occultism

A prominent role in creating the occultist legend of Atlantis was played by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891). A Russian by birth, she spent almost her entire life abroad, travelling extensively in India.

In 1875 in New York, she co-founded the "Theosophical Society" with her two friends, the American Colonel Steel Olcott and the esoteric-mystic William Judge. While in 1885 he returned to London where he founded a branch of the Society which he named "Stoa of London". In the meantime in 1880 he had returned to India with Olcott where they collaborated with a Hindu reform movement and embraced Buddhism.

Blavatsky described Theosophy as "the synthesis of science, religion and philosophy", declaring that it was reviving an "Ancient Wisdom" based on all the religions of the world. And he connected theosophy with Hermeticism and Neoplatonism

Her work, as it turned out later, consisted of tricks, and she was accused of producing fraudulent paranormal phenomena. Critics called her an adventurer and a charlatan, while her fans called her an "enlightened sage".

In 1888 she published in London her major work "The Secret Doctrine" in three volumes (Cosmogony. Anthropogenesis, Introversion) which were translated into most languages.

He wrote that the Atlantean people were descendants of an older continent known as Mou or Lemuria, and constituted the Fourth Primary Tribe of mankind, while the Lemurians represented the Third Tribe. 

In this work she developed the occultist legend of Atlantis. She claimed that her sources were "The Book of Dzyan", for which there are supposed to be only a few copies, which it is, however, impossible to obtain. One of these copies is supposed to exist in a Tibetan monastery, and another in the Vatican; the latter copy is closely guarded.

Blavatsky claimed she read this book of Dzyan by clairvoyancy and other occult methods. But, she literally said that there were no direct references to the destruction of Atlantis

The theosophists generally claimed that they were descendants of the Aryans and that the Aryans originally came from Atlantis. Atlantis and Lemuria (also called "Mu") were continents in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, respectively, that were supposed to have been devastated by major catastrophes in prehistoric times and sunk under the sea. It is said that these continents were very advanced civilizations, capable of many things that were not possible in the following days.

The Αnthroposophists refer to the "Chronicle of Akasha", supposed to be a record of a mystical legend of historical knowledge. They claim that our language can give only a remote idea of this chronicle. According to occultist doctrine, everything take place in the world is recorded on surrounding objects in the same way as light, acting on film, forms a hidden image until the film is developed. From the imprints of events form stratums on objects, and with the aid of clairvoyance, accessible only to a few, to the "initiated", the occultists of the higher echelons are able to "see" pictures of the past and sort out their content. The Atlantis legend is only part of this "Chronicle".

A representative of this thought group was the German Rudolf Steiner who claimed that, through the Akashic Chronicles (records), he knew that the Atlanteans were indeed the descendants of Mu and possessed wonderful technology, but they communicated with each other through writing and not telepathically as was the case with their ancestors.

The fullest occultist legend about Atlantis was published in 1896 by Scott-Elliot and and later by Manzi (in 1922). Both, reinforced the myth of Atlantis by Donnelly and Blavatsky, as the core of culture and especially of magic.

The map, in figure 1, taken from the French edition of Scott-Elliot’s work, shows the land surface of the earth as he believed it looked a million years ago, at the point when the Atlantean race was at its height and before internal warfare brought about the ‘first great submergence’ 800,000 years ago. The continent of Atlantis stretched from just east of Iceland to near what is now Rio de Janeiro. Lemuria is coloured green,as are the remnants of the Hyperborea, a northern land, first described by Herodotus.