Book excerpt: Atlas is a personification and symbol of the old continents of Lemuria and Atlantis. Homer, who preceded Plato by many centuries, also speaks of the Atlanteans and of their island in his Odyssey. The Odyssey makes of Atlas the guardian and the supporter of the huge pillars that separate the heavens from the earth. The old Greeks were but the dwarfed and weak remnant of that once glorious sub-race of the Fourth Race. Egypt and Greece, the Phœnicians, and the Northern stocks, had proceeded from the last sub-race of the Atlanteans, already swallowed up in one of the early sub-races of the Aryan stock. Like the Odyssean Tityos, who grew so large that he split his mother's womb and had to be carried to term by Gaia, the Initiates in Greece were called sons of Gaia. Cyclopes, the beloved priests of Apollo, were the last three sub-races of the Lemurians, the one-eye referring to the all-penetrating spiritual eye, which atrophied when their pastoral life evolved into the sensual culture of the Atlanteans, only to be replaced by the outward-looking eyes of greed and selfishness. Though pre-historic, Boreas was a real Continent, the favourite abode of Apollo and his beloved priests and servants. Phoenician sails whitened the Indian Ocean and the Norwegian fiords. The perpetual daylight enjoyed by the Laestrygonians indicates that they were inhabitants of the North Cape. Scylla and Charybdis were the enormous icebergs of the Arctic seas.