It must be remembered throughout that we are dealing with the
Atlantean race only, so that any reference would be out of place that
bore on the still more degraded fetish-worship that even then
existed--as it still does--amongst the debased representatives of the
Lemurian peoples.

All through the centuries then the various rituals composed to
celebrate these various forms of worship were carried on, till the
final submergence of Poseidonis, by which time the countless hosts of
Atlantean emigrants had already established on foreign lands the
various cults of the mother-continent.

To trace the rise and follow the progress in detail of the archaic
religions, which in historic times have blossomed into such diverse
and antagonistic forms, would be an undertaking of great difficulty,
but the illumination it would throw on matters of transcendent
importance may some day induce the attempt.

In conclusion, it would be vain to attempt to summarize what is
already too much of a summary. Rather let us hope that the foregoing
may lend itself as the text from which may be developed histories of
the many offshoots of the various sub-races--histories which may
analytically examine political and social developments which have been
here touched on in the most fragmentary manner.

One word, however, may still be said about that evolution of the
race--that progress which all creation, with mankind at its head, is
ever destined to achieve century by century, millennium by millennium,
manvantara by manvantara, and kalpa by kalpa.

The descent of spirit into matter--these two poles of the one eternal
substance--is the process which occupies the first half of every
cycle. Now the period we have been contemplating in the foregoing
pages--the period during which the Atlantean race was running its
course--was the very middle or turning point of this present
manvantara.

The process of evolution which in our present Fifth Race has now set
in--the return, that is, of matter into spirit--had in those days
revealed itself in but a few isolated individual cases--forerunners of
the resurrection of the spirit.

But the problem, which all who have given the subject any amount of
consideration must have felt to be still awaiting a solution, is the
surprising contrast in the attributes of the Atlantean race. Side by
side with their brutal passions, their degraded animal propensities,
were their psychic faculties, their godlike intuition.