Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds. Jerome Clark
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in prospecting. In 1883, while engaged in surveying the boundaries of the Oliver mining claim, the young man—while “in sight of the inspiring peak of Mount Shasta,” he would later state—experienced a sudden urge to start scrawling sentences in his notebook. Confused and alarmed, he hastened home. There he sat down and watched his hand, clutching a pen, fly across the page. Known to both occultists and psychologists, this automatic writing sometimes produces whole books, as often as not said to be dictated by superior discarnate intelligences, and this is how, it is claimed, A Dweller on Two Planets came to be.
According to some occult chroniclers, California’s Mount Shasta houses an advanced race of survivors from the sunken Pacific continent of Lemuria (iStock).
Oliver continued to write—the narrative arrived in spurts, no more than a few pages at a time—and completed the manuscript in 1886. Afterwards, he tried without success to get it published. When one copy of the manuscript burned in a train wreck on the way back from New York, Oliver expressed these ominous sentiments in a November 22, 1897, letter to a correspondent: “Many months ago Phylos [who evidently 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 in his [Phylos’] own realm that would make every possible effort to defeat the appearance of his book. It would seem as if this train wreck, if by it the MS. is lost, was the crowning effort of the opposition.”
A 1904 map depicts what some believed to be the greatest extent of the Lemurian world (Mary Evans Picture Library).
The manuscript, which was gathering dust when Oliver died before his time at age 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-page work in 1905. It bore the by-line “Phylos the Thibetan.” (Speaking in the novel’s characteristically obese prose, one character intones, “And some day the world shall hear of him [the central character] as Phylos the Thibetan, yet shall he not reside in Thibet in Asia, but shall be so called because he shall for a time live on the soul plane of the occult 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, psychically communicated the words Oliver had transcribed.
Whatever else may be said of him, Phylos—presumably a confabulation of Oliver’s unconscious mind—is not a great novelist or even a limply gifted one. But whatever its literary shortcomings—the book, ripely written, pompous, and preposterous, makes for what politely may be called a challenging read—it has become something of a metaphysical standard, read even today at least by individuals of a New Age bent. A fair number of modern Shasta legends can be traced back to it.
Dweller’s plot, such as it is, concerns the past and present life of its narrator, Walter Pierson. After the Civil War, Pierson moves to California and becomes a partner in a gold-mining company in the Shasta area. The work force he supervises includes a number of Chinese men on whom Pierson looks down with racism and contempt—except for one, Quong, who, unlike his fellows, is a “real man,” of high character and intelligence. Because of his superior nature, Quong eschews the company of his countrymen but works with the white laborers and soon has their respect because of his energy, wisdom, and compassion.
One day, as Pierson and Quong are on an outing in the wilderness, a grizzly bear rises up, about to attack Pierson, who is armed only with a knife. Suddenly, Quong appears, walks calmly toward the bear, and orders it to lie down. He sits on it and pets the creature, which licks his hand and then departs into the woods.
Soon Pierson learns that Quong is an ancient master of the mystic arts, a member of a secret brotherhood that lives inside the mountain. The two enter through a hidden door and meet other masters inside a luxurious temple. Pierson is initiated into the occult mysteries, and another of the masters takes him in his astral body to Venus (known to its inhabitants as Hesper). On that planet Pierson learns of his previous lifetime in Atlantis, where much of the story is set. Eventually, Pierson is transformed into Phylos, a cosmic guardian.
Though neglected by modern writers on Shasta, Eugene E. Thomas’ 1894 novel, Brotherhood of Mt. Shasta, helped shape the evolving occult beliefs that Dweller set in motion. The protagonist, young Donald Crane, finds that a colony of masters, descended in part from Lemuria, lives secretly inside the mountain. Crane goes through seven steps on his way to mystical enlightenment before joining the “Sacred Brotherhood. “
If Frederick Spencer Oliver and Eugene Thomas first put forth the idea of Mount Shasta as a hideaway for a lost colony of mystical adepts with sunken-continent connections, a man who shared a middle name with Oliver—Harvey Spencer Lewis (1883–1939)—did much to fill in the details and to reinforce the link between Shasta and Lemuria. In his early adult life, Lewis, a journalist and editor in New York, developed interests in psychical research and occultism, much of it focused on Rosicrucianism. In 1909, in France, he was initiated into the order. On his return to the United States he became First Imperator of the Ancient and Mystic Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC), founded in 1915. In the 1920s AMORC moved to San Jose, California, where the organization, which still exists, remains headquartered.
Writing as “Selvius” in the August 1925 issue of the Rosicrucian magazine The Mystic Triangle, Lewis declared, “For fifty years or more the natives of Northern California and tourists, explorers, and government officials have contributed facts, and some fancies, to the accumulating mass of evidence proving the existence of the ‘mystic village’ (a name used by common agreement) and supplying the most astounding facts ever attributed to human beings.” These “facts” included numerous observations of mysterious phenomena on the mountainside as well as the regular appearances of odd individuals, dressed in pure white robes, “gray-haired, barefoot and very tall,” paying for goods with nuggets of pure gold. Moreover:
A symbol of the Rosicrucians, a mystical organization that believes in many occult practices. Some followers of this faith believed that there was a link between Lemuria and Mt. Shasta Mary Evans Picture Library).
At midnight, throughout the whole year, a ceremony is performed in this village, called the “ceremony of adoration to Guatama.” This latter word is their name for America; and the real purpose of the ceremony is to celebrate the arrival on this continent of their forebears when the continent of Lemuria disappeared beneath the quiet waters of the Pacific. At such ceremonies wonderful lights are used to such an extent that the whole southern side of Mt. Shasta is illuminated and made visible at great distances. These same lights are used at sunrise, daily[,] and are often seen by passengers on the Shasta Limited [train] which passes Shasta at about sunrise in certain seasons.
Though inclined to reclusiveness, the Lemurians—numbering no more than a few hundred—were good neighbors, helping farmers grow bumper crops with their advanced agricultural knowledge and making generous charitable contributions. On one occasion, apparently unremarked upon in the local press, a Lemurian walked all the way down to San Francisco, where he was given the key to the city, “much to the embarrassment of the simple soul who came to bring greetings on the anniversary of the establishment of their community in California.”
Either Lewis was extraordinarily credulous, or he was simply imaginative and making it up as he went along. (Needless to say, actual residents of the Shasta area knew nothing of any of this until occult pilgrims started showing up and asking them questions.) In any case, his piece completed what Oliver had begun, linking lost continents and survivors holed up at Shasta. In 1931 AMORC