Atlas is the true name of this archipelago --- continent is an altogether false term, for every "house" or mountain peak was cut from its fellows by natural, though often very narrow waterways. The African Atlas is a mere offshoot of the range. It was the true Atlas that supported the ancient world by its moral and magical strength, and hence the name of the fabled globe-bearer. The root is the Lemurian "Tla" or "Tlas", black, for reasons which will appear in due course. "A" is the feminine prefix, derived from the shape of the mouth when uttering the sound. "Black woman" is therefore as near a translation as one can give in English; the Latin has a closer equivalent.
The mountains are cut off, not only from each other by the channels of the sea, but from the plains at their feet by cliffs naturally or artificially smoothed and undercut for at least thirty feet on every side in order to make access impossible.
These plains had been made flat by generations of labour. Vines and fruit-trees growing only on the upper slopes, they were devoted principally to corn, and to grass pastures for the amphibian herds of Atlas. This corn was of a kind now unknown, flourishing in sea-water, and the periodical flood-tides served the same purpose as the Nile in Egypt. Enormous floating stages of spongy rock --- no trees of any kind grew anywhere on the plains so wood was unknown --- supported the villages. These were inhabited by a type of man similar to the modern Caucasian race. They were not permitted to use any of the food of their masters, neither the corn, nor the amphibians, nor the vast supplies of shellfish, but were fed by what they called "bread from heaven," which indeed came down from the mountains, being the whole of their refuse of every kind. The whole population was put to perpetual hard labour. The young and active tended the amphibians, grew the corn, collected the shell-fish, gathered the "bread from heaven" for their elders, and were compelled to reproduce their kind. At twenty they were considered strong enough for the factory, where they worked in gangs on a machine combining the features of our pump and treadmill for sixteen hours of the twentyfour. This machine supplied Atlas with its "ZRO"[2] or "power," of which I shall speak presently. Any worker showing even temporary weakness was transferred to the phosphorus works, where he was sure to die within a few months. Phosphorus was a prime necessity of Atlas; however, it was not used in its red or yellow forms, but in a third allotrope, a blue-black or rather violet-black substance, only known in powder finer than precipitated gold, harder than diamond, eleven times heavier than yellow phosphorus, quite incombustible, and so shockingly poisonous that, in spite of every precaution, an ounce of it cost the lives (on an average) of some two hundred and fifty men. Of its properties I shall speak later.
The people were left in utmost slavery and ignorance by the wise counsel of the first of the philosophers of Atlas, who had written: "An empty brain is a threat to Society." He had consequently instituted a system of mental culture, comprising two parts:
[#1] There were four (some say five) distinct races, each having several sub-races. But the main characteristics were the same. some alleged the Portuguese and the English to be survivals of this or kindred stock.
[#2] Or Zra'd. The ZR is drawled slowly; the the lips are suddenly curled back in a sneering snarl, and the vowel sharply and forcibly uttered. It is disputed whether this word is connected with the Sanscrit SRI, holy.
Taken from Liber 51 ‘The Lost Continent’ … Crowley
