A scholar of Atlantis with a connection to the world of Forteans.
Egerton Sykes was born in London in 1894. I cannot be more specific than that. As a boy, he enjoyed reading Jules Verne, and those stories, particularly “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” led him to an interest in Atlantis. He started collecting Atlantean literature as a teenager. Friends knew Sykes as “Bill.”
In World War I, he served as a lieutenant in France; he was still a very young man. Shell shock sent him to the hospital. Sykes had some training in engineering, and spoke a number of languages, mostly German, French, and Polish; he went into journalism and diplomacy. From 1930 to 1942, he was stationed in Poland as a foreign correspondent for various newspapers. He continued to grow his collection of Atlantis books, and also helped to get a number of people out of the country as the Nazis became increasingly bellicose. In the 1939 siege of Warsaw, he lost his first Atlantean collection. Reportedly, he lost a son during World War II.
Egerton Sykes was born in London in 1894. I cannot be more specific than that. As a boy, he enjoyed reading Jules Verne, and those stories, particularly “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” led him to an interest in Atlantis. He started collecting Atlantean literature as a teenager. Friends knew Sykes as “Bill.”
In World War I, he served as a lieutenant in France; he was still a very young man. Shell shock sent him to the hospital. Sykes had some training in engineering, and spoke a number of languages, mostly German, French, and Polish; he went into journalism and diplomacy. From 1930 to 1942, he was stationed in Poland as a foreign correspondent for various newspapers. He continued to grow his collection of Atlantis books, and also helped to get a number of people out of the country as the Nazis became increasingly bellicose. In the 1939 siege of Warsaw, he lost his first Atlantean collection. Reportedly, he lost a son during World War II.
Over the next several years, he moved around the world, while also re-building his collection, through purchases, and maintaining a worldwide network of correspondents on the topic. He was attached to the British embassy, and later was in Cairo and Naples and Rome. In 1965, he bragged that he had been involved with both world wars, witnessed five revolutions and, with his wife, lived in 28 countries. He made his first visit to the United States in the mid-1960s.
Sykes retired shortly after the end of World War II, although I do not know exactly when—that’s how it is reported in biographical sources. In 1945, he put out a “List of Classical Sources,” that noted all manuscripts related to Atlantis and, also—with Lewis Spence and H. S. Bellamy—an updated version of Ignatius Donelly’s classic “Atlantis: The Antediluvian World.” He ran a small publishing concern in London, Markham House Press Ltd., and founded both magazines and organizations: the journal Atlantis ran from 1948 to 1976; and the periodical New World Antiquity from 1954 to 1979. The organizations were The Atlantis Research Center, The Hoerbiger Institute, and The Avalon Society.
As Sykes came to see the issue, Atlantis had once stood in the center of the Atlantic. Evidence of its cultural influence could be found in pre-Christian myths—he wrote books on mythology, and the Avalon Society investigated the astronomical meanings of Stonehenge and similar megalithic sites—and paying attention to these myths might help in its rediscovery: at the back of his interest was not just Verne, but Hans Schliemann who had followed myths and legends to discover the historical Troy. Atlantis just existed so far back in prehistory, it was harder to find, though there were reports of underwater stone structures that he thought more than suggestive.
Atlantis had been destroyed more than 10,000 years ago when something shook earth’s gravitational arrangement quite significantly. That might have been the shifting of the poles—shades of the Drayson problem—or the earth’s relationship to its Moon. Here, Sykes turned to Hans Hoerbiger—hence the Society he founded in Hoerbiger’s name—which argued, in a general way, ice was the fundamental substance of the universe (shades of the annular theory and Isaac Newton Vail), with a succession of earth’s satellites falling into the ocean. It was the latest that destroyed Atlantis. Myths of a worldwide flood were remembrances of this cataclysm. But before the continent was destroyed, its peoples had moved out east and west, populating the world. Evidence of their origin and the diffusion of Atlantean culture could be seen in the concurrence of myths around the world.
Sykes continued to study Atlantis throughout his life. He died 27 April 1983, not quite one hundred years old.
*************
Without having gone through all of Sykes’s compendious writing, it seems that he came to Charles Fort in the late 1940s or early 1950s; he continued with an interest in Forteana, but seems to have absorbed such reports into his own system of thought, one that ran parallel to Forteanism.
There was mention of Sykes in Walter Gillings’s British science fiction ‘zine “Fantasy Review,” and his Research Centre, in the spring of 1948. He was also active with the London Circle of science fiction fans that met in White Horse pub, at least for a short time, and that may have made him a subject for the ‘zine. The rumor was that he hoped to organize fandom, was repudiated, and so didn’t show up any longer.
Two-and-a-half years later, he joined the Fortean Society. Sykes never appeared in Doubt, and I do not know how long he continued with the Society. In late October 1950, Tiffany Thayer wrote to Eric Frank Russell that Eg Sykes had been associated with the Society, and then made a cryptic comment: “Between ourselves, I think he’s Dagg un drag.” The reference was to N. V. Dagg, editor of “Tomorrow,” whose fascist politics Thayer hated, but otherwise I cannot parse the put-down.
Sykes, by accounts, could be impatient with the occult, which he thought “clogs up the question of Atlantis.” Flying saucer talk could be especially bothersome to him. But he also had a “wide appreciation for the mystical approach,” with an interest in antigravity, dowsing, the zodiac, present day neanderthals and dinosaurs, and extraterrestrial life. He used ESP in his own work, as a means of focusing. But he thought that all of these subjects could be explained by natural, ordinary laws and were amenable to scientific study. Joscelyn Godwin wrote, he was “drawn to parapsychological and Fortean topics, but from a generally rational approach.”
In 1959, Fortean (and Theosophist) A. L. Joquel published a series of three articles on Atlantis in Sykes’s magazine. In the 1970s, he wrote an article on perpetual motion inventor—and Fortean topic—John Keely for the Journal of the Borderland Research (N. Meade Layne's old group). His papers and library (thousands of volumes) went to Edgar Cayce’s A.R.E. Library in Virginia Beach. And when the International Fortean Organization came together (in the late 1960s), Sykes was listed as one of the research consultants.
Sykes retired shortly after the end of World War II, although I do not know exactly when—that’s how it is reported in biographical sources. In 1945, he put out a “List of Classical Sources,” that noted all manuscripts related to Atlantis and, also—with Lewis Spence and H. S. Bellamy—an updated version of Ignatius Donelly’s classic “Atlantis: The Antediluvian World.” He ran a small publishing concern in London, Markham House Press Ltd., and founded both magazines and organizations: the journal Atlantis ran from 1948 to 1976; and the periodical New World Antiquity from 1954 to 1979. The organizations were The Atlantis Research Center, The Hoerbiger Institute, and The Avalon Society.
As Sykes came to see the issue, Atlantis had once stood in the center of the Atlantic. Evidence of its cultural influence could be found in pre-Christian myths—he wrote books on mythology, and the Avalon Society investigated the astronomical meanings of Stonehenge and similar megalithic sites—and paying attention to these myths might help in its rediscovery: at the back of his interest was not just Verne, but Hans Schliemann who had followed myths and legends to discover the historical Troy. Atlantis just existed so far back in prehistory, it was harder to find, though there were reports of underwater stone structures that he thought more than suggestive.
Atlantis had been destroyed more than 10,000 years ago when something shook earth’s gravitational arrangement quite significantly. That might have been the shifting of the poles—shades of the Drayson problem—or the earth’s relationship to its Moon. Here, Sykes turned to Hans Hoerbiger—hence the Society he founded in Hoerbiger’s name—which argued, in a general way, ice was the fundamental substance of the universe (shades of the annular theory and Isaac Newton Vail), with a succession of earth’s satellites falling into the ocean. It was the latest that destroyed Atlantis. Myths of a worldwide flood were remembrances of this cataclysm. But before the continent was destroyed, its peoples had moved out east and west, populating the world. Evidence of their origin and the diffusion of Atlantean culture could be seen in the concurrence of myths around the world.
Sykes continued to study Atlantis throughout his life. He died 27 April 1983, not quite one hundred years old.
*************
Without having gone through all of Sykes’s compendious writing, it seems that he came to Charles Fort in the late 1940s or early 1950s; he continued with an interest in Forteana, but seems to have absorbed such reports into his own system of thought, one that ran parallel to Forteanism.
There was mention of Sykes in Walter Gillings’s British science fiction ‘zine “Fantasy Review,” and his Research Centre, in the spring of 1948. He was also active with the London Circle of science fiction fans that met in White Horse pub, at least for a short time, and that may have made him a subject for the ‘zine. The rumor was that he hoped to organize fandom, was repudiated, and so didn’t show up any longer.
Two-and-a-half years later, he joined the Fortean Society. Sykes never appeared in Doubt, and I do not know how long he continued with the Society. In late October 1950, Tiffany Thayer wrote to Eric Frank Russell that Eg Sykes had been associated with the Society, and then made a cryptic comment: “Between ourselves, I think he’s Dagg un drag.” The reference was to N. V. Dagg, editor of “Tomorrow,” whose fascist politics Thayer hated, but otherwise I cannot parse the put-down.
Sykes, by accounts, could be impatient with the occult, which he thought “clogs up the question of Atlantis.” Flying saucer talk could be especially bothersome to him. But he also had a “wide appreciation for the mystical approach,” with an interest in antigravity, dowsing, the zodiac, present day neanderthals and dinosaurs, and extraterrestrial life. He used ESP in his own work, as a means of focusing. But he thought that all of these subjects could be explained by natural, ordinary laws and were amenable to scientific study. Joscelyn Godwin wrote, he was “drawn to parapsychological and Fortean topics, but from a generally rational approach.”
In 1959, Fortean (and Theosophist) A. L. Joquel published a series of three articles on Atlantis in Sykes’s magazine. In the 1970s, he wrote an article on perpetual motion inventor—and Fortean topic—John Keely for the Journal of the Borderland Research (N. Meade Layne's old group). His papers and library (thousands of volumes) went to Edgar Cayce’s A.R.E. Library in Virginia Beach. And when the International Fortean Organization came together (in the late 1960s), Sykes was listed as one of the research consultants.
