A Dweller on Two Planets

1905 channeled book by Frederick Spencer Oliver

A Dweller on Two Planets, or The Dividing of the Way is a 423-page channeled account first published in 1905, presented as the first-person testimony of a discarnate intelligence calling himself Phylos the Thibetan — also identified in the text as "Yol Gorro" — transcribed by the California prospector Frederick Spencer Oliver (1866–1899) through automatic writing, visions, and mental "dictations" that began in 1883–84, when Oliver was seventeen and surveying his family's mining claim near Mount Shasta. By Oliver's account in his amanuensis preface, Phylos dictated the material to him over roughly three years as a true record of Phylos's own former life in Atlantis, recounting its politics, architecture, and science and the cataclysm that destroyed it, and of a later incarnation as the 19th-century American gold miner Walter Pierson.

The manuscript was completed in 1886 and copyrighted in 1894 and again in 1899 following an addition, but Oliver died in 1899 before it reached print; it was published six years later, in 1905, through the arrangement of his mother Mary Elizabeth Manley-Oliver. Though treated by literary historians as an early work of speculative fiction, the book has been read within later esoteric circles as a founding disclosure of the Atlantean past and of a still-inhabited chamber beneath Mount Shasta, and it is named as source material for the I AM movement, the Lemurian Fellowship, and the teachings of Elizabeth Clare Prophet.

Genesis and composition

Oliver's introduction states that the account came to him unbidden: while out surveying, he began writing uncontrollably in his notebook, ran home in a state described as terror, and then sat and let his hand continue. These episodes of automatic writing recurred over the following years, a few pages produced at a sitting, until the narrative Phylos was dictating reached its close. Oliver presents himself throughout as an amanuensis rather than an author — his own name appears on the book only as the recipient and transcriber of Phylos's testimony, never as its source.

Publication history

The manuscript was finished in 1886, typewritten and copyrighted in 1894, and copyrighted again in 1899 after Oliver added further material. Oliver died in 1899 without seeing it printed. His mother, Mary Elizabeth Manley-Oliver, arranged for publication through the Baumgardt Publishing Company in 1905, an event notable enough to draw a contemporary newspaper notice on the manuscript's unusual channeled origin. A 1920 edition from Poseid Publishing in Los Angeles carried Oliver's amanuensis preface in the form most often reprinted since.

In 1940 the Lemurian Fellowship — the esoteric school founded in 1936 by Robert D. Stelle and Howard John Zitko — published An Earth Dweller's Return as a direct sequel, extending Phylos's narrative under the Fellowship's own imprint. The Fellowship continues to sell A Dweller on Two Planets through its own bookstore, stating that while the book "is not a part of the Lemurian teaching and training program," it offers the title because earlier distributors had let it go out of print and "many seek out these truth classics."

Contents

Phylos's testimony opens in Atlantis — called Poseid — describing a civilization of advanced political, architectural, and scientific accomplishment: antigravity-powered aircraft and submarines, television, wireless telephony, aerial water generators, air conditioning, and high-speed rail. Phylos's own life and that of a circle of souls he interacts with are set against Poseid's social, economic, political, and religious order, and against the karmic consequences that follow the nation into its cataclysmic destruction — "Poseid, queen of the waves" — brought on by a departure from the spiritual principles that had made it great.

Phylos's final incarnation, by his own account, is as Walter Pierson, a gold miner and occult student in 19th-century America, whose karma from the Atlantean life plays itself out and who studies under adepts he calls the Theo-Christic Brotherhood. While his physical body remains at a temple concealed inside Mount Shasta, his subtle body travels to Hysperia — the planet Venus — where he describes artworks that appear alive, a voice-operated typewriter, and other advanced technology. The narrative treats reincarnation and karma as operative laws running across both lifetimes, framed explicitly as a warning against a technological age repeating Atlantis's mistakes.

Mount Shasta and the Lemurian-survivor tradition

The book's placement of Phylos's hidden temple inside Mount Shasta is credited with originating the mountain's modern occult reputation. The historian Walter Kafton-Minkel judged that A Dweller on Two Planets "was not very good fiction, but it did establish all the main elements of the modern Mt. Shasta mythos." The researcher Richard Toronto places Oliver in the same occultist lineage as Helena Blavatsky, William Scott-Elliot, and Rudolf Steiner, noting that Oliver "believed survivors of the Lemurian catastrophe were alive and well in a complex of tunnels inside Mt. Shasta in California."

The tradition Oliver set down was elaborated by later writers who located a surviving Lemurian population, rather than only Phylos's Atlantean temple, beneath the same mountain: Harvey Spencer Lewis popularized a Mount Shasta repository of Lemurian survivors in Lemuria: The Lost Continent of the Pacific (1931) under the pen name Wishar S. Cerve, and the underground city later known as Telos became the settled name for the complex in subsequent accounts.

Legacy as a root text

Hare's 2002 introduction states plainly that the book "is openly acknowledged as source material for many new age belief systems, including the 'I AM' movement, the Lemurian Fellowship, and Elizabeth Claire Prophet." The Lemurian Fellowship traces its own published tradition directly to the book, releasing An Earth Dweller's Return as its sequel in 1940 and continuing to distribute the original volume to readers of what it calls its "truth classics." The I AM movement founded by Guy Warren Ballard grew out of his own 1930s encounter with the ascended master Saint Germain at Mount Shasta, in a landscape Oliver's book had already marked as the site of a hidden esoteric brotherhood. Hare's introduction further names Elizabeth Clare Prophet and her Church Universal and Triumphant as heirs to the same source material, situating A Dweller on Two Planets at the root of a lineage of Ascended Master teachings running from Ballard's "I AM COME!" pageants through the Summit Lighthouse and into the present-day Mount Shasta pilgrimage tradition.

Reception

Hare's assessment of the book as literature was mixed: "as a literary work it is weak in many ways," though "the details of the narrative reveal a well-read and highly intelligent, if inexperienced, author," and he located "the real brilliance of this book" in its speculative-fiction depiction of Atlantean high technology and the afterlife — antigravity, mass transit, "dark-side" energy, and voice-operated typewriters among them. Hare further remarked that the "cigar-shaped, highly maneuverable Atlantean flying machines" Phylos describes bear "an eerie resemblance to 20th Century UFO reports."

See also

• Telos
• Theosophy
• An Earth Dweller's Return
• Church Universal and Triumphant

References

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