Our Atlantean Forefathers

"The water imbibed by the Atlantean acted differently upon the life-force animating his body from what it would in the man of to-day ; and in consequence of this, the Atlantean was able--of his own volition--to use his physical forces in other ways than would be possible now."

--Rudolf Steiner, Atlantis and Lemuria

Yes I'm reading Theosophy again, but this time I'm reading one of the founding members of the Theosophist movement: the Austrian philosopher and writer Rudolf Steiner. I tried reading the first lady of Theosophy, Madame Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine earlier this year, but I got as far as a few pages past her introduction before I had to put it down to finish my proper school readings. Perhaps this summer I'll brave her again, just as I keep saying I'll read Nikos Kazantzakis's The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel to the final page before I am side-tracked with some other literary intrigue. Regardless of the "letter of the law" or true veracity of the Theosophical movement I must admit I've become enamoured with their occult ideas--which began as an extension of my interest in Lovecraft and writing a paper interpreting The Call of Cthulhu based on Marshall McLuhan.

I also picked up, and started reading for my own personal interest, William Gibson's Neuromancer last night. Earlier this week during office hours a professor of mine exhorted me to read it because of my burgeoning interest in Marshall McLuhan, and paranoid visions in literature, in addition to a few other less popular, more occult writers of the last few centuries. Now I know why I'm more sad to leave university soon: some of my professors are awe-inspiring, walking resource libraries of recommendations, and a few, also, share and have been encouraging my own quirky literary interest (as well as prospects for a M.A. thesis) about a welter of later nineteenth, earlier twentieth century occult and weird writers. As one of my professors asserted, few if any people have written about which I'm enamoured, and it's an open field of possibility--open as much to humilitation as discovery!