I’ve also been digesting something of vast interest as background or source material—which has belatedly introduced me to a cycle of myth with which I have reason to believe you are particularly familiar—i.e., the Atlantis-Lemuria tales, as developed by modern occultists & the sophical charlatans. Really, some of these hints about the lost “City of the Golden Gates” & the shapeless monsters of archaic Lemuria are ineffably pregnant with fantastic suggestion; & I only wish I could get hold of more of the stuff. What I have read is The Story of Atlantis & the Lost Lemuria, by W. Scott-Elliot.
-- H. P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith, June 17, 1926
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WILLIAM SCOTT-ELLIOT (d. 1930), banker, amateur anthropologist, and adherent of Theosophy, wrote two influential books of pseudoscience, The Story of Atlantis (1896) and The Lost Lemuria (1904) which attempted to explore the histories of the two titular lost continents in light of Helena Blavatsky's theories about root races and ancient history. These books were combined in 1925 as The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria, which H. P. Lovecraft read and used as an important influence on the development of the Cthulhu Mythos.
THE STORY OF ATLANTIS
1896 "The destruction of Atlantis was accomplished by a series of catastrophes varying in character from great cataclysms in which whole territories and populations perished, to comparatively unimportant landslips such as occur on our own coasts to-day." |
THE LOST LEMURIA
1904 "[A]lthough the lost continent of Atlantis has so far received scant recognition from the world of science, the general concensus of opinion has for long pointed to the existence, at some prehistoric time, of a vast southern continent to which the name of Lemuria has been assigned." |