Renaud Evrard

[aeon]

Richard Shaver as cigarette smoking sheik
by Renaud Evrard

"It was, rather, an advertisement opposite the table of contents for a book entitled I Remember Lemuria that caught my eye. The advertisement takes up an entire page. At the top, the words "Atlantis" and "Lemuria" flow in cursive against a background of blue.

"MAGIC WORDS!" the ad declares. "Are you interested in the almost forgotten past of the Earth? " it begins, "If you are, here is the wonder book of all time concerning the great catastrophe which destroyed the civilization of 24,000 years ago!" It was not the topic of the book that was particularly unusual. Revelations about the world before the Flood are as old as the Bible, and have been a stock-in-trade topic in American popular culture ever since the publication in 1882 of Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, by American lawyer Ignatius Donnelly.

What grabbed my attention and what sets apart I Remember Lemuria from others of its kind
are the details of its authorship. A cartoon profile of a Caucasian man is featured prominently in the center of the page. He wears what appears to be a towel over his head, and a smoldering cigarette dangles from between his lips. This is a graphic of Richard Sharpe Shaver, the author. As the ad elaborates, this book on antediluvian civilizations "is an incredible story of a Pennsylvanian welder who began to receive strange thoughts from his electric welder. At first he thought he was going mad, but then, when the astounding story of Lemuria came to him, he realized that here was something more than mere madness." Shaver, then, is portrayed as a kind of hybrid, something between a generic Asiatic sage (the towel, perhaps meant to signify a Middle Eastern kufiya) and an iconic American working man (the smoldering cigarette).

Later I would read that Richard Shaver was in fact a welder for the Ford Motor Company plant in Wisconsin, who claimed until the end of his life to have actually received intelligent messages from and through his welding gun. In 1943, he sought out Amazing Stories editor Ray Palmer to pass along his tale. I was further intrigued to learn that Palmer was so convinced of the story's veracity that he went on to co-author with Shaver a number of stories closely based on Shaver's visionary experiences.

In brief, these told a truly amazing tale of a technologically advanced civilization of morally depraved survivors of the antediluvian continent of Lemuria, which had continued to flourish underneath the Earth since the time of the Flood, calculated to have occurred 24,000 years ago. The subterranean "deros" (a shortened form of "detrimental robots") were now intent on destroying modern civilization so that they could relocate their society to the Earth's surface. Occasionally one of their high altitude rockets could be seen shooting through the skies, a sign that the battle with the human race was underway.

In 1945, Palmer featured these Lemurian tales as an ongoing series in Amazing Stories, advertising them as embellishments of non-fictional truths. Not only were readers fascinated by the stories, but some of them even began to write letters to Palmer confessing that they, too, had encountered the deros. A more skeptical management pressured Palmer to withdraw his claims of the stories' basis in fact. But holding fast to his faith in Shaver, he refused. The act of defiance cost Palmer his position with Amazing Stories, but even then he persisted in his conviction.

Palmer featured I Remember Lemuria, the complete collection of his and Shaver's stories, on the first page of his new paranormal magazine Fate, characterizing the work as "one of the most significant esoteric books ever published." My introduction to Richard-Shaver-as-cigarette-smoking-sheik in Fate Magazine galvanized my already growing suspicion that the paranormal is not simply about events and entities that have no place in the religious or scientific order of things.

I was captivated, for starters, by the role of the sentient welding gun as a key component of I Remember Lemuria. I had already begun to notice that wondrous machines featured prominently throughout all three of the paranormal gatherings of my travels. At Lily Dale, for example, mediums spoke of themselves as "downloading information from the Universe," likening themselves to human computers. This image of the Spiritualist cyborg dates back, in fact, to the very origins of the movement; as early as 1850, observers were comparing mediums to human telegraph machines. Later in the twentieth century, uncanny demonstrations of mind-to-mind communication such a mediumship would be likened to demonstrations of "mental radio."

Lily Dale mediums thus continued a long standing discourse that conceived of paranormal connections between minds (both those of the living and those of the dead) in terms of extant communications technology. Further illustrations of this comparison could be found in the camp's museum, which showcased a number of the "precipitated spirit paintings" that were so popular among Lily Dale's visitors in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. These were likenesses of departed loved ones that spontaneously materialized on canvases, just like film developing in emulsion, supposedly due to the presence of accomplished mediums.

Dowsers, too, imagined themselves as human-machine hybrids in their searches for underground water or hidden objects. They spoke of themselves as resonating with unseen waves that emanated from the objects of their divining. As was true for Spiritualist mediums, dowsers typically supplemented this materialist explanation with theoretical models borrowed from quantum physics, pointing to the non-local (and in fact wave-less) interactions between subatomic particles at a distance. As for their own romance with machines, the sprawling convention bookstore featured several booths selling both the more conventional tools of the dowsing trade (metal or plastic rods, and pendulums), as well as more complicated machinery.

For example, a Polish-born dowser versed in the art of "radiesthesia" (literally, the perception of radiation through the senses) sold over forty kinds of pendulums, each one sensitive to the particular vibrations allegedly emanated by natural objects. She peddled as well an array of special gadgets designed to manipulate subtle energies: the Nikram, "a device for generating energy and sending it long distances to a living body"; the Radiation Neutralizer MA 1506 that "disperses harmful radiation within an area of 150 square miles, 25m above and 3.5m below itself"; and the H40 Colour Energy Generator "used to supply the body with energy of a specific wavelength as determined by colour according to the reading of the color chart."