extraordinary%20encounters

182 Mount Shasta
A nineteenth-century engraving of Mount Shasta, California, the scene of occult legends from far back in the past (Library
of Congress)
entity named Phylos the Tibetan had dictated
to him. In fact, when the novel was published
in 1899, Phylos, not Oliver, was identified as
the author. Phylos said he had experienced
several incarnations, including one in Atlantis
and another on Venus. In his most recent one,
during the mid-century California gold rush,
he (“he” being Walter Pierson, the name he
held during that lifetime) met Quong, a Chinese
man. Quong, a knower of mystical secrets,
led Pierson into Shasta via a hidden tunnel.
Inside the mountain they found huge
chambers and treasures belonging to a secret
brotherhood of advanced beings who had
lived there for a very long time, devoting
themselves to humanity’s spiritual betterment.
In his astral body, Pierson traveled to Venus,
where he learned many secrets; he also learned
of his previous lives. Once enlightened, he
was rechristened Phylos and became a
guardian of the cosmos. A modern chronicler
remarks that the “Tibetan” part of his title
“seems to have been added for Mystery’s sake”
(Kafton-Minkel, 1989).
Oliver’s novel owed much of its inspiration
to Madame Blavatsky’s theological writings
and to works of mystical fantasy such as Edward
Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni: A Rosicrucian
Tale and Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two
Worlds. It was original, however, in setting a
secret civilization within Mount Shasta. The
next writer to do so, Harvey Spencer Lewis
(writing as “Wishar C. Cerve”), identified the
inhabitants as survivors of Lemuria, the Pacific
Ocean’s version of Atlantis. According to
Lewis’s Lemuria: Lost Continent of the Pacific
(1931), when Lemuria split and sank, its east
coast crashed into part of North America’s
west coast to become the states of Washington,
Oregon, and California. Many of the surviving
Lemurians took up residence inside
Shasta.
Lewis claimed that persons living near
Shasta occasionally encountered distinguished-looking
men in white robes as they
walked out of the forest. Sometimes these beings,
who stood seven feet tall, did business in
local stores, using gold nuggets to make their