Mount Shasta / Lemuria folklore (early 1900s occult tradition)
Mount Shasta rises alone over northern California, an ice-capped volcano in the country of the Shasta, Wintu, Achumawi, Atsugewi and Modoc peoples, and legends gather around it like its clouds. The Wintu trace their origin to a sacred spring on its slopes and still hold ceremonies there every August. The Klamath tell of the spirit chief Skell, who came down from the sky to its summit and fought Llao of the underworld at Mount Mazama by hurling hot rocks and lava, a memory perhaps of the eruptions at both peaks.
The strangest story arrived later. Lemuria began as science: in 1864 the zoologist Philip Sclater proposed a sunken continent to explain why lemur fossils turned up in Madagascar and India but not in Africa, and plate tectonics later made the idea obsolete. By then the occultists had it. Helena Blavatsky made Lemuria the homeland of an ancient root race of humanity, and in 1883 Frederick Spencer Oliver, a young man of Yreka just north of the mountain, filled notebooks in what he described as uncontrollable automatic writing while surveying his family's mining claim. The result, A Dweller on Two Planets, published in 1905 after his early death, placed survivors of Lemuria in tunnels beneath Shasta, with jewelled walls and fur-carpeted floors, sometimes seen on the surface in white robes.
In 1931 Harvey Spencer Lewis, writing as Wishar Spenle Cerve in a book published by the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, made the hidden Lemurians of Shasta and their city of Telos widely popular. In the 1930s the businessman Guy Ballard said he had met an ascended master, the Count of St. Germain, while hiking on the mountain, and with his wife Edna founded the I AM Activity, which at its height claimed about a million followers before its leaders were charged with defrauding them. It is still active in the town of Mount Shasta, with a reading room and its annual I AM COME! pageant each August, and Telos has passed into many other movements.
Locals tell of Lemurians seven feet tall in white robes and sandals walking into town in the 1940s to buy supplies with nuggets of gold, and vanishing before the shopkeeper could hand them their change. Some say the saucer-shaped lenticular clouds that often cap the summit are Lemurian camouflage for ships docking at Telos. Meanwhile seekers keep coming for guided meditations, vision quests and tours of sacred sites, and many visitors who came for the mountain have never left.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
