Doreal's channelled text · a storybook in 5 pages
In the 1930s Maurice Doreal published a channelled account of ancient Atlantis and its god-king Thoth — unrelated to the real, medieval Emerald Tablet.
Doreal said that in 1925 he travelled to the Great Pyramid and found ancient tablets left there by Thoth, an Egyptian god he recast as an immortal king of Atlantis. No tablet has ever been produced or independently seen.
The tablets describe Atlantis as a vast, advanced civilization destroyed by its own pride and misused power — a familiar shape, echoing older flood and lost-continent stories that long predate Doreal's writing.
Around 1930 Doreal founded the Brotherhood of the White Temple in Denver, teaching the tablets alongside Theosophy and other esoteric ideas. By the 1950s the group had moved to a rural compound, preparing for a nuclear war it expected.
The real Emerald Tablet, the Tabula Smaragdina, is a short alchemical text first recorded in medieval Arabic manuscripts, centuries before Doreal wrote a word. The two share a name and little else.
A researcher tracing the tablets' wording later found close echoes of early twentieth-century pulp fiction — H. P. Lovecraft's stories and A. Merritt's 1919 novel The Moon Pool — inside Doreal's supposedly ancient text.