A Dweller on Two Planets

Layered on top of these indigenous traditions, and often in tension with them, often appropriating elements of them without acknowledgement or understanding, is a more recent Euro-American mythology that began in earnest in the late 19th century and has grown steadily more elaborate in the decades since.

In 1894, a young Californian named Frederick Spencer Oliver published a book called A Dweller on Two Planets, presented not as a novel but as a channel text, a work dictated to Oliver by a spirit entity named Phylos the Tibetan.

The book described an advanced civilization of Lemurian survivors, refugees from the lost continent of Lemuria, living inside Mount Shasta in a network of tunnels and chambers beneath the mountain's surface.

The Lemurians, according to the book, possessed advanced technology, profound spiritual wisdom, and the ability to appear and disappear at will on the mountain's upper slopes.