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a legacy of these survivors.
    Atlantis ... the very word is enough to make an academic historian bury his head in his hands and groan, ‘Oh no!’ And even though West tries to disinfect it by placing it in quotation marks, suggesting that he is referring simply to some great lost civilisation of the past—but not necessarily in the Atlantic—the name itself is enough to place anyone who uses it beyond the pale of intellectual respectability.
    The fact remains that Schwaller de Lubicz believed that the answer to the mystery of Egyptian civilisation lies in the fact that it was founded by survivors from the great lost continent which, according to Plato (our sole source), perished about 9500 BC in a volcanic cataclysm. It was these survivors who built the Sphinx, and who designed—and perhaps even built—the Giza pyramids. And it was Schwaller who led John West to begin his quest for the age of the Sphinx by trying to establish whether it was eroded by wind-blown sand or by rainfall.

    Who precisely was Schwaller de Lubicz, and what right had he to pronounce on such matters?
    René Schwaller was born in Alsace in 1887, into a wealthy bourgeois family. His father was a pharmaceutical chemist, and René spent his childhood dreaming in the forests, and painting and conducting chemical experiments. From the beginning, he was equally fascinated by art and science, a combination whose significance for his life-work can hardly be underestimated. At the age of seven, his wife tells us, he received a ‘revelation regarding the nature of the divine, and seven years later, another illumination regarding the nature of matter.’
    As a teenager he went to Paris to study painting under Matisse. Matisse himself was at this time under the influence of the philosopher Henri Bergson, who emphasised the inadequacy of the intellect to grasp reality—which slips through it like water through the holes in a fishnet—and again, his own tendency to mistrust ‘mere science’ was reinforced. Yet, typically, he also plunged into the study of modern physics, which at the time was undergoing the great revolutions of Einstein and Planck.
    He joined the Theosophical Society—its founder, Madame Blavatsky, had died when he was four—and was soon delivering lectures and writing articles for its journal. In the first of these he paid homage to science, which ‘leads to all progress, fecundates every activity, nourishes all humanity’, while at the same time attacking it for its conservatism and nihilism. Yet by nature, Schwaller was far more hard-headed and pragmatic than the Theosophists. He was setting himself a difficult task: to undermine rationalism with rational thought. 1
    The next step seems to have been an interest in alchemy, the ‘science’ of the transmutation of matter, and the pursuit of the ‘philosophers’ stone’. But Schwaller was not interested in trying to turn lead into gold; he believed—as Jung later came to believe—that alchemy is basically a mystical quest whose aim is ‘illumination’, and of which the transmutation of metals is a mere by-product. He soon extended his alchemical studies to stained glass and the geometry of Gothic cathedrals, convinced that their geometry and measurements concealed some secret knowledge of the ancients.
    The ‘occult’ tradition is based upon the notion that there existed in the past a science that embraced religion and the arts—including architecture—and that this knowledge was restricted to a small caste of priests and initiates, and was ‘encoded’ by medieval stonemasons in the great Gothic cathedrals. One of the classic expositions of this idea, The Canon by William Stirling (published in 1897) states:
    From the times of ancient Egypt this law [the Canon] has been a sacred arcanum, only communicated by symbols and parables, the making of which, in the ancient world, constituted the most important form of literary art; it therefore required for its exposition a