Meet me in Atlantis

Some publications, when referring to HPB and her work, are still filled up with worn out with misinterpretations and incorrect assumptions. The following excerpt is such an example. The reader needs to note that it isn't what the magazine's editor thinks, nor what Theosophy Forward tries to convey.

Adams, Mark. Meet Me in Atlantis: My Obsessive Quest to Find the Sunken City. New York: Dutton, 2015. [Warren County Public Library] "

Public Eye Meet me in Atlantis 2

Another writer famous for her supernatural insights into Atlantis / was the late nineteenth-century Russian-born occultist Madame Blavatsky, whose head would surely be carved alongside [Edgar] Cayce’s on the Mount Rushmore of psychics. Famous for her séances and for her founding the grab-bag spiritual movement known as Theosophy, Blavatsky popularized the idea of Atlantis as the ancient home of a race of supermen. She claimed that her book The Secret Doctrine was based on a manuscript written in Atlantis (translated from the original language, Senzar), which was at its height in the years prior to 850,000 BC, at least half a million years before the first Homo sapiens is believed to have emigrated from the African continent. The populace of Blavatsky’s Atlantis enjoyed such modern conviences as electricity and airships powered by psychic energy called vril. The causes she attributes to its downfall seem obvious in retrospect: a group practicing black magic spoiled everything by breeding human-animal hybrids akin to centaurs, which were exploited as warriors and sex slaves. Had Blavatsky’s thoughts on ‘cosmic evolution’ merely served as fodder for future New Age fantasies about Atlantis—you can still browse a nice selection of tarot cards at the Theosophical Society bookstore on East Fifty-Third Street in Manhattan—she could be written off as a harmless crank. But her ideas about ‘root races’—a division of humanity into higher and lower species—were adopted by German mystics with a passionate interest in demonstrating that the superior Nordic race could trace its lineage back to a mythical island. Blavatsky had written of the Aryans as the most developed of the root races of Atlantis. The term Aryan (from the Sanskrit word for ‘noble’) had originally been used by linguists to describe peoples stretching from northern Europe to India whose languages had shared origins” (pp. 85-86).