practice of sorcery many of the
inhabitants had, of course, become aware of the existence of powerful
elementals--creatures who had been called into being, or at least
animated by their own powerful wills, which being directed towards
maleficent ends, naturally produced the elementals of power and
malignity. So degraded had then become man's feelings of reverence and
worship, that they actually began to adore these semi-conscious
creations of their own malignant thought. The ritual with which these
beings were worshipped was blood-stained from the very start, and of
course every sacrifice offered at their shrine gave vitality and
persistence to these vampire-like creations--so much so, that even to
the present day in various parts of the world, the elementals formed
by the powerful will of these old Atlantean sorcerers still continue
to exact their tribute from unoffending village communities.

Though inaugurated and widely practised by the brutal Turanians, this
blood-stained ritual seems never to have spread to any extent among
the other sub-races, though human sacrifices appear to have been not
uncommon among some branches of the Semites.

In the great Toltec empire of Mexico the sun-worship of their
forefathers was still the national religion, while the bloodless
offerings to their beneficent Deity, Quetzalcoatl, consisted merely of
flowers and fruit. It was only with the coming of the savage Aztecs
that the harmless Mexican ritual was supplemented with the blood of
human sacrifices, which drenched the altars of their war-god,
Huitzilopochtli, and the tearing out of the hearts of the victims on
the summit of the Teocali may be regarded as a direct survival of the
elemental-worship of their Turanian ancestors in Atlantis.

It will be seen then that as in our own days, the religious life of
the people embraced the most varied forms of belief and worship. From
the small minority who aspired to initiation, and had touch with the
higher spiritual life--who knew that good will towards all men,
control of thought, and purity of life and action were the necessary
preliminaries to the attainment of the highest states of consciousness
and the widest realms of vision--innumerable phases led down through
the more or less blind worship of cosmic powers, or of anthropomorphic
gods, to the degraded but most widely extended ritual in which each
man adored his own image, and to the blood-stained rites of the
elemental worship.