Akashic Records and Lost Continents: Key Points
- Atlantis and Lemuria began as a Platonic allegory and a nineteenth century zoological hypothesis respectively, but both were absorbed by Theosophy and recast as spiritual epochs in humanity’s evolution.
- The Akashic Records are described in Theosophy as an eternal archive impressed on the astral plane, holding the vibration of every action, thought, emotion, light, and sound since the beginning of the universe.
- Psychics claim to access this archive through clairvoyance or out of body travel, describing it variously as a radio broadcast, a television signal, or an immense library staffed by spirit guides.
- Edgar Cayce drew hundreds of Atlantis readings from what he called the Book of Life, while Rudolf Steiner and W. Scott-Elliot produced detailed Lemurian and Atlantean histories from the same source.
- Interpretations split three ways: believers who read the records literally, moderates who see a symbol of the collective unconscious, and skeptics who cite plate tectonics, cryptomnesia, and failed predictions.
- Since the archive is the only claimed route to continents no one can reach, the two ideas form a closed loop that evidence cannot test, which explains both their scientific dismissal and their staying power.
Introduction
Many notions in the modern esoteric imagination have been as persistent as the idea that ancient civilizations once thrived on lost continents, their memory surviving only in myth and in the psychic gifts of a select few. The best-known of these lost lands are Atlantis and Lemuria, and their claimed histories have been rebuilt for more than a century, less by excavation than by clairvoyants. The idea of the Akashic Records is a major tenet of that endeavor. The Akashic Records is a Theosophical notion that argues that a cosmic archive exists where every event, thought, and emotion since the dawn of the cosmos is etched permanently (Guiley, 1991). Writers such as Helena Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, W. Scott-Elliot, and Edgar Cayce all claimed to have read this archive, and from it they spun intricate descriptions of drowned empires, their technology, their faiths, and their annihilation. That connection between the lost continents and the Akashic Records is not accidental. The records provide the epistemology that makes the continents knowable, and the continents provide the dramatic substance that makes the records worth looking at.
Atlantis: From Platonic Allegory to Spiritual Age
Plato introduced Atlantis into Western thought, describing in the dialogues Timaeus and Critias a mighty island empire beyond the Pillars of Heracles that was destroyed in a day and a night of disaster (Plato, 2008). For nearly two thousand years, the narrative was taken as an allegory. The narrative altered in the nineteenth century, when Ignatius Donnelly contended in Atlantis: The Antediluvian World that the island was a genuine place and the shared source of Egyptian, Mesoamerican, and Mediterranean civilization (Donnelly, 1882). Donnelly’s book was tremendously popular and appeared at a time when Theosophy was developing a spiritual history of humanity based around a series of “root races.” In this context, Atlantis was no longer a geographical enigma but a spiritual age, a period in the growth of awareness, filled by beings with psychic capacities greater than our own but whose abuse of such talents led to disaster (Blavatsky, 1888). The study of the paranormal took over this version. In current esoteric writings, Atlantis is often portrayed as technologically advanced, spiritually stratified, and self-destroyed in the end, a cautionary analogy to the modern industrial world.
Lemuria: From Scientific Hypothesis to Occult Continent
Lemuria had a more bizarre pedigree, for it was a scientific idea. A naturalist, Philip Sclater, hypothesized a submerged landmass in the Indian Ocean to explain the distribution of lemurs between Madagascar, India, and the Malay Archipelago (Sclater, 1864), and the evolutionist Ernst Haeckel later suggested that such a continent might have been the cradle of mankind. Occultists had embraced the land bridge by the time plate tectonics would make it unneeded. Blavatsky put Lemuria before Atlantis in her series of root races and described a vast semi-etheric humanity that progressively condensed into physical form and established sexual reproduction (Blavatsky, 1888). James Churchward, who had no connection with Theosophy, moved the continent to the Pacific and called it Mu, alleging that he read its history on tablets revealed to him by an Indian priest (Churchward, 1926). Sumathi Ramaswamy has traced the travels of this spectacular geography between European science, Theosophical metaphysics, and Tamil nationalism, receiving a distinct meaning in each context (Ramaswamy, 2004). In contemporary paranormal discourse, Lemuria is frequently portrayed as the softer and more intuitive forerunner to Atlantis, a culture of feeling rather than of machines.
The Akashic Records and Their Readers
The alleged means of access to both are the Akashic Records. The term comes from the Sanskrit akasha, which in Theosophy is understood as the primal etheric matter of the universe or all-pervading space, and the records are said to be maintained as impressions on the astral plane, holding the vibrations of every action, thought, emotion, light, and sound (Guiley, 1991). Nothing is lost, for the archive is supposed to be eternal and entire, including the history of continents that left no readable ruins. Psychics who say they consult the records describe the event in very intimate analogies. Some refer to listening to an astral television or radio program as “astral listening.” Some others talk about going to a large library and picking up the volume they require, sometimes with the assistance of spirit guides who take them to the correct shelf (Guiley, 1991). The range of images is instructive in itself, for it indicates that the factual content is being translated into the language of symbols that the seer understands.
Edgar Cayce is the most well-documented practitioner of this practice. Cayce referred to the archive as the Universal Memory of Nature and the Book of Life and utilized it primarily to trace karmic roots of illness and personal problems in the former incarnations of his clients (Guiley, 1991). In Langley’s version, Cayce describes an out-of-body adventure in which he leaves his body and travels down a short straight shaft of light. On either side was fog or smoke and shadowy figures tried to distract him and pleaded for his help but he stayed in the light. As he continued, the figures became clearer and less bothersome, initially seeming to help him before eventually ignoring him completely. Finally, he reached a hill with a mount and a magnificent temple. In it was a room like a library, full of the volumes of people’s lives, from which he simply picked down the one he wanted (Langley, 1967). Thousands of Cayce’s readings were preserved and indexed, many of which mention Atlantis. They describe a continent called Poseidia, a crystalline power source often referred to as the firestone or tuaoi stone, a schism between political factions, and a migration of Atlantean refugees to Egypt and the Yucatan prior to the final destruction (Cayce, 1968; Edgar Cayce Foundation, 1976). Cayce also claimed parts of Atlantis would emerge again around Bimini in 1968 or 1969, a prediction that handed his followers a unique falsifiable test.
The other big example is Rudolf Steiner. Steiner named the archive the Akashic Chronicle and wrote a series of essays on the prehistory of the earth and humanity, describing accounts of Lemurian and Atlantean life, including descriptions of Atlantean memory, language, and a life force technology that powered flying vehicles (Steiner, 1959; McDermott, 1984). Likewise, W. Scott-Elliot’s The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria was based on clairvoyant sources, Mesoamerican, led with the assistance of Theosophical seers, and even included maps of the popular and consecutive epochs (Scott-Elliot, 1925). Beyond the lost continents, the same technique was used. Levi Dowling claims races. “I’ve translated The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, stenigma, and the Akashic Records, filling in the missing years of Jesus’s life” (Dowling, 1908). All these endeavors share a common thread in the retrievability of history through attunement rather than through evidence.
Competing Interpretations and Critical Responses
Theories on all of this fall into about three factions. The records are physically real, they say, and carried in the light itself, and anyone with enough training and attunement may learn to read them (Cavendish, 1974; Guiley, 1991). A second, more moderate approach views the archive as a symbolic description of the collective unconscious, so that Atlantis and Lemuria are mythic images of humanity’s spiritual birth rather than sunken actual states. Skeptics hold a third view. But geologists are adamant that the ocean floors are new, continental crust can’t simply sink, and plate tectonics can explain the biological distributions (Ramaswamy, 2004). Lemuria was created to explain. Archaeologists have pointed out that lost-continent claims often rely on diffusionist assumptions that deny indigenous peoples credit for their monuments (Feder, 2020), and L. Sprague de Camp has documented how Atlantis narratives proliferate in response to literary fashion rather than to discovery (de Camp, 1970). The phenomenon of cryptomnesia, or unconscious recollection of data that has been read and forgotten, provides a logical explanation of the overlap between successive claims of clairvoyance, since later readers of the records tended to confirm the contours formed by earlier ones. It is also worth noting that Bimini did not rise in 1969.
Conclusion
The matching of the lost continents with the Akashic Records is a consistent, albeit unprovable, system of knowledge. The continents are unreachable and the archive is the perfect tool to reach the unreachable; therefore, the two ideas support each other in a closed circle that no excavation can break. That circularity is why mainstream science has never taken the material seriously, and it’s also why the tradition has been so steady throughout more than a century of writing. Regardless of what one thinks about their literal veracity, the Akashic records of Atlantis and Lemuria are nevertheless culturally important documents. They chart the ways in which modern searchers have conceptualized human origins, comprehended the relationship between spiritual power and moral duty, and contended, against the grain of the archive and the trowel, that memory endures materiality.
References
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