The location of Lemuria, according to Lewis Spence (Mary Evans Picture Library).
Retrospectively, typically years after the (supposed) fact, several individuals claimed to have met mystic masters on the mountain in the early 1930s. The most notorious of them, Guy Warren Ballard (1878–1939), anticipated the post–1947 flying-saucer contactees who allegedly interacted with wise, beautiful Venusians—though with Ballard those encounters were in Wyoming’s Grand Tetons.
As related in Unveiled Mysteries (1934), which he wrote under the pseudonym “Godfré Ray King,” Ballard’s mystical adventures began, however, on Shasta one day in 1930, when he was thirsty and looking for a spring. In the course of his search, he met a handsome young stranger whom he first took to be a fellow hiker. The young man asked for Ballard’s cup, which he filled with a richly textured liquid. On drinking it, Ballard felt something like an electrical shock run through him. Within a few minutes Ballard saw his companion’s “face, body, and clothing become the living breathing tangible ‘Presence’ of the Master, Saint Germain. … He stood there before me—a Magnificent God-like figure—in a white jeweled robe, a Light and Love sparkling in his eyes that revealed and proved the Dominion and Majesty that are his.”1
LEMURIA
The other legendary lost continent, Atlantis, is a genuinely ancient one, close to 2,500 years old. It cannot be traced past Plato’s telling of it in works thought to date from around 355 B. C. E., when it was used for purposes not of history but of political allegory. Whatever its pretensions to the contrary, Lemuria, on the other hand, has a history less than a century and a half in age.
Though in occult tradition it would become the Pacific’s equivalent to the Atlantic Ocean’s sunken civilization, Lemuria began in the Indian Ocean as a speculative, if scientifically grounded, effort by the English zoologist Philip Sclater to explain how lemurs (primitive primates) could exist both on the island of Madagascar and the southern tip of the Indian continent, two widely separated locations. He speculated that this land bridge, which he called “Lemuria,” had once linked them. Later, German evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel put forth the idea that Homo sapiens came into being on that sunken land bridge. Others thought that, perhaps millions of years ago, Lemuria was a land mass connected to an immense continent, called Gondwanaland, which occupied most of the Southern Hemisphere.
About 200 million years ago there were two supercontinents, instead of today’s seven smaller ones. Those who believe in Lemuria think that it might have been connected to Gondwanaland.
It bears noting that none of these scientists thought these landscapes harbored civilizations, advanced or otherwise. Progress in geology, including the discovery of continental drift, rendered such guesswork obsolete. The name and concept Lemuria survives because the celebrated occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky picked up on it in her The Secret Doctrine (1889), where Lemuria was represented as being the home of humanity’s third “root race.” The Lemurians were apelike creatures that laid eggs and had three eyes, one in the back of the head. They were also hermaphrodites.
Theosophical visionaries reported their own experiences of Lemurians. W. Scott-Elliot claimed that humans entered physical bodies for the first time on Lemuria. Venusians known as Lords of the Flame helped guide evolution, and Lemurians came more and more humanlike and spiritually developed. The continent broke up during the Mesozoic era, and one peninsula became Atlantis.
Working with Mayan hieroglyphics in the Yucatan late in the nineteenth century, archaeologist Augustus le Plongeon claimed to have found references to Mu, a Lost civilization that he believed must be Atlantis. When he died, his papers fell into the hands of James Churchward, who wrote four books based in part on them. According to Churchward, Mu was not Atlantis but a South Pacific continent and the “motherland of man.” The people of Mu were white (of course, as suited the racial sensibilities of Churchward’s time), numbering 64,000,000. They built great cities, and when they were not doing that, they worshipped the sun. Churchward claimed that he learned much of this history from tablets written in the no longer extant Nazcal language, but when challenged to produce them, he grew oddly—or revealingly—elusive. In any case, he argued the case in four books, most famously the first, The Lost Continent of Mu (1926). Before long, Mu was assumed to be just another name for Lemuria.
In the decades since then, Lemuria has become a staple of mystical thought. Efforts to prove its consensus-reality existence in any geographical, archaeological, or other scientifically grounded sense are rare. It is now almost entirely the province of mystics and New Agers. Lemurians are rumored to survive in colonies at Mount Shasta, inside the hollow Earth, on other planets, and elsewhere. Some people report physical or psychic visits to these hiding places. Channelers record long-winded messages from discarnate Lemurians, the contents varying from messenger to messenger.
Further Reading
De Camp, L. Sprague. Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science, and Literature. New York: Dover Publications, 1970.
Scott-Elliot, W. The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria. London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1925.
Sheppard, Jack. “Lemuria Did Exist.” Fate 4, 3 (July, 1950): 18–25.
Saint Germain told Ballard that he had been directed to initiate the Seventh Golden Age. He spent centuries roaming Europe trying to find an embodied human being sufficiently advanced to receive the Great Law of Life and to lead the effort on earth. Unsuccessful, he shifted his operation to the United States, where he encountered Ballard, whom Saint Germain designated—along with Ballard’s wife and son—the Accredited Messenger of the Ascended Masters.
The continent of Lemuria is swept under the ocean waves in this illustration (Mary Evans Picture Library).
Ballard experienced other dramatic metaphysical diversions, though not at Shasta, over the several years that remained to him. With his medium wife, Edna, and son, Donald, he spent the rest of the 1930s on the road promoting I AM [Ascended Master] Activity, a sect which, outside its following, was reviled for its authoritarian structure, fascistic ideology, and dubious financial dealings.
Channeler Nola Van Valer (d. 1979) reported that she and her husband, Jerry, met masters at Shasta as early as 1930. That spring Jerry had traveled by train to the area, where he met Mol Long in the town of McCloud. In a story reminiscent of Ballard’s, the mystic master produced a bowl of soup “which tasted like nothing I have ever tasted upon this Earth. I drank the soup and became so alive with vibration that I was at complete peace and rest within myself.” In June his wife joined him, and the two underwent occult education at the feet of Shasta masters.
In Mysteries of Mount Shasta (1949) Maurice Doreal—born Claude Doggins (c. 1898–1963) and founder (in 1929) of the Brotherhood of the White Temple—recalled his 1931 encounters at the mountain, not with Saint Germain or Lemurians but with Atlanteans. In Doreal’s telling he was lecturing in Los Angeles when two persons from Mount Shasta came to hear him. After a few days they whisked him to Shasta. First, they drove him to the city’s outskirts, then covered his face with a thin, transparent mask. Doreal would write:
Then they gave me a belt with two little