Universal Religion

The following is excerpted from 2012 and the Shift of Ages: A Guide to the End of the World (Adventures Unlimited Press).

In the mid-1970's, a Hindu Guru of the 2,300-year-old Natha lineage, Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami, said his inner psychic eye opened on a book from the ancient library of the deity Subramanya. In the weeks and months that followed, his disciples gathered close and transcribed while he watched the pages turn and read the text aloud. The result was a remarkable book, Lemurian Scrolls, which remained restricted to high-level initiates in the Saiva Siddhanta Order for the next twenty-four years. In 1997, while preparing a private printing of a few hundred copies for long-time students, Subramuniyaswami relates that the "divine thrust came to release [Lemurian Scrolls] freely to the world at large," and the book was published for the general public.

Lemurian Scrolls, he says, was written in two parts by disciples at ashrams in Lemuria, one part near the end of the Treta Yuga and the other in the Dvapara Yuga. The book opens with the story of mankind's migration to Earth from the Pleiades star cluster during the Satya Yuga -- a story I will briefly summarize here.

The first humans arrived on Earth, the Scrolls say, in subtle etheric bodies, and used the "thick clouds of gases and healthful substances" on the planet to form physical bodies through which to express themselves. Those who were first to arrive aided the ones who arrived subsequently by making offerings to them of cut fruit, flowers and other substances, the essences of which the arriving beings used to manifest delicate physical forms.  Their bodies eventually became dense enough to smell and feel, and in time they were able to eat normally like the animals that already occupied the planet. This was done in temples, where the priests would make the offerings on a pedestal, which served as a focus of concentration.

The celestial beings would stand on the pedestal and absorb the Earth's pungent substances and with it materialize strong physical bodies. In the beginning it took a long time to bring the etheric body of a soul into physical form so he could walk off this pedestal on his own in the Earth's atmosphere. But through the thousands of years that passed, it became a very rapid process, and the entire Earth became populated with celestial beings from several of the major planets in the galaxy. Thus, the souls arrived in full force to begin a long, tedious evolutionary pattern through the three yugas to follow.

Near the end of the Treta Yuga, some of these celestial beings were caught and eaten by the planet's carnivorous creatures, and in this manner they entered the evolutionary cycle of animals, being reborn afterwards with an animal nervous system and animal instincts but a divine soul. The process of becoming liberated from the animal body after that would take an extremely long time, but during the Kali Yuga, the Scrolls predicted, a human kingdom would begin to emerge from the animal kingdom, and at the end of the Kali Yuga the conditions would appear for many souls to become liberated, having realized the Self and thus accomplished their purpose in migrating to the planet.

Since at least the latter half of the 18th century, Western esotericists have claimed that there is a secret inner tradition that has been upheld by enlightened people in every religion from ancient times to the present. Among the proponents of this philosophy, the writings of Helena Blavatsky have had a uniquely far-reaching impact.

Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (b. 1831 - d. 1891) was a daughter of Russian nobility and an intellectual heiress to the Russian Age of Enlightenment. In 1848, at the age of seventeen, the young Blavatsky fled on a stolen horse from an unhappy arranged marriage, to spend the next ten years wandering around the world, collecting esoteric wisdom from a wide assortment of gurus and masters -- no doubt among many extraordinary adventures and equally extraordinary hardships. In 1873, she immigrated to New York City, where in 1875 she co-founded the Theosophical Society.   

Now a mature Adept in her own right, Blavatsky claimed to represent a secret association of mystical Adepts who had sent her forth to correct some errors that had developed in the nascent Spiritualist movement (which, she said, they also had created). An extraordinary account of Spiritualism's origins was given by an eminent Theosophist, the Countess Wachtmeister, addressing a Spiritualist audience in 1897. As quoted by Jocelyn Godwin ("The Hidden Hand - Part I: The Provocation of the Hydesville Phenomena." Theosophical History. 1990. III/2) -- she related:

A group of Atlantean Adepts, who had brought with them the traditions of that older period of time and the knowledge of Occultism, as practiced in those early days, seeing how the world was rushing down into materialism with rapid strides, noticing how, as persons were developing their intellectual powers, the churches gradually lost their hold upon them, and so having nothing to cling to they were drifting down into materialism, the Lodge determined to stop this terrible downward course; and a spiritual influx was thrown down here into America, and then began the Rochester manifestations, these Adepts being living men, great souls from Atlantis incarnated into the bodies of North American Indians. It was they who brought forward this grand movement of Spiritualism.

And all this time we thought it was the dolphins.

In an article published in The Theosophist in 1883, Madame Blavatsky succinctly summarized her own chronicle of human history:

During the occupation of the Earth for one period by the great tidal wave of humanity," she wrote, "seven great races are successively developed, their end being in every case marked by a tremendous cataclysm which changes the face of the earth in the distribution of land and water. The present race of mankind, as often stated, is the fifth race. The inhabitants of the great continent of Atlantis were the fourth race. When they were in their prime, the European continent was not in existence as we know it now, but none the less was there free communication between Atlantis and such portions of Europe as did exist, and Egypt. The ancient Egyptians themselves were not an Atlantic colony.

In the same article she affirmed that there was "an ancient connection between the central American peoples and the lost continent of Atlantis."

Annie Besant -- President of the Theosophical Society after the death of Blavatsky's successor -- was essentially in agreement with Countess Wachtmeister's account. Joscelyn Godwin -- my primary source for the history of Theosophy -- quotes from a talk given by Besant in India during World War I and published in 1921; I reproduce here a slightly different selection from the same talk, which I will quote at length for different reasons.

Most of you have doubtless heard of the Brother­hood of Yucatan, in Mexico, an exceedingly remark­able group of Occultists, who came down by definite succession in Fourth Race bodies, maintaining the Fourth Race methods of occult progress... They are utilising bodies whose nervous constitution is very much finer, is more highly organised, especially those who in the decadence of the Fourth Race went on under the special guidance of the White Lodge of the time, and took up methods which were specially intended to save the Fifth Race from the catastrophe in which a majority of the Fourth Race were over­whelmed in the great cataclysm of Atlantis. None the less, as I say, the Fourth Race remains the majority [on earth today?], and this Occult Brotherhood of Yucatan is specially charged with looking after them. Their methods have always been -- as were Fourth Race methods of the past -- those which dealt with the advance of mankind through what is called now "the lower psychism"; that is, through a number of occult phenomena connected with the physical plane and tangible, so that, on the physical plane, proofs might be afforded of the reality of the hidden worlds...

...[W]hen it was seen that the Fifth Race was drifting into materialism in its most advanced members, the scientific world, and that knowledge was progressing much faster than the social consci­ence and moral evolution, it was thought necessary to start a movement which would appeal to those who were materialistically-minded, and would afford them a certain amount of proof, tangible on the physical plane, of the reality of the superphysical, of the unseen, though not of the spiritual, worlds.

Hence the Spiritualist Movement. That proceeded in the western world by demonstrations available to physical investigation, by knocking, by tilting of material objects, such as tables, chairs, or anything else that was conveniently movable. Later on, there were voices that were made audible, and still later what is called "materialisation"...

The Yucatan Brotherhood, accustomed to the use of that method, handed down from ancient days, took up the guidance of this rescue movement. Sometimes, in the early days of the Theosophical Society, its Masters Themselves manifested in this fashion; at other times, They spoke and taught through H. P. Blavatsky...

Materialisation is not so marked now as it was in the earlier days, when we find that very many of the "controls" were North American Indians. It was very characteristic of the early phases. It began in America, of course, where the available people were, so to speak, most handy, and you find a number of American Indians acting as controls of those first mediums. They were given all sorts of names, such as "Sunshine," and the like. When they material­ised, they materialised in their own forms, which very often were those of children... (Talks with a Class. Chicago: Theosophical Press, 1922.)

The first question that ought immediately to arise is: if this is so, why is there no evidence of Atlantis or Lemuria's existence? Isn't the most likely explanation that they simply didn't exist?

The answer implied by Blavatsky and Rene Guenon, and articulated by the latter's followers, was that the earlier cycles of humanity had not yet fully descended into material form, and thus did not have physical evidence of their existence to leave behind.

In any case, whatever gross or subtle plane they understand them to have inhabited, contemporary Native American groups include the legendary continents of Atlantis and Lemuria in their mythico-historical narratives.

On a visit to the Hopi reservation in 2006, Traditionalist Hopi Elder Martin Gashweseoma showed me a book of maps titled Cycles: A View of Planet Earth from 4 Million BC to 15,000 AD. It was published in South Africa in 2000, and presented a series of maps showing Earth changes from 4 million BCE up to 15,000 CE. The purpose of the maps was to show how the ancient continents of Atlantis and Lemuria were once aspects of the planet's geography. According to the maps, for millions of years -- from 4 million BCE to 10,000 BCE -- the small land mass of Atlantis extended off the northwestern edge of Africa, experiencing a series of cataclysms beginning around 800,000 BCE. There was an enormous spread of land from Asia down to Australia, which constituted the ancient continent of Lemuria. This began to break up sometime around 700,000 - 500,000 BCE, settling into a form that resembled its present geography sometime around 300,000 - 100,000 BCE.

Furthermore, over the next millennium (after the year 2000 CE), the cartographer foresaw extensive future changes in the planet's geography. By 3000 CE, much of the eastern half North America and the northeastern part of South America would be under water, along with a central band of Africa. Meanwhile, Lemuria would begin re-emerging from the Pacific Ocean. Some of the Americas would re-emerge around 9000 CE, and by 15,000 CE would form a single band with a large lake around where the Gulf of Mexico is now, while Africa will also have expanded and Lemuria will have re-emerged as a significant presence in the Pacific Ocean area.

Grandfather Martin showed me this book without comment, but I infer that he meant to suggest that Lemuria and Atlantis were the two previous worlds inhabited by humans in Hopi traditional history, before we migrated to the present Fourth World.

Mayan Daykeeper Hunbatz Men's association of Mayan Elders is more explicit about this belief. As Grandfather Gerardo Barrios Kaanek' relates:

The great Gods... made the plans to begin life in this part of the universe. When they were finished, they call[ed] upon the great builders of this project... These four builders came to this part of the universe and created the galaxies, the solar system, the beginning of life on this planet, and planned the four primary continents. These continents were called Kax Uleu, the red earth; Sak Uleu, the white earth; Akab Uleu, the black earth; and Rax Uleu, the yellow earth. In the western world, these continents are called Atlantis (the red continent), Yis (the white continent), Mu (the black continent), and Lemuria (the yellow continent). Atlantis was what the Caribbean Islands are now, beginning in Florida, making an arc and following all the way to Venezuela. Yis, was the North Pole. Mu, was south of Africa. Lemuria, was between Australia and the islands to the northeast of Australia. Each one of these continents had the seed of the four races of the universe.

Alexander Price is a writer and Sufi dervish whose articles have appeared in Reality Sandwich, Alchemy Journal, and 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. He is the founder of the Mahakranti Mystery School and editor of the independent arts & literary magazine Theophanies. Find more information about the book and the author here.