Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from … · Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and...

5
Detroit Jerome Clark Hidden Realms , Lost Civilizations , and Beings from Other Worlds

Transcript of Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from … · Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and...

Page 1: Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from … · Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from ... Twilight Zone … 253 ... Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings

Detroit

Jerome Clark

Hidden Realms,Lost Civilizations,

andBeings from

Other Worlds

realms MB 2/22/10 10:57 AM Page v

Page 2: Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from … · Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from ... Twilight Zone … 253 ... Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings

PART ONEEarth’s Secret Places

Lemurian Mountain: Outpost of the LostContinentals … 1

A Sunken Continent of the Mind: Cayce’sAtlantis … 23

Cities of the Poles: Voyages byExclamation Point … 41

Living Hell: The Demons beneath Us … 55

PART TWOThe Alternate Solar System

By the Light of the Moon: Lives of theLunarians … 79

Shrouded in Mystery: Venusians in AllTheir Variety … 99

The Not-So-Dying Race: MartiansEnvisioned and Encountered … 129

Extremophile Living: Life and Love onthe Outer Planets … 169

PART THREEBetween This Worldand the Otherworld

The Road to Fair Elfland: FairiesExperienced … 193

Ghost Riders in the Sky: Spectral Armieson the March … 213

Sky Serpents: The Horror of the Heights… 229

Mystery Airships: Aeronauts from theTwilight Zone … 253

Contents

Acknowledgments [xi]

Introduction [xiii]

Endnotes [285]

Index [293]

HIDDEN REALMS, LOST CIVILIZATIONS, AND BEINGS FROM OTHER WORLDS [ix]

realms MB 2/22/10 10:57 AM Page ix

Page 3: Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from … · Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from ... Twilight Zone … 253 ... Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings

Situated near the southern end of the Cascade range, in Siskiyou County, Mt. Shastarises 14,161 feet (4,316 meters) above the landscape of northern California, 40 miles

(64 kilometers) south of Oregon and midway between the Pacific Ocean and theNevada border. It is a volcano which, according to geological evidence, erupts every600 to 800 years. It has been alleged that the most recent eruption—or so some haveinferred from the testimony of an observer looking to land from a ship at sea—occurred in 1786. The witnessed eruption, however, may not have been of Shasta; theissue is in dispute. (White people did not start settling in the area until 1827.) The lakes,rivers, and forests surrounding the mountain make Shasta a major tourist destination.

Whatever its distinctive beauty and natural features, Mt. Shasta is best knownaround the world for the curious lore associated with it. Its most celebrated legends,which owe more to conscious fabrication than to traditional folklore, are barely morethan a century old. Older supernatural myths and tales, which come from the Ameri-can Indian tribes who live or lived in the area, are just as interesting and in some waysmore intriguing. For example, besides the ubiquitous belief in a race of supernatural,often invisible little people—a worldwide fairy tradition with cultural variations—natives spoke of their fear of cave-dwelling hairy giants, the Shupchers, who dis-patched their victims by embracing and crushing them. As Bigfoot and Sasquatch suchcreatures, albeit minus murderous impulses, would survive, at least in supposition andtestimony, into modern times.

XDwellers on Two Continents

Shasta as international occult landmark is in good part, however, the consequence ofthe imagination of Frederick Spencer Oliver, born in 1866. Two years later his par-

HIDDEN REALMS, LOST CIVILIZATIONS, AND BEINGS FROM OTHER WORLDS [3]

LemurianMountain:Outpost of the

Lost Continentals

realms MB 2/22/10 10:57 AM Page 3

Page 4: Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from … · Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from ... Twilight Zone … 253 ... Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings

ents and he migrated from Washington, D.C., to Yreka, California, just north of Shas-ta, where the family sought to secure its fortune in prospecting. In 1883, while engagedin surveying the boundaries of the Oliver mining claim, the young man—while “insight of the inspiring peak of Mount Shasta,” he would later state—experienced a sud-den urge to start scrawling sentences in his notebook. Confused and alarmed, he has-tened home. There he sat down and watched his hand, clutching a pen, fly across thepage. Known to both occultists and psychologists, this automatic writing sometimesproduces whole books, as often as not said to be dictated by superior discarnate intel-ligences, and this is how, it is claimed, A Dweller on Two Planets came to be.

Oliver continued to write—the narrative arrived in spurts, no more than a fewpages at a time—and completed the manuscript in 1886. Afterwards, he tried withoutsuccess to get it published. When one copy of the manuscript burned in a train wreckon the way back from New York, Oliver expressed these ominous sentiments in aNovember 22, 1897, letter to a correspondent: “Many months ago Phylos [who evident-ly channeled his thoughts through Oliver] informed both myself [sic] and Mr. Putnam[presumably publisher G.P. Putnam] that from then on there were evil opponents inhis [Phylos’] own realm that would make every possible effort to defeat the appearanceof his book. It would seem as if this train wreck, if by it the MS. is lost, was the crown-ing effort of the opposition.”

[4] HIDDEN REALMS, LOST CIVILIZATIONS, AND BEINGS FROM OTHER WORLDS

Lemurian Mountain: Outpost of the Lost Continentals

According to some occult chroniclers, California’s Mount Shasta houses an advanced race ofsurvivors from the sunken Pacific continent of Lemuria (iStock).

realms MB 2/22/10 10:57 AM Page 4

Page 5: Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from … · Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from ... Twilight Zone … 253 ... Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings

The manuscript, which was gathering dust when Oliver died before his time atage 33, in 1899, may well have been lost if his mother, Mary Elizabeth Manley-Oliver(with assistance from family friends), had not paid for its publication as a 423-pagework in 1905. It bore the by-line “Phylos the Thibetan.” (Speaking in the novel’s char-acteristically obese prose, one character intones, “And some day the world shall hear ofhim [the central character] as Phylos the Thibetan, yet shall he not reside in Thibet inAsia, but shall be so called because he shall for a time live on the soul plane of theoccult adepts of Thibet.”) Phylos, “an adept of the arcane and occult in the universe,”one of whose past lives was spent on the lost Pacific continent of Lemuria, psychicallycommunicated the words Oliver had transcribed.

Whatever else may be said of him, Phylos—presumably a confabulation of Oliv-er’s unconscious mind—is not a great novelist or even a limply gifted one. But whatev-er its literary shortcomings—the book, ripely written, pompous, and preposterous,makes for what politely may be called a challenging read—it has become something ofa metaphysical standard, read even today at least by individuals of a New Age bent. Afair number of modern Shasta legends can be traced back to it.

HIDDEN REALMS, LOST CIVILIZATIONS, AND BEINGS FROM OTHER WORLDS [5]

Lemurian Mountain: Outpost of the Lost Continentals

A 1904 map depicts what some believed to be the greatest extent of the Lemurian world(Mary Evans Picture Library).

realms MB 2/22/10 10:57 AM Page 5