Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Daphne Vigers



Daphne Vigers (fl. 1940s-1960s)

The 1944 Andrew Dakers edition
Daphne Vigers published only two editions of one book, Atlantis Rising (London: Andrew Dakers, 1944; second edition London: Aquarian Press, 1952). The dust-wrapper to the reprint gives what little biographical information is known about the author, noting that as a young woman in her twenties she “went though a series of extraordinary experiences in which she witnessed the scenes of a long vanished land”. Her quasi-novel tells of the earthly paradise of Atlantis, and of the “final cataclysm in which the whole land sank beneath the Atlantic Ocean”.  The book describes Vigers’s visits, by psychic projection, to ancient Atlantis, and also to the future when Atlantis will have risen again above the waves.  Vigers declares that the British race is descended from the noble Atlanteans who did not fall victim to the black magic of renegade priests. In all, though presented as a novel, this book is more of an occult tract.


The 1952 Aquarian Press edition
Vigers apparently wrote at least two other unpublished works. Bernard Miall (1876-1953) served as publisher’s reader in late 1941 for an earlier novel, City of Terrible Nights, about the blitzkrieg of London.  He called it “an artless, spontaneous, unaffected novel, with occasional paragraphs or pages of comment, shrewd or commonplace, but apparently individual.” Another book was Wingless Flight, for which John Gordon Hargrave (1894-1982) completed twenty-two drawings, under the pseudonym “Thot”, intended to be published with the book.  Their captions indicate the visionary nature of the text, which apparently no longer survives.

 Vigers was listed as living in southwest London from 1947 thorough 1965, after which time she disappears from the public record. 

2 comments:

  1. I discovered 'Atlantis Rising'in a second hand bookshop in Hay on Wye sometime in the 1980s. I thought the book was fascinating. I was interested in the name Helio Arkan which was so similar to the 'H-A' (Helio Arcanophus) from Atlantis channelled by Tony Neate and his first wife Murry Hope. The wisdom in their books is in my opinion very profound. I knew Murry in the 1980s and 90s and asked her about Daphne Vigers although she didn't recall the name. I thought that she may have been a member of the association called the Atlanteans that Murry and Tony ran in the 1950s based first of all in London's Earls Court and later in Bath. Tony and his second wife Anne moved to Malvern where they set up Runnings Court and the the Wrekin Trust with Sir George Trevelyan.

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  2. Thanks for writing. It's odd that Vigers has so completely disappeared.

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