset a northeastern wind fills the sails. On the quarter-deck the passenger says “Yes, certainly; at once,” as if spoken to. The stone casket comes out of the companionway about as fast as a man would walk, and is put into his hands. No one else is near.

Characters are cut in the stone. One is a form of the winged globe, the signet seal of the most learned Ancient Brother. It holds the contents in trust for him who has the password. The narrator lays his left palm on the passenger’s left palm. A shock like an electric thrill passes. Another hand lies on the back of his, and a majestic figure stands beside them. A low chant. He seems borne up over a vast city. Three syllables, one from each of the three, open the casket. He does not print the word. Inside is a large roll of the finest papyrus, in plain minute characters of what they suppose was a transition period of Egyptian civilization. A fragrance pours from it.

For over 29,000 years, my brother, this papyrus has not seen the light.

W. P. Phelon, Our Story of Atlantis (1903), p. 79

When it was sealed, the three were still in the body. It opens only to the presence of the three. After it is read, it will be left in the narrator’s hands. They will begin the next day, six of the early hours.

Chapter VI. Tlana’s continent

The passenger translates. The narrator writes shorthand. The manuscript is offered as a full record of the country and of the secret causes of the overthrow. It opens with the scribe.

I, Tlana, Scribe of the Mighty Three, to whom it has been given strictly in charge so to do, herein write the history of my beloved country.

W. P. Phelon, Our Story of Atlantis (1903), p. 82

The parenthetical date in that invocation is “About 29,000 B. C.” The continent is about 1,000 miles (1609 kilometers) broad and 3,000 miles (4828 kilometers) long, mostly level fertile plains, mountainous to the west, north, and east. One river drains nearly the whole length. An artificial canal and locks form the great port of the City of Atlantis, northeast of the center, up to the foothills. Among those mountains stands the Great Temple dedicated to OM, who is the ONE, the All.

Records fail for the beginning of man’s occupancy. Wise men’s perception supplies it. When the Fifth Race men needed a home, they found it here. Soil and minerals surpass any other country. One metal exists nowhere else: the ductility and color of copper, the strength of iron. They have named it Orichalcum. Fauna of every species was distributed from here to the rest of the earth. Public works are immense. Poorer private houses outshine the kings of other nations. Hot and cold springs feed stone pipes to public baths and to private houses under conditions.

Royal palaces stand in the center, inside three canals built entirely around them, with two zones of land between. A canal 300 feet (91 meters) wide, 100 feet (30.48 meters) deep, and six miles long connects them with the Great Sea and the port. The Great Temple is in the northeast of the city. Its tower, with the observatory, occupies the northeast quarter of the temple grounds. Mountains defend the north, east, and west. From the mountains the city extends in a circular form southward.

Beyond the city, upwards of 75,000 square miles have been cultivated from time immemorial, and are in fact one vast garden. Irrigation comes from the river and from a canal 600 feet (182 meters) wide, 100 feet (30.48 meters) deep, running 1,200 miles (1931 kilometers). Locks at the port raise and lower galleys into that canal. The population of plain and mountains is many millions. Prophets and Magi say there will never be so many people gathered in the same place at the same time. Three or four generations are alive at once, because the life-giving power of the spirit has not yet been much weakened. Supplies do not retard the increase.

By day the docks roar like a tornado. Galleys have reached every port. The eastern barbarians cannot make the bronze clubs, axes, knives, and swords, so those sell. The supply that never meets demand is a bright yellow metal, resistant to the elements, used to decorate buildings and persons. Traders seek it everywhere and exchange Atlantian goods for it. It has become a measure of value. The Magi predict that through the foul greed of man this will grow into a calamity for the whole race, and that the desire will become destructive in the more physical nations. The nation has tried to deal justly, so they are hardly responsible, but if the evil comes they will meet it in later bodies.

They are not flesh-eaters. The climate does not compel the concentration of food sought in flesh. Because they are not bound to the soil they can study the real forces.

At the north, three high peaks are landmarks. From the highest summit, the great peak Alyhlo, the scribe points out plateaux, tropical fruit through the whole circle of the year, hamlets, and the capital. Galleys in the port move neither by sail nor oar, nor by any impulsion of elemental force. The Magi have imparted the secret of etheric impulse born of thought, and against this, wind and tide have no power. I keep his double negative: “wind nor tide have no power.”

Chapter VII. The Caribbean comparison, and the city

Phelon breaks the manuscript to compare it with the present map. The old continent covered in part the Caribbean Archipelago. He spells it Carribean. If the highest peak were six miles high, two immense inland seas would lie where the Gulf of Mexico is. Trade winds would cross them. The western and northern mountains are the backbone, and their peaks and tablelands are now a chain of islands. The Amazon lies on the line of drainage from the inland sea. The climate was equable because cold winds were absent, not because it was simply torrid. It was always seedtime and always harvest. Bud, blossom, and fruit stood on the same tree. Planting and harvest were a sequence, not a season. He likens the shape to the upper lake country.

The manuscript resumes. Change from life to death is welcomed. The only reason to prolong a body is to increase the spirit’s force. On all seas the galleys fly the Atlantian flag, a winged globe in blue on a yellow ground. Sailors of other nations dare not cross the wastes between countries. Warehouses stand behind solid walls raised above any flood from the interior or any tide. Snowmelt and sudden vapor hardly matter. Iron tramways connect the capital with the kingdom. Enormous loads move by a motive force whose secret only the Magi know.

The whole city is pure white marble from quarries in the Northern Hills, exported as well, and used over and over in the rebuilding of Mediterranean cities. The stone cannot endure a northern climate. The plan is a disc with a segment wanting, fitted against the northern foothills. Semicircular avenues begin and end in the mountains, crossed by radii. The center is the King’s palace.

There is no ownership of land except in the King’s name, as representative of the nation. The Magi hold that a man cannot own anything in which his labor, or some representative of it, is not a component. Handiwork can be claimed. Fire, air, water, and earth cannot. An attempt to own them brings disaster. A house, a tree, or a crop belongs to the man who made it. Lands are parceled by lot. Only the improvements have a price. A neighbor’s location can be bought, with consent, as improvements. The land has no more value than the air.

Every family owns its home. A young man who takes a wife receives a portion, assigned so that inequalities of place are evened. No crowding, even in the thickest part of the city. The plan is a central open court, generally two stories, on pillars, with a pool and an overflowing fountain fed by an aqueduct so old that no living Atlantian can date it. Temple archives record the planning. When the couple locate, the chief astrologer of the Temple gives a horoscope that names the number of the new family. A room is built for each. He contrasts herding animals with the man who individualizes. The first story is for the offices of living. Courts are paved in colored patterns with a kind of glass, and carpeted with rugs of vegetable textiles made principally for export. Goods stand beside products from every part of the earth. None are bloodstained spoils. No galley has been seized by the god of the seas.

Streets follow one plan, adopted thousands of years ago, every foot added under a master mind. The road bed is a secret. The ways are dustless and noiseless. Public buildings are large, domed, with pinnacles and minarets, and statues, all in white marble. The Magi say that in days to come a nation on the Mediterranean called the Greeks will personify the city as a beautiful woman rising from the sea. The more important buildings are decorated with gold, which is why traders buy the metal so eagerly. The poetical name adopted in the city is “the tears of the sun.”

Public rooms are elliptical, with a fountain, seats like an amphitheater at one focus, and a tribune at the other. Training schools of the young are open at the center to sun and air. The fathers’ saying, which they try to make a rule, is: eight years to infancy and play, eight years to boyhood and training in physical things, eight years to young manhood and learning of the world outside Atlantis, and one thousand years to learning of the invisible and real.

Chapter VIII. Bodies, sexes, and the Magi

Either sex is almost perfect in physical organization, nearly equally trained. They are not all on one plane, because each life adds a small variation, and returning egos seek the best bodies. Because the equality of the sexes is absolute, the women’s bodies are as strong as the men’s. In other nations the women are inferior in size and strength, because those nations have believed and asserted female inferiority from age to age, and the thought has dwarfed body and mind. Atlantis has held the opposite. Painter and sculptor copy both sexes. Climate and transmitted principles give intellectual vigor. Common laborers are beyond the literary class of the barbarian nations in perception of nature’s laws.

Schools develop the physical and direct mental habits. Very little memorized knowledge is imparted. The design is to train the faculties so that the cipher of the Astral books can be read. Sickness is unknown. There are no lame, halt, blind, deaf, or dumb, and no beggars to sit as models for a mother’s prenatal mind. This is true of the people in commerce, agriculture, and building. Others, by natural impulsion, seek the invisible and the truths of the ONE, and teach the youth. The only class distinction is founded upon knowledge.

Those thinkers kept records, and are wiser in speech, in mathematics of the unseen, in alchemy, in astrology, and in the physics of the unseen. Buildings set apart for them became temples. Later all were gathered into the one Great Temple, so that the symbolism of the ONE who is ALL might be perfect. All manifestation, on all planes, is referred back to the ONE. The Magi control elemental forces, who come not under confinement but in obedience. This power, he says, never will be held except by Atlantian born people, whatever the globe’s conditions. A greater proportion have attained the superior light than in any other nation, past or present, because incarnating egos choose their own people. Children are born old, the brightness of the last life heavy on them.

Chapter IX. The golden rule and the government

One basic law, called the golden rule, or preference of another before self, runs through country and city. Evils of selfishness are absent, because selfishness is the fear of destitution. No man, no man’s wife, and no man’s children can, under the law, lack the necessities. He who has more than enough is steward for him who temporarily has less. That does not relieve anyone from labor in the ratio of ability.

Quarrying, transport, and fitting of houses are done by elemental force under a master in charge of a section. He educates them and provides for them out of the Astral storehouse. The form of government has already been copied by a powerful nation in the northern part of Asia. Because of their situation on the physical plane, they will most likely keep the form and lose the spiritual power.

The nation is linked by the masters of the families, in groups under teachers. The teachers stand under the Magi of the Temple. The Magi stand under the Most Ancient, the Seven, the Five, and the Three. In the hands of the Three rest the destinies of the nation, and on them rested the karmic conditions engendered by currents of potency that went out and returned.

No temporal power exists except as a symbol of the Manifested. Organized effort originates with the priesthood of the Great Temple, who have charge of occult knowledge. Every house is independent. The Atlantians are monogamists, one husband of one wife, because polygamist races decrease in power. To be diseased or crippled, or to head a family in which such a member lives, is deemed a crime against the people. Thought is brought to bear, through occult forces, to make the nation whole.

Persons gifted psychically, or familiar with the instrument entrusted to them, are trained as Masters or Guides. They may or may not have families. A number of persons or families look to them for counsel. For thousands of years the Magi, who give their whole time to the Unseen and lay aside their bodies at their own volition, have placed the people’s welfare beyond any other consideration. There are no poor and no inferior class. All necessary labor is honorable. They have perfect communication with the outside world and with each other. Atlantis is the fairest city on the planet, and they are content.

Chapter X. The Great Temple and the New Year

He quotes “one who saw” the temple. I take that voice as still the manuscript, which he has been copying. Northeast of the island continent, on a plateau of many acres where the ground breaks into the foothills, the surface was leveled and paved with a soft material whose secret the Atlantians alone knew. It hardened under sun and air until it was like adamant. Eastward, a belt to the seacoast, not on a level with the sea, was paved so the eye reached the horizon.

The white-walled temple faces south, toward the areas of assemblage. Closed courts, offices, and cloisters face the northern mountains. Two stories. Pillars from the rock support arches and the slabs of the upper floor. The upper story is enclosed. From the battlements one looks down about ninety feet. East and west are gardens, groves, fountains, streams, domesticated animals, and flowers, sacred to the temple, open to the people under caretakers, except reserved spots for students and teachers.

In the northeast section, the great tower and observatory, fifty feet in diameter, rising 210 feet (64 meters), a landmark for hundreds of miles. This is a second set of tower measures. Chapter IV, in the passenger’s mouth, gave 100 feet (30.48 meters) in diameter at the base and 210 feet (64 meters) high. Chapter XIII will give a third. I do not collapse them.

The tower was commenced fifteen feet below the surface. Trap rock, then a square block of concrete, then the superstructure to a total height of 225 feet (68 meters), the square of fifteen. On the temple floor, on a raised dais, is the secret chamber of the Holy of Holies. At high festivals the Veil of Isis blazes across it. Above, level with the upper floor, the chamber of the Forty-five, and still above that the Fifteen, the Seven, the Five, and the Three. Outside, the tower is smooth from bottom to top, like one block set on end.

Cloisters hold apartments for study. Supplemental apartments are hollowed in the neighboring mountains, reached by secret passages, arranged so that treasuries deposited there would be held even if buried under the sea for ages. Beyond the plaza, toward the city, trees and fountains reach the edge of the pavement.

Outer courts are a separation from those with no inspiration for the inner. The outermost court, the court of the people, holds the undecided. The inner court of the people holds those willing to obligate themselves. Training there is individual: concentration alone, then passivity alone, like a voice trained before it joins a choir. The outer court of the Brotherhood laps into the inner court of the Temple. United work must stay in the key on which it started. Anger sharps or flats the vibration. The law built on this statement is the sentence he prints as the great law of the Temple: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Teaching, ceremony, and symbolism rest on it.

The illustration is the Great Feast of the New Year, on the 21st of March. It commemorates the sun’s rebirth, out of equal days and nights, and the promise of seedtime and harvest for the northern hemisphere. Every family should be present, or represented. The feast lasts seven days. He describes one of the last feasts, ten years before the destruction, when government and people were in their most perfect unity.

Three days before, lines of travelers converge on the city, on foot and by every conveyance. Houses fill. Tents of linen and cotton, bleached by a process never imparted to any other nationality, spread in gardens and parks. No tents on the plateau or in the outer courts. Assemblies are morning, evening, and at the meridian. At dawn a low sound like a torrent. Faces turn east. The temple choir, raised in a porch, sings. Trumpets take the final note. The sun springs from beneath the sea. The multitude kneel and ascribe glory to the manifested source of life, the unsleeping eye of the One.

At meridian, in every street and on the housetops, faces turn toward the temple. Above the highest pinnacle a crystal ball shoots up, almost as dazzling as the sun, and receives the concentrated thought of the faithful. In the evening the song is farewell, the multitude faces west, and stringed instruments hush his exit. Six days of this, with processions, lectures, and the sciences of the Brotherhood between the great assemblies. The Brotherhood embraced the whole people in its ramifications.

On the evening of the sixth day the courts fill. The choir opens in a different key, rhythm, and time. He spells it rythm. The chief instructor, on a high tribune, discourses on physical life, on the sun as life, health, plenty, and peace, and on the darkness that enforces rest. His peroration: the darkness is death and desolation, and in the beginning the Existent saw, when he said, let there be, and there was, light. At that word millions of lights gleam over the temple, inside and outside, even on the highest points. One blaze of white marble. The one thing about electricity the Atlantians do not know is the point where knowledge lays hold with potency upon the One.

No sacrifices. No shedding of the blood of animal or human victims. They will not teach destruction by burning any living thing, because man is naturally destructive and should be taught the opposite. The ceremonies cement the people into a common Brotherhood.

Chapter XI. Thought, healing, and a poet

He is warned by the Unseen not to write unguardedly, lest power for mischief reach the unobligated. In the old days the world lay at their feet. Later generations will be clouded by heavier physical conditions. The cut-off will come because, having dominated physical workings, they sought also to master what belongs only to the spiritual realm. There is but one God. None created can sit in the seat of the uncreated.

Early communication was by outer sense. In the latter days the instructed are taught by thought transference. Education of the young is not memorizing, and does not hope to bring spiritual help out of bodily conditions. The physical, at its most perfect, begets weakness and death. Manifestation exemplifies what occurred on the spiritual plane. A future professor of mathematics, or a chemist, will demonstrate. The demonstration is not the truth. It proves, from the physical side, what he has learned. They do not linger over demonstrations.

The first course strengthens mentality. If the machinery of thought is unfit, the person is treated by the thought of those about them, up into a healthful condition, which is really harmony. Phelon, in his own voice for a page, says the later names “science of spiritual conditions,” “mental science,” “science of truth,” and “science of knowing” are a glimpse of this. The privilege of giving the truths out so they can be understood belongs to the Atlantian-born. What is now an occasional miraculous healing was an everyday occurrence.

Those who united to increase the race mated themselves according to the astrologers. Thus mated, it rarely happened, as one of our poets hath sung, that a child was “Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time into this breathing world, scarce half-made up.” When any such unripeness appeared, it was treated on the mental plane. The lines are Shakespeare’s, from Richard III. Phelon prints them as the Atlantian manuscript quoting one of its own poets. I mark that. I do not treat them as an Atlantian original.

Chapter XII. The eleventh commandment

Students meet in small assemblies. The Wise Ones do not talk to the outer senses. They teach by thought transference, which the whole nation, so largely Atlantian, will one day possess. A professor could say “sit still for a moment, turn inward your consciousness and perceive,” and make the quiet of the inner vision visible. Whoever looked at the white tower and wished to learn was sure of the opportunity, and with it the obligation.

What a master of the later day said, “A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another,” was the dictum of the temple teachers. Perfect unity, perfect harmony, perfect love. He calls the other commandments the “dreadful ten,” concerning the physical, and this the Eleventh. Seek first the knowledge and potency of the Unseen, and knowledge of all else will come. Physical knowledge is contemplation of a few fundamental principles. It is not so difficult to make gold as might be considered. Records in stone, in the great treasury of the waters, hold fundamental principles. Those who take the obligation will advance beyond the three-fold gates into the great mysteries. What belonged to the nation intellectually and morally was control of all knowledge except the origin and power of life, which concerns the One alone.

Some whom the scribe knew as men in the old days, he now perceives as women. The spirit behind each is the same. The body is taken as a man or as a woman according to the experience required. The body is nothing. The soul of the Ego is everything.

Chapter XIII. The plaza and the tower of the Three

The physical body is adapted to the need of the Ego. What stands behind all is one with the One, indivisible, always the same. This was taught first in the forests and the mountains, afterwards in the Great Temple built into those mountains. Much of the temple work was done by control of the elements, to lighten physical toil. The later age, he says, has recovered some of this, but chains a portion of the force and limits it in a form, instead of saying to the universal force, do this. Elemental building leaves no tears and no blood marks. It is clean. Man the created is the link to the potency of the One.

In the northeastern part of the continent a group of rocky mountains reached far below the ordinary soil, buttressed, so it seemed, from the center of the earth. Future events showed it was not so, but they held tons of piled rock. The rocks were cut to a level. A plaza ran east to west so that rising and setting sun could be seen from any part, and also the North Star and the Southern Cross, each low in the heavens. The view was unobstructed from horizon to horizon. The plaza could hold every member of the nation at one time. It was many acres. He adds that it is wonderful how many people can stand on one acre if they are harmonious. The yearly convocation, for guidance for the coming year, was always at the vernal equinox.

Wings and stories were added for the temple colony, the Temple Staff, with symmetry kept. At the northeast corner, on foundations of solid rock, story after story, the tower, and on its top the tallest observatory ever known. Those who had passed the lower degrees kept watch there. From the lower part of the tower the wall of the temple went out over the area, enclosing the Great Hall of Convocation. From the Holy of Holies at the bottom of the tower, at convocations, Light, Strength, and Force streamed from the united power of the Three, Five, Seven, Fifteen, and Forty-five.

The tower measures in this chapter do not match chapter IV or the fifty-foot figure in chapter X. I copy them as printed.

The tower was 22 1/2 feet (0.61 meters) in diameter at the highest point of the coping. It was built of hewn stone in the shape of the trunk of a tree, large at its base, growing a little smaller in diameter, half way up, and then widening again.

W. P. Phelon, Our Story of Atlantis (1903), p. 156

The page prints the fraction as 22 1/2. Cement from the southern part of the continent, once hardened, was as firm as the rock, so the tower seemed one solid stone. Ten feet above the floor at the coping, a spherical dome of glass, made of a single piece, transparent as water. Heavenly motions were minuted from the chamber below. The floor was mosaic. When it reappears, he who is wise may read in it the founding of the temple, its date, its object, and its purposes. A circular disc in the wall, movable by a secret spring, was known only to the Three, one of whom was constantly on duty at this holy of holies. Another holy of holies stood in the Great Hall of Convocation, symbol of the highest person of the Superior Wisdom. One was the Superior Wisdom and the other the Inferior Wisdom.

A heavy linen carpet, woven almost impervious, protected the floor. On it, a circle of the whole circumference of the chamber, and within it three other circles, each joining the others at their circumferences, centers equally distant from the center of the great circle. Intersecting equilateral triangles and the six-pointed star. A seat for each of the Three in the centers of the inscribed circles. In the center of the great circle, a tripod and a censer, the Eternal Fire. In invocation the potency of the Three had to be embodied in the outer circle, each guarding his own circle, and from the center a potency that could call and conquer. Vigils were nightly and daily. Records of observations were kept. These three had risen until they could perceive all that could happen to Atlantis and to the rest of the planet. Other furnishings were no longer necessary. In the perception of the Divine Birthright they declared themselves one with the All Potency. This perception engendered pride of station, which, conjoined to their knowledge, was the cause of their overthrow.

Chapter XIV. The Five, the Seven, and the Fifteen

All knowledge comes from the home of the Great Gods, the silence. Between the Three and the Five, a heavy floor, each stone fitted as if the whole were one rock. From the highest concavity of the lower ceiling to the floor of the upper chamber, three and eight-tenths feet of solid masonry. The arch sprang from five pillars. Between them, five single pieces of marble, polished: white, black, white, black, white. Between the two white ones, a band of burnished gold, an art lost for ages and recovered in Etruria. The mirrors were turned toward the earth at a slight angle. In them, as in an open book, could be seen all that was happening, had happened, or was about to happen. They were reflectors of the Astral Books. Whoever knew the cipher could read. No one was eligible to the Five who did not manifest this perception under training. Failure returned him for further training, or, if the gift was not his, left him only a memory as of a dream. Good was perceived in the white mirrors. Evil or obstruction in the black.

During the last twenty-five years of the temple in the city, the odd white mirror clouded, growing darker until the destruction. Under the waters today there are three black and two white mirrors. When the hour of redemption strikes, the stain will be wiped from the white. On the floor of the upper chamber, this prophecy:

When the three are all black, swift destruction cometh to the Temple and the people.

W. P. Phelon, Our Story of Atlantis (1903), p. 163

Ambition took no notice. The chamber had neither windows nor doors. Ventilation brought fresh air. Entrance was as in the upper chamber. Light from the great dome passed through the solid masonry as though it were glass. The floor held a mosaic record of the nation and of its occult happenings, under the same carpet. On the carpet, a circle twenty-two and eight-tenths feet in diameter. Within it a pentagon, thirteen and eight-tenths feet on a side. From the center of each side to the circle, a semicircle. In the center, a smaller circle touching all the semicircles, four and eight-tenths feet in diameter. Where the semicircles intersected, four figures like ellipses. At the point farthest from the center, the station of the one who officiated. The triangle has become the pentagon. All the civilization the world boasts today, he says, is the result of the vibrations set in motion in this tower.

Between the Five and the Seven, three feet of solid masonry. Here the text has already moved to the Seven, and the sentence about three feet of masonry sits just before the alloy roof. The roof was arched and lined with an alloy of silver, gold, and copper, polished, which did not reflect anything in the chamber. Seven pilasters supported it: one of orichalcum, one of gold, one of silver, one of lead, one of tin, one of copper, and one of platinum. Platinum was used instead of quicksilver, because quicksilver could not be retained in place or form, and platinum was its opposite. On the platinum plate, at its base, the proportions of the alloy were engraved. Sounds came from the vault, sometimes sweet, sometimes turbulent. It reflected the nation’s sounds, and the sounds of all with whom they dealt, and it was in touch with all the planets. In reflecting sounds it reflected the colors of the sounds, because the same vibrations make both. The chamber of the Three was the One in the heavens. The Five, man’s thought on the Astral plane. The Seven, thought in its first potency of manifestation.

Same sourceless light. Mosaic history under the carpet. A circle of twenty-one feet. Within it a heptagon. Radii to the center, so each side is the base of a triangle. Inside each triangle a circle touching the sides. The center of that circle is the station of one of the Seven.

One more chamber of potent effort, the Fifteen. The Forty-five was more a school of training than a laboratory. Separating masonry, seven feet thick. In the center a square rose above the temple roof. Inside, a square room, sides facing the points of the compass. One circular window on each side. East red, west blue, south yellow, north white. The floor was tiled in a material generations of wear could not destroy, and on the tiles a lesson containing, from beginning to end, all the knowledge man would ever need on earth. The wisest might read it partially. To those lacking understanding it remained foolishness.

Fifteen seats in a semi-ellipse, seven on each side of the keystone of the arch. He spells it semi-elipse. In one focus, a crystal globe, light always emanating, hanging midway from floor to ceiling without visible support, swaying with the thought currents. In the other focus, three brazen serpents reared on their tails, holding a censer of perpetual fire in their mouths. During sessions, incense fed by invisible hands. Here, after the school of the Forty-five, candidates were selected under obligation. If they kept it, they might hope for promotion. If not, they fell back. From these Fifteen came the Seven, the Five, and the Three. They were not allowed to know the powers beyond them unless they occupied the chair of the Elder Brother. They moved among the people and were persons of authority among the Temple Dwellers. They controlled the forces below them in order to mass them.

The chamber rested on the walls of the Forty-five by a ponderous arch whose edges met the solid rock. Beneath the floor of the Forty-five was hewn the Holy of Holies of the Great Hall, so the mysteries could be shown to the people at stated seasons. The chamber of the Forty-five was twenty-five by twenty-five feet. The walls were twelve feet thick. Within that wall, impervious to sound, the students of this degree met. The floor was of the finest woods from all quarters of the earth. Air was pure. Sittings lasted sometimes hours that seemed days, sometimes days that seemed hours. I take the printed order: sometimes for a shorter time, sometimes for days that seemed but hours.

Chapter XV. The Forty-five

Four rows of seats, eleven in each row, arranged elliptically, facing a raised dais where the Elder Brother sat during instruction. Rows rose one behind another, in the order of their ages. Close to the Elder Brother, another seat, empty to personal sense, filled on the psychic plane by an Elder Brother from the Invisible.

A narrow staircase in the thick wall, and a sliding door. The chamber was ceiled and floored, sides, top, and bottom, with wood from the country to be known later as South America, but then a large island. The wood was peculiarly hard, dark red, and took a brilliant lasting polish. Fitted, it seemed one piece. Elemental force did the work. With the door closed they seemed inside a shell. No earthquake had occurred for many hundred years, and none was predicted.

The doorway was in the open end of the oval. Points of light, held as by invisible torch-bearers, could be fixed or moved. What they were composed of, hundreds of men in days to come will spend years trying to know. At times a reflector of thought pictured the past or the future, a transparent blackboard, large enough to fill the whole twenty-five feet, dissolving under the will of the instructors, solid as a bar of brass against passage, and invisible. The Elder Brother spoke from his own mentality, from records of the past, or from sequence in the future, and the screen showed the same. Everything moved on the line of the One Creative Thought.

He describes one session, and he says he remembers it. Persons enter across the square of demonstration, so that nothing stands between them and the seats. No absentee. Tardiness was unknown. A bell, sonorous, seeming in the center of the room, invisible, strikes the hour. They had perceived and received all human knowledge, including the measuring of time. Forty-four and the Elder Brother look up. A dim form has filled the chair. They sit in the position of meditation which later times the Egyptians copied in their temple work and left on their books of stone. Three points, in succession: Unity, Harmony, and Love. These three constitute the Unmanifested, so the Forty-five were taught. At a sign they stand, make a sign recognized by visible and invisible, and repeat words of potency, reinforced by a sound like a great organ, partly reflected and partly responsive out of the Invisible.

On this night the Elder Brother describes unfolding, clouds, darkness, limitation, and opposition. To the physical eye, lurid fires. To a clearer condition, colors and the forms behind the colors. The future presents itself as the Eternal Now. One of the Forty-five sees the Brotherhood of Wisdom, for a time, unrepresented on earth, and then, under the obligations that hold members whether living or dead, a remanifestation. Gatherings of the far future are pictured. The narrator says a responding condition in himself saw others who would come into it then, and would testify to the ancient days. Lessons were given by voice, by sight, or by thought transference. When the instructions came from the Three, the play of forms and colors was something never seen elsewhere. Those reflections impinged on the Great Astral Record, and the record of what the secret chambers thought and did is one day to become supremely dominant.

Chapter XVI. Under the tower

What was in sight was not all, any more than the fruiting tree is the larger part. In the mid-heavens, angels and spirits of light. On earth, mortals visible and invisible. Beneath the surface, beings of the lower races, never subjugated by the powers of the upper chambers. Later ages will class them as Salamanders, Water Spirits, Kobolds, Goblins, and Dwarfs, workers in fire, water, and earth or rock.

In the internal fires, of a heat he calls unregisterable, during the latter days, the immense stores of gold and jewels in the temple treasury were manufactured under primal conditions. That illustrated transmutation. The tower pointed up, the search for truth. The part that sank into the earth typified material uses, and held the lesson of the Descent into Matter, and the doctrine of the Three Brains. To Atlantian and foreigner the lesson was: in the heavens above, and the earth beneath, and the waters under the earth.

The city wore gold and jewels up to the verge of the barbaric, used even by those in humble walks, if Atlantis could be said to have had any. Poverty and riches had ceased to press. Some almost limitless source had to be accessible. The tower went down into the mountains the same distance it rose. Cellars and sub-cellars were occupied by the lower races, subjugated by the upper chambers. Only the Three were fully told, by the Builders. To the Three, material things had ceased to matter except as adornment of temple or city.

Under the sanctuary, a door in the solid rock at the rear, then stairs and chamber, again and again. Implements for the workers. Projected spirit power brought back the results of combinations. Many of these implements will come to reincarnated Atlantians. More will be given only to the most trusted few.

Four cellars, in this order. First, Spirits of the Air. Second, Spirits of the Earth. Third, elementals whose forms thinly clothed fierce blazing fires, solving metallurgy. Fourth, the lowest, Spirits of the watery deep. A tunnel from each. Air spirits, by a spiral, to the highest points of the mountains, to communicate with fellows outside and receive supplies. Earth spirits, onto a little plateau, inaccessible, constantly veiled by an impenetrable fog. Fire spirits, diagonally down under the continent to the volcanic fires. Water spirits, to the seas by the shortest feasible route.

In the center of the mountain, a cave-like room, the treasury of temple and of nation, communicating with all four tunnels and, by a secret entrance, with the temple. The way in is a procedure, and I copy the steps as he gives them.

He who knew the secret stood at the rear of the Most Holy Place at high noon on a certain day, and watched until, by an arrangement of the polished marbles, a single ray from the chambers above struck the back wall. It could be seen only from one position, and only for three minutes. He turned one quarter to the right, seven steps, back to his original position, five steps, one quarter to the left, three steps, to an apparently blank ornamented wall. Pressure on a jewel opened a door of rock, weighing tons, balanced, silent, screened by the shrine in front. Inside, the stone settled shut. From within, a slight projection opened it. Thirteen times thirteen steps, through a high arched passage, brought him to another blank wall. The passage was lighted by never-dying lights from positive and negative earths combined with the rock, an electrical phosphorescent light whose secret perished with the nation. The treasure chamber opened to the Temple Inspector on the day of the vernal equinox, when the sun went down.

Chapter XVII. The treasury

An avarice-tainted soul would never be allowed to see it. Great heaps of gold, silver, and aluminum. The method was condensed electrical power acting through surcharged magnets of the finest steel. In times to come, induction will for a time be little understood, and then there will come a method of extracting aluminum from the original clay. Production had not ceased. Every day added to the store. Heaps of jewels, some still warm from the fires of earth and water in which they were crystallized. Workers in the cellars deposited the results here. Civil rulers could draw reserves in any amount. The city had its own storehouses besides. This was the temple’s, the labor of the temple’s servants.

No human eye has seen, nor any tongue described, the wealth still lying in that treasury beneath the waves. There is enough gold in it to destroy the value of the gold now in use. When it is found it will belong to a nation purified from avarice, so that no karmic weight transfers to the finders. On the inner door, a seal:

The potent Will of the Most Mighty holds this treasure safely, until the time of the restoration shall come. The Angel of the waters has charge of it.

W. P. Phelon, Our Story of Atlantis (1903), p. 196

Jewels and gold were manufactured by the occupants of the cellars. Reflection out of the Astral light, on the vision of the clear-sighted, made so many earnest believers in the transmutation of base metals.

Chapter XVIII. Convocations

The priesthood had charge of education. The especially gifted, reverence joined to desire for the hidden, were transferred to the temple service, the first separation of wheat from chaff. Higher intelligence moved them to the Forty-five, then to the Fifteen, then upward.

Training of the Forty-five, in order: submission to unseen guidance, more intense than for ordinary scholars; then meditation, until it was second nature; then concentration; then projection of the concentered thought. As the absolute Unity, IT meditates. As the Divine Ideation, It concentrates. As the Creative Thought, It projects. Years in the Forty-five and the Fifteen made each of the Seven expert. In the Five they practiced attracting vibrations of unseen force into alignment with their own projection, controlling the powers of the great names. His image is workmen whirling a ball of soft metal from the furnace until it takes a form, then launching it. To the Three belonged the directing. No clashing thought was allowed. Lots decided which of the Three would control the outward moving of the vibrations. The other two added their potency.

Regular convocations were under the full moon of each month. Special convocations were under the will of the Three. The word given at the last convocation was whispered to each, out of the Invisible. At the close, the Elder Brother of each section received from the Elder Brother of the highest section a word. The example he prints is “Myld.” It was communicated to the inner sense, never spoken aloud, as the closing password. A special call brought the word to the inner ear, naming the day and fixing the hour at a certain distance from the sun’s setting. If there was no special call, then at the next regular meeting each one, in succession, in a low breath, pronounced the word, so that what had been given out was recalled.

Work opened in the upper chamber by the Three. At the first word the Center of Fire glowed, and what needed potency was apportioned to the lower chambers. In the Five, the polished marble slabs reflected the orders. In the Seven, notes of the bell told the story. To the inner ear of the Elder Brother of the Fifteen came what was to be done. The gathered force of the nation, in charge of the Forty-five, went to the Fifteen, intensified, then to the Seven, where it was bound, solidified, and shaped, then to the Five, who harmonized the activity with the vibrations of the Universe, and then to the Three, who united their force in the One and stood ready to hurl into space the concentrated potency of a nation.

Chapter XIX. Why the knowledge was scattered

The priesthood guided the state so long as they considered the nation as one, and so long as they put aside separateness. The Three, Five, Seven, Fifteen, and Forty-five were separate and yet one. The only distinction was who could work with the highest potency in the place where he was put. They looked to the perfect doing, not to the result. The work was not idle floating. It was sometimes fierce warfare in the Invisible, against those who guarded hidden truths and those who wrought to confuse mortal understanding. Centuries passed before they had compassed the fact that numbers, harmoniously united on one spiritual point, were as powerful as combinations on the physical plane, with this difference: a spiritual mass, once trained, could not be stampeded. None were admitted to the secret assemblies until the overcoming of the body and its desires was far advanced.

Developed occult thought acted as a magnet for others on the same lines, from the incarnating spheres and from other points on earth where lamps lighted from the Atlantian torch had stirred a search. They gravitated to Atlantis, and would have shared its fate, blotting out for a time all the knowledge that went before, had not watchers in the Silence foreseen the cataclysm, though not its cause, and scattered enough abroad to become the seed of the generations that followed.

Earlier movements pushed one inspired leader to the front. The world met new ideas with the knife, the fagot, the scaffold, and later with the subtler force of mind. Depositaries of knowledge suffered ignominious death, and the knowledge itself was in danger of eradication before it was established. Malign forces acted on that, again and again. Those in charge have therefore resolved that, instead of teaching through the tongue and brain of a Brahma or a Jesus, his place should be supplied by a sodality of many welded into one. The obstacle that remains is individuality. Units must be trained into a oneness of the whole. Thus shall be born a new Messiah, or a new Truth. The Christos of that Great Cycle will be a union of many individuals, or a nation, standing as the representative of the new unfoldment.

In the Record of the Adepts, one of the Mighty Ones saw an image whose head, body, and limbs were of different metals, and whose feet were of iron and aluminum. Each metal was a Messianic age, a new Truth, and an empire related to that truth, the leaders of previous dispensations. Then a stone cut out of the mountain without hands, a nation fashioning itself until it obtains Messiahship, and overshadows all that came before. All who look toward the light must, as parts of that nation, draw together like drops of mercury, and become as one.

Chapter XX. The prophecy

Among the archives of that time, a prophecy has come to the present generation. I condense the claims and keep his sentences where the event is the one I would set beside other cataclysm accounts.

The highest knowledge ever given will be seized by the few. Rightfully held for the many, it brings wisdom, blessing, and growth. Overcoming the physical brings distress, because the physical does not yield to the Spirit without resistance. Progress is stimulated by the instinct to return to the first powers, before the Spirit individualized itself from the ONE. It is no sin to seek to know. The ONE intends that the individualized shall enter into all knowledge. Whoever fits the self will receive it. Whoever grasps potency without being fitted may lose what is already attained. If the nation has advanced so far that its knowledge would be dangerous to the other nations, the knowledge will be withdrawn.

The physical man has no value except as an agent in the happenings on earth. It might seem awful that millions of bodies should cease to exist. Nothing in that issue could be charged against the leaders. That fulfilled the law by itself. What the leaders suffered for was disobedience: the forceful taking, from the ONE, of knowledge for which the taker was not prepared. When limited power meets universal potency there can be but one issue. There was no sin, only the outcome of the law. Even the intense desire was in one sense lawful, the result of causes implanted by the Creative Thought. They were not responsible, but they were the instruments. The law had to be proved. Instruments who stand in front must suffer for what they have provoked.

The outlook, as the prophecy states it, is that the instruments of the Unseen have not developed the strength necessary for the perfect culmination. Until further training can develop proper concentration, they seek to hold as much as possible of what has already been gained.

Chapter XXI. The Troano clipping and Karnak

He calls this an addendum, to show the book has authoritative substance, and gives two clippings from the newspaper flotsam of the last years.

The first is the Maya account of the destruction of Atlantis, from Dr. Augustus Le Plongeon’s rendering of the Troano manuscript.

The year six Kan, on the eleventh Muluc, in the month Zac, there occurred terrible earthquakes, which continued without intermission until the thirteenth Chuen. The country of the hills of mud, the 'land of Mu,' was sacrificed. Being twice upheaved, it suddenly disappeared during the night, the basin being continually shaken by volcanic forces.

W. P. Phelon, Our Story of Atlantis (1903), pp. 214 to 215, quoting Le Plongeon's rendering of the Troano manuscript

The land sank and rose several times. At last the surface gave way. The ten countries were torn asunder and scattered. They sank with sixty-four millions of inhabitants, eight thousand years before the writing of that book. Set beside page 5, the same sixty-four millions are there “about 11,500 years ago,” and Mu is called Plato’s Atlantis. The eight thousand years are counted before the writing of the Troano book, not before Phelon. He does not reconcile the two.

The second clipping is offered as one of the buildings which reincarnated Atlantians put up when they held sway in the land of the Nile, centuries after the destruction of their own country. Workmen restoring the partly fallen Hypnostyle Hall of the great Temple of Karnac, his spellings, had eleven columns give way. Thirteen had fallen in ancient times. Three more were so shaken they had to be removed. Twenty-seven columns will be reconstructed. The clipping says the uppermost member of each column weighs 1242 tons, and the architraves 25 tons each. I print 1242 as the clipping prints it. It is a newspaper figure in his addendum, not a weight he claims to have taken. Modern engineering is not equal to the task, so a huge inclined plane, requiring 100,000 cubic meters of earth, after the manner of the ancient architects, will be built and removed. Completion is expected by May of 1904. In December last, M. Legran, in charge, found a bust. The statue, labeled Khonsu of Thebes, God of the Day, will be placed in the reconstructed temple. Other portions have come to light. A small piece may be lacking to complete one leg.

The book ends there. FINIS, on page 217.

The findings I would carry out of this, when I set him beside the others, are the West Indian site at 30 degrees north and 42 degrees west, the manuscript’s 1,000 by 3,000 miles (4828 kilometers) and the Fifth Race, the four dates that do not agree with each other, the tower measures that also do not agree, the degrees from the Forty-five up to the Three, the New Year on 21 March with no sacrifice, and his forecast that the land is rising in his own century. The voyage and the papyrus are his claim of experience, under a foreword that allows him to write from someone else. The Mexican cities, Xochicalo, Wilson, and Karnak are clippings he asks the reader to take as corroboration.