THE ATLANTEAN ENIGMA IN WESTERN OCCULTISM

Michael Howard

# We are starlight/we are golden/ and we have got to get ourselves back to the Garden #
Woodstock by Joni Mitchell

After writing a letter c/o Prediction magazine, which featured her articles on Tarot,
astrology, folklore and magic, I was invited in August 1967 by ‘Madeline Montalban’ (Sylvia
Royals 1910-1982) to visit her flat at 3 Grape Street, St Giles Circus in London’s West End.
At this fascinating first meeting with someone who was to become an influential figure in my
life and my occult teacher we discussed a wide range of esoteric subjects. One of these was
the mythical lost continent of Atlantis – and it will become clearer why I deliberately use the
term ‘mythical’ in relation to it. In common with many other occultists of her generation
Madeline was a firm believer in the ancient existence of Atlantis and heavily into all matters
Atlantean. In fact she believed that all the members of her Order of the Morning Star had
shared incarnations in the priesthoods of Ancient Egypt and Atlantis and in her mind both
countries were linked.
Madeline claimed that certain high ranking Atlantean magical adepts became aware
psychically through divining or communication in trance from spirits that the great island in
the Atlantic Ocean was to be destroyed in a cataclysmic event. This was because its
inhabitants, or at least the ruling power elite and the priesthood, had indulged in evil acts such
as ‘black magic’ or sorcery and had mated humans with animals to create a bestial hybrid
‘slave race’ – a form of ancient genetic engineering. They had also invented ‘super weapons
of mass destruction’, possibly using nuclear energy, that threatened the whole world.
According to Madeline, these ‘good’ Atlantean adepts and priests and priestesses and their
followers secretly left the island in specially built boats called ‘arks’. These refugees from the
lost continent colonised South America, North Africa and the British Isles, hence the
similarities between the pyramids and megalithic structures found in these places. Because the
Atlantean adepts were spiritually and technologically more advanced then the primitive
people they encountered they acted as cultural exemplars and teachers. As a result the natives
regarded them a gods and goddesses and worshipped them. In Ancient Egypt the examples
given by Madeline were the creator god Ptah, Isis and her brother and husband Osiris and the
magician Thoth (pronounced phonetically as Tehuti) who invented writing.
To be honest I never accepted this Atlantean hypothesis and I had previously been exposed
to it, or its variations, before meeting Madeline. As an occultly precocious teenager I had read
Madame Helena Blavatsky’s monumental three volume work The Secret Doctrine and her
Isis Unveiled and she was a firm believer in Atlantis. I had also read other books on the
subject by the American writer Ignatius Donnelley, Rudolf Steiner and Lewis Spence and
James Churchward’s series of ‘Mu’ books on Lemuria, the earlier Pacific equivalent to
Atlantis. About the same time as first meeting Madeline I was introduced to the occult novels
of Dion Fortune The Sea Priestess and Moon Magic featuring the reincarnated Atlantean
adept Vivien Le Fay. Later in the 1970s Atlantis came up again in my life when I met and
became friendly with Christine Hartley, the author of the classic The Western Mystery
Tradition who had worked pre-war with Dion Fortune. While I was interested in the concept
of Atlantis I never really believed it had once existed as a physical reality or, as many others
claim, had ever been incarnated on it.
The concept of Atlantis and its associated legends still has a powerful hold on modern
occultists and magicians and even witches like Alex Sanders. The late Kenneth Grant wrote
of the ‘atavistic sorceries’, draconian cultus and therianthropic ‘dark gods’ of Atlantis, as has
his magical associate Michael Bertiaux of the La Couleuvre Noire or Cult of the Black Snake.
At the opposite end of the occult spectrum, the veteran Christian occultist Gareth Knight, who
is a senior member of Dion Fortune’s modern Society of the Inner Light, has written
extensively about the Atlantean royal bloodline in his books on the Arthurian Mysteries. His
writings are based on trance communications received by Dion Fortune from her inner plane
contacts in the 1940s. In common with Madeline Montalban and Christine Hartley, Knight
identifies the Atlanteans who fled to Britain as Arthur, Guinevere, Merlin, Morgan Le Fay and
other characters from the Arthurian legends.
While most writers on the subject accept the story allegedly told to the Greek philosopher
Plato by Ancient Egyptian priests that places Atlantis ‘beyond the Pillars of Hercules’ (the
straits of Gibraltar between Spain and North Africa), no acceptable physical evidence has so
far been found in the Atlantic to support this idea. This has led other writers coming to the
subject from a materialistic viewpoint to speculate that ‘Atlantis’ was an ancient Minoan-type
civilisation on an island in the eastern Mediterranean that was destroyed by a massive
volcanic eruption. More left-field theories place Atlantis as a now underwater city located in
the mysterious Bermuda Triangle and still responsible for the ships and planes that go missing
in that area today. It has even been claimed that the Atlantean civilisation flourished in what is
now Antarctica when it had a tropical climate millions of years ago and the Nazis in their
loony neo-mythology located it on the mystical island of Thule near the North Pole – the
ancestral home of the Aryan ‘master race’.
If the premise is accepted that the story of Atlantis was a myth rather then a physical place in
the material world what does it mean or represent on a spiritual, metaphysical and
philosophical level? Strangely I believe the answer to that question can be found in the
Luciferian tradition that Madeline Montalban taught to senior students of her correspondence
course on angelic magic and to members of her Order of the Morning Star. Since ancient
times humans have always nostalgically looked back into the distant past to some kind of
romantic, perfect ‘Golden Age’ – a primeval halcyon period of peace, harmony, prosperity
and fertility when animals and humans lived side-by-side and communicated with each other.
Examples can be found in prehistoric shamanism, Sumeria and Babylon, the biblical myths of
the Garden of Eden, the Flood and the Tower of Babel, in the Hindu Vedas, Norse mythology,
the Islamic concept of Paradise, and even modern matriarchal pagan feminism. Such an
Arcadian concept is also found today with science fiction visions of future utopias, a nostalgic
tendency to look back through rose-tinted glasses to a romantic ‘golden age’ of the past that
was better then the present and the craze for retro themes in fashion, culture and lifestyles.
Using a myth that is familar to most people and as been part of common religious beliefs for
at least 1500 years, the idea of a Golden Age is illustrated by the biblical myth of the Garden
of Eden and its repercussions as found in the Book of Genesis at the beginning of the Old
Testament. As is well known Genesis features the creation myth of Judaism and Christianity.
It describes how Yahweh created the world, populated it with plants, animals and fish and
then created the literally clay-born first human Adam, ‘the man of the dust of the ground’, and
breathed life into him giving him a ‘living soul’ (Genesis 2:7). Yahweh then planted ‘ a
garden eastwards of Eden’ (so in fact it was not really the Garden of Eden!) for the first
human to live in and provided it with every tree that was ‘good for food’, as well as the
special Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which are sometimes
confused or conflated but are obviously separate (Genesis 2:8-19). Adam became a gardener
in his new abode and the myth goes on to say that Yahweh then created Eve as his female
companion because he was lonely. However the Luciferian tradition says that Adam was
having sex with animals before Lilith became his first partner. She eventually left him when
Adam refused to allow her to be sexually dominant in their relationship.
Everything was hunky dory for a while in the Garden until the serpent raised its head and
allegedly seduced Eve. He promised the first woman that if she and her partner ate the fruit of
the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil their “eyes would be opened, and ye shalt be as
gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5-6) As soon as the couple had partaken of the
forbidden fruit they suddenly realised they were naked and feeling shame for the first time
covered their genitals with improvised aprons made of fig leaves. When Yahweh found out
that the Old Serpent had subverted his plans for the human race he cursed Adam and Eve and
their descendants to a life of hard labour tilling the soil for food and had the Archangel
Michael cast them out of the Garden. As a gesture of good will he did provide them with coats
made from animal skins. According to Madeline Montalban’s Luciferian teachings, Eden
represented a previous existence in the spiritual realm. The reaction of the first couple and
Yahweh to their naked state and the ‘Fall of Man’ was a metaphor for the descent of the first
human beings from the astral level to the material world.
Later in Genesis we have another Edenic/Atlantean myth in the casting out of the half-
angelic/half human Cain to become a wanderer across the world after he killed his brother
Abel (Genesis 4:2). A couple of chapters on the myth takes another turn when the angelic
‘Sons of God’ or Watchers decide to incarnate in physical bodies because they are allegedly
captivated by the beauty of the ‘daughters of men’. Esoteric sources say that in fact these
alluring women are the ‘children of Cain’ i.e. his tribal descendants. It is said that the
Watchers or ‘fallen angels’ are sexually attracted by their long hair, which is why Catholic
women are supposed to cover their heads with scarves in church and Muslim women wear the
hijab in public.
This forbidden liaison between incarnated spirits and human females resulted in the birth of
the hybrid half-angelic and half-human race known as the Nephelim. According to Judeo-
Christian propaganda, these ‘mighty men of old…men of renown’ carried out so many evil
acts that Yahweh decided to destroy the whole human race by wiping it from the face of the
Earth with a great flood – just as the Gods did to the Atlanteans (Genesis 6:5-7). Materialists
have speculated that the myth of the Deluge or Flood, survived only by the ‘just and perfect
man’ Noah and his family and menagerie in his Ark, is a memory of the rise in sea levels at
the end of the last Ice Age approximately 10,000 years ago. During that period many low
lying coastal regions were submerged. Certainly this myth of the survival of the human race
from a universal cataclysm along with antediluvian knowledge inherited from divine beings is
also found among Middle Eastern people who the Hebrews had contact with.
Finally in biblical terms an echo of the myth of Atlantis can be found in the story of King
Nimrod, the ‘mighty hunter’, a grandson of Noah. In Genesis 11 it is said that in Nimrod’s
time the inhabitants of the Earth (or at least the known world) spoke one single language and
understood each other. Nimrod’s sin was to have his engineers construct a tower or ziggurat (a
pyramid-like religious structure with an altar or temple on its summit) that was designed to
reach up to the heavens. Possibly this meant it had some astronomical significance or was
associated with a stellar religion. Naturally the eternally grumpy and tyrannical Yahweh was
not amused with this development as humans were getting too big for their boots again. He
destroyed the tower at Babel and scattered the king’s subjects to the four corners of the world
so they no longer spoke the same language. Having put an end to Nimrod’s ambitions,
Yahweh selected Abram or Abraham and manipulated him like a human puppet. He promised
the old man not only a child by his equally elderly and sterile wife but also a ‘promised land’
of his own if he relocated from his native Chaldea to Canaan. He would also bless and protect
Abraham’s family and relatives and curse anyone who opposed them (Genesis 12: 1-5).
Therefore I believe that the popular myth of Atlantis (now the subject of a BBC television
series oddly based on classical Greek mythology) survives because it represents this ancient
desire for a return to a Golden Age that never really existed. It is an archetypal and eternal
myth that will continue to exist and in its own way be valid as long as the human race
survives. At its heart are Luciferian concepts and teachings related to the intervention in
planetary evolution of spirit teachers and cultural exemplars, the descent of spirit into matter
and the eventual redemption of both the human race and Lucifer-Lumiel as cosmic harmony
is restored.

Copyright © M.A.Howard 2014.