This shelf collects the founding texts of the modern Atlantis mythos: Ignatius Donnelly's bestselling case for a real Atlantic civilization and his cometary-catastrophe sequel Ragnarok; Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton's science-fiction novel Vril, which occultists later took as literal fact; W. Scott-Elliot's Theosophical accounts of Atlantis and Lemuria, drawn from clairvoyant reading of the Akashic Records rather than from any physical evidence; the automatic-writing novel A Dweller on Two Planets, source of the enduring legend of ascended masters beneath Mount Shasta; H.P. Blavatsky's Stanzas of Dzyan; and the New York American's famous 1912 Schliemann newspaper hoax.

None of these books is a work of accepted archaeology or geology. They are preserved here as primary sources in the history of an idea: nearly every later Atlantis theory, esoteric or otherwise, argues with one of these authors, borrows from them, or repeats them without saying so. Read them as the influential, often sincere documents they are — not as evidence that Atlantis, Lemuria, or Mu ever existed.