The Case Of The Missing Continent
Atlantis, Lemuria, and other lost worlds of esoteric religion
“Atlantis as the origin of New World culture is a theory dating back almost to the discovery of the New World itself,” Robert Wauchope wrote in 1962.1 It became a popular idea about the Americas even before they were colonized. We can blame the Spanish and the Italians. Columbus, a Genoan, sailed west looking for the legendary island of “Antilia” on behalf of the Spanish king and queen. Then people got creative. First, Italian poet Giralamo Frocastoro in 1530, and then historian Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdés in 1535, suggested that the New World was populated by the descendants of the fabled Atlantis.
Over the centuries, various parties have credited ancient Egypt, Phoenicians, and the ‘lost tribes’ of Israel with founding the societies of North and South America. Yet “of all the American Indian origin theorists, advocates of the Lost Continent are by far the most devoted to their cause,” Wauchope says. He names two modern esoteric religions in particular. Emphasis added:
Lost Atlantis devotees have been, for the most part, congenital romanticists and mystics. Nowadays they are to be found among adventure readers and members of mystic organizations like the Rosicrucians and the Theosophists, but as late as the nineteenth century they counted among their number a great many old-time scholars who flocked to the local meetings and international congresses of learned societies here and abroad to expound on an advanced civilization that flourished many thousands of years ago on a giant island in the Atlantic Ocean and that colonized the ancient American continent before being destroyed by cataclysmic volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tidal waves, to sink beneath the sea forever.
The 19th century was a particularly febrile period for lost continents. Ernst Haeckel, a keen Darwinian taxonomist, wanted to explain the distribution of lemurs and other common species between Madagascar and Australia. In his Natural History of Creation, published in 1868, and then his Origin and Geneology of the Human Race of 1870, Haeckel proposed a hypothetical landmass, which he called Lemuria, that had slid beneath the waves of the Indian Ocean many eons ago.
At the time, his thought experiment was even more reasonable and scientific than the Atlantean controversy. Theosophy reestablished Lemuria as an explicitly spiritual project. In An Outline of the Principles of Modern Theosophy, published in 1894, Irish Theosophist Claude Falls Wright asserted that the residents of Lemuria were the “Third Race” of mankind.2 They were also “of enormous stature — from twenty-seven to even thirty feet in height” and “possessed such powers over nature as we cannot now conceive of.”
The progressive Lemurians, the ones who evolved spiritually, “are the true ancestors of present-day humanity, for it was during the period of their existence that man first received the gift of mind,” Wright explains. The fallen Lemurians on the other hand settled Atlantis, the scene of Plato’s ancient parable of collapsing civilizations.
It all sounds like Swiss UFO prophet Eduard ‘Billy’ Meier because he draws from all the same material, including lost worlds that exist both under the sea and in outer space. The lost worlds of the fantasy past are in fact the promised worlds of the heavenly future; they are the same worlds. Shangri-La, or its interstellar equivalent, is always waiting for us just beyond the horizon. ‘Atlantis in the Americas’ is a legacy of esoteric religion in the early age of science, when people already believed in extraterrestrials and even communed with them in spirit.
Previous essays in this series are available for premium subscribers:
Tammy Wynette sings about “Mu-Mu land” in one of the most bizarre hits of the 1990s. The KLF made extensive use of the Lemuria allegory throughout their back catalog. It is a purely modern myth that riffs on the primordial narrative of lost civilizations and lost gods.
Many of the proponents of Atlantis-in-the-New-World were trying to be scientific, at least as far as they understood what that was. Abbé Charles-Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, a Catholic priest who helped decode the ancient Mayan script, connected the Americas to Atlantis once again as a grand theory of human history in his 1862 book Grammaire de la langue quichée. His 1866 book Monuments anciens du Mexique expanded on the idea, and then his 1868 Quatre lettres sur le Mexique interpreted Mayan mythology as stories of Atlantis.
“To his own horror he became increasingly convinced that all these native writings which he had so laboriously translated from the original Nahuatl and Yucatee Maya and Guatemalan Quiche were in fact pure allegory, and that the deities and other mythological characters of Maya and Mexican legends, to whose understanding he had contributed more than any man alive, were simply Indian representations of the great forces of nature,” Wauchope writes. “But what forces of nature?”
The Abbé was also interested in Spiritualism, the new American religious movement sweeping the globe. So too were Augustus Le Plongeon, a Mayan archaeologist who developed an idea that Atlantis had settled the Americas, and Ignatius L. Donnelly, a writer who popularized the Atlantis myth in modern America. Both of them cited the Abbé. Donelly’s book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World “contains numerous references to Brasseur de Bourbourg's scholarship,” Wauchope notes.
Le Plongeon was far more daring than the conservative Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg however. He “uncritically … accepted any similarity as evidence of historical contact” between the Americas and the Old World. He always “went overboard for every notion that occurred to him or anyone else,” Wauchope writes.
Erroneously assuming that all of his identifications of Mayan art were correct, whenever he encountered contrary evidence Le Plongeon “merely admitted bewilderment and walked calmly away from the subject, still convinced of his original hypothesis.” For example, he insisted that ancient people had advanced technologies.
He was utterly incapable of critically examining either the factual or logical evidence bearing on any theory that he wanted to believe. When he found a line across a sculptured lintel in an ancient ruin in Yucatan and noticed some zigzag motifs near it, he immediately decided that the prehistoric Maya communicated by means of electric telegraph wires!
His widow Alice, described as “a good deal of a mystic” herself, continued promoting his ideas after his death. When her own end drew near, Mme Le Plongeon gave a mysterious envelope to a friend that allegedly contained the coded locations of Mayan artifacts her husband had secretly buried. No such artifacts were ever found. “Le Plungeon believed in making people puzzle out things,” an acquaintance later said, “and he had rather odd ideas for protecting the secrets.”
Le Plungeon’s fascination with Freemasonry, which he said had been transmitted to Egypt from the Mayan highlands by way of Atlantis, locates his personal beliefs within the late 19th century bricolage of occult and esoteric religion known today as the ‘New Age.’ Secret knowledge, secret societies, secret artifacts, secrets of the ancients, secrets of the hidden temple: this is all mysticism, a communion with the divine through insight rather than evidence.
Donnelly was different from Francis Bacon or Thomas More, who both wrote about Atlantis as utopian fiction, or from Jules Verne, whose fictional Captain Nemo discovers the ruins of Atlantis under the sea. Donnelly was in earnest. He took Plato’s ancient parable literally.
His first book, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World presents what Donnelly understood to be a scientific case that a real place called Atlantis had once existed, flourished in the ancient world, and submerged in a cataclysm. Which, again, was not all that unreasonable to suggest at the time, but he was no scientist.
The progressive politics of an Atlantis-American
As all first books are said to be self-inserts, Donnelly’s Atlantis could well be a metaphor of his own career deaths. Before writing about Atlantis, he had set aside a legal partnership to pursue a more lucrative opportunity, made and then lost a fortune on real estate speculation in Nininger, Minnesota, and finally destroyed his reputation with the Republican Party.
Ignoring sage advice, Rep. Donnelly of Minnesota launched into a four-hour tirade of invective against a rival, offending sensibilities in Washington, and lost his seat. “Donnelly used language which even in its expurgated state makes most extraordinary reading and of which he had no occasion to be proud,” John D. Hicks writes in a 1921 article, “The Political Career of Ignatius Donnelly.”3 “Members of the House were delighted with the discomfiture of [his rival], but they thought less of Donnelly afterwards and the incident was used to discredit him in the campaign which followed.”
Donnelly had lost his position with a mainstream party, but “the reformer spirit within him had been deeply buried beneath the demands of party regularity, whereas after those eventful years it was uncovered and given the chance it needed to grow.”
Donnelly’s spiritual biography begins with a loss of faith. Whereas he “rejected the tenets of the Roman Catholic church to which he was bound by every natural tie, only to accept in his declining years the vagaries of spiritualism,” Donnelly always “believed that poverty was unnecessary and wrong, and that any party or group of men whose actions forced poverty or distress on others ought to be overthrown.” His morality therefore remained culturally Christian while his explanations became conspiratorial.
Despite his professed atheism, Donnelly frequently employed biblical references to make his arguments. In 1874 Donnelly published the Anti-Monopolist, a populist journal, bearing a motto from Exodus: “Speak to the children of Israel that they go forward.” In another example, Donnelly’s 1870 letter to the St. Paul Dispatch cited Psalm 24:1.
The first right of man is to have everything essential to his happiness. Whatever stands in the way of this is not law but fraud and robbery. “The earth is man’s and the fullness thereof.” Wherever amid the fullness of the earth a human stomach goes empty, or a human brain remains darkened in ignorance, there is wrong and crime and fraud somewhere.4
Donnelly began from the theory that all inequality was a conspiracy. He was no radical bomb-thrower, however. Donnelly “held to the traditional veneration of the Constitution of the United States, he ever denied that he was even a socialist, and he denounced in fervid oratory every suggestion of violence among his followers,” Hicks writes.
He was instead a populist organizer, inspiring and setting up the farmers’ granges of 1873, then the Greenback clubs of the 1880s, and then the third party organizing conventions of 1892, propelling the progressive movement through his writings and oratory.
Seen in this light, Donnelly’s 1882 book about Atlantis is really about the United States. Unless Americans heeded his prophecy, Donnelly was suggesting, the United States was doomed to die as a civilization.
Donnelly himself drew no line between fiction and politics. He reproduced a portion of his biggest bestseller, Caesar’s Column, as the preamble to the third party convention in St Louis in February 1882, which “to this day … remains the most famous document in populist history,” as Hicks wrote in 1921.
In that preamble, Donnelly warns that the working classes of the world must unite against “a vast conspiracy against mankind” or else face “terrible social convulsions, the destruction of civilization, or the establishment of an absolute despotism.” Donnelly reprised this diluvian argument in a newspaper op-ed.
We are all of us profoundly impressed with the conviction that if some change does not take place in public affairs there will be not only political revolution but physical revolution. The masses to-day through all mining and manufacturing regions are held in check and obedience by dread of rifles and Gatling guns. As the pressure of wretchedness increases this fear may pass away, and when it does where will our country be?5
His words were sensational. When Donnelly gave his stump speech in Omaha at the 1892 People’s Party nominating convention, “the delegates staged a demonstration which blocked all proceedings for twenty-five minutes,” Hicks remarks.
This is all the more remarkable because while Ceasar's Column “was Donnelly's most popular work, and sold by the hundreds of thousands of copies,” it had been “published under an assumed name and was not for some time attributed to Donnelly.”
“Its phenomenal success is evidence of the profound unrest of the times from which the populist movement took root and grew,” Hicks writes. Whereas contemporaries compared the book to Edward Bellamy’s utopian Christian socialism in Looking Backward, “Donnelly looked forward to something closely akin to the current conception of bolshevism.” In 1921, that was quite a statement by Hicks.
Donnelly “foresaw a time when the lower classes, stung by their increasing wrongs, would join together in a great ‘Brotherhood of Destruction,’ including millions of members the world over, whose efforts would finally culminate in the annihilation of society itself.” For “unless the wrongs of the masses were righted a social cataclysm would result.”
Atlantis would be lost again. Unless we strive for utopia, we are bound to slide into the sea. What we really need is a political technology, the one the ancients had, but forgot.
Like the Theosophists, Donnelly was an interventionist who wanted leagues of nations and world disarmament to forestall the great wars and proletarian violence that would otherwise result from the vast economic conspiracy against the Little Guy.
He spoke as a prophet of peace. “When the day comes a great federation of European republics will clasp hands across the ocean, with this mighty union of states, and kings, standing armies, aristocracies and established churches will become the fossil monsters of a dark and brutal past,” Donnelly prophesied.6 Heaven on earth, basically.
Donnelly was “so exceedingly vain of his own opinions that he could seldom be persuaded to modify them even on the advice of his best friends,” Hicks observes. His “impractical turn of mind unfitted him for the serious business of legislation, but as an agitator he was ever superb.”
Donnelly performed a secular prophethood. “Rejected and reviled by the few, he aspired to become the political Moses of the many,” Hicks writes. It was an age of political religions, with prophets named Hegel, Feurbach, Marx and Engels. But his politics were never shaped by European philosophers.
“His inconsistencies and his consistencies alike baffle understanding.” A keen advocate of railroad monopolies until they stopped funding his campaigns, Donnelly became an ardent enemy of the railroads. His imaginarium was shaped by rumors of “mill rings” that controlled wheat prices in the Midwest.
Culturally inclined to magical thinking, Donnelly’s policy opinions were therefore fungible, especially when it came to silver and gold and greenbacks. He was not a technocrat.
The boldness of his pronouncements increased. Donnelly followed up Atlantis: The Antediluvian World with the 1883 Age of Ragnarok, which proposed that clay, gravel, and silt concentrations on earth were the result of interactions with a massive comet in past epochs.
Then in 1888, Donnelly went too far with The Great Cryptogram, a book purporting to prove that a code hidden within the writings of Shakespeare revealed Francis Bacon to be the true author. Donnelly was embarrassed when his British critics applied his code with equal success to Don Quixote. He blamed the Minnesota railroads for the debunking of his work in England.
Yet he was stubborn, convinced that he would one day be vindicated.
In one frame of mind he steadfastly maintained in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary the impossible theories of Atlantis, Ragnarok, and the Baconian cipher; in another, he switched from high tariff to low tariff, from low tariff to high tariff, and then back again, for inside of two years after his return from England he was defending the free-trade position once more. Perhaps there was no tariff policy sufficiently irrational to be at home in his erratic mind.
“It is not surprising that in his later writings. Donnelly refused to be bound by the limitations of the scientist or the literary critic, and selected romance as the most fitting medium for the expression of his views,” Hicks writes. Those views were not shaped by rigorous methodology. “Donnelly loved theories, and having stumbled upon a good one he seldom rested until he had proved it to his own satisfaction.”
The ancients of Mu, justified
In the best tradition of intellectual hucksters, Ignatius Donnelly was his own best citation.
For such a purpose he had an almost limitless fund of information to draw upon. He possessed one of those peculiarly retentive memories that enabled him to recall at will practically everything of consequence that he had ever heard or read, and he read everything that he could get his hands upon. His private library became the wonder and admiration of the whole northwest. It contained books on every subject, and infinite numbers of pamphlets which he bound carefully together for future reference. He saved everything — newspaper clippings about himself or about subjects in which he was interested, the multitudinous letters which he received from his friends, and occasionally also copies of letters which he himself wrote.
British inventor James Churchward, who invented much of the pseudoscience related to the lost continent he called “Mu,” was similarly his own best source of information. Writing three books late in life, Churchward promulgated the “genuine records of Mu” written in the ancient Egyptian hieratic alphabet (the so-called “Naacal writings”).
Like almost every western mystic of his era touting an eastern occult source, Churchward framed his understanding in a miraculous revelation. He had learned this ‘true story’ of Mu from a mysterious Indian sage who had revealed ancient tablets and translated them.
Churchward shortened Lemuria to Mu. He also relocated the lost continent from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, “from somewhere north of Hawaii to the south as far as the Fijis and Easter Island,” according to his 1931 book The Children of MU.7
“About twelve thousand years ago cataclysmic earthquakes rent Mu asunder,” he wrote.
She became a fiery vortex, and the waters of the Pacific rushed in, making a watery grave for a vast civilization and sixty million of people. Easter Island, Tahiti, Samoas, Cook, Tongas, Marshall, Gilbert, Caroline, Marianas, Hawaii and the Marquesas are the pathetic fingers of that great land, standing today as sentinels to a silent grave.
But before the cataclysm, the inhabitants of Mu settled the Mayan lands of Mexico as well as the Nile Delta of Egypt, according to Churchward. In fact, the entire world — including Atlantis — was settled from the lost continent of Mu.
“Colonization must have started at least 70,000 years before Mu sank, for there are Naacal writings in the Orient stating that the [Mayan adepts] carried the religion and the sciences of the Motherland to the colonies” that far back, Churchward said.
These people were “stalwart, young adventurers with milk-white skins, blue eyes and light, flaxen hair.” A portion of the peoples of Mu settled Africa from Micronesia, their black skin being the result of an “unbalancing between the Life Force and the elementary compounds forming the skin” as a result of their “glands.”
The site of the Garden of Eden, Mu became “the Empire of the Sun,” Churchward writes, having “the rule of the whole world. Her laws governed all people. When she was gone, all laws throughout the world became chaotic.” Things sure have gone downhill ever since the loss of the lost continent.
Writing in the heady days of Stalin’s Comintern, Churchward asserts that Mu had “a communistic form of government” in which “all crops were divided according to their laws. I have found no mention whatever of money. Whether they had any or not I cannot say.”
Churchward is certain however that Mu commanded forces of nature that modern humans have yet to understand. “All Forces are vibratory,” he wrote, anticipating the Summer of Love: See, it’s all about vibes, man! This is no accident. It is the occult theosophical bricolage of the New Age. Hippie lingo uses many esoteric and occult references.
Among the various forces, “some have a high vibration, others lower vibrations. A high vibration either nullifies or repels a lower one with which it may be opposed.” As a result of their mastering this nonsense, ancient Mu had antigravity.
“Overcoming and nullifying the Force of Gravity as it is known to us today, but which to the ancients was known as the Cold Magnetic Force, was one of the sciences practiced 100,000 years ago.” So there was antigravity technology, but no money — just like Star Trek.
As the 20th century dawned, the prophets of the New Age already had the stars in their sight. Max Heindel, astrologer and Christian Theosophist, published The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception in 1909. It is a spiritual cosmology. “The inhabitants of Mercury are the furthest advanced” in spirit, “hence are closer to the Sun” than Venus, Heindel writes.8
Every solar system is “swimming in a World of Divine Spirit, and thus it will be apparent that in order to travel from one solar system to another it would be necessary to be able to function consciously in the highest vehicle of man, the Divine Spirit.”
The heart is a hyperdrive: this is all recognizable as a Swedenborgian conception of the heavens, complete with a Central Sun that once held the primitive earth in orbit before setting it loose within the galaxy. Every planet has three different dimensions and there are seven levels of each dimension. Heindel’s description of planetary distribution in our solar system according to “density” recalls the same idea expressed by Spiritualist writer and Swedenborg imitator Andrew Jackson Davis half a century earlier. It is Swedenborgian religion.
Per Theosophy, which built upon Swedenborg, the other planets of our solar system are homes to humanity’s spiritual guides. Read past the capitalized words, and we find the Ancient Astronauts in charge of managing human spiritual progress. Emphases added:
The immediate Leaders of humanity (apart from the creative Hierarchies) who helped man to take the first tottering steps in Evolution, after Involution had furnished him with vehicles, were Beings much further advanced than man along the path of evolution. They came on this errand of love from the two planets which are located between the Earth and the Sun — Venus and Mercury.
“They came … from … Venus and Mercury.” This too is Swedenborg’s influence. “It was known that these messengers communed with the Gods,” Heindel writes. “They were held in deep reverence and their commands were obeyed without question.” Gods on earth riding Vedic chariots, basically, but forty years before the first flying saucer reports.
The Lords of Venus were leaders of the masses of our people. They were inferior beings of the Venus evolution, who appeared among men and were known as "messengers of the Gods." For the good of our humanity they led and guided it, step by step. There was no rebellion against their authority, because man had not yet evolved an independent will. It was to bring him to the stage where he would be able to manifest will and judgment that they guided him, until he should be able to guide himself.
Heindel also situates human biological evolution on Lemuria, still smoking from its rise out of the ocean at the beginning of the world. “Upon the harder and comparatively cool spots man lived surrounded by giant fern-forests and animals of enormous size,” he writes.
Everything was protean. “The forms of both man and animal were yet quite plastic. The skeleton had formed, but man himself had great power in molding the flesh of his own body and that of the animals about him.” Heindel writes that “the Lemurian had no eyes. He had two sensitive spots which were affected by the light of the Sun as it shone dimly through the fiery atmosphere of ancient Lemuria, but it was not until nearly the close of the Atlantean Epoch that he had sight as we have it today.”
Humans didn’t even learn how to think until they lived on Atlantis. “The mind was given to man in the Atlantean Epoch to give purpose to action, but as the Ego was exceedingly weak and the desire nature strong, the nascent mind coalesced with the desire body; the faculty of Cunning resulted and was the cause of all the wickedness of the middle third of the Atlantean Epoch,” Heindel explains. Things sure have gone downhill since we developed eyeballs and brains.
It is worth noting that just before Heindel begins to describe the Atlantean Epoch, he writes that the role of capital-D Degeneration — that is, racial degeneration brought on by miscegenation — in the decline of races has been too little studied by scientists. According to his telling, the Atlanteans declined this way by intermarrying with other descendants of Mu as they spread across the world.
Heindel does not think of himself as racist, indeed he expresses confidence that human evolution will produce unrecognizable future races of men. He is perhaps disturbingly comfortable with the notion of racial extinction as a form of natural selection. He may have picked up these ideas from his travels in Europe, where he befriended the German Theosophists, such as Rudolph Steiner, founder of Anthroposophy.
It was also the early age of geology as a legitimate science, before human understanding of plate tectonics. “Volcanic cataclysms destroyed the greater part of the Lemurian continent and in its stead rose the Atlantean continent, where the Atlantic Ocean now is,” Heindel writes. “The Toltecs were the third Atlantean Race,” he says, landing on the shores of the Americas once again.
According to Heindel, the “Elder Brothers” guarded the secret of creating life “and all the deep secrets of Nature until man shall be fit to use them for the uplifting of the race — for the glory of God and not for personal profit or self-aggrandizement.” Our scientific advancement is in their hands, for we are too immature to be trusted with their knowledge.
Heindel was trying to reconcile the two most influential works of alternative spirituality in his day, The Secret Doctrine by Helena Blavatsky and Esoteric Buddhism by A.P. Sinnett. Today, his works are published by the Rosicrucian Fellowship. Among the most telling signs of Rosicrucian influence on Heindel’s work is the assignment of a seven-color prism to the seven planets of the classical solar system.
Heindel writes that “there are in reality seven ‘Rays’ or streams of life, all pursuing different evolutions, yet all belonging to the original class of virgin spirits to which our humanity belongs.” This was the influence of Hermeticism, the ancient magic religion of Hermes Trismegistus as reimagined by the early moderns.
This incomplete survey — I have left out H. Spencer Lewis, to name just one example — has demonstrated that the modern lost continents of Atlantis and Mu have always been explicitly spiritual and political projects, and that from the 1890s, extraterrestrials were always part of this cultural-religious bricolage or pastiche.
Lost worlds tempt us with glimpses of the primordial past, when humanity was one, before all the disunity and discord of clashing civilizations and beliefs. Or, alternately, they are reservoirs of savage primordial terror. King Kong made the latter lost world type into a cinematic trope in 1933. It was the golden age of Christian Theosophy.
And then, like Mu and Atlantis, it all slipped beneath the waves. When the Second World War was over, no one was interested in esoteric religion anymore. Luckily for the cult of belief in Ascended Masters from Venus guiding human spiritual destiny, everyone was seeing new signs in the sky, and Theosophy had the perfect explanation for this phenomenon.
Lost worlds in outer space
In this series, we have already covered the story of how Christian Theosophy transitioned to the New Age by way of the flying saucer. George Adamski, the first earthling to claim personal contact with an extraterrestrial in the flesh, was a practitioner of the occult for decades before his meeting with the man from Venus named “Orthon.” He was also a keen believer in Atlantis and Mu.
We have likewise examined the story of the first UFO cult ever studied by science, and the influence of George Hunt Williamson, Adamski’s “witness” to the meeting with Orthon, on that “Seekers” group in Oak Park near Detroit in 1954. According to Michel Zirger and Maurizio Martinelli, Williamson was even closer to the core of the Seekers group than the authors of When Prophecy Fails understood at the time.
In The Incredible Life of George Hunt Williamson: Mystical Journey, the authors write that Williamson met Dr. Charles Loughead in Detroit during December 1954, the same time frame in which Leon Festinger’s team of University of Chicago psychology students was infiltrating the Seekers for social science purposes.
Loughead had brought national attention to the group when he put out a press release warning that the destruction of the world by floodwaters, a la Atlantis, was imminent. The Seekers believed that their medium, Dorothy Martin, had channeled messages from Sanat Kumara, the risen Jesus, warning of doomsday. They also believed that a flying saucer would evacuate them from the earth before the end.
Dr. Charles Loughead was a devotee of Atlantis and Mu and flying saucers. He had traveled to meet Adamski and obtained an enlarged drawing of the ‘footprints of Orthon’ from Williamson, the artist.
Zirger and Martinelli write that after the doomsday prophecy failed, Williamson continued his communication with extraterrestrials, He had help from Martin and the Lougheads. Williamson had fallen out with Adamski at this point and needed a new faith group.
Lillian Loughead “was usually in charge of making notes and of tape-recording the messages delivered to the group.” Putting himself in a trance, Williamson “served as a channel for various extra- or super-terrestrial entities who expressed themselves through him, each with voices stunningly different from his own,” the authors write.9
“Perhaps the most notable among them was the enigmatic ‘Brother Philip,’ affiliated to the no less enigmatic ‘Monastery of the Seven Rays’, supposedly hidden in the heart of the Andes.” This Brother Philip “over interminable sessions revealed esoteric information related to humankind’s history since the disappearance of Mu.”
During 1953, Williamson had published two books. In the first, The Saucers Speak!, which he co-authored with fellow Adamski “witness” Al Bailey, Williamson claimed to have received extensive Morse code radio messages from extraterrestrials. Technology took over from Theosophy, as the electromagnetic spectrum allowed “communication … with several planets in our own Solar System and with space craft in our atmosphere from other solar systems.”10
“Ancient records show beyond the shadow of a doubt that the ‘saucers’ have been here for centuries,” Williamson and Bailey wrote. In his second, solo book of 1953, Other Tongues—Other Flesh, George Hunt Williamson revived the ancient astronaut theory, connecting UFOs to Atlantis and Mu.
He credits Emanuel Swedenborg, who “brought great new truths to the spiritually hungry world in the 1700s,” as an inspiration on his first page.
Ancient manuscripts tell us that at one time man on Earth lived in a Golden Age and “spoke with angels.” This simply means that in Atlantis and Lemuria and before, Earth people were in constant contact with beings from outer space or “angels.” Through evil and greed and lust, the Golden Age passed from the Earth and with it went the ability to speak the Solex-Mal. We will again speak this “language of angels,” in the New Age now dawning.11
Solex-Mal is the universal language of the spirit, according to Williamson. In the tradition of Le Plongeon, he recognized the “scroll writing” of Atlantis all over the New World, he said, “because the ruins of great antiquity there were originally colonies of the Lost Continents.” Of course he was the only person able to understand this mysterious script.
Earth is both a colony of the intergalactic human race and a colonizer, Williamson said. Citing “several research groups,” he writes “that during the catastrophes that struck both Lemuria and Atlantis, groups of people were evacuated from the Earth and taken to other planets. Especially Mars and Venus.”
The troublemakers came from Orion. “It is believed that the good people escaped from Atlantis by spacecraft and went to the planet Mars while the evil destroyers lost their physical equipment in the sinking of the Lost Continent and migrated to Orion in spiritual form,” Williamson writes.
He speculated that Nazca lines were “beacons for the gods.” Lost worlds proved the existence of life on other worlds. “I believe these lost cities have a definite tie-in with flying saucers,” Williamson told a Miami newspaper in October 1957, one of many scrapbook items in Mystical Journey. “As an anthropologist I have become fully convinced that the earth was visited by outer space objects in civilizations past,” namely Atlantis and Mu.
That same year, the voice of Brother Philip drew together Williamson, his wife Betty, their toddler Mark, the Lougheads, and Dorothy Martin on an “adventure of mystic exploration in Peru,” in Zirger and Martinelli’s florid prose. Seeking the Abbey of the Seven Rays, they adopted a lifestyle modeled on the Essenes, whose Dead Sea Scrolls had famously been unearthed by a second dig in 1956.
In Peru, Williamson channeled Aramu-Muru (Lord Muru), the spiritual head of the Brotherhood of the Seven Rays in the Valley of the Blue Moon near Lake Titicaca. He again channeled Brother Philip, who talked at length about an Amethystine Order, named for the “seventh ray” of the spiritual spectrum, which is violet or amethyst.
First the Lougheads, then Martin left Williamson and his family behind in Peru. Despite the spiritual experience, conditions were rough, and they were comfortably middle class Americans.
Then Williamson left his wife and son behind in Peru to travel in Europe, lecturing and visiting Italian sites that convinced him “beyond doubt that the ancient civilizations of the two Continents and The Lost Cities of the World have much in common, as well as establishing the existence of UFOs thousands of years ago during the Atlantean and Lemurian times.”
He told everyone who would listen that the Maya and the Inca had been settled from Mu, that the “Lost Cities of South America and the UFOs belonging to space visitors, are connected.”
But his beliefs were still being shaped by transformative experience. Gazing at what he called “the Ascension Shroud” in Turin, Williamson conjectured that Jesus the “Ascended Master” had produced the image on the legendary cloth as he transformed into a higher state of being. This was the influence of interwar Theosophy.
In his 1961 book Secret of the Andes, Williamson invokes the “Ascended Master Saint Germain,” Chohan of the Seventh Ray and Master Teacher or Spiritual Head of the Amethystine Order.”12 This is the same Comte de Saint Germain that Guy Ballard located on Venus, directing human spiritual evolution, for his “I AM Activity” cult in Depression-era America.
Saint Germain still appears in co-equal position with Jesus of Nazareth in the altar arrangements of Christian Theosophy, which also feature seven colored rays.
The Great Pretendian
Atlantis, Mu, and Ancient Aliens are Theosophical religious programming on the History Channel. While this bricolage, or belief-set, presents itself in compatibility with Christianity, it has always existed in tension with Christian orthodoxy because it challenges monotheism and the unique character of the holy trinity. We can observe this tension in the long arc of Williamson’s career, which resolved in esoteric Christianity.
The spiritual biography of George Hunt Williamson begins at his contacts with Native American religion. By 1951, he was organizing Indian ceremonial dance competitions in Palm Springs and inviting Gov. Earl Warren to attend them.
Zirger and Martinelli recall these claims in breathless hagiography for the great man. They never wonder if Williamson, a white man, was the right person to organize competitive Native American dances, much less win them against Native American dancers as he claims he did.
By his own account, Williamson had just read Donald Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucers Are Real when he had an anthropology field assignment with the Chippewa of Minnesota from July 1951 to May 1952.
During that time, Williamson says that he was invited to lead the battle charge of the Chippewa actors in a Ronald Reagan film, receiving the endorsement of Chief Spotted Hawk, “Medicine Man of all the Chippewa Indians of the United States.”
Even more dubious is the story of a spiritual teacher called Star Hunter, who told Williamson “you have a white face, but you have a red heart. You will not understand it for many, many years, but you come with mighty signs and symbols.”
Of course, the only pertinent citation for this incredible spiritual journey is George Hunt Williamson himself. He is the only document Zirger and Martinelli need in order to believe every word of it.
In Other Tongues—Other Flesh, Williamson compares his vision quest to that of Emmanuel Swedenborg. Mirroring the Protestant Christian “Swedish prophet,” who tried at the end of his life to syncretize his own religion with Kabbalistic Judaism and esoteric Islam, Williamson was syncretizing Native American religion to his Christianity from the outset.
Flying saucers were always an element of his mythology tying the two worlds together; they bridged the gap between diverse Native American beliefs and diverse Christian doctrines. Atlantis and Mu were narrative waypoints in his New Age gospel.
Planetary peace was his guidestar. In his 1958 book Secret Places of the Lion, Williamson writes that the “Goodly Company” gathers entities from other worlds, “more specifically from the star system of Sirius,” to influence human spiritual evolution. He writes that Blavatsky’s Great White Brotherhood is real. He also spends ten pages on the holy grail myth, for his beliefs were still taking shape.
In Other Tongues-Other Flesh, Williamson had written that throughout human history on earth, a “Goodly Company” of “Wanderers” have “lifted up other planets to their present majestic state of progression where all war, greed, lust and falsity is non-existent.”
They passed through Mars, Venus, and other spheres before volunteering for the Earth mission. And the mission to Earth began not just one or two lifetimes back, but it all started in the Miocene Epoch millions of years ago! The Universal “chimney-sweeps” will not go on to other degraded worlds until the planet Earth returns to the Interplanetary Brotherhood, established in Love, Truth, and peace.
Williamson later refered to an “Interplanetary Confederation” in 1956 and then a “Space Confederation” and “Galactic Administration” in 1959. In both Saucers Speak! and Other Tongues—Other Flesh, Williamson postulates that atomic testing has alerted galactic authorities to earth’s state of technological danger, and that global doom is imminent unless earth joins the interstellar peace program. Fortunately, earth has a number of special organizations set up to guard this truth.
“On November 13, 1955, Maha Chohan spoke of Lake Titicaca along with Shamballa, Luxor, Darjeeling, and the Cities of Saint John as Retreats and Sanctuaries of the Great White Brotherhood,” Williamson wrote about a channeling session in Secret of the Andes. “Of course, there are many more throughout the world,” all run by “various ancient Orders.” Williamson named some of them. Emphasis added:
Among the oldest on Earth are the Order of Melchizedek the Order of Essenes, the Order of the Emerald Cross, the Amethystine Order, and the Fraternitas Rosae Crucis or Order (Fraternity) of the Rosy Cross, and the Order of the Red Hand. More recent are the Order of Mount Carmel and the Order of the Holy Grail.
Road in the Sky, published in 1959, was the last book to ever have Williamson’s name on the cover. It describes earth as the scene of a 500,000-year-old contest between good and evil factions of the galaxy. Against his literary agent’s advice, Williamson put the name “Brother Philip” on the cover of his 1961 book, Secret of the Andes. He would never publish under either name again.
Zirger sees a transition to the “resolutely neo-gnostic, insofar that one can link him to the totality of it, as it is mostly presented as emanating from Brother Philip and his coreligionists” — sources that Williamson had channeled from the aether.
Personal tragedy had altered Williamson’s perspective, however. The Mystic Journey authors note that reincarnation belief is “at the heart of all his works,” and his belief was put to the test when Betty Jane Williamson died suddenly in 1958 as he was touring Europe.
In 1960, he had his name changed to Michael d’Obrenovic, claiming to be a direct descendant of Prince Lazar of Serbia (1371-1389), a noted member of the Knights of Malta. Michel Zirger writes that he inherited his ancestor’s spiritual mantle. “I can confirm that he was indeed affiliated with the Order of the Knights of Malta, where he seemed to have held the functions of Grand Prior.”
Williamson has been identified as a Freemason, a Rosicrucian, or even a Knight Templar by various people. In 1971, Williamson/d’Obrenovic became a priest of the Orthodox Church. He died in 1981.
Mystical Journey is all too credulous of its topic, for example presenting extensive documentary attestation from Williamson’s mother about the secret noble origins of her son, typewritten and signed and therefore official.
Alain Moreau hits that cracked tone of overt credulity in the foreword when he asserts that people really do live on Venus, right now, just like George Adamski and George Hunt Williamson said, and that contacts from Venus are still happening on earth today.
They are of course referring to channelers who claim to contact beings on other planets in the solar system, the same thing Williamson learned to do from watching Adamski.
Zirger and Martinelli note that Adamski “used to show real or feigned dislike for mediumship practices,” such as George Hunt Williamson channeling alien contacts. In fact Adamski felt threatened by the young upstart communing with his gods, a challenge to his spiritual authority that is intrinsic to all channeling cults.
Dorothy Martin had a similar experience with the Seekers in 1954, and after settling in the American southwest, became Sister Thedra, brooking no rivals in her monopoly of contacts with higher beings.
Grievance frames Mystical Journey. The authors are eager to credit George Hunt Williamson with being the first person to link flying saucers to Ezekiel’s chariot, all but accusing Erich von Däniken of plagiarism in his 1968 Chariots of the Gods? They accuse ufologist Rod Steiger of plagiarizing Williamson’s taxonomy of extraterrestrial contacts (“Star People/Helpers” versus “Wanderers/Agents”).
Everyone is just copying the original, except that as we have seen, Williamson was not being original at all. At best, he was cribbing from Max Heindel fifty years before him.
Williamson was “totally convinced that there is a very ancient plan, implemented in our times, to reveal esoteric truth to all who desired it,” Maurizio Martinelli writes. And of course, Williamson said that a New Age was at hand.
“He thought that it began toward the end of the nineteenth century with the writings of H.P. Blavatsky and H. Rider Haggard,” naming a spiritual figure alongside a 19th pioneer of the lost world as a fiction genre. This plan “was continued by men such as Nicolas Roerich in the 1930s” — naming a Russian Spiritualist — “and novelist James Hilton” in the same period. Fiction citations blend with pseudofactual ones.
“In this way, this anthropologist, archaeologist, explorer, and ufologist, was also very much a mystic and a seeker,” Martinelli writes. Indeed, it is impossible to separate these aspects of Williamson into discrete people, as he was one man reading fanciful books and channeling multiple beings from beyond.
CONCLUSION: Going off the map
Mystic Journey documents some of the contacts Williamson made along his spiritual journey. He had for example spent several months working for William Pelley, the prewar American fascist who influenced Guy Ballard’s Christian Theosophy ‘I AM Activity’ in the 1930s.
Michael Zirger calls Pelley’s 1941 book The Golden Scripts “an alternative gospel.” Containing more than 1,000 pages of bible fan fiction channeled directly from Jesus Christ himself, Pelley’s book says that “Star Guests” — extraterrestrials — “intervene in the evolution of earth through successive reincarnations.”
It is one of many attempts by various writers to incorporate a globalized theosophical framework with Christianity in pursuit of global peace.
Williamson was also a friend of ufologist Morris K. Jessup, progenitor of the so-called ‘Philadelphia Experiment’ legend, as well as the author of UFOs and the Bible. Jessup’s death is still ruled mysterious by ufologists today. Williamson suggested the existence of ancient astronauts three years earlier than Jessup, Zirger notes, suggesting that Jessup imitated Williamson rather than, say, Heindel.
George Hunt Williamson also met the son of Edgar Cayce in 1957 at the dead clairvoyant’s Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE). Virginia Beach, the site of Cayce’s shrine, was just one of many pilgrimage sites that Williamson visited in his spiritual journey. Williamson admired Cayce as a pioneer in the democratization of the reincarnated afterlife.
Spiritual seekers learned about their own past lives on Atlantis and Mu — through Cayce’s powers of psychic observation, by mail order. Happily, lost continents consist of pure belief, so they offer plenty of wonderful past lives that cannot be falsified through documentation.
Theosophy trespasses on the spiritual integrity of every belief system in a Borg-like effort to syncretize all human spirituality into a single system of acceptable thought, which is supposedly the state of humanity before Mu and Atlantis were destroyed. Helena Blavatsky and all her inheritors failed at this project. They are still failing. They will always fail.
Today, Graham Hancock maintains the kernel of this belief in a divine unity of the past, a lost world of peace and harmonic existence some 12,000 years or so ago, when all of humanity supposedly shared one language and culture, before there was war. If we can find it, we can have that world again, they say.
But there never was such a time or place, so the search for it must always end at some point that is not on any map of the real world.
The Peaceful Race From The Heavens
“We have not been left alone to evolve on our own as most planets have, but instead we are a mixture of many different races that have come here over the millennia,” J. Randolph Winters writes in his exegesis of the Swiss flying saucer prophet Eduard ‘Billy’ Meier. “It is this mixture of races who are at different spiritual levels of evolution that has led to the difficult times we are now experiencing” in 1994, when
Wauchope, Robert. Lost Tribes & Sunken Continents: Myth and Method in the Study of American Indians. University of Chicago Press, 1962.
Wright, Claude Falls. An Outline of the Principles of Modern Theosophy. Theosophical Book Company, 1897.
Hicks, John D. “The Political Career of Ignatius Donnelly.” The Mississippi Historical Review, Vol 8, No. 1/2 June/Sept. 1921, pp 80-132.
Donnelly, Ignatius. Letter to the St Paul Dispatch, 30 March 1870.
Clipping from the Anaconda Standard (Montana), September 6, 1893, in Donnelly Scrapbooks, volume 14; Penny Press (Minneapolis), June 8, 1894.
Donnelly, Ignatius. Extracts from a speech reported in the Minneapolis Tribune, September 30, 1888.
Churchward, James. The Children of MU. Ives Washburn, 1933 (fourth printing).
Heindel, Max. The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception. Rosicrucian Fellowship, 1909.
Zirger, Michel and Martinelli, Maurizio. The Incredible Life of George Hunt Williamson: Mystical Journey. Verdechiaro, 2022.
Williamson, George and Bailey, Alfred. The Saucers Speak!: A Documentary Report of Interstellar Communication by Radiotelegraphy. New Age Publishing, 1954.
Williamson, George Hunt. Other Tongues—Other Flesh. Amherst Press, 1953.
Brother Philip aka Williamson, George Hunt. Secret of the Andes. Neville Spearman, 1961
Big deal! I got the Loch Ness Monster in my pond out back.