extraordinary%20encounters

purchases and refusing change. The strangers
had long, curly hair, and on their large foreheads
there were bulges visible with “special
decoration” over them covering their third
eyes. Along the thick forests on Shasta’s eastern
flank, the Lemurians had built great marble
temples. On some evenings they held mystical
celebrations at which they lit big fires and
danced. They also raised odd-looking cattle.
They flew “peculiarly shaped boats which
have flown out of this region high in the air
over the hills and valleys . . . to the waters of
the Pacific Ocean.” Mostly, however, the
Lemurians managed to keep themselves and
their activities invisible, setting up energy
walls that effectively concealed them from
prying eyes.
The American branch of the Rosicrucians,
headquartered in San Jose, published Lewis’s
book. During the 1930s, it also sponsored expeditions
that sought to locate the secret entrances
to Shasta. Articles in Rosicrucian Di -
gest discussed the mountain’s “mysteries.”
Then on May 22, 1932, the Los Angeles Times’
Sunday magazine ran a destined-to-be-influential
piece by Edward Lanser. Lanser claimed
that while taking a train trip on the Shasta
Limited on his way to Portland, he observed
mysterious lights on Shasta in the early dawn.
The conductor told him that “the Lemurians”
were holding ceremonies. On his way back to
Portland, Lanser wrote, Lanser spent time in
the Shasta area and found that nearly everyone
there took the reality of the Lemurians for
granted. “Business men, amateur explorers,
officials, and ranchers in the country surrounding
Shasta spoke freely of the community,
and all attested to the weird rituals that
are performed on the mountainside after sunset,
midnight and sunrise,” he wrote (De
Camp, 1980). The Lemurians performed
these rituals to celebrate their escape to “Gautama”
(North America). He asserted that
“Prof. Edgar Lucien Larkin,” whom he characterized
as a famous astronomer, had actually
been able to observe Lemurians and their
temples through a telescope. Larkin was in reality
an occult buff who had died some eight
Mount Shasta 183
years earlier. Though widely quoted since,
Lanser’s story was a hoax or—more to the
point—a tongue-in-cheek exercise satirizing
the curious beliefs the mystically minded were
circulating about a beautiful but otherwise ordinary
natural monument.
In Unveiled Mysteries (1934) Guy Warren
Ballard, writing as Godre Ray King, reported
that in 1930, while working as a mining engineer
at Shasta, he met Saint Germain, an immortal
being who gave him a creamy liquid to
drink. The liquid, Saint Germain explained,
was “Life—Omnipresent Life.” Many other
encounters followed, and Ballard (who died in
1939) soon formed the I AM Activity, a notorious
cultlike organization that combined
Theosophical doctrine with fascist ideology.
Around the same time, occultist Maurice Doreal
was detailing his own Shasta experiences,
which were with the Atlanteans who lived in a
colony seven miles beneath the mountain.
Though the colony had only three hundred
fifty-three inhabitants, it dominated the
Lemurians, four and a half million of whom
lived, essentially, as prisoners of the Atlanteans
even deeper under Shasta. Doreal was unique
in his depiction of the Lemurians as evil and
dangerous.
As Sh a s t a’s legends continued to expand, it
was said that the mountain’s interior housed
two magnificent Lemurian cities, Il e t h e l e m e
and Yaktayvia. The latter, some said, was the
s o u rce of beautiful bell sounds, which some
had professed to hear emanating from the
mountain. The Yaktayvians are master bell
builders. All the while, occult pilgrims we re
arriving in growing numbers to the are a ;
many would stay. Some claimed to have seen
and communicated with Lemurians and
other extraord i n a ry beings. Others re p o rt e d
UFO sightings on the mountain. Be l i e ve r s
explained the phenomena as Lemurian aircraft
or visiting extraterrestrial spacecraft calling
on their friends inside the mountain. At
least one person, Nola Van Va l e r, swore that
she had met Phylos the Tibetan on the
mountain. On another occasion she spoke
with Saint Ge r m a i n .