Editing Lewis Spence (section)

==Atlantis==
Spence's research into the mythology and culture of the [[New World]], together with his examination of the cultures of western Europe and north-west Africa, led him to the question of [[Atlantis]]. During the 1920s he published a series of books which sought to rescue the topic from the occultists who had more or less brought it into disrepute. These works, including ''The Problem of Atlantis'' (1924) and ''History of Atlantis'' (1927), adopted theories inaugurated by [[Ignatius Donnelly]] and looked at the lost island as a [[Bronze Age]] civilization that formed a cultural link with the New World, which he invoked through examples he found of parallels between the early civilizations of the Old and New Worlds. Despite Spence's erudition and the width of his reading, the conclusions he reached, avoiding peer-reviewed journals,<ref>Though Spence wrote reviews of popularizations of mythology and folklore for ''Folklore''.</ref> have been almost universally rejected by mainstream scholarship. His popularisations met stiff criticism in professional journals, but his continued appeal among theory hobbyists is summed up by a reviewer of ''The Problem of Atlantis'' (1924) in ''The Geographical Journal'': "Mr. Spence is an industrious writer, and, even if he fails to convince, has done service in marshalling the evidence and has produced an entertaining volume which is well worth reading."<ref>R.N.R.B. in ''The Geographical Journal'' '''64'''.2 (August 1924:181-182).</ref> Nevertheless, he seems to have had some influence upon the ideas of controversial author [[Immanuel Velikovsky]], and as his books have come into the public domain, they have been successfully reprinted and some have been scanned for the Internet.

Spence's 1940 book ''Occult Causes of the Present War'' ({{ISBN|0766100510}}) is an early book in the field of [[Nazi occultism]].