Like everybody else I'm curious about the stories of lost continents like Atlantis and Mu, and of lost civilizations like Hyperborea. During the hippie era there were lots of paperback books on this subject. Some hippies were obsessed with it.
I wonder if some of these books were reprints of books written by Germans in the 10s, 20s and 30s. Himmler in particular was a believer in these lost continents and was convinced that these places were inhabited by proto-Aryans.
In the late 30s he sent a famous expedition to Tibet, which he believed was formerly inhabited by refugees from Atlantis. These refugees created a warrior culture, the Aryans, which was unfortunately (he believed) tainted by Buddhism. That warrior culture spread out to places like India, Persia, and Germany.
That's Ernst Schafer above, the guy who led the expedition.
Another picture of Schafer (above). That's him on the left. Notice the Indiana Jones-type pith helmet on the right with the SS symbol on the side.
Tibet (above) wasn't open to foreigners and getting in to measure skulls, look for artifacts, etc. was a chore. Tibetans were alternately hostile and friendly and were amused to find foreigners who thought they (the Tibetans) were a superior race.
A lot of these ideas were popularized by Hans Horbiger, who in turn was influenced by Madam Blavatsky, a 19th century mystic. Blavatsky's most famous book, "The Secret Doctrine" is available free on the internet somewhere. I found it unreadable, but maybe you'll have better luck.
Different authors had different theories, but here's the one Himmler latched on to, The World Ice Theory. According to this idea the universe is characterized by the conflict of fire in the form of stars, and ice which covers many planetary bodies. Somehow this conflict created ice spirits which emerged when a thunderbolt struck ice in the artic region of our own Earth. These spirits lived a civilized existence in a Northern land that came to be called Hyperborea.
Eventually the spirit creatures were driven out of their land by earthquakes, vulcanism, meteor strikes, etc., fled to Mexico and South America, and eventually ended up in Lemuria, a lost continent in the Pacific or in the Indian Ocean, depending on who you read.
The internet is full of maps with conflicting ideas about the location of Lemuria (above). In the map above I have no idea what the term "Cara Lines" and "Negroid Lines" mean, or why a sea was thought to have existed in the middle of South America. Somehow the Hyperborean spirit beings took on a human appearance at this time.
Natural catastrophes made Lemuria sink beneath the sea and Aryan corruption and decadence made the situation worse. Most of the population was lost but a few hardy refugees managed to make their way to Atlantis (above) where they established a virtual Utopia.
After a while, Atlantis (above) sunk too. Boy, Himmler's proto-Aryans weren't very lucky in their choice of places to live!
The nature of Atlantis changes according to the romantic ideals of the era that's considering it. The nazis attributed war-like racial theories to the Atlanteans, and the hippies attributed peaceful, pastoral natures to them. In recent decades the flying saucer people made Atlantis their own.
Anyway, the refugees from Atlantis established themselves in Tibet. At this point they became what Himmler believed were full-blown Aryans.
Here's (above) Ernst Schafer in a photo taken in 1992.
Here's the expedition's anthropologist, Hanns Beger (above) in a photo taken in 2001. The Tibet expedition only lasted for a year or two then both men returned to Germany, where they continued to work for the SS. Beger became an assistant to a concentration camp doctor who conducted torturous experiments on Jewish prisoners. One of these men, I can't remember which one, got into a scrape on a train in 1942 and tried to strangle a man to death.
