... For about the next 60 years Shasta remained just a big, beautiful mountain. But after Darwin’s
Origin of Species was published in 1859, events began to be set in motion that would change Shasta’s image rather markedly.
Among the phenomena most troubling to the Darwinists was the little lemur, since it [together with other fossil, flora, and fauna specimens] was found in such non-connected locales as Madagascar, India, Africa, and the Malay Archipelago. English Zoologist Philip Sclater hypothesized a primeval land-mass covering this entire area. In honor of the lemur he called it “Lemuria”. Little did he expect what a Frankenstein Monster he had created! Some of the more speculative scientists promptly added to the hypothesis. In the 1870s German naturalist Ernst Haeckel went so far as to propose Lemuria as the ancient home of the human race:
Of the five now-existing continents neither Australia nor America nor Europe can have been this primeval home [of man], or the so-called “Paradise” the “cradle of the human race”. Besides southern Asia, the only other of the now-existing continents which might be viewed in this light is Africa. But there are a number of circumstances, especially chronological facts, which suggest that the primeval home of man was a continent now sunk beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean, which extended along the south of Asia, as it is at present (and probably in direct connection with it), towards the east, as far as Further India and the Sunda Islands; towards the west as far as Madagascar and the southeastern shores of Africa ... By assuming this Lemuria to have been man’s primeval home, we greatly facilitate the explanation of the geographical distribution of the human species by migration.
The occultists came running. First on board was Helena Blavatsky of the Theosophical Society. In her 1888 book
The Secret Doctrine she avowed that the “Book of Dzyan” included an account of Lemuria in addition to Atlantis. Her “Third Root Race” consisted of Lemurians (as “gigantic, brainless, apelike creatures”). [The fourth RR was Atlantis. Current humanity is the fifth. The Sixth will evolve from us and return to Lemuria, while the Seventh will chuck Earth altogether and emigrate to Mercury.]
Later Theosophists embellished Blavatsky’s Lemurian mythos, most notably Annie Besant and W. Scott-Elliot in his
The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria (1896). Scott-Elliot’s account went into extraordinary detail, offering a sinister picture of semi-reptilian Lemurians [shades of
V] who kept pet dinosaurs.
While Scott-Elliot was conjuring up Lemurian monsters, an 18-year-old Shasta-area human named Frederick Spencer Oliver began to write a tale which he said had been inspired by a discarnate personality named “Phylos the Tibetan”. Published in 1896 as
A Dweller on Two Planets, it became something of a minor Shasta/occult classic. Oliver/Phylos said nothing about Lemurians, reptilian or otherwise. His Shastoids went by the name of the “Lothinian Brotherhood” and were proper mammals. The Lothinians lived in sumptuous caverns within the mountain, whose interior was a maze of polished walls and fur-carpeted floors. O/P was guided to this inner sanctum by a Dr. Lao-like Chinese initiate named Quong:
We halted in from of a huge ledge of basaltic rocks, some hundreds of feet in height. The ledge was broken and twisted as if by some rending convulsion. All about the base lay huge fragments broken off the face of the wall. Against the cliff rested a giant block many tons in weight. Touching this with his hand, the Tchin said: “Here is our Sach, our Temple, so to say; this rock is guard at the entrance to a place remarkable, to say the least, if viewed from an occidental standpoint.”
The Lothinian Brotherhood had anticipated George Lucas by some time, as may be gleaned from one of their instructions to O/P:
“Thou art impatient, my brother; know then, what was at one time known upon the Earth, but is now for ages forgotten: that Nature has a dual aspect, is double, is positive and negative; that the great positive side is the side known to mundane science, while the other or negative or ‘Night Side’ - or, as it was once known on Earth by the men of Atla ‘Navaz’ - is a side all unknown and scarcely guessed in the most exceeding flights of speculation, left unbroached, secretly kept by a few, who knew not that they entertain an angel, an angelic wisdom that in a century more, yea, less time! shall overturn much of the face of terrene things, shall bestow aerial vessels, and all else once known to those men of Atla of whom I spoke. Thou dost not yet understand?”
I said that I did not - that I thought he referred to some domain of the physical forces not yet known; but what had this to do with the Sun?
“This: The suns of systems are centers of forces of the Night Side of Nature whereof I spoke, and are force and matter of a higher value than are planets and satellites, just as water above a cataract is truly water - but being above and mobile, flows over and down, developing energy. In other words, out of the cold, dark, negative side or ‘Night Side’ force emerges, drawn to the positive polarity which constitutes in its outgoing flow that termed ‘Nature’, and develops in its fall magnetism, electricity, light, color, heat, sound, and lastly solid matter - for this last is a child of energy, not its parent. When the Navaz forces drop to light, if the light waves enter a spectroscope, they will emerge as colors. These correspond to the various spectrum bands and will, as the descent progresses, give the noted lines of the Solar spectrum, as the great ‘B’ line of oxygen, the conspicuous ‘1474’ line, and the brilliant ‘H’ and ‘K’ violet bands.”
Meanwhile the Lemurian link continued to be forged [no pun intended]. Next in line was Rudolph Steiner, who broke with the Theosophists in 1906 in disgust over Annie Besant’s Krishnamurti scam. He accepted a charter from the German
Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) and then went on to form his own Anthrosophical Society. In 1923 he wrote
Cosmic Memory: Atlantis and Lemuria, which specifically fingered Mount You-Know-What as a remaining refuge for You-Know-Who.
Back at the Mount Lowe observatory next door to Mount Y-K-W was an astronomer/ occultist named Edgar Larkin, who at about the same time decided that it would be interesting to train his telescope towards “He Who Sleeps in the Clouds”. Imagine his surprise and delight to see dazzling lights and colorful pavilions of happy Lemurians frolicking on the slopes! Larkin died in 1924 before meeting any Lemurians personally, but the cat was now definitely out of the bag where Shasta and Lemuria were concerned.
Next to add his 2-cents-worth was H. Spencer Lewis, founder of the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC) in San Jose.
I should pause a moment here to make certain you don't get confused. Lewis got going in occultism in 1909, when he joined one of the splinter-groups of Eliphas Levi’s Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose-Croix in France. [The group joined by Lewis was headed by one Josephin Peladan, hence the later rumor that France harbored a gang of Satanists called “Palladinists”! Cf. Lillie,
Satanism in Modern France.]
In 1915 Lewis split from Peladan and, also on the strength of a charter from O.T.O. chief Theodor Reuss, founded his AMORC in New York. He took it down to Florida in 1925, then to San Jose in 1927. A few years down the road, after Lewis had survived a scandal and acquired some nice real estate & begun to construct all those fancy Egyptian buildings Setians toured during the Set-V Conclave, Aleister Crowley showed up [as new Outer Head of the O.T.O.] and demanded title to the property on the strength of the O.T.O. charter. Lewis ignored him.
But Lewis didn't ignore Mount Shasta. In 1931, under the pen-name of “W.S. Cerve”, he authored
Lemuria, the Lost Continent of the Pacific. None of HPB’s or Steiner’s fooling around for Lewis - he got down to specifics, to wit: 150,000 years ago people lived on Lemuria, then called Mu for short. 82,000 years ago magnetic changes caused continental shifts and submergences. Europe rose up, and North & South America drifted away from Europe & Africa and bumped into the east coast of Lemuria. Then the west parts of Lemuria submerged. Its eastern area became what is today Washington, Oregon, California, and parts of Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico.
Lewis’ book resulted in all sorts of occultists flocking to Shasta to scrounge for Lemurians, a snipe-hunt still going on today. In 1932 reporter Edgar Lanser wrote an account of Larkin’s telescopic sightings in the
Los Angeles Times Star, and went on to say that Shasta residents enjoyed occasional visits from & commerce with their Lemurian neighbors. Lanser reported mysterious red & green lights on Shasta’s slopes and thus inaugurated one of the more durable Shasta legends. Recounts Nigel Pennick in
Hitler’s Secret Sciences (RL#14M):
For over a century occultists have claimed that these special holy mountains are in reality energy centers which collect cosmic forces from space and channel them into the “veins of the Earth”, the energy grid composed of ley lines.
Observations of holy mountains reinforce this assertion. At certain times of the year, when the energy is at its maximum, strange lights and other phenomena are often seen at such places. Mount Shasta, one of the Native Americans’ sacred peaks, is one such site; for there many inexplicable flashes of light have been observed. First recorded by prospectors in the old California gold rush of 1849, these flashes were seen in daylight, and in clear weather when there was no lightning about.
Nowadays cars in the vicinity of the mountain develop ignition failure without any obvious cause. This is a classic energy manifestation noted in connection with UFOs, Stonehenge, and the enigmatic “transmitter” Hitler erected on the Brocken peak in Germany.
When a vast forest fire engulfed much of the district in 1931, Mount Shasta was suddenly swathed in a mysterious fog. The fire could not burn where the fog protected the mountain peak. For many years afterwards a perfect curve around the mountain marked the furthest advance of the flames ...
