They too had their virgin-mother goddess, "Our Lady" whose son, the"Lord of Light," was called the "Saviour," bearing an accuratecorrespondence to Isis, Beltis and the many other virgin-goddesses ofthe east with their divine sons.

Their rites of sun and fire worship closely resembled those of theearly Kelts of Britain and Ireland, and like the latter they claimedto be the "children of the sun." An ark or argha was one of theuniversal sacred symbols which we find alike in India, Chaldea,Assyria, Egypt, Greece and amongst the Keltic peoples. LordKingsborough in his _Mexican Antiquities_ (vol. viii. p. 250) says:"As among the Jews the ark was a sort of portable temple in which thedeity was supposed to be continually present, so among the Mexicans,the Cherokees and the Indians of Michoacan and Honduras, an ark washeld in the highest veneration and was considered an object too sacredto be touched by any but the priests."

In addition to baptism, the tribes of Mexico, Central America and Peruresembled the nations of the old world in their rites of confession,absolution, fasting, and marriage before priests by joining hands. Theyhad even a ceremony resembling the Eucharist, in which cakes marked withthe Tau (an Egyptian form of cross) were eaten, the people calling themthe flesh of their God. These exactly resemble the sacred cakes of Egyptand other eastern nations. Like these nations too, the people of the newworld had monastic orders, male and female, in which broken vows werepunished with death. Like the Egyptians they embalmed their dead, theyworshipped sun, moon, and planets, but over and above these adored aDeity "omnipresent, who knoweth all things ... invisible, incorporeal,one God of perfect perfection" (see Sahagun's _Historia de NuevaEspana_, lib. vi.).

Baptismal rites were practised by all nations. In Babylon and Egyptthe candidates for initiation into the Mysteries were first baptized.Tertullian in his _De Baptismo_ says that they were promised inconsequence "regeneration and the pardon of all their perjuries." TheScandinavian nations practised baptism of new-born children; and whenwe turn to Mexico and Peru we find infant baptism there as a solemnceremonial, consisting of water sprinkling, the sign of the cross, andprayers for the washing away of sin (see Humboldt's _MexicanResearches_ and Prescott's _Mexico_).

In like manner in both hemispheres the worship of the sun-disk orcircle, and of the serpent, was universal, and more surprising stillis the similarity of the word signifying "God" in the principallanguages of east and west. Compare the Sanscrit "Dyaus" or"Dyaus-pitar," the Greek "Theos" and Zeus, the Latin "Deus" and"Jupiter," the Keltic "Dia" and "Ta," pronounced "Thyah" (seeming tobear affinity to the Egyptian Tau), the Jewish "Jah" or "Yah" andlastly the Mexican "Teo" or "Zeo."

_Fourth._--Nothing seems to have surprised the first Spanishadventurers in Mexico and Peru more than the extraordinary similarityto those of the old world, of the religious beliefs, rites, andemblems which they found established in the new. The Spanish priestsregarded this similarity as the work of the devil. The worship of thecross by the natives, and its constant presence in all religiousbuildings and ceremonies, was the principal subject of theiramazement; and indeed nowhere--not even in India and Egypt--was thissymbol held in more profound veneration than amongst the primitivetribes of the American continents, while the meaning underlying itsworship was identical. In the west, as in the east, the cross was thesymbol of life--sometimes of life physical, more often of lifeeternal.

A remarkable fact about the American Indians, and one which is astanding puzzle to ethnologists, is the wide range of colour andcomplexion to be found among them. From the white tint of the Menominee,Dakota, Mandan and Zuni tribes, many of whom have auburn hair and blueeyes, to the almost negro blackness of the Karos of Kansas and the nowextinct tribes of California, the Indian races run through every shadeof red-brown, copper, olive, cinnamon, and bronze. (See Short's _NorthAmericans of Antiquity_, Winchell's _Pre-Adamites_, and Catlin's_Indians of North America_; see also _Atlantis_, by Ignatius Donnellywho has collected a great mass of evidence under this and other heads.)We shall see by and by how the diversity of complexion on the Americancontinent is accounted for by the original race-tints on the parentcontinent of Atlantis.

Professor Retzius, in his _Smithsonian Report_, considers that theprimitive dolichocephalae of America are nearly related to the Guanchesof the Canary Islands, and to the population on the Atlantic seaboard ofAfrica, which Latham comprises under the name of Egyptian-Atlantidae.

Thesame form of skull is found in the Canary Islands off the African coastand the Carib Islands off the American coast, while the colour of theskin in both is that of a reddish-brown.

The ancient Egyptians depicted themselves as red men of much the samecomplexion as exists to-day among some tribes of American Indians.

"The ancient Peruvians," says Short, "appear from numerous examples ofhair found in their tombs to have been an auburn-haired race."

Ethnological Types._--Atlantis as we shall see is said to have beeninhabited by red, yellow, white and black races. It is now proved bythe researches of Le Plongeon, De Quatrefages, Bancroft and othersthat black populations of negroid type existed even up to recent timesin America. Many of the monuments of Central America are decoratedwith negro faces, and some of the idols found there are clearlyintended to represent negros, with small skulls, short woolly hair andthick lips. The Popul Vuh, speaking of the first home of theGuatemalan race, says that "black and white men together" lived inthis happy land "in great peace," speaking "one language." (SeeBancroft's _Native Races_, p. 547.) The Popul Vuh goes on to relatehow the people migrated from their ancestral home, how their language_became altered_, and how some went to the east, while other travelledwest (to Central America).

The similarity of language among the various savages races of thePacific islands has been used as an argument by writers on thissubject. The existence of similar languages among races separated byleagues of ocean, across which in historic time they are known to havehad no means of transport, is certainly an argument in favour of theirdescent from a single race occupying a single continent, but theargument cannot be used here, for the continent in question was notAtlantis, but the still earlier Lemuria.

One more point may be noticed, _viz._, the extraordinary resemblancebetween many words in the Hebrew language and words bearing preciselythe same meaning in the tongue of the Chiapenecs--a branch of the Mayarace, and amongst the most ancient in Central America. A list of thesewords is given in _North Americans of Antiquity_, p. 475.

The Phoenicians apparently were the first nation in the EasternHemisphere to use a phonetic alphabet, the characters being regardedas mere signs for sounds. It is a curious fact that at an equallyearly date we find a phonetic alphabet in Central America amongst theMayas of Yucatan, whose traditions ascribe the origin of theircivilization to a land across the sea to the east. Le Plongeon, thegreat authority on this subject, writes: "One-third of this tongue(the Maya) is pure Greek. Who brought the dialect of Homer to America?or who took to Greece that of the Mayas? Greek is the off-spring ofthe Sanscrit. Is Maya? or are they coeval?" Still more surprising isit to find thirteen letters out of the Maya alphabet bearing mostdistinct relation to the Egyptian hieroglyphic signs for the sameletters. It is probable that the earliest form of alphabet washieroglyphic, "the writing of the Gods," as the Egyptians called it,and that it developed later in Atlantis into the phonetic. It would benatural to assume that the Egyptians were an early colony fromAtlantis (as they actually were) and that they carried away with themthe primitive type of writing which has thus left its traces on bothhemispheres, while the Phoenicians, who were a sea-going people,obtained and assimilated the later form of alphabet during theirtrading voyages with the people of the west.

_Third._--From the fauna and flora we now turn to man.

_Language._--The Basque language stands alone amongst Europeantongues, having affinity with none of them. According to Farrar,"there never has been any doubt that this isolated language,preserving its identity in a western corner of Europe, between twomighty kingdoms, resembles in its structure the aboriginal languagesof the vast opposite continent (America) and those alone" (_Familiesof Speech_, p. 132).

Professor Wallace in his delightful _Island Life_ as well as otherwriters in many important works, have put forward ingenious hypothesesto account for the identity of flora and fauna on widely separatedlands, and for their transit across the ocean, but all areunconvincing, and all break down at different points.It is well known that wheat as we know it has never existed in a trulywild state, nor is there any evidence tracing its descent from fossilspecies. Five varieties of wheat were _already cultivated_ in Europein the stone age--one variety found in the "Lake dwellings" beingknown as Egyptian wheat, from which Darwin argues that the Lakedwellers "either still kept up commercial intercourse with somesouthern people, or had originally proceeded as colonists from thesouth." He concludes that wheat, barley, oats, etc., are descendedfrom various _species now extinct_, or so widely different as toescape identification in which case he says: "Man must havecultivated cereals from an enormously remote period." The regionswhere these extinct species flourished, and the civilization underwhich they were cultivated by intelligent selection, are both suppliedby the lost continent whose colonists carried them east and west.

But the greatest problem of all is the plantain or banana. ProfessorKuntze, an eminent German botanist, asks, "In what way was this plant"(a native of tropical Asia and Africa) "which cannot stand a voyagethrough the temperate zone, carried to America?" As he points out, theplant is seedless, it cannot be propagated by cuttings, neither has ita tuber which could be easily transported. Its root is tree-like. Totransport it special care would be required, nor could it stand a longtransit. The only way in which he can account for its appearance inAmerica is to suppose that it must have been transported by civilizedman at a time when the polar regions had a tropical climate! He adds,"a cultivated plant which does not possess seeds must have been underculture for a _very long period_ ... it is perhaps fair to infer thatthese plants were cultivated as early as the beginning of the Diluvialperiod." Why, it may be asked, should not this inference take us backto still earlier times, and where did the civilization necessary forthe plant's cultivation exist, or the climate and circumstancesrequisite for its transportation, unless there were at some time alink between the old world and the new?

Turning now from the animal to the vegetable kingdom it appears thatthe greater part of the flora of the Miocene age in Europe--foundchiefly in the fossil beds of Switzerland--exist at the present day inAmerica, some of them in Africa. But the noteworthy fact about Americais that while the greater proportion are to be found in the EasternStates, very many are wanting on the Pacific coast. This seems to showthat it was from the Atlantic side that they entered the continent.Professor Asa Gray says that out of 66 genera and 155 species found inthe forest east of the Rocky Mountains, only 31 genera and 78 speciesare found west of these heights.

The soundings too showed that the ridge is covered with volcanic_debris_ of which traces are to be found right across the ocean to theAmerican coasts. Indeed the fact that the ocean bed, particularlyabout the Azores, has been the scene of volcanic disturbance on agigantic scale, and that within a quite measurable period of geologictime, is conclusively proved by the investigations made during theabove named expeditions.Mr. Starkie Gardner is of opinion that in the Eocene times the BritishIslands formed part of a larger island or continent stretching intothe Atlantic, and "that a great tract of land formerly existed wherethe sea now is, and that Cornwall, the Scilly and Channel Islands,Ireland and Brittany are the remains of its highest summits" (_Pop.Sc. Review_, July, 1878).

_Second._--The proved existence on continents separated by greatoceans of similar or identical species of fauna and flora is thestanding puzzle to biologists and botanists alike. But if a linkbetween these continents once existed allowing for the naturalmigration of such animals and plants, the puzzle is solved. Now thefossil remains of the camel are found in India, Africa, South Americaand Kansas: but it is one of the generally accepted hypotheses ofnaturalists that every species of animal and plant originated in butone part of the globe, from which centre it gradually overran theother portions.

How then can the facts of such fossil remains beaccounted for without the existence of land communication in someremote age? Recent discoveries in the fossil beds of Nebraska seemalso to prove that the horse originated in the Western Hemisphere, forthat is the only part of the world where fossil remains have beendiscovered, showing the various intermediate forms which have beenidentified as the precursors of the true horse. It would therefore bedifficult to account for the presence of the horse in Europe except onthe hypothesis of continuous land communication between the twocontinents, seeing that it is certain that the horse existed in a wildstate in Europe and Asia before his domestication by man, which may betraced back almost to the stone age. Cattle and sheep as we now knowthem have an equally remote ancestry.

Darwin finds domesticated cattlein Europe in the earliest part of the stone age, having long beforedeveloped out of wild forms akin to the buffalo of America. Remains ofthe cave-lion of Europe are also found in North America.

In the first place, then, the testimony of the deep-sea soundings maybe summarized in a few words. Thanks chiefly to the expeditions of theBritish and American gunboats, "Challenger" and "Dolphin" (thoughGermany also was associated in this scientific exploration) the bed ofthe whole Atlantic Ocean is now mapped out, with the result that animmense bank or ridge of great elevation is shewn to exist inmid-Atlantic. This ridge stretches in a south-westerly direction fromabout fifty degrees north towards the coast of South America, then ina south-easterly direction towards the coast of Africa, changing itsdirection again about Ascension Island, and running due south toTristan d'Acunha. The ridge rises almost sheer about 9,000 feet fromthe ocean depths around it, while the Azores, St. Paul, Ascension, andTristan d'Acunha are the peaks of this land which still remain abovewater. A line of 3,500 fathoms, or say, 21,000 feet, is required tosound the deepest parts of the Atlantic, but the higher parts of theridge are only a hundred to a few hundred fathoms beneath the sea.

Now the testimony of the oldest writers and of modern scientificresearch alike bear witness to the existence of an ancient continentoccupying the site of the lost Atlantis.

Before proceeding to the consideration of the subject itself, it isproposed cursorily to glance at the generally known sources whichsupply corroborative evidence.

These may be grouped into the fivefollowing classes:

First, the testimony of the deep-sea soundings.

Second, the distribution of fauna and flora.

Third, the similarity of language and of ethnological type.

Fourth, the similarity of religious belief, ritual, and architecture.

Fifth, the testimony of ancient writers, of early race traditions, andof archaic flood-legends.

Catastrophes, too, on a scale such as have not yet been experiencedduring the life of our present Fifth Race, took place on more than oneoccasion during the progress of the Fourth. The destruction ofAtlantis was accomplished by a series of catastrophes varying incharacter from great cataclysms in which whole territories andpopulations perished, to comparatively unimportant landslips such asoccur on our own coasts to-day. When the destruction was onceinaugurated by the first great catastrophe there was no intermissionof the minor landslips which continued slowly but steadily to eataway the continent. Four of the great catastrophes stand out above therest in magnitude. The first took place in the Miocene age, about800,000 years ago. The second, which was of minor importance, occurredabout 200,000 years ago. The third--about 80,000 years ago--was a verygreat one. It destroyed all that remained of the Atlantean continent,with the exception of the island to which Plato gave the name ofPoseidonis, which in its turn was submerged in the fourth and finalgreat catastrophe of 9,564 B.C.

In addition also to the blank period in the past, there is the blankperiod in the future. For of the seven sub-races required to completethe history of a great Root Race, five only have so far come intoexistence.

Our own Teutonic or 5th sub-race has already developed manynations, but has not yet run its course, while the 6th and 7thsub-races, who will be developed on the continents of North and SouthAmerica, will have thousands of years of history to give to the world.

In attempting, therefore, to summarize in a few pages informationabout the world's progress during a period which must have occupied atleast as great a stretch of years as that above referred to, it mustbe realized how slight a sketch this must inevitably be.A record of the world's progress during the period of the Fourth orAtlantean Race must embrace the history of many nations, and registerthe rise and fall of many civilizations.

The Story of Atlantis

A Geographical, Historical and Ethnological Sketch.

The general scope of the subject before us will best be realized byconsidering the amount of information that is obtainable about thevarious nations who compose our great Fifth or Aryan Race.From the time of the Greeks and the Romans onwards volumes have beenwritten about every people who in their turn have filled the stage ofhistory.

The political institutions, the religious beliefs, the socialand domestic manners and customs have all been analyzed andcatalogued, and countless works in many tongues record for our benefitthe march of progress.Further, it must be remembered that of the history of this Fifth Racewe possess but a fragment--the record merely of the last family racesof the Keltic sub-race, and the first family races of our own Teutonicstock.

But the hundreds of thousands of years which elapsed from the timewhen the earliest Aryans left their home on the shores of the centralAsian Sea to the time of the Greeks and Romans, bore witness to therise and fall of innumerable civilizations.

Of the 1st sub-race of ourAryan Race who inhabited India and colonial Egypt in prehistoric timeswe know practically nothing, and the same may be said of the Chaldean,Babylonian, and Assyrian nations who composed the 2nd sub-race--forthe fragments of knowledge obtained from the recently decipheredhieroglyphs or cuneiform inscriptions on Egyptian tombs or Babyloniantablets can scarcely be said to constitute history.

The Persians whobelonged to the 3rd or Iranian sub-race have it is true, left a fewmore traces, but of the earlier civilizations of the Keltic or 4thsub-race we have no records at all. It is only with the rise of thelast family shoots of this Keltic stock, _viz._, the Greek and Romanpeoples, that we come upon historic times.

In this way nonsense is made of the whole retrospect; and theethnological scheme remains so vague and shadowy that it fails todisplace crude conceptions of mankind's beginning which still dominatereligious thinking, and keep back the spiritual progress of the age.The decadence and ultimate disappearance of Atlantean civilisation isin turn as instructive as its rise and glory; but I have nowaccomplished the main purpose with which I sought leave to introducethe work now before the world, with a brief prefatory explanation, andif its contents fail to convey a sense of its importance to anylisteners I am now addressing, that result could hardly beaccomplished by further recommendations of mine.

A. P. SINNETT.

Laborious as the task has been however, it will be recognized as amplyrepaying the trouble taken, by everyone who is able to perceive howabsolutely necessary to a proper comprehension of the world as we findit, is a proper comprehension of its preceding Atlantean phase.Without this knowledge all speculations concerning ethnology arefutile and misleading. The course of race development is chaos andconfusion without the key furnished by the character of Atlanteancivilization and the configuration of the earth at Atlantean periods.Geologists know that land and ocean surfaces must have repeatedlychanged places during the period at which they also know--from thesituation of human remains in the various strata--that the lands wereinhabited. And yet for want of accurate knowledge as to the dates atwhich the changes took place, they discard the whole theory from theirpractical thinking, and except for certain hypotheses started bynaturalists dealing with the southern hemisphere, have generallyendeavoured to harmonize race migrations with the configuration of theearth in existence at the present time.

For the benefit of others who may be more intuitive it may be well tosay a word or two that may guard them from supposing that becausehistorical research by means of astral clairvoyance is not impeded byhaving to deal with periods removed from our own by hundreds ofthousands of years, it is on that account a process which involves notrouble. Every fact stated in the present volume has been picked upbit by bit with watchful and attentive care, in the course of aninvestigation on which more than one qualified person has beenengaged, in the intervals of other activity, for some years past. Andto promote the success of their work they have been allowed access tosome maps and other records physically preserved from the remoteperiods concerned--though in safer keeping than in that of theturbulent races occupied in Europe with the development ofcivilisation in brief intervals of leisure from warfare, and hardpressed by the fanaticism that so long treated science as sacrilegiousduring the middle ages of Europe.

There is no limit really to the resources of astral clairvoyance ininvestigations concerning the past history of the earth, whether weare concerned with the events that have befallen the human race inprehistoric epochs, or with the growth of the planet itself throughgeological periods which antedated the advent of man, or with morerecent events, current narrations of which have been distorted bycareless or perverse historians. The memory of Nature is infalliblyaccurate and inexhaustibly minute. A time will come as certainly asthe precession of the equinoxes, when the literary method ofhistorical research will be laid aside as out of date, in the case ofall original work. People among us who are capable of exercisingastral clairvoyance in full perfection--but have not yet been calledaway to higher functions in connexion with the promotion of humanprogress, of which ordinary humanity at present knows even less thanan Indian ryot knows of cabinet councils--are still very few. Thosewho know what the few can do, and through what processes of trainingand self-discipline they have passed in pursuit of interior ideals, ofwhich when attained astral clairvoyance is but an individualcircumstance, are many, but still a small minority as compared withthe modern cultivated world. But as time goes on, and within ameasurable future, some of us have reason to feel sure that thenumbers of those who are competent to exercise astral clairvoyancewill increase sufficiently to extend the circle of those who are awareof their capacities, till it comes to embrace all the intelligence andculture of civilised mankind only a few generations hence. Meanwhilethe present volume is the first that has been put forward as thepioneer essay of the new method of historical research. It is amusingto all who are concerned with it, to think how inevitably it will bemistaken--for some little while as yet, by materialistic readers,unable to accept the frank explanation here given of the principle onwhich it has been prepared--for a work of imagination.

The memory of Nature is in reality a stupendous unity, just as inanother way all mankind is found to constitute a spiritual unity if weascend to a sufficiently elevated plane of Nature in search of thewonderful convergence where unity is reached without the loss ofindividuality. For ordinary humanity, however, at the early stage of itsevolution represented at present by the majority, the interior spiritualcapacities ranging beyond those which the brain is an instrument forexpressing, are as yet too imperfectly developed to enable them to gettouch with any other records in the vast archives of Nature's memory,except those with which they have individually been in contact at theircreation. The blindfold interior effort they are competent to make, willnot, as a rule, call up any others. But in a flickering fashion we haveexperience in ordinary life of efforts that are a little more effectual."Thought Transference" is a humble example. In that case "impressions onthe mind" of one person--Nature's memory pictures, with which he is innormal relationship, are caught up by someone else who is just able,however unconscious of the method he uses--to range Nature's memoryunder favourable conditions, a little beyond the area with which he himself is in normal relationship. Such a person has begun, howeverslightly, to exercise the faculty of astral clairvoyance. That term maybe conveniently used to denote the kind of clairvoyance I am nowendeavouring to elucidate, the kind which, in some of its moremagnificent developments, has been employed to carry out theinvestigations on the basis of which the present account of Atlantis hasbeen compiled.

I do not say that the one thought necessarily ensues as a logicalconsequence of the other. Occultists know that what I have stated isthe fact, but my present purpose is to show the reader who is not anOccultist, how the accomplished Occultist arrives at his results,without hoping to epitomize all the stages of his mental progress inthis brief explanation. Theosophical literature at large must beconsulted by those who would seek a fuller elucidation of themagnificent prospects and practical demonstrations of its teaching inmany directions, which, in the course of the Theosophical development,have been laid before the world for the benefit of all who arecompetent to profit by them.

We may best be helped to a comprehension of clairvoyance as related topast events, by considering in the first instance the phenomena ofmemory. The theory of memory which relates it to an imaginaryrearrangement of physical molecules of brain matter, going on at everyinstant of our lives, is one that presents itself as plausible to noone who can ascend one degree above the thinking level of theuncompromising atheistical materialist. To every one who accepts, aseven a reasonable hypothesis, the idea that a man is something morethan a carcase in a state of animation, it must be a reasonablehypothesis that memory has to do with that principle in man which issuper-physical. His memory in short, is a function of some other thanthe physical plane. The pictures of memory are imprinted, it is clear,on some non-physical medium, and are accessible to the embodiedthinker in ordinary cases by virtue of some effort he makes in asmuch unconsciousness as to its precise character, as he is unconsciousof the brain impulse which actuates the muscles of his heart. Theevents with which he has had to do in the past are photographed byNature on some imperishable page of super-physical matter, and bymaking an appropriate interior effort, he is capable of bringing themagain, when he requires them, within the area of some interior sensewhich reflects its perception on the physical brain. We are not all ofus able to make this effort equally well, so that memory is sometimesdim, but even in the experience of mesmeric research, the occasionalsuper-excitation of memory under mesmerism is a familiar fact. Thecircumstances plainly show that the record of Nature is accessible ifwe know how to recover it, or even if our own capacity to make aneffort for its recovery is somehow improved without our having animproved knowledge of the method employed. And from this thought wemay arrive by an easy transition at the idea, that in truth therecords of Nature are not separate collections of individual property,but constitute the all-embracing memory of Nature herself, on whichdifferent people are in a position to make drafts according to theirseveral capacities.

For anyone who will have the patience to study the published resultsof psychic investigation during the last fifty years, the reality ofclairvoyance as an occasional phenomenon of human intelligence mustestablish itself on an immovable foundation. For those who, withoutbeing occultists--students that is to say of Nature's loftier aspects,in a position to obtain better teaching than that which any writtenbooks can give--for those who merely avail themselves of recordedevidence, a declaration on the part of others of a disbelief in thepossibility of clairvoyance, is on a level with the proverbialAfrican's disbelief in ice. But the experiences of clairvoyance thathave accumulated on the hands of those who have studied it inconnection with mesmerism, do no more than prove the existence inhuman nature of a capacity for cognizing physical phenomena distanteither in space or time, in some way which has nothing to do with thephysical senses. Those who have studied the mysteries of clairvoyancein connection with theosophic teaching have been enabled to realizethat the ultimate resources of that faculty range as far beyond itshumbler manifestations, dealt with by unassisted enquirers, as theresources of the higher mathematics exceed those of the abacus.Clairvoyance, indeed, is of many kinds, all of which fall easily intotheir places when we appreciate the manner in which humanconsciousness functions on different planes of Nature. The faculty ofreading the pages of a closed book, or of discerning objectsblindfold, or at a distance from the observer, is quite a differentfaculty from that employed on the cognition of past events. That lastis the kind of which it is necessary to say something here, in orderthat the true character of the present treatise on Atlantis may beunderstood, but I allude to the others merely that the explanation Ihave to give may not be mistaken for a complete theory of clairvoyancein all its varieties.

THE STORY OF ATLANTIS PREFACE.

For readers unacquainted with the progress that has been made inrecent years by earnest students of occultism attached to theTheosophical Society, the significance of the statement embodied inthe following pages would be misapprehended without some preliminaryexplanation. Historical research has depended for western civilisationhitherto, on written records of one kind or another. When literarymemoranda have fallen short, stone monuments have sometimes beenavailable, and fossil remains have given us a few unequivocal, thoughinarticulate assurances concerning the antiquity of the human race;but modern culture has lost sight of or has overlooked possibilitiesconnected with the investigation of past events, which are independentof fallible evidence transmitted to us by ancient writers. The worldat large is thus at present so imperfectly alive to the resources ofhuman faculty, that by most people as yet, the very existence, even asa potentiality, of psychic powers, which some of us all the while areconsciously exercising every day, is scornfully denied and derided.The situation is sadly ludicrous from the point of view of those whoappreciate the prospects of evolution, because mankind is thuswilfully holding at arm's length, the knowledge that is essential toits own ulterior progress. The maximum cultivation of which the humanintellect is susceptible while it denies itself all the resources ofits higher spiritual consciousness, can never be more than apreparatory process as compared with that which may set in when thefaculties are sufficiently enlarged to enter into consciousrelationship with the super-physical planes or aspects of Nature.